Lessons from my masters, Carlyle, Tennyson and Ruskin

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SERVICES

Chapter I. The Scheme Of His Life

I DO not know any word more fitly spoken about Carlyle than that of Professor Masson, that -there has been in his hfe an element of soldierly arrangement. It has not been a life at haphazard, but a campaign, planned with reasoning calmness, with comprehensive intelHgence, and carried out with adamantine resolution. Finding, as genius v^ has so often found, that he could not adjust himself to the professional pace and dogmatic harness which were ready for him at the close of his college course, he discovered, on the threshold of manhood, that literature was the goal at which he ought to aim, "the haven of expatriated spiritualisms," where shelter and honourable activity might await him. We are not left to conjecture in attempting to realise the spirit and the anticipations with which he entered upon a literary career. Upwards of fifty years ago, in the first book he gave to the world, he described a literary hfe, its dangers, its temptations, its drawbacks, its advantages ; and though the passage is long, we cannot, I think, do better, in commencing our talk about him, than read it over.

The Man of Letters.

If to know wisdom were to practise it ; if fame brought true dignity and peace of mind ; or happiness consisted in nourishing the intellect with its appropriate food, and surrounding the imagination with ideal beauty, a literary life would be the most enviable which the lot of this

1—2

Thomas Carlyle.

world affords. But the truth is far otherwise. The Man of Letters has no immutable, all-conquering volition, more than other men ; to understand and to perform are two very difteront tlunjfswith him aa with every one. His fame rarely exerts a favourable influence on his digjiity of character, and never on his peace of mind : its glitter is external, for the eyes of others ; within, it is but the aliment of unrest, the oil ca«t uiwn the ever-gnawing fire of ambition, quickening into fresh vehemence the blaze which it stills for a moment. Moreover, this Man of Letters is not wholly made of spirit, but of clay and spirit mixed : his thinking fscaltiee may be nobly trained and exercised, but he must have affections as well as thoughts to make him happy, and food and raiment must bo given him, or he dies. Far from being the most enviable, his way of life b, in'rhajw, among the many modes by which an ardent mind endeavours to ex])re«8 its activity, the most thickly beset with suffering and degradation. Look at the biography of authors ! Except the Newgate Calendar, it is the most sickening chapter in the history of man. The calamities of these people are a fertile topic ; and too often their faults and vices have kept pace with their calamities. Nor is it difficult to see how this has happened. Talent of any sort is generally accom{)auie<l with a jM'culiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most esKontial constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so formed.

Tlie employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency ; the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life ; its delights are too ethereal and too transient to furnish that perennial flow of saiisfaction, coarse, but plenteous and substantial, of which happiness in this world of ours is made. The most finished efforts of the mind give it little pleasure, frequently they give it pain ; for men's aims are ever Iwyond their strength. And the outward recomi>en80 of these undt^rtakings, the distinction they confer, is of still smaller value : the desire for it is insatiable even when successful ; and, when baffled, it issues in jealousy and envy, and every pitiful and painful feeling. So keen a temperament with so little to restrain or satisfy, so much to distress or tempt it, produces contradictions which few are adequate to reconcile. Hence the unhappiness of literary men, hence their faults and follit*. Thus literature is apt to form a dangerous and discontenting occupation even for the amateur. But for him whose rank and worldly comforts dejiend on it, who does not live to write, but writes to live, its difficulties and perils are fearfully increased. Few spectacles are more afflicting than that of such a man, so gifted and so fated, so jostled and tossed to and fro in the rude bustle of life, the buffetings of which he is so little fitted to endure. Cherishing, it may be, the loftiest thoughts, and clogged with the meanest wants ; of pure and holy purposes, yet ever driven from the straight path by the pressure of necessity, or the impulse of passion; thirsting for glory, and frequently in want of daily bread; hovering between the empyrean of his fancy and the squalid desert of reality ; cramped and foiled in his most strenuous exertions ; dissatisfied

