Thomas Carlyle Viewed Psychologically
THE JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL MEDICINE AND MENTAL PATHOLOGY. Art. I.?
A howl echoed from John-o’-Grroat’s to Land’s End on the posthumous publication of the “Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle.” This cry of pain and indignation arose from those who had abruptly seen an idol which they had been accustomed to reverence as arrayed in all pomp and power and majesty, desecrated, denuded, and exposed as a coarse, rough-hewn, and somewhat unattractive block; from others who had been the fellow-worshippers with these idolaters when the object of their reverence was desecrated and broken by Iconoclasts of their own creed; and from others who, less enthusiastic in their sentiments, experienced disappointment on the premature disclosure of attributes and circumstances utterly irreconcilable with the object of their intellectual regard. Among the latter I would feel disposed to range myself, regarding Carlyle as one of the most conspicuous thinkers of our age, if not a man of exalted genius; but as further conceiving his powerful mind to be warped, unregulated, and eccentric?or, say, in some of its phases, eccentric. It would be foreign from my purpose and my feelings to do more than allude to the unseemly internecine squabble existing between his friends and relatives as to the time and mode in which his literary remains should have been brought before the public. My impression is that the author of these memorials did not intend that they should see the light unrevised, perhaps expurgated ; but such as they now are, I shall, in my analysis of the lifelong mental condition of Carlyle, confine myself exclusively, almost rigidly, to the facts and illustrations which they contain ; as my impression is that the published works of Carlyle may, in many respects, be accepted as his holiday attire, elaborated and finished with extreme care and difficulty and pain, deserving the designation of the pangs of literary parturition ; or that in many cases his works may be compared to his war-paint, seeing that the tomahawk and scalping-knife were more freely used than is consistent with the general character and tendencies of the writer. In employing such materials it will be absolutely essential to our purpose to quote the very words of some of the multitudinous biographers and critics in order to secure a sufficient amount of accuracy and evidence, so as to avoid the possibility of personal bias; but every effort shall be made to represent the materials provided, scanty though they be, in all kindness and sympathy as well as in philosophical discrimination. I must claim the credence as well as the indulgence of my readers as to the fidelity of the quotations and extracts which I must unavoidably introduce into the text, as the employment of references, inverted commas, &c., would prove not merely perplexing, but would utterly destroy the continuity of the statement. The paucity and the rudeness of the aspects in which Carlyle has represented himself in his ” Eeminiscences ” may be fairly attributed to his conviction that he was merely preparing the outlines of an autobiography. But why Mr. Froude, who is a man high in culture, fine taste, and literary tact, should have permitted such an imperfect sketch, such a mere skeleton, to be obtruded upon those who admired and those who did not admire the author?even before the ” wee crimsontipped flower,” the only funeral wreath that was permitted in Ecclefechan churchyard, could have “glinted” on the sage’s grave?is incomprehensible.
The future sage of Chelsea was one of nine children of a stalwart, reticent, respectable, but rather repulsive yeoman, who plied in succession the trades of farm-servant, mason, and farmer, in an obscure but romantic valley in the south of Scotland. He belonged to a family possessed of great muscular strength, displaying much eccentricity, and, occasionally, the pugnacity and violent habits which characterised the borderers in the debatable land towards the close of the last century. The tide of hereditary tendencies thus originated may have been swelled by the insanity of Carlyle’s mother, who was deranged for some time, removed from home, and, even after her return, spoke absurdly and incoherently. Her child was a 6mall, large-headed boy of singular precocity, being able to speak when fifteen months old, could repeat the heads of any sermon to which he listened, at a time when such discourses were prodigiously long and prosaic, and performed many other feats in which memory played the most conspicuous part. It is recounted that he became the pet of a village dame, who carried him much to and fro in the village, and, doubtless, imparted much of that folk-lore which was then prevalent in the district; and, from a trustworthy authority, we learn that she always regarded him as a thoughtful and studious child, who mixed little with the village children, or even with his own brothers or sisters, having a greater relish for the society of his grandfather and other grown-up people, and who was fond of roaming about the fields and hills, always with a book in his hand.
