Last words of Thomas Carlyle ...

Introduction

The two manuscripts included in The Last Words of Thomas Carlyle were left among the author's papers at his death. One of them, Wot ton Reinfred, is Carlyle 's only essay in fiction, and it therefore possesses so distinctive an interest that its omission from Carlyle's complete works would not be justifiable. The other, Excursion {Futile Ejzough) to Paris, offers a vivid picture of Carlyle's personality. By the publication of these two manuscripts, with the accompanying letters, a new and considerable volume is added to the list of Carlyle's works.

Wotton Reinfred was probably written soon after Carlyle's marriage, at the time when he and his wife entertained the idea of producing a novel in collaboration. The romance iv INTRODUCTION.

may be said to possess a peculiar psychological interest, inasmuch as it represents the earlier peHod of Carlyle's literary development. In the labored but not faulty style, the most familiar characteristics of the writer's later work are only occasionally apparent. So far as matter is concerned, the reader will not be slow to discover, in the conversations of Wotton and the Doctor, the first expression of ideas and doctrines afterward set forth with more formality in Sartor Resartus. " It is a poor philosophy which can be taught in words," is the Doctor's proposition. " We talk and talk, and talking without acting, though Socrates were the speaker, does not help our case, but aggravates it. Thou must act, thou must work, thou must do ! Collect thyself, compose thyself, find what is wanting that so tortures thee, do but attempt with all thy strength to attain it, and thou art saved." Here is the doctrine afterward expanded by Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus.

Concerning Carlyle's judgment of his contemporaries, he has often enlightened us with

INTRODUCTION. y

his wonted frankness, but in Wottott Reinfred alone he appears as the writer of a romance whose characters are drawn from real life. On this point we may quote Mr. James Anthony Froude, who says :

. " The interest of Wotton Reinfred to me is considerable from the sketches which it contains of particular men and women, most of whom I knew and could, if necessary, identify. The story, too, is taken generally from real life, and perhaps Carlyle did not finish it from the sense that it could not be published while the persons and things could be recognized. That objection to the publication no longer exists. Everybody is dead whose likenesses have been drawn, and the incidents stated have long been forgotten."

Mr. Leslie Stephen adds to this testimony in a letter from which we make the following extract :

" It is interesting as a historical document. It gives Carlyle before he had adopted his peculiar manner, and yet there are some characteristic bits — especially at the beginning — in vi INTRODUCTION.

the Sartor Resartus vein. I take it that these are reminiscences of Irving and of the Thackeray circle, and there is a curious portrait of Coleridge, not very thinly veiled. There is enough autobiography, too, of interest in its way."

The Excursion (Futile Enough) to Paris is the unreserved daily record of a journey in company with the Brownings, when Carlyle paid a visit to Lord Ashburton. That this record is characteristic, and that it presents a singularly vivid picture of the writer's personality, is self-evident. It is a picture Avhich adds something to our knowledge of Carlyle the man, and is therefore worth preservation. The world has long since known that even Carlyle's heroic figure may claim the sympathy and pity due a great soul fretting against its material environments.

WOTTON REINFRED.

Chapter I

" Surely," said Wotton, as he sat by the clear evening fire engaged in various talk with his friend, " surely, my good Doctor, the poet is wrong ; and happiness if it be the aim was never meant to be the end of our being." The old Doctor gave a quiet smile. "Happiness ! " continued Wotton with increasing vehemence, " happiness ! where is it ? The foolish can not find it, the wisest have sought for it in vain. Not on the towering heights of royalty, not in the houses of the rich and noble, not down in the thatched hut of the peasant does it dwell. The ambitious, be it in the cabinet, the battle-field, or the countingroom, discovers after a thousand mocking disappointments that he is a hapless drudge ; the voluptuary dies despicable and wretched, like

Copyright, 1892, by D. Appleton and Company.

a putrid gourd ; Brutus exclaims, ' O virtue, I have worshipped thee as a substance, and must I find thee a shadow ? ' But Science ! Yes, Science ! And what does Science teach us? The wisdom of living? The nature of our own being, and the art of directing it aright? Alas ! alas ! on these things she speaks not but in enigmas ; for darkness and the shadow of doubt rest over the path of our pilgrimage, and at our journey's end the wisest of us can but exclaim with the old sage : Foede munditm intravi, miser vixi, perturbatus niorior ! "

** Do not forget his prayer," said the other, meekly.

"Yes! O causa causariim^ miserere mei!'" cried Reinfred, looking upwards, with tears almost starting to his e3^es. '' Miserere mei T' repeated he, throwing himself down on the table, and hiding his face in his hands.