The Man of Letters.

with his best performances, disgusted with his fortune, this man of letters too often spends his weary days in conflicts with obscure misery : harassed, chagrined, debased, or maddened ; the victim at once of tragedy and farce ; the last forlorn outpost in the war of mind against matter, Many are the noble souls that have perished bitterly, with their tasks unfinished, under these corroding woes ! Some in utter famine, like Otway ; some in dark insanity, like Cowper and CoUins ; some, like Chatterton, have sought out a more stern quietus, and turning their indignant steps away from a world which refused them welcome, have taken refuge in that strong fortress, where poverty and cold neglect, and the thousand natural shocks whicli flesh is heir to, could not reach them any more. Yet among these men are to be found the brightest specimens and the chief benefactors of mankind ! It is they that keep awake the finer parts of our souls ; that give us better aims than power or pleasure, and withstand the total sovereignty of Mammon in this earth. They are the vanguard in the march of mind ; the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and the activity of their happier brethren. Pity that from aU their conquests, so rich in benefit to others, themselves should reap so little. But it is vain to murmur. They are volunteers in this cause ; they weighed the charms of it against the perils, and they must abide the results of their decision, as all must.

The hardships of the course they follow are formidable, but not all inevitable ; and to such as pursue it rightly, it is not without its great rewards. If an author's life is more agitated and more painful than that of others, it may also be made more spirit-stirring and exalted ; fortune may render him unhappy ; it is only himseK that can make him despicable. The history of genius has, in fact, its bright side as well as its dark. And if it is distressing to survey the misery, and, what is worse, the debasement, of so many gifted men, it is doubly cheering on the other hand to reflect on the few, who, amid the temptations and sorrows to which life in aU its provinces and most in theirs is liable, have travelled through it in calm and virtuous majesty, and are now hallowed in our memories, not less for their conduct than their writings. Such men are the flower of this lower world ; to such can the epithet of great be applied with its true emphasis. There is a congruity in their proceedings which one loves to contemplate ; he who would write heroic poems, should make his whole life a heroic poem ! So thought our Milton ; and, what was more difficult, he acted so. To Milton, the moral king of authors, a heroic multitude, out of many ages and countries, might be joined ; ' a cloud of witnesses ' that encompass the true literary man throughout his pilgrimage, inspiring him to lofty emulation, cheering his solitary thoughts with hope, teaching him to struggle, to endure, to conquer difficulties, or, in failure and heavy sufferings, to

" Arm th' obdured breast With stubborn patience as with triple steel."

We need not hesitate to place Carlyle, along with Milton

Thomas Carlyle.

vj among the moral kings of literature. He has travelled through life in "calm and virtuous majesty." With the stormful splendour cast upon Milton's career hy his glorious intermeddling in politics, there is indeed nothing in that of Carlyle to correspond; but in completeness, and what I may call homogeneity, as the career of a Man of Letters, that of Carlyle is superior even to that of Milton. He has known no other devotion except Uterature ; has done the work of no pohtical party, has not condescended to a professorship, but has made it the object of his life to act upon mankind by the pen. As every peasant that carried a musket in the Grand Army felt a pride in Napoleon, the little Corporal who had become Emperor of France, so the humblest camp-follower in the huge army of hterature may think with pride of Thomas Carlyle. Over all the dangers that he foresaw he has regally triumphed ; all the more than princely guerdons, which he declared to be within the sphere of an author's ambition, he has honourably earned ; amid the tumults and changes of a feverish time, and .the quarrels and calamities of petty souls, he has risen above all jealousy, preserved an absolutely unblemished name, and never been distracted for an hour from that rest of noble purpose, that peace of serene activity, which is the most substantial happiness attainable on earth. His life has been built upon reahties. With clear discernment and unflinching firmness, he has put aside or trampled on unreahties.

