Complete Prose Works
last meaning in his pages. Accordingly, though he was no chartist or
radical, I consider Carlyle's by far the most indignant comment or
protest anent the fruits of feudalism to-day in Great Britain--the
increasing poverty and degradation of the homeless, landless twenty
millions, while a few thousands, or rather a few hundreds, possess the
entire soil, the money, and the fat berths. Trade and shipping, and
clubs and culture, and prestige, and guns, and a fine select class of
gentry and aristocracy, with every modern improvement, cannot begin to
salve or defend such stupendous hoggishness.
The way to test how much he has left his country were to consider,
or try to consider, for a moment, the array of British thought, the
resultant _ensemble_ of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, _but
with Carlyle left out_. It would be like an army with no artillery. The
show were still a gay and rich one--Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many
more--horsemen and rapid infantry, and banners flying--but the last
heavy roar so dear to the ear of the train'd soldier, and that settles
fate and victory, would be lacking.
For the last three years we in America have had transmitted glimpses of
a thin-bodied, lonesome, wifeless, childless, very old man, lying on
a sofa, kept out of bed by indomitable will, but, of late, never well
enough to take the open air. I have noted this news from time to time
in brief descriptions in the papers. A week ago I read such an item just
before I started out for my customary evening stroll between eight
and nine. In the fine cold night, unusually clear, (Feb. 5, '81,) as
I walk'd some open grounds adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, and his
approaching--perhaps even then actual--death, filled me with thoughts
eluding statement, and curiously blending with the scene. The planet
Venus, an hour high in the west, with all her volume and lustre
recover'd, (she has been shorn and languid for nearly a year,) including
an additional sentiment I never noticed before--not merely voluptuous,
Paphian, steeping, fascinating--now with calm commanding seriousness and
hauteur--the Milo Venus now. Upward to the zenith, Jupiter, Saturn, and
the moon past her quarter, trailing in procession, with the Pleiades
following, and the constellation Taurus, and red Aldebaran. Not a cloud
in heaven. Orion strode through the southeast, with his glittering
belt--and a trifle below hung the sun of the night, Sirius. Every star
dilated, more vitreous, nearer than usual. Not as in some clear nights
when the larger stars entirely outshine the rest. Every little star or
cluster just as distinctly visible, and just as nigh. Berenice's hair
showing every gem, and new ones. To the northeast and north the Sickle,
the Goat and kids, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers.
While through the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing
and bathing my whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying. (To
soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of
death and genius, consider them under the stars at midnight.)
And now that he has gone hence, can it be that Thomas Carlyle, soon to
chemically dissolve in ashes and by winds, remains an identity still?
In ways perhaps eluding all the statements, lore and speculations of ten
thousand years--eluding all possible statements to mortal sense--does he
yet exist, a definite, vital being, a spirit, an individual--perhaps
now wafted in space among those stellar systems, which, suggestive and
limitless as they are, merely edge more limitless, far more suggestive
systems? I have no doubt of it. In silence, of a fine night, such
questions are answer'd to the soul, the best answers that can be given.
With me, too, when depress'd by some specially sad event, or tearing
problem, I wait till I go out under the stars for the last voiceless
satisfaction.
CARLYLE FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW
_Later Thoughts and Jottings_
There is surely at present an inexplicable _rapport_ (all the more
piquant from its contradictoriness) between that deceas'd author and our
United States of America--no matter whether it lasts or not[13] As we
Westerners assume definite shape, and result in formations and fruitage
unknown before, it is curious with what a new sense our eyes turn to
representative outgrowths of crises and personages in the Old World.
Beyond question, since Carlyle's death, and the publication of Froude's
memoirs, not only the interest in his books, but every personal bit
regarding the famous Scotchman--his dyspepsia, his buffetings, his
parentage, his paragon of a wife, his career in Edinburgh, in the
lonesome nest on Craigenputtock moor, and then so many years in
London--is probably wider and livelier to-day in this country than
in his own land. Whether I succeed or no, I, too, reaching across the
Atlantic and taking the man's dark fortune-telling of humanity and
politics, would offset it all, (such is the fancy that comes to me,)
by a far more profound horoscope-casting of those themes--G. F.
Hegel's.[14]
First, about a chance, a never-fulfill'd vacuity of this pale cast of
thought--this British Hamlet from Cheyne row, more puzzling than the
Danish one, with his contrivances for settling the broken and spavin'd
joints of the world's government, especially its democratic dislocation.
Carlyle's grim fate was cast to live and dwell in, and largely embody,
the parturition agony and qualms of the old order, amid crowded
accumulations of ghastly morbidity, giving birth to the new.