It would be rash to connect this prematurity in age and habits with the early intellectual development recorded; but, in all cases of rapid enlargement of the brain, it should be recollected that there is a tendency to irregular evolution of its various parts, to cerebral irritations of various origin, as well as with rare psychical qualities. Before reaching his eighth year, and in the marvellously brief period of three months, it is affirmed that he mastered Virgil and Horace, under the tutorship of his clergyman’s son, and in such a manner as to astonish his teachers on going to school in the neighbouring village. His physical strength does not appear to have kept pace with the advancement of his knowledge. He was puny, or dwarfish, and his inferiority to his companions provoked that cruel tyranny which even boys are prone to exercise over those who are more defective or defenceless than themselves, and which inflicted upon Carlyle miseries and feelings of retaliation which were never obliterated, and which, poisoning the very fountain-head of gentleness and brotherhood, may have embittered his intercourse with many classes of his fellow-men. During his attendance in this humble academy, two events, important to him, occurred. He formed a boyish friendship with the only individual whom he seems to have sincerely and permanently loved. This was Edward Irving, who seems to have shared in his literary tastes, as well as in his patriotism, and to have preserved a certain influence over his feelingy, although unfortunately not over his religious opinions, almost throughout their mutual lives, and until the preacher became first an enthusiast, then a fanatic, and ultimately a theomaniac. The utterance of Mrs. Carlyle herself is almost prophetic when she says, ” It was mostly mad people who came running after Carlyle;” but although the setting sun of the career of both was obscured by gloom or positive darkness, there was neither similarity nor identification in the clouds by which they were surrounded. The second event alluded to consisted in his first tasting of the sweets ot fictitious literature, most strictly prohibited by his father as frivolous, pernicious, and profane; his introduction to this forbidden honey having consisted in securing an odd volume of ” Roderick Random,” and in devouring it in solitude in the fields, while his more natural schoolfellows were enjoying the boisterous attractions of the playground. He ever regarded Smollett as one of the best examples of a pure English style ; and without venturing upon any disputation as to his correctness, we may conjecture that this early impression and opinion ?the quaint, gloomy, transcendental theology taught liim from the pulpit?as well as his subsequent devotion to the German language, may have mainly contributed to build up that obscure, involved, and parenthetical style of thought and phraseology which afterwards became habitual. His unfamiliarity with the best, specimens of the poets and novelists may have prevented him from euphemising the uncouth Doric in which his tongue learned to syllabalise his thoughts; but there were other factors at work in preventing him from drawing waters in the well of ” English undefiled” and in selecting new or more attractive forms of expression. The most culpable of these was an apparent antipathy and estrangement towards the classical languages, which were then and are still conceived to lay the foundations of purity and perspicacity in construction. ” The minister’s son was the first person that ever taught me Latin, and I am not sure but that he laid a very great curse upon me in so doing. I think it is likely I should have been a wiser man, and certainly a godlier one, if I had followed in my father’s steps, and left Greek an:l Latin to the fools that wanted them.”
This scathing, mature condemnation was uttered in despite of early proficiency and subsequent cultivation, but evidently without appreciation, or rather with a contempt for the benefits which he had himself derived from such studies. It is possible that, from his unfamiliarity with that popular literature which must have fallen under his notice, if it did not attract his admiration, and by its wide divergence from the standard which he had created for himself arose his ignorance or silence upon this subject, and that to such causes may be traced his contempt for the poets and philosophers and litterateurs, who adorned the age of which he was himself a prominent ornament, but whom he denounces in such terms as?” Our current literature is like our current life, made up of shams, hypocrisies, counterfeits, deceits, and lies.”
Independently, or rather in addition to such considerations as explanatory of the great obtuseness or disregard of the sage towards the most sublime efforts of genius, it must be recollected that there was a radical, probably a congenital defect or inappetency for music, painting, art, and architecture, to such an extent in reference to the latter, that, when gazing on the glories of York Cathedral, he bluntly confessed his wonder that men could collect and heap-up such piles of stones. But did he even receive impressions of beautv or sublimity from external nature ? We can recollect one glance almost of inspiration when gazing down the beautiful valley of Kith from his hermitage in the wilds, where he had buried himself in order to compose a crooked travesty of his youth and early manhood, and the world in general, under the title of ” Sartor Kesartus “; but, in general, the light which shines in upon his consciousness, or blazes out from his imagination, is lurid, while his landscapes are volcanic, sulphureous, phlegothonic, the reflections of the pain and irritation created by dyspepsia and stomachic disease. A rainbow rarely spanned his murky cloudland ; and. yet the writhing hypochondriac was conscious that his one and only function in life required for its happy pursuit health and robustness. He appeared to be charmed with the pleasing aspect and arrangement of his drawing-room, created by the delicate taste or sense of comfort of his wife; but the suspicion is allowable that he valued this evening resort as much for its comfort, his squatting on the rug, his tobacco, and the presence of a good listener, as for its elegance and beauty. From his infancy a soil appears to have been preparing for the sowing of that seed which was calculated to darken and disfigure even a genial and generous disposition. If his schoolboy days at Annan were bald and barren, except in friendship, his home was equally unattractive; during his early years it was poverty almost penury-stricken, and destitute of almost ail the feelings and pleasant amenities which constitute the happiness and much of the primary education of childhood. There was, indeed, one redeeming and beautifying presence whioh must have irradiated his budding thoughts and emotions in the love and companionship of his mother, which he seems to have treasured with religious tenacity throughout life. She confessed that she did not understand ” Tarn’s tricks,” but she evidently understood, supported, and strengthened the child, and identified herself with his inner soul; for even on the verge of life he not only often repeated her name, but bemoaned the absence of such a relationship. Yet this loved and trusted guide uttered words tantamount to a confession that her charge was somewhat refractory, violent, and unmanageable.