His cousin looked at him sympathisingly, but spoke not,

*' And yet," cried the other, starting up, and throwing back his head to conceal the wetness of his eyes, " if He DO not hear me ? If there is no ear to hear me ; and the voice of my sorrow peals unreturned through the grim wilderness, and only the echo of the dead rocks replies to me in the gloom ! O heaven and earth, what am I or where am I ? Alone ! Alone ! They are dead, all dead, buried beneath the ground or faithless above it, and for me there is no soul that careth ! Forgive me, my father," continued he, after a moment's pause ; " I do you wrong, but I am very v/eak ; and surely these things will kill me soon."

" Dear boy," said his friend, " you are not to blame, you take the matter like a young man as you are ; because hope has hid herself you think she is utterly fled. Tush, I tell you, all this is nonsense, and you will see it yet though you think my words but wind. You were twenty-two last Christmas, and the life of man is three score years and ten. You have much to do, and much to learn in this world ; only nature must have her coarse, nay, she is teaching you even now, teaching you with hard but useful stripes, and you will act your part the better and more wisely for it."

*' It is acted already," said the other, bitterly, " and the curtain is dropped, and I have nothing more to do but undress, but shuffle off this mortal coil."

"Dropped? Aye, but not the green one, it is the painted curtain that has dropped, and the first act truly is done, and we have other four to come to. Pity that our interlude of music were not gayer, but we must even put up with it, sighs and groans though it be. O, Wotton Reinfred, thou art beside thyself ; much learning doth make thee mad. I swear it is even so," continued he, rising into his usual lively tone. " There hast thou sat poring over thy Geometries and Stereometries, thy Fluxions direct and inverse, by the Newtonian and the Leibnitzian method, thy Universal History, thy Scotch Philosophy and French Poetics, till thy eyes are dazed with so many lamps, and for very light thou canst not see a glimpse, and so in thy head the world is whirling like a sick man's dream, and for thee it has neither top nor bottom, beginning, middle, nor end ! I care not for thy scepticism, Wotton : I tell thee, it will grow to be belief, and all the sounder for thy once having doubted. I say so because thy froward mind is honest withal, and thou lovest truth sincerely. But deuce take it, man ! I would have had thee pleading in the courts like a brave advocate — "

" Illustrating the case of Stradling versus Styles," cried Reinfred, hastily, for the talk displeased him. *' Spending my immortal spirit, in vain jangling, for a piece of bread ? I have bread already."

*' So much the better ! But the honour, the use to others — "

*' May be strongly doubted," cried the youth, still more sharply.

" Well, I grant it would not do," said the Doctor, hastening to quit this rather thorny province. ^'Thou hadst a heart too, but we could not master it ; six months of the Institute had no whit abated thy aversion, nay, thy horror ; and at last, when I saw thee after a resolute night as Justice of the Peace absolutely seized with a kind of tetanus or locked-Jaw, I myself was obliged to vote that we should give it up." — " Heigho ! " ejaculated Wotton. *' But now, in Heaven's name," continued the Doctor, " what is it that should so overcloud thee, nay for ever benight thee notwithstanding? Are we not here in thy own walled house, amid thy own freehold fields? Hast thou no talent that this world has use for? Young, healthy ; a proper fellow of thy inches ; learned too, though I say it, for thy years ; and independent, if not rich ! Pshaw ! Is thy game lost because the first trick has gone against thee ? Patience, and shuffle the cards ! Is the world all dead because Edmund Walter is a scoundrel jackanapes, and — "

** Good God ! " cried Wotton, starting from his seat, and pacing hurriedly over the floor, " can you not spare me ? What have I to do with Edmund Walter? The tiger-ape ! " cried he, stamping on the ground, " with his body and shoulder knots, his smirks and fleers ! A

WOT TON REIN FRED. y

gilt outside, and within a very lazar-house! Gayspeeches, a most frolick sunny thing ; and in its heart the poison of asps ! O the — But I will not curse him. No, poor devil ! He but follows the current of his own vile nature, like the rest of us. God help him — and me ! " added he, pausing, with a deep sigh.

" Yet it is strange," said the other, " how this puppy could muster rhetoric for such a thing. Strange that for a cap and feather Jane Montagu should have — "

" Doctor ! " said Wotton, turning towards him abruptly, with a look striving to be calm. *' I shall request of you never to mention that name in my hearing again."

