A CARLYLE N American man of letters, Mr C. G. Leland, writes in his Memoirs that he bought Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, "first edition," and read it through forty times, of which he kept count, before he left college;1 and there is other testimony, as striking, to the very wide influence of Carlyle in the middle of the last century. "There was the utmost avidity for his books wherever they were available, especially among the young men; phrases from them were in all young men's mouths, and were affecting the public speech."2 Huxley, who was not one of his disciples, wrote in March 1881: "I should not yield to the most devoted of his followers in gratitude for the bracing wholesome influence of his writings, when as a young man I was essaying without rudder or compass to strike out a course for myself." 3 With Milton and Wordsworth he was one of those who most influenced T. H. Green.* It is not so now. To some extent the overheightening of emphasis in some of Carlyle's later books has accentuated the reaction in fancy and fashion that always follows a great vogue, and there have not been wanting critical voices to turn the minds of the young in other directions, though not all of his critics seem destined for immortality. Nor can it be questioned that, while Froude's Biography revealed him in a new light to such readers as Edward Fitzgerald-" How is it," he asks, “that I did not know that Carlyle was so good, grand, and even loveable, till I 1 C. G. Leland, Memoirs, i. 108. 2 Masson, Carlyle, p. 67. 3 Life of Huxley, ii. 34. Compare E. Caird, Essays, i. 231; and T. E. Brown's Letters, 8 February 1881. 4 Bryce, Contemporary Biography, 87. read the Letters which Froude now edits?"-for many the volumes went far to abolish Carlyle's influence. None the less his works remain, and the fact stands that he was one of the formative minds of the nineteenth century. We may well ask what it was he did, and what he was; and the latter is the real question. It was, at all events, one of his own firmest convictions, a belief that lies at the heart of his best work, that in every case the man is more than his word, more than his act. The value of the book is as an index to the personality, and the personality of the great man is his real contribution to mankind. Carlyle recommends Novalis to his readers-"If they feel, with us, that the most profitable employment any book can give them, is to study honestly, some earnest, deep-minded, truth-loving Man, to work their way into his manner of thought, till they see the world with his eyes, feel as he felt and judge as he judged, neither believing, nor denying, till they can in some measure so feel and judge." 2 "Get first into the sphere of thought," he says, "by which it is so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man like Luther, otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing with you." 3 Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan on the 4th of December 1795. Of his father, James Carlyle, he has left an impressive memorial. The old man died in January 1832 at the age of seventy-five, and his son could not leave London to go to his burial. His mind ran upon his father and during the last days of the month he wrote down his reminiscences of him. James Carlyle was a Scottish peasant of a type well known north of the border, bred in a school of hardship, a man "religious with the consent of his whole faculties." "Every morning and every evening, for perhaps sixty years, he had prayed to the Great Father in words which I shall 1 Letter of 1 September 1882. Life of William Morris, ii. 76. read this book." 2 Essay on Novalis, p. 50. Cf. letter of William Morris; Mackail, "I like him much the better for having 3 Heroes, Lecture iv. now no more hear him impressively pronounce, 'Prepare us for those solemn events, death, judgment and eternity.' He would pray also, 'Forsake us not when we are old and our heads grown grey.'1 God did not forsake him. He had an air of deepest gravity, even sternness. Yet he could laugh with his whole throat, and his whole heart. I have often seen him weep too; his voice would thicken and his lips curve while reading the Bible. He had a merciful heart to real distress, though he hated idleness, and for imbecility and fatuity had no tolerance. Onceand I think once only-I saw him in a passion of tears. It was when the remains of my mother's fever hung upon her, in 1817, and seemed to threaten the extinction of her reason. We were all of us nigh desperate, and ourselves mad. He burst at last into quite a torrent of grief, cried piteously, and threw himself on the floor and lay moaning... It was as if a rock of granite had melted and was thawing into water. . . "He seldom or never spoke except actually to convey an idea. How in a few sentences he would sketch you off an entire biography, an entire object or transaction, keen, clear, rugged, genuine, completely rounded in. . . . "How he used to speak of death, especially in late years -or rather to be silent, and look at it! There was no feeling in him here that he cared to hide. He trembled at the really terrible; the mock terrible he cared nought for. That last act of his life, when in the last agony, with the thick, ghastly vapours of death rising round him to choke him, he burst through and called with a man's voice on the Great God to have mercy on him-that was the epitome and concluding summary of his whole life." It is not hard to recognise some hint of James Carlyle in all his son's thoughts. Instinctively he compared men with his father. Margaret Aitken, Carlyle's mother, was a woman of 1 It is worth noting that these prayers shaped themselves in the words of Psalm lxxi. 9 and 18. character and kindliness, of that Scottish kind who bear men, and have body and mind and soul enough to breed them. She lived to see his greatness recognized, and died when he was fifty-eight, leaving a gap in his life not to be known but by sympathetic study of the long and helpful intercourse that ceased on Christmas Day 1853, and of the sorrow that followed. She had nine children in all, of whom he was the eldest. Every volume added to his published correspondence brings further evidence to the intense love that bound the family together, the mutual support they gave to one another throughout life, the careful and tender solicitude with which brothers and sisters studied their mother and each other. No judgment upon Carlyle is adequate which does not recognize this deep tenderness. Sometimes one fancies that disappointment in other directions intensified this love of his own people, but in any case the family was one of the foundations of his being. The world into which Carlyle was born was a difficult one. The world is never a very easy place to manage with, but the beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of peculiar trouble in Great Britain. The natural progress of the country had been dammed for a generation by the reaction against the French Revolution. The Terror and the European war had scared the governing classes of this country into a course of senseless repression -the cruelty of frightened dullness. Romilly, the reformer of the barbarous penal code, wrote in 1808: "If any person be desirous of having an adequate idea of the mischievous effects which have been produced in this country by the French Revolution and all its attendant horrors, he should attempt some legislative reform on humane and liberal principles." When he pleaded for lessening the number of offences to which the death penalty was attached, a • Member of Parliament replied, "I am for hanging all,”— hanging them in public as the way was in those days,—and Lord Ellenborough and Lord Eldon were of the same mind; they were not for altering "those laws which a century had proved to be necessary, and which were now to be overturned by speculation and modern philosophy."1 Indeed, those laws were reinforced. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended. The Press was attacked; a stamp duty was imposed on newspapers to stop their circulation; five hundred writers were sentenced to more or less severe penalties between 1809 and 1822 for promoting rebellion, conspiracy or blasphemy. Cobbett's stormy life is a sort of barometric record of the period, for he was at times the direct object of Government legislation. With the principles (or prejudices) that animated them, it was a vital matter for the ruling classes to keep Parliament unreformed; corruption was essential to the maintenance of the constitution. "You need not ask me, my lord, who I votes for; I always votes for Mister Most," said an independent elector to Lord Cochrane in 1806.3 Meantime there was an increasing amount of suffering among the people. Population had increased, and foreign trade was interrupted. A General Enclosure Act was passed in 1801, and the small farmers began to disappear, pasture-rights were lost, and village industries were moving away to the towns. Harvests were bad from 1789 to 1802. Wheat was dear, but its high price benefited the landlord rather than the labourer. War and law kept the price up, and laws and wars alike were made by a Parliament of land-owners. War also meant the press-gang. Why would you trouble Buonaparte's reign? 1 In 1789 a woman was burnt at the stake for coining. 4 E. I. Carlyle, William Cobbett, p. 127. * A return "in chronological order of all Acts passed for the inclosure of Commons or Waste lands" was ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, 29 July 1914. It contains between 4500 and 5000 titles. |