His father was cold and stern; and although he did not either understand or properly estimate his boy, he desired to cast him in his own iron mould. He is said to have seemed as if he were walled in : he had not the free means to unbosom himself. It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear repelled ns from him. Yet awe, or reverence, or fear, so mystified and misled the son, to whom his ambition prescribed nothing higher than husbandry or orthodoxy, that, as if under the influence of superstition, he magnified his father’s attitude and qualities into a Titanic aspect, and regarded him as equal, if not superior, to that grandest of Scotland’s sons, Robert Burns. This comparison, it is charitably supposed, was made before Carlyle had read, or read with discrimination, the works of the ploughman poet. This guardian attempted to bend the youthful will to his own settled purpose, but then, as subsequently, signally failed. Such divergences, perhaps, at first amounted to little more than the opposing tastes and tendencies elicited in a domestic controversy carried on by friendly antagonists around the cottage fireside on a winter’s evening, recalling the family circle in the “Cotter’s Saturday Night;” but they deepened and widened as life rolled on, and as its issues became graver and grander. The patriarch was inevitably disappointed that he could not inspire his son with the reverence or the holy zeal of becoming a pastor in the dissenting sect to which he belonged, or a revised covenanter, and, it might be, the shepherd of the flock, to mingle with which he weekly marshalled his numerous progeny in the bare and humble chapel where they worshipped, and where a chronic dispute was sustained as to whether blinds should be provided for the windows, having, as it was solemnly argued, the effect of shutting out light from the temple of Deity. But this disappointment engendered no niggard spirit in the parent, for, although never possessing more than ?100 in his life, his scanty means enabled the aspiring genius to matriculate in the University of Edinburgh, although it is surmised the expenses of his curriculum must have been partly contributed to from private tuition. As a student he was, doubtless, industrious and hardworking, and the anecdote has been preserved that in the library he was regarded as an insatiable glutton in reading, although unfortunately the precise nature of the diet selected has not been ascertained, but it may be confidently asserted that his appetite was omnivorous. It is illustrative of the encroachment of the spirit of egoism, solitariness, and of subjective life, that during this and a subsequent period of residence in Edinburgh, comparatively little is known of his pursuits or companions. This period was marked, not merely by unremitting mental toil, but by a crisis whichi it is almost certain, exercised a powerful and detrimental effect upon his constitution and character. He had been destined, perhaps from his cradle, but certainly from the domestic deliberatings and disputations of his family, to be a minister. ” But now that I had gained man’s estate, I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father’s kirk ; and it was needful I should now settle it. And so I entered into my chamber and closed the door, and around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition. Doubt, Fear, Unbelief, Mockery, and Scorn were there, and I arose and wrestled with them in travail and agony of spirit. Whether I ate I know not; whether I slept I know not; I only know that when I came forth again it was w ith the direful persuasion that I was the miserable owner of a diabolical arrangement.called a stomach ; and I have never been free from that knowledge from that hour to this, and I suppose that I never shall be until I am laid in my grave.”