Coming to London in early manhood, he estabhshed himself in an unpretentious house in a quiet street in Chelsea— a house sufficient, but not more than sufficient, with room for his books and such friends as might visit, not his house, but himself ; and there he has remained for forty years, looking with perfect indifference, too profound for conscious scorn, upon the palatial buildings constantly rising to west of him and to north of him, in which

True to his own Ideal.

successful shop-keepers, stock-jobbers, railway-contractors, bubble company projectors, and other favourites of fortune and the age, had their reward. That small house has been his home and ideal palace, in which, as he had well assured himself, he could partake of all the real joys that flesh is heir to. Thatched in from the wind and rain, paying his way, doing his work, he satisfied all his real wants ; and he had within him no raging crew of vanities to appease, such as have tormented Voltaire and other authors, like those dogs that Milton saw at hell-gate yelling in eternal hunger round Sin, their mother. If any Prince Consort, EngHsh aristocrat, American humourist, German statesman, or other loyal admirer, wished to see him, the admirer could make his way to Cheyne Kow, Chelsea. It was of infinite importance for Carlyle to have the approval of the judge in his own breast ; of infinite importance also to have the approval of the Eternal Maker ; it was of some importance, but of very Httle in comparison, what the great body of his countrymen thought of him; it was of no importance at all what the leaders of fashion thought. The impertinence of a cross or a ribbon, offered him in his old age by "him they call Dizzy," he could quietly, not ungraciously, put aside ; the more appropriate honour of a place in the Prussian Eoyal Order for Merit he could graciously accept. He was " king of himseK and of his world," as he said of Goethe ; able at all times to consume his own smoke ; firm in that silent, modest, yet seKsufficing and unconquerable pride, which is as knightly armour to defend and as kingly purple to adorn. His life has been in the plainest sense practical, and yet it has been ideal and subHme.

Chapter II

HIS PURITAN PARENTAGE; AND EARLY LIFE AND APPRENTICESHIP TO LITERATURE.

OF the practicality — ^perhaps, also, though less obviously, of the sublimity — of Carlyle's life, the roots are discoverable in his father's house. He came of substantial farmer people in the Dumfriesshire viUage of Ecclefechau, where he was bom in 1795. It has been mentioned on good authority that Carlyle speaks of his father as one of the most remarkable men, if not the most remarkable man, he has ever known. Intense shrewdness and profound religious fervour were his characteristics. Among the traditions of young Carlyle's home, which would come invested with a halo of sacredness to the child, was that of reverence and affection for the memory of the Covenanters. It is interesting to catch sight of those threads of connection between memorable characters and occurrences which nature commonly manages to keep out of sight. Such a thread is that which connected OHver Cromwell with Carlyle. It was a man imbued with enthusiasm for the Covenanters, a man capable, in the nineteenth century, of sjrmpathetically realising and reproducing the fire that burned in their hearts, who could find the key to Cromwell's character, and do justice to him and to the Covenanters alike. But there was another thread of connection between the strong Puritanic rehgion of Carlyle's father's house, and Carlyle's

His Kindred.

character as a Man of Letters. The Covenanters are things of the past. Even in Scotland there are now few or none who, if a Covenanter of 1638, or a Covenanter of 1643, were to rise from the dead, would be recognised by either as brethren. But the fervour of Puritanism passed into the heart of Scotland, into the marrow of the nation's bones, and has lived and throbbed in the moral intensity of a Burns, a Chalmers, a Carlyle. In preaching the gospel of earnestness, in smiting cant and affectation, in tearing to rags, amid sardonic laughter, all the flimsy sentimentalities which mimic and mock the realities of feeling, Carlyle has been a true Puritan. This has been one of the essential elements in his success. Without earnestness no man is ever great, or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men ; he may be brilhant, entertaining, popular ; but he will want weight. No soul-moving picture was ever painted that had not in it depth of shadow. The hght must also be there ; a gleam on the horizon, if no more, is indispensable ; but the light itself is worthless if there is no shadow to give it rehef and tenderness.

