Part 10

Carlyle's "Frederick the Great"[25] seems to us a badly written book. Let us consider the volume containing the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth chapters. Nothing in these chapters is brought out clearly. When we have finished the book, the mind is filled with a confusion of vague images. We know that Mr. Carlyle is not bound to "provide us with brains" as well as with a history, but neither was he so bound in other days. Yet no such confusion was left after reading the "French Revolution." How brilliantly distinct was every leading event, every influential person, every pathetic or poetic episode, in that charmed narrative! Who can forget Carlyle's account of the "Menads," the King's "Flight to Varennes," the Constitutions that "would not march," the "September Massacres," "Charlotte Corday,"--every chief tragic movement, every grotesque episode, moving forward, distinct and clear, to the final issue, "a whiff of grapeshot"? Is there anything like that in this confused "Frederick"?

Compare, for example, the chapters on Voltaire in the present volume with the article on Voltaire published in 1829.

The sixteenth book is devoted to the ten years of peace which followed the second Silesian war. These were from 1746 to 1756. The book contains fifteen chapters. Carlyle begins, in chapter i., by lamenting that there is very little to be known or said about these ten years. "Nothing visible in them of main significance but a crash of authors' quarrels, and the crowning visit of Voltaire." Yet one would think that matter enough might be found in describing the immense activity of Friedrich, of which Macaulay says, "His exertions were such as were hardly to be expected from a human body or a human mind." During these years Frederick brought a seventh part of his people into the army, and organized and drilled it under his own personal inspection, till it became the finest in Europe. He compiled a code of laws, in which he, among the first, abolished torture. He made constant journeys through his dominions, examining the condition of manufactures, arts, commerce, and agriculture. He introduced the strictest economy into the expenditures of the state. He indulged himself, indeed, in various architectural extravagances at Berlin and Potsdam,--but otherwise saved every florin for his army. He wrote "Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg," and an epic poem on the "Art of War." But our author disdains to give us an account of these things. They are not picturesque, they can be told in only general terms, and Carlyle will tell us only what an eyewitness could see or a listener hear. Accordingly, instead of giving us an account of these great labors of his hero, he inserts (chapter ii.) "a peep at Voltaire and his divine Emilie," "a visit to Frederick by Marshal Saxe;" (chapter iii.) a long account of Candidate Linsenbarth's visit to the king; "Sir Jonas Hanway stalks across the scene;" the lawsuit of Voltaire about the Jew Hirsch; "a demon news-writer gives an idea of Friedrich;" the quarrel of Voltaire and Maupertuis; "Friedrich is visible in Holland to the naked eye for some minutes."

This is very unsatisfactory. Reports of eyewitnesses are, no doubt, picturesque and valuable; but so only on condition of being properly arranged, and tending, in their use, toward some positive result. Then the tone of banter, of irony, almost of persiflage, is discouraging. If the whole story of Friedrich is so unintelligible, uninteresting, or incommunicable, why take the trouble to write it? The _poco-curante_ air with which he narrates, as though it were of no great consequence whether he told his story or not, contrasts wonderfully with his early earnestness. Carlyle writes this history like a man thoroughly _blasé_. Impossible for him to take any interest in it himself,--how, then, does he expect to interest us? Has he not himself told us, in his former writings, that the man who proposes to teach others anything must be good enough to believe it first himself?

Here is the problem we have to solve. How came this change from the Carlyle of the Past to the Carlyle of the Present,--from Carlyle the universal believer to Carlyle the universal skeptic,--from him to whom the world was full of wonder and beauty, to him who can see in it nothing but Force on the one side and Shams on the other? What changed that tender, loving, brave soul into this hard cynic? And how was it, as Faith and Love faded out of him, that the life passed from his thought, the glory from his pen, and the page, once alive with flashing ideas, turned into this confused heap of rubbish, in which silver spoons, old shoes, gold sovereigns, and copper pennies are pitched out promiscuously, for the patient reader to sift and pick over as he can? In reading the Carlyle of thirty years ago, we were like California miners,--come upon a rich _placer_, never before opened, where we could all become rich in a day. Now the reader of Carlyle is a _chiffonier_, raking in a heap of street dust for whatever precious matters may turn up.

To investigate this question is our purpose now,--and in doing so we will consider, in succession, these two Carlyles.

I. It was about the year 1830 that readers of books in this vicinity became aware of a new power coming up in the literary republic. Opinions concerning him varied widely. To some he seemed a Jack Cade, leader of rebels, foe to good taste and all sound opinions. Especially did his admiration for Goethe and for German literature seem to many preposterous and extravagant. It was said of these, that "the force of folly could no further go,"--that they "constituted a burlesque too extravagant to be amusing." The tone of Carlyle was said to be of "unbounded assumption;" his language to be "obscure and barbarous;" his ideas composed of "extravagant paradoxes, familiar truths or familiar falsehoods;" "wildest extravagance and merest silliness."