Other annotators have darkened this already gloomy picture, and have written that the most brilliant years of youth and early manhood were overshadowed to him by doubt as to his own vocation in life, by repugnance to the pursuits that lay before him, by dyspepsia which never left him, by despondency, by hypochondriasis. But we deeply regret to confess that this melancholy chapter in Carlyle’s history is not exhausted. He not only repudiated all connection with his father’s creed and church, but Irving drew from him, in the gentlest manner, the confession that he did not think as his companion did of the Christian religion, and that it was vain to expect he ever could or would. Do we blame the still youthful philosopher for his scepticism? Should we blame the colour-blind for his inability to perceive the most luminous and beautiful rays in the spectrum ? Both are mentally incapable of seeing and embracing truths which are patent, even forced upon the attention of much inferior minds. There are individuals originally so constituted that they fail to conceive a Creator or Saviour; there are others in whom such conceptions have been blotted out by disease; and still others who, labouring under mental perversity, feel antagonism for Divine truth, defy the Author of their sufferings- deny the existence of such a Being, and argue against the possibility of such an arrangement in relation to themselves. This intellectual rebellion is often encountered in forms of religious and misanthropical melancholia. Carlyle has written of his own conversion soberly, and in what appears to us appropriate language?certainly in no satirical spirit?a condition probably altogether evanescent. He addressed a long communication to Dr Chalmers, which is vague and vapoury, realising his own or Goethe’s sneer as to thinking about thinking, and which certainly leaves the subject nearly as he found it, and his own convictions hazy and undeclared. His orbit seems to have been far outside and beyond such discussions, and to have guided him or constrained him into altitudes or abysses where the human intellectual eye could not follow, nor the human mind calculate. This gloom and confusion was doubtless the light in which he lived, the colouring imparted by bis malady to the most insignificant as well as to the most sacred of the impressions made on his consciousness; but it is greatly to be lamented that this sciolist?and I hope he was nothing more?had not recorded a clear, coherent, and precise declaration of his difficulties and uncertainties of what he aocepted and what he rejected, of the dogmata upon which other men rest, and has left his admirers as well as his detractors to guess at his creed, or his want of it, and to attribute his extravagances and evasions to the ramblings and ravings of alienation.
It is marvellous that, when rejecting the faith of his father, or recoiling from the forms of worship in which he participated, he did not seek for truth under some other new aspect in one of the many creeds or rituals which were accessible around. It is equally marvellous that he should have remained stolid and uninspired by the persuasiveness of external nature, by the pensive sympathy and unobtrusive piety and example of his mother, that he should not have sought, or sought ineffectually, for enlightenment or consolation from the philosophical authorities with which he must have been familiar; but, failing to draw knowledge from such sources, his mind seems to have remained a blank, and unimpressionable by religious truth. He often expatiates upon profundities, immensities, eternities, employing the magniloquent sesquipedalian words, not in order to mystiiy his readers, but in the hope, perhaps, of deceiving himself. Some of his writings betray, in epithets and phrases, the indelibility of early religious forms of expression; but these are the relics of a former world; they are merely remembered sounds, and form no part nor portion of the inner reflecting man ; in^ deed, that he turned from the influence of such holy memories may be suspected from the narrative that, on arriving towards evening at the door of his father’s cottage, and finding from the chant of ” Plaintive Martyrs,” or some equally familiar sound from within, that the family was engaged in worship, he did not join them, nor kneel in humble reverence, at least, of early teaching by those who ^n all sincerity and simplicity, if not in wisdom, had attempted to train his childish mind to the conception that there was a Being outside mind, to the conception that there was a Being outside himself, above himself, more powerful than himself, and, so far as his thoughts or even imagination could reach, omnipotent.
But we are disposed to find, in the terrible religious cataclysm incorporated with his autobiography, other results than mere infidelity, or, to use a softer term, intellectual doubt and darkness. We imagine that his whole nature underwent a change, not assuredly sudden nor rapid, but that long-continued affections of the digestive and nutritive organs, although compatible with life and energy and lucidity in certain departments of cogitation, must have sapped and altered the foundations of his original intellectual constitution, and have eventuated in phenomena which may not have been connected in the opinions of those most interested in his career, but are in ours, with the working and fruits of his studies, his supposed discoveries in ethics, and must have exercised an enormous power over every process of ratiocination or reverie in which he engaged, and in imparting not merely acrimony and jealousy to the disposition with which he viewed all surrounding objects, and even in causing a deviation from that course of investigation in which a healthier judgment or imagination would have prosecuted research. Traces of acidity and ungeniality may be noticed, even on his own confession, in early years; but it was not until Valetudinarianism had penetrated deeply into his system that the revolution occurred which altered the current and course of his thoughts, and even modes of expression, in which he became the Ishmael of literature, and, Titan like, hurled his rocks and club against the serene sky of consecrated usages, beliefs, and hopes, proclaiming