There is no reason to doubt that some of those touches in which Carlyle describes the childhood and youth of the hero of Sartor Kesartus, may be correctly applied to his own biography. His first schoolmaster, "a down-bent, broken-hearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that guild are," pronounced him a genius fit for the learned professions. He took to reading with earnest delight, laying out his coppers on stall-literature. That sense of mystery in what, to common observation, are the simplest and most unsuggestive things, which manifests itself in all his books, was early developed. He assigns to Teufelsdrockh's tweKth year the following incident, which I confidently accept as autobiographic : — " It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silent noon-tide, and watched it flowing, gurghng, to think how this same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the earHest date of history. Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua forded Jordan, even as at the mid-day when Ccesar, doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his Commentaries dry — this httle Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas, or Siloa, was murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen ; here, too, as in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein or veinlet of the grand world-circulation of waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, has lasted and lasts simply vnth the world. Thou fool ! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest Art a mushroom ; the idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age." Not only the habit of wondering and pondering in presence of the unfathomable mystery which encompasses us on all sides, but the habit of tracing the connection of one thing with another and reflecting on the interminable series of consequneces flowing from every fact, which we meet with in Carlyle's writings, are clearly foreshadowed in the preceding words. " Christ died on the Cross," he said once, in conversation with Emerson, as both lay resting on the moorland ; " that built the church in the valley yonder, that brought you and me to this moor ; all things hang together." I quote from memory, and do not vouch for the words, but this was their sense. In the musings of the boy Teufelsdrockh upon the brook " may there not lie," Carlyle himself significantly asks, "the beginning of those well-nigh unutterable meditations on the grandeur and mystery of time, and its relation to eternity, which play such a part " in the philosophy of that transcendental Professor of Weiss-nicht-wo, who is justly beheved to be, in the main, a portrait of Carlyle himself? He studied at the University of Edinburgh, but he has 4 always and bitterly said that he owes it nothing but the miscellaneous reading afforded by its hbrary. " We boasted ourselves a rational University; in the highest degree

Cannot be a Minister. 11

hostile to mysticism ; thus was the young vacant mind furnished with much talk about progress of the species, dark ages, prejudice, and the hke ; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness ; whereby the better sort had soon to end in sick, impotent scepticism ; the worser sort explode in spiritual self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents become dead." Is this the first declaration of that war against "victorious analysis" and omnipotent " logic-chopping," which Carlyle has carried on for so many years ?

From the professors who undertook, apparently with small ability, to instruct him in human science and learning, he passed to other professors, who attempted to instruct him in theology, with a view to his entering the ministry of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, Of them we expressly hear little in his works, but he has always talked freely of the experiences of his youth, and it is no secret that whatever seeds of doubt had been previously sown ^ in his mind germinated vigorously under the gardening of the divines. He experienced " fever-paroxysms of doubt." " In the silent night-watches, still darker in his heart than over sky and earth, he has cast himself before the Allseeing, and with audible prayers cried vehemently for Hght, for deHverance from death and the grave." The end was that he could not see his way to entering the ministry. Whether his doubts were well-founded or ill-founded, he clearly did right in making no effort to crush them by force, and in abstaining from taking Orders while he continued under their influence. " What the light of your mind," he wrote, long afterwards, "which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, — that, in God's name, leave uncredited ; at your peril, do not try believing that."