" Pooh, think not of her, or think of her as she merits. A selfish minx after all ; brighter talents, but no sounder judgment, or truer heart than the rest of them ; a worthless — "

** O do not blame her ! Who knows how much or how little she was to blame? The thraldom of her situation, her youth, that cold cozening cruel woman ; all things were against us. No, worthless she was not; and if her heart was false, it was doubly and trebly false, for she knew the light and yet chose darkness rather than light. But could she love that caitiff ? She must have loved him ! O there is a dark baleful mystery over it which I shall never pierce through. Would she were gone from my thoughts, gone as if she had not been ; for here the remembrance of her is but a curse. Was it not hard? One only hope, and that to mock me with the Fiend's arch scoff! The world was dead around me, the last heart that loved me in the cold grave ; all efforts baffled, one by one the green places of my universe scathed and blackened into ashes ; my whole life one error, a seeking of light and goodness and a finding of darkness and despair. I was to myself as a frightful mistake ; a spectre in the middle of breathing men, an unearthly presence, that ought not to be there. And she — O fair and golden as the dawn she rose upon my soul. Night with its ghastly fantasms fled away ; and beautiful and solemn in earnest shade and gay sunshine lay our life before me. And then, and then ! O God, a

WOT TON REINFRED, g

gleam of hell passed over the face of my angel, and the pageant was rolled together like a scroll, and thickest darkness fell over me, and I heard the laughter of a demon ! But what of it?" cried he, suddenly checking himself. " It was a vision, a brief calenture, a thing that belonged not to this earth."

He stood gazing out upon the starry night. The old man approached, but knew not what to say. " Do they not look down on us as if with pity from their serene spaces," said Reinfred, " like eyes glistening with heavenly tears over the poor perplexities of man ? ' Herrliche Gefiihle esttarren in,' etc. Their brightness is not bedimmed by any vapour, the mists of our troubled planet do not reach them. Thousands of human generations all as noisy as our own have been engulphed in the abyss of time, and there is no wreck of them seen any more ; and Arcturus and Orion and the Pleiades are still shining in their courses, clear and young as when the shepherd first noted them on the plain of Shinar. O what is life, or why should we sorrow or joy lO WOT TON REINFRED.

over it when it is but for a moment? What is all the earth and all that have inherited or shall inherit it? Blot it out utterly and it is not missed from the Creation. Blot me out, and shall I be missed ? Shame on me, foolish child, to whine for such a toy!"

" Truth, virtue, beauty, are in man," said the other ; " they are older than the stars, and will live when these too have returned to the void night whence they were called forth in the beginning. O Wotton, my son, thou wilt know and feel this at last, though now thou know it not; and affliction will be precious which teaches thee such knowledge." Wotton shook his head. " But I am wrong," continued he. " Why do I lead thee to such thoughts ? It is a poor philosophy which can be taught in words : we talk and talk ; and talking without acting, though Socrates were the speaker, does not help our case but aggravate it. Thou must act, thou must work, thou must do! Collect thyself, compose thyself, find what is wanting that so tortures thee ; do but

WOT TON REINFRED, II

attempt with all thy strength to attain it and thou art saved."

" Wanting ? " said Wotton. " Wanting ? There is nothing wanting but deepest sleep, where there were no dreams to trouble me. Ere long I shall find it in my mother's bosom. But what of this?" added he, impatiently. " Why do we talk, as thou sayest, when there is nothing to be done ? O, my old friend, I abuse your goodness, and load you with griefs which I should bear myself. Forgive me, forgive me. I was not always weak. It must alter, for the better or the worse it must."

" For the better ! " cried the Doctor, cheerily. " It must and will. I tell thee help is on the road : it will arrive when we least think of it. But enough ! Now tell me, to come to business at last, what sayest thou to Mosely's letter?"

** That travelling will not recreate me ; that I want no spiritual leech, for spiritual recipes cannot avail ; that Mosely is a good man, but knows nothing of my * case ' as he calls it ; in brief, that I cannot and must not go."

" Dost thou know I came hither solely to persuade thee ; to offer myself as thy companion? "

*< My good, kind, only friend ! But why should it be? Why should I intrude upon happy men : to sit in their circle like a death'shead, marring- all pleasure by my sepulchral moods ? Leave me to fight with my own despicable fate. Here in the mountains I consume my griefs in silence, and except when you in your chivalrous benevolence come over to doctor me, I trouble no one with them."

