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CARLYLE 
 
 PERSONALLY AND IN HIS WRITINGS 
 
CARLYLE 
 
 PERSONALLY AND IN HIS WRITINGS 
 
 Cttio (ZBtiintiutgl) lectures ' '^ 
 
 DAVID MASSON. 
 
 :j> 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1885 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The following Lectures were prepared for 
 the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, 
 and were delivered, with the exception of 
 a few passages, before audiences consisting 
 of members of that Institution, on the 
 evenings of 24th and 27th February in the 
 present year. 
 
 Edinburgh : April 1885. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Carlyle Personally 3 
 
 LECTURE IL 
 Carlyle's Literary Life and His Creed . .55 
 
CARLYLE PERSONALLY 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 
 
 Four years ago, on the 5th of February 
 "Y JrS^i, Carlyle died, in his house in Cheyne 
 Row, Chelsea, in the eighty-sixth year of 
 his age. If ever a man died in peaceful 
 dignity and amid universal honour, it was 
 surely he. It was not merely that he 
 had long been the venerated Patriarch of 
 British Literature, an acknowledged sove- 
 reign among the British men of letters 
 of his generation. There had gathered 
 round him, moreover, to a degree distin- 
 guishing him from even the best and 
 highest of his literary contemporaries, that 
 peculiar kind of enthusiastic national regard 
 which is due to a heroic and unsullied life 
 and to a nobly extraordinary personality. 
 
 6o i 
 
4 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 While he was but in the middle of his 
 manhood, and had thirty-seven years more 
 of life and labour still before him, his 
 dying friend John Sterling had sent him 
 this message of farewell, — "Towards me 
 it is still more true than towards England 
 that no man has been and done like 
 yo2i'\' and during those thirty-seven years 
 Sterling's words had become almost an 
 accepted formula for myriads of persons 
 in all parts of the English-speaking earth 
 when they thought of Carlyle and would 
 express their admiration for him and 
 obligations to him. And so, as I have 
 said, it was in peaceful dignity and amid 
 universal honour that the old man died at 
 last ; and, when his body was borne, 
 privately and unostentatiously, to its simple 
 resting-place in the burying-ground of his 
 native Ecclefechan, there were thousands 
 that followed it thither in imagination, to 
 stand round the spot reverently and with 
 uncovered heads, think of all that the old 
 man had been, and take loving leave of 
 him with the prayer, — 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 5 
 
 " Quiet consummation have, 
 And renowned be thy grave ! " 
 
 Alas! there was to be no such "quiet 
 consummation " for Carlyle and his labours 
 when they laid him in the grave. It is as 
 if, during the four years that have elapsed 
 since then, there had been a perpetual 
 hurrying and skurrying of rude feet to and 
 from his lonely sepulchre, with something 
 of that result which is described for us at 
 the close of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. 
 The Athenian misanthrope, we are there 
 told, had prepared his own grave, and had 
 left the world with this invitation for all 
 and sundry that might be interested in 
 him posthumously, — 
 
 " Thither come, 
 And let my gravestone be your oracle." 
 
 And, when they do come to the solitary 
 spot, this is the epitaph which they are 
 said to have found already inscribed upon 
 the tombstone by the hands of the dead 
 man himself, who had ironically invited 
 them thither, — 
 
6 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 " Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft : 
 Seek not my name : a plague consume you wicked 
 
 caitiffs left ! 
 Here lie I, Timon ; who, alive, all living men did hate : 
 Pass by and curse thy fill ; but pass, and stay not 
 
 here thy gait." 
 
 The majority, we are left to suppose, depart 
 half-affrighted and half-angry, veiling their 
 fright and anger in attempted agreement 
 merely to laugh. For even the thoughtful 
 Athenian general, the finest-fibred of them 
 all, had at first but this charitable limita- 
 tion to add In construing the words of the 
 reported epitaph, — 
 
 " These well express in thee thy latter spirits " ; 
 
 and not till he had let his thoughts range 
 back over the whole of the great and 
 strange life that had closed in such gloom 
 had he risen to the more generous con- 
 clusion with which he and his men are seen 
 re-entering Athens, — 
 
 "Dead 
 Is noble Timon ; of whose memory 
 Hereafter more." 
 