He now, for some years, was a schoolmaster, proving to be a stern discipHnarian ; but so strong a genius for literature could not fail to assert itself, and his ardent study of German led him gradually into his life-path. He found with unspeakable emotion, in the writings of Goethe, that such doubts as his had been entertained by others, and not only entertained, but triumphed over. Thus commenced a relation to Goethe, which was destined to exert a profound and ineffaceable influence upon his mind. But some time elapsed before he recognised the sovereignty of Goethe in German Hterature, or, at least, before he set his throne far above those of all other Germans. He studied Schiller with ardent enthusiasm, and his first book was that biography of Schiller, from which I quoted his description of the Man of Letters. The work abounds with beauties, both of thought and style, but is elaborate, pohshed, and formal, and has neither the freedom of movement nor the impetuous force that were to become so characteristic of the author. PubUshed originally in the London Magazine, it appeared as a book in 1825. A translation was issued in Germany, with a commendatory preface by Goethe ; a correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle ensued ; and we find him, in 1828, describing to the great poet the circumstances of his life at Craigen-Puttoch, a small estate in Dumfriesshire, brought as a dowry by his wife, to whom he had been married two years previously. " Among the granite hills and the black morasses, which stretch westward through Galloway, almost to the Irish Sea," the estate stood forth, " a green oasis, a tract of ploughed, partly enclosed and planted, ground, where com ripens and trees afford a shade, although surrounded by sea-mews and rough- woolled sheep." Fine descriptive glimpses of the scenery amidst which he hved at the time occur in the famous book which he wrote amidst its soUtudes. " The rocks are of that sort called Primitive by the mineralogists, which always arrange themselves in masses of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness, however, is here

The Sower's Song. 13'

tempered by a singular airiness of form and softness of environment ; in a climate favourable to vegetation, the grey cliff, itself covered with lichens, shoots up through a garment of foliage and verdure ; and v^hite, bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster round the everlasting granite. . . . Often, also, could I see the black Tempest marching in anger through the distance ; round some Schreckhorn, as yet grim-blue, V70uld the eddying vapour gather, and there tumultuously eddy, and flow down like a mad witch's hair ; till, after a space, it vanished, and in the clear sunbeam your Schreckhorn stood smiling grim- white, for the vapour had held snow."

Carlyle had now served his apprenticeship to Hterature. In addition to the Life of Schiller he had pubhshed a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and more than one volume of tales from Jean Paul, Tieck, and other German authors. He had begun to write in the Edinburgh Beview, and produced his memorable essay on Burns. But he had not yet given to the world anything so strongly stamped with his original genius as to mark him out as a great original among living writers. Such a work he produced at Craigen-Puttoch, — the name of it Sartor Eesartus. It contains the essential facts of his spiritual history, the fundamental principles of his philosophy. I shall give some account of it in the next chapter, and shall close, for the present, with one of those few poems written by Carlyle before he settled finally to prose.

The Sower's Song.

Now hands to seed-sheet, boys,

We step and we cast ; old Time's on wing ;

And would ye partake of harvest's joys,

The corn must be sown in spring.

Fall gently and still, good corn, Lie warm in thy earthy bed, And stand so yellow some mom.

That beast and man may be fed.

\ Old Earth is a pleasnre to see

In sunshiny cloak of rod and green ; The farrow lies fresh ; this year will be As the years that are past have been.

Fall gently and still, &c.

Old Mother, receive this com, The seed of six thousand golden siree : All these on thy kindly breast were bom ; One more thy poor cliild requires.

Fall gently and still, &o.

Now steady and sure again, And measure of stroke and step we keep ; Thus up and thus down we cast our grain ; Sow well, and you gladly reap.

Fall gently and still, kc.

There is true melody, as well as exquisite picturesqueness, in this Httle song. Carlyle was bom a poet.

M

CHAPTEE III.

SABTOB BESABTUS.

