BOOKS.

THOMAS CARLYLE.* [FIRST NOTICE.]

IT is more than doubtful, we think, whether Mr. Froude's Life of the great Rembrandt of English literature will do what be expects for his fame. Mr. Froude hopes that Carlyle's work for England is still in its infancy. That is hardly the impression which the Life itself leaves upon us. Rather is it the Life of a man with a magnificent imagination of the Rembrandt order, who found one or two great subjects well suited to his unique genius, and one or two others mach less suited to it ; who judged men, and human society, and history, from a very narrow point of view, hardly ever taking-in the significance, as facts, of any series of events of which he could form to himself no brilliant picture ; and who was so perplexed by his own impo- tence to turn the whole stream of English life into a new channel, that he grew wilder and wilder, as he grew older, in his denunciations of everything which he saw around him, and at last lost all practical influence over the mind of a people whose conscience his earlier books had done much to awaken and to stimulate. As regards the man himself, we doubt whether the Life which is now completed will make many conquests over the hearts of the new generation. We find in it a very singular man, very generous, proud to arrogance, self-conscious to so high a degree that many of his letters and journals have the effect of being penetrated with affec- tation, with a brooding imagination of the most brilliant order, fall of love and fidelity to his family and a few intimates, scorn- ful to the point of blindness towards types of character which were outside his range of sympathy, utterly intolerant of petty trials, and bounded in all directions, both intellectually and • Thomas Carlyle: a Hietory of hie Life in Londov, 1834-1881. By Tames Anthony Fronde, M.A. With portrait engraved on steel. 2 vols.

morally, by the doggedness of his imperious self-will. That is hardly a character to which, great as it was in a narrow way, men will be disposed to yield their unstinted admiration. It is, on the whole, a gloomy character, wanting in the higher charities of life, and therefore wanting also in that breadth of intellectual insight which the charities alone can give. The effect of the Life, impressive as it is, is more painful than fascinating. It is evident, we think, that Carlyle felt his own complete helpless- ness to guide the English people either in politics or in religion, and that he fretted his heart out over his own impotence to give that guidance. It was only when the chief subject with which he had to deal was in the main delineative, as in the case of the French Revolution, Cromwell, "The Past" in Past

and Present, his Life of Sterling, and in parts of his book on Frederick the Great, that he was really in his element. LI Chartism, in his Latter-Day Pamphlets, in his treatment of the Negro question, and in all his futile attempts at what he irreverently and foolishly called bringing about an "Exodus

from Houndsditch,"—as if the revelation of God to the Hebrew people had in it any element whatever of the mammon- worshipping kind,—there was no guidance, though there was much brilliant painting of chaos, and some hopeless suggestions towards misguidance. And the Life shows us in detail the- same kind of personal helplessness which the works to which we have referred show us in a magnified form. Carlyle could not conceal from himself that in all these matters he was simply floundering about in search of he knew not what. His religion was very apt not only to sink into vague talk about "the un- utterabilities,"—which might just as well have been kept to him- self, since it is no use saying at great length that you can get nothing intelligible said,—but even to reach the lowest of all ebbs of the faculty of speech. Mr. Fronde gravely assures us that Carlyle "said silently to the muddy universe, Yes, thou art there then ; the fact is no better than so. Let me recognise the fact, and admit it, and adopt it." A man of

genius, nay, of rare genius, who regards that sort of soliloquy as worth putting down on paper, is surely at his last gasp for something serious to say. That Carlyle believed in God and in Providence to the last, Mr. Fronde is careful to tell us, though he is careful to tell us also that he admitted that he could give no reason for believing in Providence,—nay, that his belief was 'even against reason." Why, after such an admission as that, Carlyle should have belaboured heavily those who could not accept his own purely transcendental Theism,—the Theism which could give no reason for its faith in Providence, even if it did not admit that faith to be "against reason,"—

and should have equally belaboured all those who accepted the truth of the Christian Revelation as persons who had not yet been able to achieve their "Exodus from Houndsditch," no man can rationally explain. Indeed, Carlyle seems to us to have regarded the ease with which he could invent a telling form of insult for any type of religion or want of religion, as a serious argument against it. Here, for instance, is his bludgeon- ing of Puseyism

"Did you (he wrote to Sterling), in the course of your historical* inquiries, ever fall in with any phenomenon adequately comparable to Paseyism ? The Church of England stood long upon her tithes and her decencies ; but now she takes to shouting in the market-place, 'My tithes are nothing, my decencies are nothing ; I am either- miraculous celestial or else nothing.' It is to me the fatallest symptom of speedy change she ever exhibited. What an alternative r Men will soon see whether you are miraculous celestial or not. Were a pair of breeches erer known to beget a son?"

Precisely of the same kind are his scoffs at Newman axd Keble. And here, again, is his description of the Benthamites as a party :— "Mill is in better health, still not in good. The set of people he is in, is one that I have to keep out of. No class of mortals ever profited me less. There is a vociferous platitude in them, a mangy hungry discontent ; their very joy like that of a thing scratching itself under disease of the itch. Mill was infinitely too good for them ; but he would have it, and his fate would. I love him much as a friend frozen in ice for me."

We ought to remember, of course, that all this was not written for publication, and that Mr. Fronde alone bears the responsi- bility of publishing these freaks of intellectual ill-temper. Still, it is simply impossible that a man who gave the rein to his

intellectual self-will in such a style as this, could have been a, trustworthy guide on subjects of the highest import. Carlyle maimed his intellect by the riotous indulgence he gave to his self-will. The principles for which he found in himself no sympathy, he merely bedaubed with all kinds

of bad names, and then asked men to hate them, not for themselves, but for the absurd dress in which he had managed to disguise them. How Mr. Fronde can seriously suppose that one who thus wilfully and grossly misled himself is to be described as "the greatest of living thinkers, if by the side of Carlyle any other person deserved to be called a thinker .at all," it is impossible to imagine. Perhaps, however, Mr. Fronde's opinion on a matter of this kind is not one of great significance.