everything, save his own rather obscure interpretation, to be sham and shoddy. While resident in Edinburgh, his first literary efforts appear to have been contributions to the Encyclopccdia, a translation from a French mathematical work, and a poem of creditable merit. His next advance was in the publication of three articles, entitled “Burns,” “Thomson,” and “Characteristics,” so clear, clever, and consequential, as to render it difficult to suppose that they were the production of the hand who wrote ” Sartor Resartus.” With exceptions of ” Wilhelm Meister ” and his ” History of the French Revolution,” all his subsequent works are characterised by the features which we shall subsequently investigate. The former book was enthusiastically received, perhaps because it discovered to English readers new modes of thinking, and an introduction to new thinkers. The latter work has been stigmatised as a rhapsody, which, however, contains many passages of brilliancy and force, scenes in which the figures are artistically grouped, as well as boldly drawn; but it rarely condescends to plain narrative or unimpassioned estimate of character ; it is unlike history; and, lastly, had it not been preceded by narratives descriptive of the actual places, personages, and transactions of the period, it could not have been comprehended at all. In the northern metropolis he was the friend and protege of Jeffrey and Brewster. They fed both his love of distinction and his larder; but it is inexplicable that he should have formed so few intimacies or connections with th<? crowds of poets, philosophers, wits, and wise men, who at that epoch secured and justified the appellation to .Auld Eeekie of the Modern Athens. It may be conjectured that politics or personal peculiarities might have shut out Carlyle from Blackwood’s coterie or the Parliament House ; but his isolation in the very centre of authorship is difficult to understand. From this stage in his progress a very discernible change in his composition in many of his convictions, and, in all probability, in his relations to society, may be noticed, nearly contemporaneous, it should be marked, with the aggravation of his stomachic malady and nervous irritability, and his retirement to the highlands of Dumfriesshire, where he engaged in the elaboration of that uncouth metaphysical romance, ” Sartor Resartus,” which probably he approached with the same sense of loathing and compunction that attended his embodiment of his more pretentious historical works. Here likewise” commenced the evolution of what has been epigrammatically styled the ” Mirage Philosophy,” as implied to the melancholy impressions of dust, rags, shabbiness, mildew, and cobwebs inhabited by monstrous spiders, which constantly crossed Carlyle’s imagination, and which must, even to a cheerful nature, which he was not, inevitably have caught a sympathetically mournful, if not dreary hue. It is confessed that this and multiform ideas of the same kind were derived from the transcendental philosophy of Fichte, which is?
” That all things which we see or work with in this earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous appearance ; that under all these lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the Divine Idea of the World ; that is, the reality which lies at the bottom of all appearance. To the mass of men, no such Divine Idea is recognisable in the world; they live merely,” says Fichte, ” among the superficialities, practicalities, and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under them.”
Such sentences as this, where the sense is evasive, or where the meaning escapes our penetration, justify the impression that when we find, as we sometimes do, that the style continues while the thinking is left out, the marvel becomes a prodigy or an incoherence.
The author has often written so metaphorically and elliptically that the fault may be ours in failing to distinguish between what is a mere flourish of rhetoric, a truth, or, to use Mr. Froude’s word, a delirium.
Some time since, and in this Series (Vol. IV., No. 2), we preferred, to a description of the mental delirium or logodiarrhcBa to which the self-suicidal Coleridge had reduced himself by his psychical habitudes or physical habits, to quote a portion of his writings, and this course was adopted on the suggestion or rather by the aid of Carlyle. There was in the extract no positive incoherence and but slight inconsequentially, but the power of constructing lucid and logical statements seemed to have escaped the writer, who was carried on blindly and blunderingly through mazes of words which it was impossible to unravel and to a point which vanished into thin air. This analysis is in a measure applicable to the following extracts from Carlyle, and which have been cited by his critic as an illustration of imaginative power and inconsistency :? ” Truly it may be said the Divinity has withdrawn from the earth, or veils Himself in that wide-wasting whirlwind of a departing era, wherein the fewest can discern His goings. Not Godhead, but an iron ignoble circle of necessity embraces all things: binds the youth of these times into a sluggard, or else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic action is paralysed, for what worth now remains unquestionable with him ? ” And again :
” His melodious stanza, which he cannot bear to see halt in any syllable, is a rough fact reduced to order ; fact made to stand firm on its feet, with the world-rocks under it, and looking free towards all the winds and all the stars. He goes about suppressing platitudes, ripping off futilities, turning deceptions inside out. The realm of Disorder, which is unveracity, Unreality, what we call Chaos, has no fiercer enemy. Honest soul! and he seemed to himself such a stupid fellow often: no tongue learning at all; little capable to give a reason for the faith that was in him. He cannot argue in articulate logic, only in inarticulate bellowings or worse. He must do a thing, leave it undemonstrated; once done, it will itself tell what kind of thing it is by-and-by. Men of genius have a hard time, I perceive, whether born on the throne or off it, and must expect contradictions next to unendurable, the plurality of blockheads being so extreme.”