" Be my patient then for once," cried the other: "what harm can it do? Your books have ceased to please you, and you are learning nothing from them but to doubt. Your long rides among the moors do but feed your melancholy humour. You can neither shoot, nor hunt, nor dine. You keep no race-horses, and the Commission of Supply does not fire your ambition. What have you to do here ? Arise, let us mingle in the full current of life, or at least survey it for a season. Who knows what fine things we may see and do ? Frank Mosely is a true man, and you will learn to love him ; he already loves you. Your case, too, he understands better than you think. Let me read you this," cried he^ taking- out a letter and leading Wotton back to the table,

" O, I know it already ! The old story over again, be not solitary, be not idle. And good heaven ! what am I that people should quacksalver me with their nostrums? Does Mosely keep a private bedlam for afflicted scholars? Or would he dissect me and experiment upon me?"

" Patience ! patience ! " said the other; '* he is a good man, and my friend. Do but listen." He read as follows :

"... TeKo^ 0, etc. The end of man is an action, not a thought^ says Aristotle ; the wisest thing he ever said. Doubt is natural to a human being, for his conceptions are infinite, his powers are only finite. Nevertheless it must be removed, and this not by negation but by affirmation. From experience springs belief, from speculation doubt, but idleness is the mother of unbelief. Neither is our happiness passive, but only active ; few men know this, though all in words admit it, hence their life is a perpetual seeking without finding.

'' Bring thy friend Reinfred hither ; I have long known him, though he knows not me. So fair a nature will not perish in its own superfluity, be its circumstances for the present never so perplexed. His state is painful, but in the end it yields peaceable fruits. It must at some time be the state of all men who are destined to be men. Bring him hither, that he may see what he has yet but heard of. Time will indeed be his physician, be it there or here : but I would gladly do myself a pleasure in knowing him. Happy and unhappy twolegged animals about me are many, but happy or even unhappy men are very few. . . ."

The discussion of this matter between our friends was protracted to a late hour ; Wotton urging his own misanthropic habitudes, his hatred of change, his inacquaintance with Mosely, and the folly and hopelessness of the whole project; his cousin answering all his cold noes with as many warm yeas, and pleading at last that in this whim of his, if he had ever merited ought, he might for this once be gratified. " It is a thing I have set my heart on," said he ; " and I shall be positively unhappy if thou deny me." Reinfred loved his cousin ; esteemed him as a man of unintelligible or mistaken views indeed, but of the kindest heart, whose helpful sympathy he had often taken in the hour of need; and who now, sad, lonely, down-pressed and darkened as the young man seemed, might almost be said to form the last link that still in any wise connected him with the living and loving world. After long resistance he began to yield, and before parting for the night a faint assent was wrung from him. " Why many words?" said he, " if it really can do anything for thee, mistaken as thou art ; against me it can do nothing."

Next morning the cousin took his leave and rode home to make arrangements for the journey, as the third day was fixed upon for their departure.

Chapter II

Reluctantly as Wotton had consented to this scheme, the good effects of it were already beginning to be felt. The preparations and preliminary settlements produced a wholesome diversion of his thoughts, so many little outward cares constraining him to calculation and exertion, the unusual bustle of his still house, all contributed to draw him from the dark Trophonius' cave of his own imagination into the light and warmth of day.

As he rode along through the bright morning to his lawyer, that he might finish, after long loitering, some acts of business relating to his little property, and some acts of beneficence to one or two poor peasants dependent on him, he almost felt as if he were in very deed ceasing to be an alien from the commonwealth of men, as if he too had some duties to perform in his own sphere, barren and humble though it was. The journey itself, though he viewed it with little pleasure, nay in general with a sort of captious regret, was yet a prospect if not a hope, and thus the future, if not filled with inviting forms, was no longer absolutely void. Nay in spite of himself some promise of enjoyment rose faintly over his mind ; for the plastic vigour of young fancies which shapes such landscapes in the clouds, though sorely marred in him was not extinct, and where good and evil are both possible, there is no such perverse alchemy as will exclusively select the latter. He could not deny that he felt some curiosity to know Mosely and his circle, so enigmatic as it seemed, from all that he had learned ; it may be even that unconsciously some low whisper of his lost Jane Montagu mingled in his fantasies, some unavowed hope of again being cast into her neighbourhood, of seeing and hearing her once more, and though not of recovering her affection, for that he could not even wish, at least of understanding how it had been for ever lost.