That Carlyle, though very far indeed from the greatest of living thinkers, was truly enough one of the greatest of living imaginers—meaning thereby those who can reconstruct for themselves in imagination a vivid picture of facts and feelings, of which little living trace seems to be left—we should be the first to maintain ; but then the facts and feelings to be recon- structed must be assumed to be of a kind to interest Carlyle, and to move him to a real effort. Even in the mere painting of a familiar scene he had few equals. We quite agree with Mr. Fronde that the following bit of painting, which we take from one of his letters to his brother, is equal in vivacity and force -to Rriskin's best achievements in the same line :— " The tea was up before I could stir from the spot. It was towards sunset when I first got into the air, with the feeling of a finished man —finished in more than one sense. Avoiding crowds and highways, I went along Battersea Bridge, and thence by a wondrous path across cow fields, mud ditches, river embankments, over a waste expanse of what attempted to pass for country, wondrous enough in the darken- inc dusk, especially as I had never been there before, and the very road was uncertain. I had left my watch and my purse. I had a good stick in my hand: Boat people sate drinking about the Red House ; steamers snorting about the river, each with a lantern at its nose. Old women sate in strange cottages trimming their evening ire. Bewildered-looking mysterious coke furnaces (with a very bad smell) glowed at one place, I know not why. Windmills stood silent. Blackguards, improper females, and miscellanies sauntered, harmless all. Chelsea lights burnt many-hued, bright over the water in the distance—under a great sky of silver, under the great still twilight. So I wandered full of thoughts, or of things I could not think."

Or, again, take his terse picture of Count d'Orsay :—

"I must tell you of the strangest compliment of all, which occurred -since I wrote last—the advent of Count d'Orsay. About a fortnight ago, this Phcebus Apollo of dandyism, escorted by poor little Charley, came whirling hither in a chariot that struck all Chelsea into mute amazement with splendour. Charley's under jaw went like the hopper or under riddle of a pair of fanners, such was his terror on bringing such a splendour into actual contact with such a grimness. Nevertheless, we did amazingly well, the Count and I. He is a tall fellow of six feet three, built like a tower, with floods of dark-auburn hair, with a beauty, with an adornment unsurpassable on this planet ; withal a rather substantial fellow at bottom, by no means without insight, without fun, and a sort of rough sarcasm rather striking out .of such a porcelain figure. He said, looking at Shelley's bust, in his French accent, 'Ab, it is one of those faces who weesh to swallow their chin.' He admired the fine epic, &c., &c. ; hoped I would call soon' and see Lady Blessington withal. Finally he went his way, and ,Chorley with reassumed jaw. Jane laughed for two days at the con- trast of my plaid dressing-gown, bilious, iron countenance, and this Paphian apparition."

-Or this of Webster, the American statesman :—

"He met Webster, the famous American, at breakfast one morn-

ing, and has left a portrait of this noticeable politician. will warrant him,' he says, 'one of the !stiffest logic buffers and Parlia- mentary athletes anywhere to be met with in our world at present- s grim, tall, broad-bottomed, yellow-skinned man, with brows like precipitous cliffs, and huge, black, dull, wearied, yet unweariable- looking eyes, under them ; amorphous projecting nose, and the angriest shut mouth I have anywhere seen. A droop on the sides of the upper lip is quite mastiff.like—magnificent to look upon ; it is so quiet withal. I guess I should like ill to be that man's nigger. However, be is a right clever man in his way, and has a husky sort .of fun in him, too ; drawls in a handfast didactic manner about "our Republican institutions," &c., and so plays his part.'"

But even his imagination and his sense of humour sometimes utterly desert Carlyle. A more stilted bit of laborious flue. writing than the letter in which he sends to Sir Robert Peel the second edition of his book on Cromwell, it would be hard to imagine; and we must say that the letters in which he attempts to soothe Mrs. Carlyle out of her anger with himself, when he has -offended her, appear to us the most irritating and irrelevant compositions imaginable,—the most helpless of efforts to try the -effect of his own vague and rather pretentious gospel on the nerves of a proud and morbid woman. How ridiculous is the solemn oracularity with which Carlyle inculcates on Sir Robert Peel that "Labour, so far as it is true, and sanctionable by the :Supreme Worker and World-Founder, may claim brotherhood with labour,"—i.e., that his own labour in writing Cromwell's Life may claim brotherhood with Peel's in the administration of the State. Of course it may ! but why be so Pecksniffian in asserting it ? Again, what were Mrs. Carlyle's reflections, we

wonder, when he adjured her thus in the midst of her displeasure with him for dancing attendance on Lady Harriet Baring :— "Courage, courage ! we will not surrender to the Devil yet ; we will defy him yet, and do the best we can to set our foot on the throat of him yet." Apparently in these cases Carlyle's imagination and sense of humour—which were as limited as they were intense—utterly failed him. In the letter to Peel, he wanted to be dignified, and not to appear to be seeking the favour of a powerful statesman ; hence he wrote a letter which must have utterly astonished Sir Robert Peel, so full does it seem of priggish and artificial self-consciousness. In the exhortations to his wife, he wanted apparently to hide from himself what Mrs. Carlyle's grievance really was, and so mystified himself with transcendental reflections quite without point or drift. The result must have been to increase tenfold the bitterness which he desired to relieve. Not only was Carlyle's intellect sadly limited by his intolerant self-will, but even at times his imagination was paralysed by the same fault. The shadow of himself was often so huge and obtrusive that it darkened his vision even where one would have snpposed that that vision was likely to be keenest and most sure.