These revelations may be prophetic, or mystic, or thaumaturgic, but to the perception of the vulgar and uninspired votary they sound very like unconsequential rodomontade. These paragraphs are not paraded as proof of the failing faculties of the sage, for we believe they were written in his meridian, but testify strongly to that involution or perplexity of illustration which was, or might be, a forerunner of the feeble, parenthetical, often absurd phraseology, traceable in the ” Reminiscences” of his wife. It would have been as easy to have washed an Ethiopian white as to convert Carlyle to the familiar and classical language of English literature. An analyst of his mode of composition has epigrammatised it as the eccentric exponent of eccentricity. He treats as unintelligible what lie did not give himself the trouble to understand, and thinks he has disposed of the population principle by fostering a senseless prejudice against it, and of the Utilitarian philosophy by calling Bentham a bore of the first magnitude. He did not write English, but badly-translated German?a peculiarity engrafted perhaps on his mind after maturity had been reached, but undoubtedly intensified by that torture, those agonised convulsive throes, to which he subjected his reasoning or his emotions during the process of composition. His constant recourse to pet epithets, nicknames, or cant phrases, such as ” the little Kaiser in the red stockings,” greatly deform and obscure his writings, and give rise to the suspicion either that he is laughing in his sleeve at his readers, as when describing his most admired production as play-acting or prophecy; or that this habit may have been assimilated to that iteration of words or syllables so often observed in the soliloquies of those who are partially deranged. This act may have been voluntary, but it certainly had a morbific origin. But, although reluctant to detect in his style in declining years indications of growingimbecility, except in the instance alluded to, there are other indications, and these of a more painful character, of perverted feeling and unfair judgments connected with his decline. An able apologist, even champion of Carlyle, who has entered the lists in order to denounce Mr. Froude for having published the “Reminiscences” at all, or at all events without deletion, expurgation, and rearrangement, reveals that even in her estimation he had passed into second childhood, that his utterances were those of a mind diseased. His works and composition betray mental decay and unvarying peevishness, and, viewed as a whole, his deportment latterly was that of a diseased state of mind. There is another count added to this sad indictment when the enfeebled octogenarian is accused of ingratitude, of profaning and abusing the hospitality and friendship of those who conferred upon him benefits as well as protection or patronage. But while it must be confessed that a loss of the higher and purer feelings often accompanies the decline of life, and while we would prefer to any other supposition the theory of even a contemner of Carlyle, that he was not himself when he felt and acted thus, it would be unjustifiable to omit this forgetfulness of obligations and kindness from the symptoms of actual disease.
Rut while octogenai’ianism may be admitted as a factor of the painful manifestations to which I am hastening, it cannot be concealed that many of these denunciations occurred when he was in the vigour of manhood, or in such vigour as his constitution ever possessed, and that no excuse nor explanation of their occurrence can be discovered except in his rudeness, churlishness, ill-temper, or in the writhing of local pain or the bitter feelings of retaliation on all around indiscriminately, which sometimes ascend from the ccenesthesis to the subversion or perversion of the sentiments and higher emotions. It has been questioned whether he was not suffering under some chronic malady, moral or physical, which might have swayed him in his own despite; and it might be surmised that the discomforts of his social position engendered a general feeling of discontent, self-absorption, and retreat from the world as it was; and that throughout his career there was much to contract his range of thought, and to concentrate his thoughts and feelings upon himself and his doings and sayings so as to render his faculties at last altogether incapable of embracing a wide scope of nature and of man, and even to impart a vague hostility against everything and every person around. The virulent caricatures of those who occupied the same level as he on the world’s platform, or had been elevated to a more distinguished place, or of his own familiar friends, consisted in detractions and defamations of various kinds and degrees, which must be grouped together in order to present some conception of the general unhealthy tone of mind which prevailed. There is not, in fact, in all the wild waste or chaos of the world which he has painted, one spot upon which the dove, or rather more correctly the raven, could have rested a foot. He attacks Jeffrey with a degree of malignity not commonly addressed even to benefactors; he sets down Lamartine as a grimacing caricaturist; Thiers as superior to Lamartine, but unfaithful and unscrupulous as a writer; and Guizot as cadaverous, undecided, and as perhaps believing in the resurrection of Louis Philippe; whilst he huddles together De Quincey, Procter, Adam