Wotton was one of those natures which it is of most importance to educate rightly, but also of greatest difficulty, and which accordingly with a capricious contradiction we often find worse educated than any other. In early boyhood he had lost his father, a man of an equal but stern and indignant temper, soured also by disappointments and treacheries, which had driven him at middle age from the commerce of the world, to hide his shattered fortunes, his great talents, and too fiery but honest and resolute spirit, in the solitude of his little rustic patrimony. Here in this barren seclusion he had lived, repelling from him by a certain calm but iron cynicism all advances either of courtesy or provocation, an isolated man, busied only with the culture of his land, amused only by studies of philosophy and literature, which no one but himself understood or valued. To neighbours he was an object of spleen, of aversion ; yet on the whole of envy rather than of pity, for he

WOT TON REIN FRED. jg

seemed complete in himself, free of all men, fearless of all men, a very king in his own domain. Even happy he might appear, but it was not so, for the worm of pride was still gnawing at his heart, and his philosophy pretended not to root it out but only to conceal it.

In a few years his deep-shrouded chagrin undermined his health, a slight sickness gathered unexpected aggravation, and he sank darkly into the grave with all his ineffectual nobleness, wayward and wilful in himself, mistaken by the world, and broken by it though he could not be bent. Of this parent Wotton recollected nothing, save his strong, earnest, silent figure, and a vague unpleasant impression from him of restraint and awe.

The mother, to whose sole guidance he was now committed, had a mother's love for her boy, and was in all respects a true-minded woman ; but for such a spirit as Wotton's no complete though in some points a most precious instructress. She trained his heart to the love of all truth and virtue ; but of his

Other faculties she took little heed, and could take little proper charge. To this good being, intellect, or even activity, except when directed to the purely useful, was no all-important matter ; for- her soul was full of loftiest religion, and truly regarded the glories of this earth as light chaff ; nay, we may say she daily and almost hourly felt as if the whole material world were but a vision and a show, a shadowy bark bound together only by the Almighty's word, and transporting us as if through a sea of dreams to the solemn shore of Eternity, in whose unutterable light the bark would melt like vapour, and we ourselves awake to endless weal or woe.

In her secluded life, for like her husband she was visited by few except the needy and distressed, such feelings gathered strength ; were reduced to principles of action, and came at last to pervade her whole conduct, most of all her conduct to her sole surviving child. She never said to him : " Be great, be learned, be rich ; " but, " Be good and holy, seek God and thou shalt find Him." " What is wealth ? " she would say ; " What are crowns and sceptres ? The fashion of them passeth away. Heed not the world, thou hast a better inheritance ; fear it not, sufficient food and raiment our Father will provide thee ; has he not clothed the sparrow against winter, and given it a fenced house to dwell in ? " She wished to have her boy instructed in learning, for though little acquainted with it herself, she reverenced it deeply ; but judging his religious and moral habitudes of far more consequence, she would not part with him from her sight, still less trust him among the contaminations of a boarding-school.

To read and write she had herself taught him ; the former talent he had acquired so early that it seemed less an art than a faculty, for he could not recollect his ever having wanted it or learned it. So soon as his strength appeared sufficient, she had sent him to a day-school in the nearest town, a distance of six miles, which, with his satchel at his back, the ruddy urchin used to canter over on his little shelty evening and morning. His progress was the boast of the teachers; and the timid still boy, devoted to his tasks and rarely mingling in the pastimes, never in the riots of his fellows, would have been a universal favourite in any community less selfish and tyrannical than one composed of schoolboys. It may seem strange to say so ; but among these little men, a curious observer will detect some almost frightful manifestations of our common evil nature. What cruelty in their treatm^ent of inferiors, whether frogs, vagrant beggars, or weaker boys ! How utterly the hearts of the little wretches seem dead to all voice of mercy or justice. It is the rude, savage, natural man, unchecked by any principle of reflection or even calculation, and obeying, like animals, no precept but that of brute giant power.

Poor Wotton had a sorry time of it in this tumultuous, cozening, brawling, club-law commonwealth : he had not friends among them, or if any elder boy took his part, feeling some touch of pity for his innocence and worth, it was only for a moment, and his usual purgatory, perhaps aggravated b}^ his late patron, returned upon him with but greater bitterness. They flouted him, they beat him, they jeered and tweaked and tortured him by a thousand cunning arts, to all which he could only answer with his tears ; so that his very heart was black within him, and in his sadness, of which he would not complain, and which also seemed to him as if eternal, he knew not what to do. For he was a quiet, pensive creature, that loved all things, his shelty, the milk-cow, nay the very cat, ungrateful termageant though she was ; and so shy and soft withal, that he generally passed for cowardly, and his tormentors had named him " weeping Wotton," and marked him down as a proper enough bookworm, but one without a particle of spirit. However, in this latter point they sometimes overshot themselves, and the boldest and tallest of the house have quailed before the " weeping Wotton," when thoroughly provoked, for his fury while it lasted was boundless, his little face gleamed like a thunderbolt, and no fear of earthly or