 That I should have lived to see the day 
 when this, or anything like this, should 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 7 
 
 pass as a description of the state of public 
 rumour and public feeling round the grave 
 of Carlyle ! That I should have lived to 
 hear the great and good man I had myself 
 the privilege of knowing characterised 
 offhand by many, immediately after his 
 death, as " a boor and a brute," or pitifully 
 apologised for by others on the plea that 
 in his " latter spirits " he was not quite 
 himself, or even dismissed into oblivion 
 more generously with the brief reflection 
 what a noble phenomenon he had been 
 all in all, and how much remained to be 
 said of him when people should be at 
 leisure ! Here's a fine revolution ! O, the 
 horror of it, and of the way in which it 
 has come to pass ! 
 
 The instrument, as you all know, has 
 been Carlyle's friend and literary executor, 
 Mr. Froude. Hardly had the sods begun 
 to join themselves over the grave in the 
 Ecclefechan burying -ground when there 
 came forth, under Mr. Froude's editorship, 
 hurriedly printed and full of the most 
 slovenly press -errors, those two volumes 
 
8 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 \ of Carlyle's own Reminiscences, consisting 
 of papers selected from his manuscripts, 
 which are certainly among the most in- 
 teresting things Carlyle ever wrote, and 
 would have been received as such with 
 delight by all the world, had it not been 
 for unexpected portions and particles of 
 their contents the publication of which 
 acted in many quarters like the opening 
 of a bag of wasps. Seven additional 
 volumes of Carlyle Biography have fol- 
 lowed, all tending in a general way to the 
 extension and intensification of the same 
 effect, three of them consisting of the 
 Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh 
 Carlyle, as edited by Mr. Froude, and the 
 remaining four forming Mr. Froude's own 
 History of Carlyle's Life, divided into 
 two sections. It is these nine volumes 
 of Carlyle Reminiscence and Biography, 
 edited or written by Mr. Froude, that 
 have done the mischief, if mischief it be. 
 The Carlyle of the present day for nearly 
 all the world is not that ideal sage and 
 patriarch of letters that went to his grave 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 9 
 
 in peaceful dignity and amid universal 
 honour four years ago, but is Mr. Froude's 
 Carlyle, the Carlyle of those nine volumes. 
 That Mr. Froude himself intended any 
 such mischief as has actually happened is 
 utterly impossible. He was Carlyle's 
 friend and trustee ; again and again he 
 declares his conviction that Carlyle, with 
 all his faults of manner and temper, 
 was the greatest and best man he had 
 ever known ; among our present men of 
 literary distinction Mr. Froude stands 
 alone in professing himself absolutely 
 and unswervingly Carlyle's disciple in all 
 matters of religious and political creed ; 
 it is impossible that he should have in- 
 tended aught of real disrespect or real 
 damage to the memory of his dead master. 
 Nor must we forget the prodigious interest 
 and impressiveness, all in all, of those 
 nine volumes, or the fact that they them- 
 selves contain, whether in the autobio- 
 graphical letters and extracts or in Mr. 
 Froude's own comments and narrative, so 
 much in direct contradiction and rebuke 
 
lO CARLVLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 of the paltry misjudgment of Carlyle which 
 many readers of the volumes have carried 
 away from them that the persistence of 
 such readers in their misjudgment can be 
 accounted for only by the radical smallness 
 of the average mind, its inability to grasp 
 or appreciate anything very uncommon. 
 Nor, again, must we forget Mr. Froude's 
 emphatic explanation that, in his concep- 
 tion of Biography, the first duty of a 
 Biographer is unflinching honesty, and 
 that consequently his aim in these volumes 
 has been not to exhibit a supposititious 
 Carlyle, or to pander to any rose-coloured 
 expectations about Carlyle, but to repre- 
 sent Carlyle as he really and truly was, 
 virtues and blemishes together. Who will 
 gainsay this principle ? Not I, at any 
 rate. All this I have in my mind ; and 
 it is because, while I have all this in my 
 mind, I still cannot but hold Mr. Froude 
 responsible for much of that current dese- 
 cration of Carlyle's memory which he 
 himself must regret, and also because I 
 cannot recognise the Carlyle of Mr. Froude 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. I I 
 
 < in the nine volumes as the real and total 
 
 ' Carlyle I myself knew, that I will point 
 
 out some of those respects in which, as it 
 
 seems to me, there has been editorial and 
 
 biographical mismanagement. 
 
