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This memoir, judged as a whole, is undoubtedly one of great and permanent interest. But we wish, in spite of Mr. Fronde'a flowing and brilliant style, that it could have been written by some one caring as much as Mr. Froude does for Carlyle and his genius, but not disposed, as he has been, to turn the memoir into. a series of intermittent discharges of moral and political spite. We have no fault to find with him for confessing plainly Carlyle's political convictions, nor even for letting us hear those furious- volleys against Liberalism, Democracy, liberty, and the like which Carlyle let off from time to time with increasing vehemence when he found that they produced little or no effect• on the English people. His wrath against Mr. Gladstone was incoherent enough, and was not even expressed with the sort of insight which he could display when he chose; but that wrath was part and parcel of him, and as the idea of Mr. Fronde's- Life was to show Carlyle as he was, without concealment and without exaggeration, it was not unfit that his rage against the tendencies to which Mr. Gladstone has given the most powerful and authoritative expression, should be frankly disclosed. But what we do object to is the venom with which Mr. Froude expounds and comments upon this vein of Carlylian misanthropy ; the irrelevant passages in which he professes to be describing the political teaching of Aristotle or Plato, whose drift he points by quoting one of Mr. Disraeli's " good-natured " sneers at Mr. Gladstone (Vol. II., p. 376) ; the• malicious gusto with which be drags his own hatred of Ireland and of Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy almost into the account of Carlyle's- death, or at least into the account of the weakness which pre- ceded death, when by his own confession Carlyle had lost all inter- est in politics, and refused to respond to Mr. Fronde's attempt to him vituperate Ireland and Mr. Gladstone (Vol.II., p. 468) „ the dreary apology for Carlyle's unworthy sneer at his early friend, John Stuart Mill, then lying dead at Avignon ; and for the still unworthier sneer which, half a year later, followed the publication of Mill's Antobiograpby,—a sincere book, if ever there were one, and not one which Carlyle ought to have read without respect and sympathy ; or, again, the malicious passages. in which Mr. Fronde represents Carlyle again and again as speak. ing of Bishop Thirlwall as a mere actor, and takes credit for Carlyle for not blaming the Bishop's theatrical assumption of orthodoxy—" Thirlwall, who discharged his functions as. a Macready, he never blamed to me " (Vol. II., p. 263) ; or, again, the very cynical passage in which Mr. Fronde actually asserts that Carlyle's Rectorial Address at Edinburgh was received with favour by the people of Great Britain because, having lost the force of his youth, Carlyle gave his creed in a. form which sounded unreal,—sounded like sermons which no one supposed it necessary to act upon :—" Carlyle, people felt with • Thomas Carlyle : a Hietory of Lis Life in Leaden. By ;James Anthony Fronde, M.A. With portrait engraved on steel. London : Longman.
a sense of relief, meant only what the preachers meant, and was a fine fellow after all" (Vol. II, p. 307). These sneers, these open and covert sneers, greatly injure the biography,— sometimes, as in this last case, without any decent pretext for them, and sometimes with plenty of pretext fur- nished by Carlyle's own' bilious volleys, but all the more unpleasant on that account. A biographer who not only loved Carlyle,—and Mr. Fronde, no doubt, really does love him,—but felt keenly what was unworthy in him as well as what was noble, would not, when he felt it his duty to expose a weak place in his hero's character, have gone on, as Mr. Fronde does, harping on the jarring notes, and presenting us with airy variations of his own on those shrill and discordant passages. Mr. Fronde has not only let us see the blots in his hero's char- acter, but has so expatiated upon them on his own account, that we close the volumes with a sigh of relief.
Besides this moral failure, there is a great literary fault in the far too constant repetitions of Carlyle's monotonous reveries and jeremiads. Great as Carlyle's genius is, his criti- cisms on life are few, and these few, when repeated, are always repeated in the same key, and often in the same words. It was necessary, no doubt, to let the reader see this. Repetition was Carlyle's strength, and we should not have known his strength without a great many repetitions ; but there is a limit even to the literary significance of repetition. If you have been told twenty times in as many pages that this• is "a paltry dog-kennel of a world—now rushing fast to total anarchy and self-government by the basest,"—that " nobleness in the world is as a thing of the past ; I have given up England to the deaf stupidities and to the fatalities that follow, likewise deaf,"—it is hardly desirable to have the same cheerful opinion repeated another twenty times, with hardly any variation, in the next twenty pages. Mr. Fronde spares his readers too little. He forgets that a biography should be a kind of sublimate or essence of the actual life; and that when it has once clearly impressed upon us what its hero did think when- ever he got up and whenever he went to bed, it need not remind us how very often his thoughts ran in that channel, any more than it need remind us bow very often its hero got up and went to bed. Mr. Fronde's memoir is far too long, and indulges a great deal too much in mere reiterations. He should have made more attempt to imitate in point of terseness Carlyle's Life of Sterling,—a book which is, in many respects, the gem of Carlyle's achievements as an artist; though we must say that it manages to let the reader see how condescendingly Carlyle looked down upon and patronised Sterling, a great deal more clearly than it enables him to see what Sterling was actually like. Carlyle was graphic in delineating very great and -very peculiar men ; but, like his friend Dickens, he was not very successful in delineating average human beings, or in catching the subtler characteristics of natures not deviating very widely from the more ordinary types. Carlyle's own nature was not, of course, of an ordinary type; and we do not in the least charge Mr. Fronde with failing to show it to ns as it was. What we do charge him with, is giving us not merely scores, but hundreds of self-portraitures almost identical, or quite identical, till we not only know Carlyle thoroughly, but, for the time, weary of him.