But to others, and especially to the younger men, this new writer came, opening up unknown worlds of beauty and wonder. A strange influence, unlike any other, attracted us to his writing. Before we knew his name, we knew _him_. We could recognize an article by our new author as soon as we opened the pages of the Foreign Review, Edinburgh, or Westminster, and read a few paragraphs. But it was not the style, though marked by a singular freedom and originality--not the tone of kindly humor, the good-natured irony, the happy illustrations brought from afar,--not the amount of literary knowledge, the familiarity with German, French, Italian, Spanish literature,--not any or all of these which so bewitched us. We knew a young man who used to walk from a neighboring town to Boston every week, in order to read over again two articles by Carlyle in two numbers of the Foreign Review lying on a table in the reading-room of the Athenæum. This was his food, in the strength of which he could go a week, till hunger drove him back to get another meal at the same table. We knew other young men and young women who taught themselves German in order to read for themselves the authors made so luminous by this writer. Those were counted fortunate who possessed the works of our author, as yet unpublished in America,--his "Life of Schiller," his "German Romance," his Review articles. What, then, was the charm,--whence the fascination?

To explain this we must describe a little the state of literature and opinion in this vicinity at the time when Carlyle's writings first made their appearance.

Unitarianism and Orthodoxy had fought their battle, and were resting on their arms. Each had intrenched itself in certain positions, each had won to its side most of those who legitimately belonged to it. Controversy had done all it could, and had come to an end. Among the Unitarians, the so-called "practical preaching" was in vogue; that is, ethical and moral essays, pointing out the goodness of being good, and the excellence of what was called "moral virtue." There was, no doubt, a body of original thinkers and writers,--better thinkers and writers, it may be, than we have now,--who were preparing the way for another advance. Channing had already unfolded his doctrine of man, of which the central idea is, that human nature is not to be moulded by religion, but to be developed by it. Walker, Greenwood, Ware, and their brave associates, were conducting this journal with unsurpassed ability. But something more was needed. The general character of preaching was not of a vitalizing sort. It was much like what Carlyle says of preaching in England at the same period: "The most enthusiastic Evangelicals do not preach a Gospel, but keep describing how it should and might be preached; to awaken the sacred fire of faith is not their endeavor; but at most, to describe how faith shows and acts, and scientifically to distinguish true faith from false." It is "not the Love of God which is taught, but the love of the Love of God."

According to this, God was outside of the world, at a distance from his children, and obliged to communicate with them in this indirect way, by breaking through the walls of natural law with an occasional miracle. There was no door by which he could enter into the sheepfold to his sheep. Miracles were represented, even by Dr. Channing, as abnormal, as "violations of the laws of nature;" something, therefore, unnatural and monstrous, and not to be believed except on the best evidence. God could not be supposed to break through the walls of this house of nature, except in order to speak to his children on some great occasions. That he had done it, in the case of Christianity, could be proved by the eleven volumes of Dr. Lardner, which showed the Four Gospels to have been written by the companions of Christ, and not otherwise.

The whole of this theory rested, it will be observed, on a sensuous system of mental philosophy. "All knowledge comes through the senses," was its foundation. Revelation, like every other form of knowledge, must come through the senses. A miracle, which appeals to the sight, touch, hearing, is the only possible proof of a divine act. For, in the last analysis, all our theology rests on our philosophy. Theology, being belief, must proceed according to those laws of belief, whatever they are, which we accept and hold. The man who thinks that all knowledge comes through the senses must receive his theological knowledge also that way, and no other. This was the general opinion thirty or forty years ago; hence this theory of Christianity, which supposes that God is obliged to break his own laws in order to communicate it.

But the result of this belief was harmful. It tended to make our religion formal, our worship a mere ceremony; it made real communication with God impossible; it turned prayer into a self-magnetizing operation; it left us virtually "without God and hope in the world." Thanks to Him who never leaves himself without a witness in the human heart, this theory was often nullified in practice by the irrepressible instincts which it denied, by the spiritual intuitions which it ridiculed. Even Professor Norton, its chief champion, had a heart steeped in the sweetest piety. Denying, intellectually, all intuitions of God, Duty, and Immortality, his beautiful and tender hymns show the highest spiritual insight. Still it cannot be denied that this theory tended to dry up the fountains of religious faith in the human heart, and to leave us in a merely mechanical and unspiritualized world.