But conceive of him (or his parents before him) coming to America,
recuperated by the cheering realities and activity of our people and
country--growing up and delving face-to-face resolutely among us here,
especially at the West--inhaling and exhaling our limitless air and
eligibilities--devoting his mind to the theories and developments
of this Republic amid its practical facts as exemplified in Kansas,
Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, or Louisiana. I say _facts_, and
face-to-face confrontings--so different from books, and all those
quiddities and mere reports in the libraries, upon which the man (it
was wittily said of him at the age of thirty, that there was no one in
Scotland who had glean'd so much and seen so little,) almost wholly fed,
and which even his sturdy and vital mind but reflected at best.
Something of the sort narrowly escaped happening. In 1835, after more
than a dozen years of trial and non-success, the author of "Sartor
Resartus" removing to London, very poor, a confirmed hypochondriac,
"Sartor" universally scoffed at, no literary prospects ahead,
deliberately settled on one last casting throw of the literary
dice--resolv'd to compose and launch forth a book on the subject of
_the French Revolution_--and if that won no higher guerdon or prize than
hitherto, to sternly abandon the trade of author forever, and emigrate
for good to America. But the venture turn'd out a lucky one, and there
was no emigration.
Carlyle's work in the sphere of literature as he commenced and carried
it out, is the same in one or two leading respects that Immanuel
Kant's was in speculative philosophy. But the Scotchman had none of the
stomachic phlegm and never-perturb'd placidity of the Konigsberg sage,
and did not, like the latter, understand his own limits, and stop when
he got to the end of them. He clears away jungle and poisonvines and
underbrush--at any rate hacks valiantly at them, smiting hip and thigh.
Kant did the like in his sphere, and it was all he profess'd to do;
his labors have left the ground fully prepared ever since--and greater
service was probably never perform'd by mortal man. But the pang and
hiatus of Carlyle seem to me to consist in the evidence everywhere that
amid a whirl of fog and fury and cross-purposes, he firmly believ'd he
had a clue to the medication of the world's ills, and that his bounden
mission was to exploit it.[15]
There were two anchors, or sheet-anchors, for steadying, as a last
resort, the Carlylean ship. One will be specified presently. The other,
perhaps the main, was only to be found in some mark'd form of personal
force, an extreme degree of competent urge and will, a man or men "born
to command." Probably there ran through every vein and current of the
Scotchman's blood something that warm'd up to this kind of trait and
character above aught else in the world, and which makes him in my
opinion the chief celebrater and promulger of it in literature--more
than Plutarch, more than Shakspere. The great masses of humanity stand
for nothing--at least nothing but nebulous raw material; only the big
planets and shining suns for him. To ideas almost invariably languid or
cold, a number-one forceful personality was sure to rouse his eulogistic
passion and savage joy. In such case, even the standard of duty
hereinafter rais'd, was to be instantly lower'd and vail'd. All that
is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were
distasteful to him from the first, and as he grew older they became
hateful and contemptible. For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating
faculty such as his, the bearings he persistently ignored were
marvellous. For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic
principle, to each and every State of the current world, not so much
of helping it to perfect legislators and executives, but as the only
effectual method for surely, however slowly, training people on a large
scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves (the ultimate
aim of political and all other development)--to gradually reduce the
fact of _governing_ to its minimum, and to subject all its staffs
and their doings to the telescopes and microscopes of committees and
parties--and greatest of all, to afford (not stagnation and obedient
content, which went well enough with the feudalism and ecclesiasticism
of the antique and medieval world, but) a vast and sane and recurrent
ebb and tide action for those floods of the great deep that have
henceforth palpably burst forever their old bounds--seem never to have
enter'd Carlyle's thought. It was splendid how he refus'd any compromise
to the last. He was curiously antique. In that harsh, picturesque, most
potent voice and figure, one seems to be carried back from the present
of the British islands more than two thousand years, to the range
between Jerusalem and Tarsus. His fullest best biographer justly says of
him:
He was a teacher and a prophet, in the Jewish sense of the word. The
prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent
spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had
interpreted correctly the sign of their own times, and their prophecies
were fulfill'd. Carlyle, like them, believ'd that he had a special
message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that
belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen.
He has told us that our most cherish'd ideas of political liberty, with
their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress
which has seem'd to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy
and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The
principles of his teachings are false. He has offer'd himself as a guide
upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself
would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on
the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors,
he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his
teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his
place among the inspired seers.
To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, and no matter
how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should