The book, however, leaves on us the impression which Mr. Fronde wishes to leave in one respect,—namely, that with all his selfishness and self-centredness, Carlyle's heart was fall of passionate love for the few—the very few. He seems to as a cold and self-occupied friend, ready to drop a friend at the shortest notice, the moment he discovers that that friend no longer admires him. But for his own family, for his wife, for one or two of his early Scotch friends, his love was deep and ardent, and absolutely independent of their love for him. The eurions and, on the whole, painful story of Carlyle's relations with his wife, leaves us with the conviction that his love for her was, after all, a good deal deeper than hers for him. There is a cold- ness and suspicion in some of her letters,—especially, for example, in that most ungenerous and inexcusable suggestion that his tender letters to her were meant less for her than for his biographer, —of which be would have been incapable. Doubtless,it was he who oftenest gave practical ground of offence ; but then it was he, too, who most deeply and passionately repented of his own faults when once he saw them. It is impossible to deny that, self-centred as he was,—incapable as he was of returning heartily the regard of the friends made in later life,—his domestic feelings were of the deepest and tenderest kind, and struck their roots into his very being.
Again, Mr. Fronde leaves on us a very genuine conviction of Carlyle's deep religious feeling. In spite of the inborn arro- gance and dogmatism which made his scorn of everybody who did not agree with him on the negative as well as the positive aspects of the religions question, so painful and sometimes so insulting, in spite of his preference for the savagery of Norse religion, and the shame with which he regarded all the weaker forms of the Gospel of love, Carlyle had at heart the intuitions of faith in singular strength and purity, though he early absorbed that total disbelief in miracle and that singular bias towards destructive criticism, which were breathed-in with the intellectual atmosphere of his early days. It is obvious that what with his savage disposition to trample on honest and thoughtful belief as if it were mere worldly in- sincerity, and what with his equally angry disgust at the pert Atheism of his times, he was in a very awkward cleft stick from which he did not know how to extricate himself. But his heart was in the deepest sense religious, so religions, that we can- not believe he really approved, even theoretically, as Mr. Fronde maintains that he did, of suicide, even for those whose work in the world was done. Of course, as Mr. Fronde tells us so, he must have, in words, affirmed his approval; but if the thought ever occurred to him of ending his own weary and lonely days by self-murder, we do not doubt that he recoiled from it as a suggestion of the Evil One. It is all very well to talk of your work being done. But who knows what his work is ? For a man so violently impatient as Carlyle, may not the very best part of his work have been the ten years of almost helpless waiting for the end?
Finally, Mr. Fronde gives us a very just estimate of Carlyle's rich and splendid imagination ; but what he does not give us any adequate impression of, is the singular limitation upon it. We have said that Carlyle's was a Rembrandt-like imagination. It lighted up special points and scenes in the world's history with marvellous force ; but for Carlyle all the rest of the world was non-existent. He judged. of the whole by a very small tract round the focal part of his vision. For the rest all was dark- ness; and yet he thought, and spoke, and lived, and taught, as if all the rest was just like the little tract he had brought into the field of his magic-lantern. While he was always telling every- body that it was by the silent actions of men that they were to be judged, he violently and acrimoniously judged the world only by its superficial babble, and never even seemed to remember that there were any silent actions at all, of which be could form no judgment, simply because they had never come under his ken. He vapoured and hectored as if all the world were adequately mirrored in the puffery of the advertisers, or the hypocrisy of the charlatans, forgetting that the puffery of the advertisers and the hypocrisy of the charlatans force themselves upon us, and that almost all that is honest, modest, and quiet, is hidden from the sight of men. This was what made his political teaching so extravagant, false, and absurd. He wrote and spoke as if all that was done, was done by the ostentatious and the foolish, and hardly attempted to discern the significance of quiet, strong, and modest agencies, of which the noisy part of the world h quite unconscious.
Hence his historical work was often very like the unrolling of a diorama which reveals to view what is showy and sensational, and leaves all that is solid and silent out of account. Wise men will value Mr. Froude's book ; but they will rightly condemn severely much that they find there, and will see also how much has been omitted in it which would have been needful to make it a true estimate of Thomas Carlyle.
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