The Conversion of Jeffrey. 131 constrained to say that no more complete and just, as well as striking, delineation of the Ploughman-Bard is possible than we find in Carlyle's Essay on his great countryman. It has been the theme of universal praise, and of the thousands of essays, articles, and orations that have been written since 1828 on the same theme, it may perhaps be said without injustice to them or the truth, that not one of them has escaped reproducing, either consciously or unconsciously, the ideas and the feelings that were first uttered in his matchless Essay by Carlyle. Even Jeffrey himself was no exception to the rule. He felt, if he did not expressly own, the constraining power of the essay. Nearly ten years after it was published, we find him sitting down at Craigcrook to study anew the life and works of Burns. The result is such as might have been expected if he had never seen them before. He tells Empson that he has read them "not without many tears." "What touches me most," he continues, "is the pitiable poverty in which that gifted being (and his noble-minded father) passed his early days-the painful frugality to which their innocence was doomed, and the thought, how small a share of the useless luxuries in which we (such comparatively poor creatures) indulge, would have sufficed to shed joy and cheerfulness in their dwellings, and perhaps to have saved that glorious spirit from the trials and temptations under which he fell so prematurely. Oh my dear Empson, there must be something terribly wrong in the present arrangement of the universe, when those things can happen, and be thought natural. I could lie down in the dirt, and cry and grovel there, I think, for a century, to save such a soul as Burns from the suffering, and the contamination, and the degradation which these same arrangements imposed upon him; and I fancy that if I could but have known him in my present state of wealth and influence, I might have saved, and reclaimed, and preserved him, even to the present day. He would not have been so old as my brother judge, Lord Glenlee, or Lord Lynedoch, or a dozen others that one meets daily in society. And what a creature, not only in genius, but in nobleness of character, potentially, at least, if right models had been put gently before him. When I think of his position, I have no feeling for the ideal poverty of your Wordsworths and Coleridges; comfortable, flattered, very spoiled, capricious, idle beings, fantastically discontented because they cannot make an easy tour to Italy, and buy casts and cameos; and what poor, peddling, whining drivellers in comparison with him!” There is not a word here about that "very obstinate" and "very conceited" fellow from Craigenputtoch; but of one thing we may rest assured-this noble letter to Empson would never have been written if the lessons taught by Carlyle had not sunk deep into the heart of Jeffrey. Less worthy was the attempt of the old editor of the Edinburgh to appropriate some of the credit due to the writer of the epoch-making essay. In one of his letters, written in 1838, but not published till after his death, Charles Sumner says :- I observed to Lord Jeffrey, that I thought Carlyle had changed his style very much since he wrote the article on Burns. 'Not at all,' said he; 'I will tell you why that is different from his other articlesI altered it." Some living critics have professed to find in this story a confirmation of what they had always thought, How he Interpreted Burns. 133 but which none of them, so far as we are aware, had ever expressed till Sumner's letter was printed. A careful study of Carlyle's writings does not support the theory. Jeffrey may possibly have cut something out; we are certain he put nothing of his own in. There is not a sentence in the essay that does not bear, both as to its form and substance, the signet mark of Carlyle; moreover, he was not the man ever to put his name to any bit of work, however microscopic, that was not his own. By no writer has the essay been more accurately described than by one of Burns's later and most competent editors, Alexander Smith, who declares that it "stands almost alone in our literature as a masterpiece of full and correct delineation." The same authority gives as the main reason why it occupies this position of pre-eminence, the fact that Carlyle has succeeded so admirably in detecting the unconscious personal reference in the literary productions of the Scottish Bard. He "makes this line or the other a transparent window of insight, through which he obtains the closest glimpses of his subject." One other reason is doubtless to be found in the fact that the essayist's own birth and upbringing were, in so many respects, akin to those of the poet; so that personal experience quickened the sympathy, without which there can be no true comprehension of the life of our fellow-man, and thus provided windows of insight, even more transparent than the poet's verse. CHAPTER XI. THE GENESIS OF "SARTOR RESARTUS "-ITS REJECTION BY EMER . THE THE PUBLISHERS WELCOME BY AMERICA In his letter to Professor Wilson, Carlyle had said, "I have some thoughts of beginning to prophesy next year, if I prosper; that seems the best style, could one strike into it rightly." The articles he was writing for the Edinburgh, the Foreign Quarterly, and Fraser represented by themselves an amount of literary activity that might have sufficed, without any further prophetic business, to engross the years in which they were produced; but there is reason to believe that simultaneously he had been, from the very outset of his settlement at Craigenputtoch, occupied also with Sartor Resartus. True, he has himself told us that it was "undoubtedly written among the mountain solitudes in 1831;" but we apprehend this meant no more than that it was completed in that year. It is said to have been re-written more than once, which we can very well believe; and several years (five, according to some authorities) were at least partially devoted to its composition. These stories about its Sartor Standing at the Gate. 135 genesis are quite likely to have more than a grain of truth in them; thus much is certain, that its mental production was not the work of one solitary year, even though that year had been crushed full of the most strenuous toil directed exclusively to the one end. It must ever be regarded as one of the most striking facts in the literary annals of this nation, that Sartor, completed in 1831, could not get itself published in book form, at least in its • native country, till 1838! Its birth, therefore, as a printed book, was even a more protracted agony than its completion in a written form-a circumstance that must appear all the more remarkable to any one who is at the trouble to look back and note what kind of literature was being poured from the English press during those seven years in which this new candidate was kept standing at 'the gate. Yet we need scarcely marvel that the publish ers looked askance at a work that bore no resemblance ⚫ to any printed book extant at that hour in the English tongue. It would probably be a hard task to get a publisher to-day for anything so completely novel in style and substance; and the chances against the acceptance of such a violent departure from the conventional standards were still greater fifty years ago. In that very year which saw Sartor ready for the press, the Edinburgh Review had felt itself compelled to give Carlyle notice to quit, the essay entitled Characteristics, richly laden with the loftiest thought expressed in the noblest language,* "It is a grand article, fuller of high thought than anything of the like sort ever seen in the Edinburgh Review before or since, and more closely packed with Carlylese ideas, or the germs of them, than any of its author's pages elsewhere-germs subsequently to be seen full-blown in Sartor Resartus and his later books, and expanded |