Smith, Malthus, Bentham, Howard, and Clarkson as having no human stuff in them because they did not make their way by force. Of the gentle, genial, exqiiisitely witty, though unfortunate, Charles Lamb, he dares to assert that he was a poor thing with an insuperable proclivity to giD, with a talk contemptuously small, a ghastly make-belief of wit, more like diluted insanity, usually ill-mannered. Of Wordsworth he says, with what may be accepted as forbearance, that he wrote poetry in a sort of limpid way; and as a hardtempered, rather dull, unproductive, and almost wearisome kind of man. He depicts the gallant and romantic Shelley as a ghastly object, colourless, pallid, without health or warmth or vigour. The noble, whole-hearted Southey appears to have secured his sympathies, or a ray from them, less by the multiplicity and grandeur of his gifts of genius than by some accidental coincidence and compatibility in political or philosophical discussion, but one, and that the most saintly, member of his family was assailed. The patriotic Hampden he did not like. The philanthropic Wilberforce, recognised by world-wide fame as humane and heroic, he calumniates as the famous nigger-philanthropist, drawing-room Christian, and bus} man and politician ; but yet the unfortunate obliquities of this sufferer’s moral perceptions were such that he could praise Mirabeau, the worst product from the caldron of the French Revolution ; he could dote on and dally with the mad Frederick as well as the bad Frederick, and could almost beatify Cromwell.
Even the females of his circle of intimates do not escape from misconstruction and misrepresentation. Even the kind and courtly Mrs. Montagu is spoken of sarcastically; Jeffrey’s daughter is harshly treated; the wife of his dear friend Irving is described as diseased and deformed?a calumny which has provoked controversy, in which the epithets malevolence, wanton misstatement, and cruelty are ventured upon with a rash forgetfulness of the peculiar infirmities of the maligner. It would be fatiguing to load these pages by swelling this catalogue with more than the names of those who have been perpetuated by sneers or faint praise in what may be styled the Carlyle literature : Leigh Hunt, Bookseller Tait, Allan Cunningham, Old Lady Holland, whom he describes as a kind of hungry ornamented witch looking over him with carnivorous views, the patriots Hampden, Elliot, and Pym, Sir W. Moleswortb, Mazzini, Mrs. Taylor, Harriet Martineau. There are certain marked periods in a life at which new mental qualities or phases come into prominence. These are puberty, the decline of vigour, and vivacity. It has been observed that, when we attain the stage when manhood merges into age, the watershed of mental existence, as it may be called, certain incompatibilities, contrarieties, irritabilities, exercise a power over the individual and all surroundings hitherto unnoticed, even unsuspected. Might not this be the case with Carlyle ? or might not?we utter it reverently?a similar constitutional change have occurred in his companion?or, again, it may have been that the hitherto gentle, discriminating, dutiful, almost worshipping companion, who had idolised, who had spoiled the sage with whom she had been associated; while, offering her adulation or adoration on the shrine or in the measure which he was accustomed to receive from his own family, showed less reciprocity than she had been accustomed to do in youth and during the growth or maturity of the sturdy and summer affections and passions, and thus estrangement may have sprung up. One who loved her, and painted her in glowing and generous colours, writes:?
” She for her part?let us not be misunderstood in saying so ?contemplated him, her great companion in life, with a certain humorous curiosity, not untinged with affectionate contempt and wonder that a creature so big should be at the same time so little, such a giant and commanding genius with all the same so many babyish weaknesses, for which she liked him all the better.
” We never marry our first love, it has been speculated ; it is highly possible that in every romantic conjugal tie the contact is with an abstraction and not with the human member of the union. It may have happened that, as time wore on, and as mental infirmity increased, the gigantic baby may have found in his wife less a companion than a critic, less a minister to his wants and wishes than an observer of much that she loved or pitied or palliated, but could not justify or admire. There is no harder task than to watch over the daily wants, real and imaginary, for a man of genius cursed with a bad digestion, intolerant of the slightest noise (for to Carlyle the cocks and hens in his neighbours’ yard were demon fowls), irritated by contradiction and of an atrabilious temperament. In this case these sources of vexation would be greatly exaggerated by the labour and annoyance which seems to have attended the act of composition. On joining his patient admirer after a day of toil, and possibly after disturbing and distracting the feeble, if not dying, woman by incessant narratives of obscure battles, he describes his way of working during his season of labour, and his long wrestling, thirteen years and more, with the Friedrich nightmare affair, and the disgust and loathing his efforts had inspired, during which he seemed to have suspended, or in great measure avoided, all except obligatory intercourse and corre spondence.