Now the first voice which came to break this enchantment was, to many, the voice of Thomas Carlyle. It needed for this end, it always needs, a man who could come face to face with Truth. Every great idol-breaker, every man who has delivered the world from the yoke of Forms, has been one who was able to see the substance of things, who was gifted with the insight of realities. Forms of worship, forms of belief, at first the channels of life, through which the Living Spirit flowed into human hearts, at last became petrified, incrusted, choked. A few drops of the vital current still ooze slowly through them, and our parched lips, sucking these few drops, cling all the more closely to the form as it becomes less and less a vehicle of life. The poorest word, old and trite, is precious when there is no open vision. We do well continually to resort to the half-dead form, "till the day dawn, and the day-star arise in our hearts."

But at last there comes a man capable of dispensing with the form,--a man endowed with a high degree of the intuitive faculty,--a born seer, a prophet, seeing the great realities of the universe with open vision. The work of such a man is to break up the old formulas and introduce new light and life. This work was done for the Orthodox thirty years ago by the writings of Coleridge; for the Unitarians in this vicinity, by the writings of Thomas Carlyle.

This was the secret of the enthusiasm felt for Carlyle, in those days, by so many of the younger men and women. He taught us to look at realities instead of names, at substance instead of surface,--to see God in the world, in nature, in life, in providence, in man,--to see divine truth and beauty and wonder everywhere around. He taught that the only organ necessary by which to see the divine in all things was sincerity, or inward truth. And so he enabled us to escape from the form into the spirit, he helped us to rise to that plane of freedom from which we could see the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, God in man, heaven on earth, immortality beginning here, eternity pervading time. This made for us a new heaven and a new earth, a new religion and a new life. Faith was once more possible, a faith not bought by the renunciation of mature reason or the beauty and glory of the present hour.

But all this was taught us by our new prophet, not by the intellect merely, but by the spirit in which he spoke. He did not seem to be giving us a new creed, so much as inspiring us with a new life. That which came from his experience went into ours. Therefore it might have been difficult, in those days, for any of his disciples to state what it was that they had learned from him. They had not learned his doctrine,--they had absorbed it. Hence, very naturally, came the imitations of Carlyle, which so disgusted the members of the old school. Hence the absurd Carlylish writing, the feeble imitations by honest, but weak disciples of the great master. It was a pity, but not unnatural, and it soon passed by.

As Carlyle thus did his work, not so much by direct teaching as by an influence hidden in all that he said, it did not much matter on what subject he wrote,--the influence was there still. But his articles on Goethe were the most attractive, because he asserted that in this patriarch of German literature he had found one who saw in all things their real essence, one whose majestic and trained intelligence could interpret to us in all parts of nature and life the inmost quality, the _terza essenza_, as the Italian Platonists called it, which made each itself. Goethe was announced as the prophet of Realism. He, it should seem, had perfectly escaped from words into things. He saw the world, not through dogmas, traditions, formulas, but as it was in itself. To him

"the world's unwithered countenance Was fresh as on creation's day."

Consider the immense charm of such hopes as these! No wonder that the critics complained that the disciples of Carlyle were "insensible to ridicule." What did they care for the laughter, which seemed to them, in their enthusiasm, like "the crackling of thorns under the pot." Ridicule, in fact, never touches the sincere enthusiast. It is a good and useful weapon against affectation, but it falls, shivered to pieces, from the magic breastplate of truth. No sincere person, at work in a cause which he knows to be important, ever minds being laughed at.

But besides his admirable discussions of Goethe, Carlyle's "Life of Schiller" opened the portals of German literature, and made an epoch in biography and criticism. It was a new thing to read a biography written with such enthusiasm,--to find a critic who could really write with reverence and tender love of the poet whom he criticised. Instead of taking his seat on the judicial bench, and calling his author up before him to be judged as a culprit, Carlyle walks with Schiller through the circles of his poems and plays, as Dante goes with Virgil through the Inferno and Paradiso. He accepts the great poet as his teacher and master,[26] a thing unknown before in all criticism. It was supposed that a biographer would become a mere Boswell if he looked up to his hero, instead of looking down on him. It was not understood that it was that "angel of the world," Reverence, which had exalted even a poor, mean, vain fool, like Boswell, and enabled him to write one of the best books ever written. It was not his reverence for Johnson which made Boswell a fool,--his reverence for Johnson made him, a fool, capable of writing one of the best books of modern times.

This capacity of reverence in Carlyle--this power of perceiving a divine, infinite quality in human souls--tinges all his biographical writing with a deep religious tone. He wrote of Goethe, Schiller, Richter, Burns, Novalis, even Voltaire, with reverence. He could see their defects easily enough, he could playfully expose their weaknesses; but beneath all was the sacred undertone of reverence for the divine element in each,--for that which God had made and meant them to be, and which they had realized more or less imperfectly in the struggle of life. The difference between the reverence of a Carlyle and that of a Boswell is, that one is blind and the other intelligent. The one worships his hero down to his shoes and stockings, the other distinguishes the divine idea from its weak embodiment.