E. CAELYLE has never pledged himseK to any *^ formal system of philosophy, his ineradicable conviction being that it is impossible to sum up truth in any system framed by man, and that, if you train yourself to look at nature through the coloured spectacles of any one theory, however comprehensive, you will see falsely, partially, or superficially. One verified fact, he maintains, is worth a score of elaborately-constructed philosophies of the universe. Those men of science who sit in cross-legged complacency, and explain to you how, out of nebulous starvapours, colliding aerolites, or otherwise, solar systems originate and worlds are formed, call forth his keenest sarcasm, v " I would beg to know," he cries, glaring into them with eyes of fiery scorn, " whether an order for a world is Hkely to come to your shop any morning. "^;::jv

Nevertheless his thinking and his writing have from first to last been dominated by a few great thoughts or ideas, and these are discoverable in their purest form in the book composed by him amid the wilds of Galloway — the worldrenowned Sartor Eesartus. I look upon this as one of the very few books produced in Great Britain in the present century deserving to be styled a true, original, and important contribution to metaphysics. It connects itself in a v/ very interesting manner with Kant's speculations on space and time, and with Sir William Hamilton's philosophy of the Infinite ; bnt it is distinctively Carlyle's, and cannot be claimed by the disciples either of Kant or of Hamilton.

The thought in this book has an affinity vnth pantheism, with which it was identified by John Sterling ;

r^ but it is not necessarily pantheistic. The thesis, or

* proposition, which underhes it, from beginning to end, is

il ,that all matter and material things are but vesture,

\ clothing, or visual appearance, of spirit. Let us not be startled by the seeming mysticism of this. It is either false, or it is perfectly simple and true. As I hold to be the case with all genuine metaphysics, the proposition carries its own evidence with it, which evidence, if we will but make the effort of patient care necessary to comprehend it — and such an effort is surely worth making, in order to get at the deepest root of thought and belief in a mighty intellectual genius Uke Carlyle — we can estimate for ourselves, saying at once whether we agree with it or disagree. Matter, as such, he holds to be dead., ■^ That is to say, he finds in the universe, as revealed to him by his senses, or conceived by his mind, no matteif which itself originates force, or which is a self-originating force. Do you and I, reader, agree with him here ? Does a stone sink, or a cork rise, in water, by its own force ? Does a magnet originate its own force ? For my part, I do not know matter at all, — I cannot conceive or think of matter, — except as inert, dead. Do we, then, know force at all? Carlyle answers Yes. When he stretches forth his hand, he initiates force. Even Professor Tyndall explicitly allows that his will determines the movement of his arm ; and Carlyle, and those who hold with Carlyle i that spirit is the only force-originating agency revealed to ! us either in experience or in consciousness, can challenge] all the materialists in the world to name an instance in

The God-revealing Miracle. 17

which mere matter does what Professor Tyndall does when he moves his arm.

" The true, inexpHcable, God-reveaHng miracle," writes Carlyle in Sartor Eesartus, " Hes in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all ; that I have free force to clutch aught therewith." How should this be a " God-reveahng miracle "? I am not sure that Carlyle explicitly answers the question ; buf we need not have much difficulty in supplying the answer which he suggests. The exertion of force by me reveals to me my own spirit ; I am conscious of my own existence when I think, or feel, or act ; I cannot do any of these things without, at the same time, becoming aware that I, the indefinable spirit or person who originate force, exist. I never think, — I cannot rationally think, — that my bones, my blood-vessels, the particles of my brain, in one word, any or all the material instruments which I set in motion, are the originating force within me. In like manner, seeing the material universe, from star to wave-spray, in motion, I conclude that the only:^ cause known to me as adequate to originate motion, or ^tp use matter as an instrument, is present in the uni^^rse, and is a Spirit, — God. Strictly, therefore, it is true, as Carlyle says, that the stretchings^ forth of my hand is to me a natural revelation of God;\ and Professor Tyndall, when he acknowledged to hisv audience that the exertion of force by his will upon his arm was a primary, indisputable fact, ought, I humbly suggest, to have followed in the steps of Carlyle, and owned that such a fact attests the existence of a Living Spirit who ^ moves the universe. But it requires immense courage in these days to utter and stand to any simple, great, and ancient truth ; it is on paradox, extravagance, ghttering superficiality, that the plaudits of the crowd are showered.