The episode devoted to a memorial of his wife may be regarded, according as it is accepted, as a maudlin, maundering, or morbid monody, replete with epithets of affection or ill-judged fragmentary incoherences, or puerilities, such boyish endearments occurring 133 times in 235 pages, rather than with expressions of the maoly sorrow of a stricken heart. Or it may be interpreted as an outpouring of compunction, as an offering to the manes or memory of one whom he had failed sufficiently to appreciate, with whom he had stood in relation of coldness and estrangement rather than of genial affection. Or there may be found in its pages glimpses of nature, a genuine regret for an amiable and worshipping companion whom he had lost for a support and succour, ever present to minister to his wants and weakness, mingled with much that is painful, unseemly, and extravagant. It must, however, be remembered that the Paper was written when the shadows of evening were gathering around a troubled and shattered life, and when his habitual malady may have shaken the frame to its very centre. Years before the final close of life, and when able to mingle with friends and relatives, and when soothed and strengthened by the affection and judicious influence flowing from these sources, he complained to a medical man of great irritability and per vigilium, that heritage and penalty of an active and ardent brain, and that after the short sleep which had been secured by long exposure to the open air, he felt as if a thousand devils were gnawing his heart. We shall allow a lenient and laudatory intimate to depict the sad lineaments of his declining days : ” ‘ They will not understand that it is death I want.’ Then he told me of the weakness that had come over him, the failing of age in all his limbs and faculties, and quoted the psalm (in that version which we Scots are born to): Threescore and ten years do sum up Our days and years, we see, And if, by reason of more strength, In some fourscore they be ; Yet doth the strength of such old men But grief and labour prove Neither he nor I could remember the next two lines, which are harsh enough, Heaven knows ; and then he burst forth suddenly into one of those unsteady laughters. ‘ It is a mother I want,’ he said with mournful humour ; the pathetic incongruity amused bis fancy, and yet it was so true. The time had come when another should gird him and carry him often where he would not. Had it been but possible to have a mother to care for that final childhood !” ” The first sight I had of him, after his wife’s death, was in her drawing-room, where, while she lived, he was little visible except in the evening to chance visitors He was seated, not in any familiar corner, but with the forlornest unaccustomedness in the middle of it, as if to show by harsh symbols how entirely all customs were broken for him. He began to talk of her, as if the one subject of which his mind was full, with a sort of subdued, half-bitter brag of satisfaction in the fact that her choice of him, so troublesome a partner, so poor, had been justified before all men, and herself proved right after all in her opinion of him which she had upheld against all objections ; from which, curiously enough, his mind passed to the mythical, as he calls it, to those early legends of childhood. . , . With that pathetic broken laugh, and the gleam of restless, feverish pain in his eyes, he began to tell of this childish incident; how his wife had been carried to the ball in a clothes-basket, perhaps the loveliest little fairy that was on the earth at the time. The contrast of the old man’s already tottering and feeble frame, his weather-beaten and worn countenance, agitated by the restless grief and the suggestion of this loveliest little fairy, was as pathetic as can be conceived, especially with the laugh of emotion that accompanied it His old wife was still so fair to him, even across the straits of death?had returned indeed into everlasting youth When there was reference to the circumstances of her death, so tragical and sudden, it was with bitter wrath, yet wondering awe, of such a contemptible reason for so great an event.” We shall not further penetrate into the solemn and sacred gloom which should surround the expiring energies of this great man, but shall leave to Mr. Froude to withdraw the veil which we, with a sense of relief, allow to fall. The following works have been read and reread in the construction of the foregoing analysis : Reminiscences. By Thomas Carlyle. Edited by Anthony Froude, in 2 vols., 1881. Thomas Carlyle: The Man and his Books. By Wm. Howie Wylie, 1881. Thomas Carlyle: The Iconoclast of Modern Shame. By Rev. J. Wilson, M.A. Albernyte, 1881.
Thomas Carlyle. An Essay. By General Sir E. B. Hamley, 1881. The Athenceum, Nos. 2,785, 2,786, 2,790. Macmillaiis Magazine, April 1881. (Mrs. Oliphant.) Quarterly Review, July 1881. Edinburgh Review, July 1881. Contemporary Review, .Tune 1881. (Miss Wedge wool.) Nineteenth Century, June 1881. (Taylor.) ? >, July 1881. (Froude), &c., See. British Quarterly Review, July 1881. (Larkin.) PART II. VOL. VII. NEW SERIES.
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