Two articles from this happy period--that on the "Signs of the Times" and that called "Characteristics"--indicate some of Carlyle's leading ideas concerning right thinking and right living. In the first, he declares the present to be an age of mechanism,--not heroic, devout, or philosophic. All things are done by machinery. "Men have no faith in individual endeavor or natural force." "Metaphysics has become material." Government is a machine. All this he thinks evil. The living force is in the individual soul,--not mechanic, but dynamic. Religion is a calculation of expediency, not an impulse of worship; no thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of man to his invisible Father, the Fountain of all goodness, beauty, and truth, but a contrivance by which a small quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a much larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. "Virtue is pleasure, is profit." "In all senses we worship and follow after power, which may be called a physical pursuit." (Ah, Carlyle of the Present! does not that wand of thine old true self touch thee?) "No man now loves truth, as truth must be loved, with an infinite love; but only with a finite love, and, as it were, _par amours_."

In the other article, "Characteristics," printed two years later, in 1831, he unfolds the doctrine of "Unconsciousness" as the sign of health in soul as well as body. He finds society sick everywhere; he finds its religion, literature, science, all diseased, yet he ends the article, as the other was ended, in hope of a change to something better.

These two articles may be considered as an introduction to his next great work, "Sartor Resartus," or the "Clothes-Philosophy." Here, in a vein of irony and genial humor, he unfolds his doctrine of substance and form. The object of all thought and all experience is to look through the clothes to the living beneath them. According to his book, all human institutions are the clothing of society; language is the garment of thought, the heavens and earth the time-vesture of the Eternal. So, too, are religious creeds and ceremonies the clothing of religion; so are all symbols the vesture of some idea; so are the crown and sceptre the vesture of government. This book is the autobiography of a seeker for truth. In it he is led from the shows of things to their innermost substance, and as in all his other writings, he teaches here also that sincerity, truthfulness, is the organ by which we are led to the solid rock of reality, which underlies all shows and shams.

II. We now come to treat of Carlyle in his present aspect,--a much less agreeable task. We leave Carlyle the generous and gentle, for Carlyle the hard cynic. We leave him, the friend of man, lover of his race, for another Carlyle, advocate of negro slavery, worshiper of mere force, sneering at philanthropy, and admiring only tyrants, despots, and slaveholders. The change, and the steps which led to it, chronologically and logically, it is our business to scrutinize,--not a grateful occupation indeed, but possibly instructive and useful.

Thomas Carlyle, after spending his previous life in Scotland, and from 1827 to 1834 in his solitude at Craigenputtoch, removed to London in the latter year, when thirty-eight years old. Since then he has permanently resided in London, in a house situated on one of the quiet streets running at right angles with the Thames. He came to London almost an unknown man; he has there become a great name and power in literature. He has had for friends such men as John Stuart Mill, Sterling, Maurice, Leigh Hunt, Browning, Thackeray, and Emerson. His "French Revolution" was published in 1837; "Sartor Resartus" (published in Frazer in 1833, and in Boston in a volume in 1836) was put forth collectively in 1838; and in the same year his "Miscellanies" (also collected and issued in Boston in 1838) were published in London, in four volumes. "Chartism" was issued in 1839. He gave four courses of Lectures in Willis's rooms "to a select but crowded audience," in 1837, 1838, 1839, and 1840. Only the last of these--"Heroes and Hero-Worship"--was published. "Past and Present" followed in 1843, "Oliver Cromwell" in 1845. In 1850 he printed "Latter-Day Pamphlets," and subsequently his "Life of Sterling" (1851), and the four volumes, now issued, of "Frederick the Great."

The first evidence of an altered tendency is perhaps to be traced in the "French Revolution." It is a noble and glorious book; but, as one of his friendly critics has said, "its philosophy is contemptuous and mocking, and it depicts the varied and gigantic characters which stalk across the scene, not so much as responsible and living mortals, as the mere mechanical implements of some tremendous and irresistible destiny." In "Heroes and Hero-Worship" the habit has grown of revering mere will, rather than calm intellectual and moral power. The same thing is shown in "Past and Present," in "Cromwell," and in "Latter-Day Pamphlets," which the critic quoted above says is "only remarkable as a violent imitation of himself, and not of his better self." For the works of this later period, indeed, the best motto would be that verse from Daniel: "He shall exalt himself, and magnify himself, and speak marvelous things; neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, but in his stead shall he honor the God of Forces, a god whom his fathers knew not."