 In the first place, then, as it seems to 
 \1 me, Mr. Froude has published a great 
 ideal that he ought not to have published. 
 It would be very unfair, indeed, to apply 
 to him the full strength of Tennyson's 
 withering denunciation of the habit of 
 posthumous publication of all sorts of 
 details respecting the private lives of men 
 of letters : — 
 
 " For now the Poet cannot die, 
 Nor leave his music as of old, 
 But round him ere he scarce be cold 
 Begins the scandal and the cry : 
 
 ' Proclaim the faults he would not show : 
 I Break lock and seal : betray the trust : 
 I Keep nothing sacred : 'tis but just 
 The many-headed beast should know.' " 
 
 For one thing, Mr. Froude has acted 
 under direct commission from the de- 
 ceased. The commission was so ample. 
 
12 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 for proclamation of faults as well as merits, 
 that it seems as if Carlyle had expressly 
 bequeathed himself to Mr. Froude for 
 dissection at his pleasure. For another 
 thing, even were the principle of Tenny- 
 son's stanzas more true generally than I 
 think it is, — the principle that the public 
 has nothing to do with the personal char- 
 acter of a poet or other man of letters, but 
 only with the writings he has himself 
 chosen to give to the world, — Carlyle is 
 the last man to be accorded the benefit of 
 such a principle. He was not a man of 
 letters of the common type, but a moralist, 
 a public censor, a preacher and propag- 
 andist of peculiar faiths ; and the public 
 had and has some right of inquiry respect- 
 ing that basis of personal character and 
 conduct on which he stood while he 
 preached and moralised, and whence he 
 derived his warrant for being so loud and 
 vehement. 
 
 Even in Carlyle's case, however, there 
 were limits to what " the many -headed 
 beast " was entitled to know ; and Mr. 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 1 3 
 
 Froude has clearly transgressed them. Of 
 Mr. Froude's boldness in printing from the 
 private letters and papers Carlyle's most 
 biting judgments respecting his eminent 
 public contemporaries, — his contemptuous 
 and iconoclastic criticisms, for example, of 
 Keats, Charles Lamb, Wordsworth, and 
 Mr. Gladstone, — I for one would make no 
 complaint. These are public names and 
 reputations ; Carlyle, who was the most 
 fearless of talkers, had said much the same 
 things to all about him while he was alive ; 
 and, where he was wrong, — as I believe he 
 was in each of the cases I have specified, 
 — it was his own reputation that would 
 have to take the consequence. But it was 
 a different thing to publish sarcasms and 
 blistering scandals about poor private per- 
 sons still living, or who had lately gone to 
 their graves and left children or other sur- 
 viving relatives to be pained and injured. 
 Here Mr. Froude is inexcusable. He had 
 ample editorial discretion allowed him ; by 
 Mr. Carlyle's instructions he could omit 
 what he chose, burn what he chose, delay 
 
 u 
 
14 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 or postpone publication as he might find 
 best. My own belief is that Carlyle him- 
 self never contemplated such reckless pub- 
 lication of the private and unessential 
 asperities of his letters and journals as Mr. 
 Froude has thought proper, and that, there- 
 fore, in so far as the non-omission of these 
 merely private and unessential asperities has 
 imparted for the present a character of feroc- 
 ity and hard-heartedness to the popular por- 
 trait of Carlyle, Mr. Froude cannot escape 
 the blame. True, the asperities are origin- 
 ally and authentically Carlyle's own ; there 
 they stand in black and white, in Carlyle's 
 own hand or from his dictation. But is it 
 not recognised all the world over that there 
 is a distinction between writing a thing in 
 a private letter or journal and publishing 
 the same thing in print ? Do we not all 
 of us write every day in private letters and 
 journals, or say in the confidence of con- 
 versation, things that we do not intend for 
 the public ; and would not life be impos- 
 sible, and society be cracked to pieces, but 
 for the safeguard of conventional respect 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 1 5 
 
 for the sacredness of this distinction ? 
 Even if Carlyle had instructed Mr. Froude 
 to publish all the private asperities, — which 
 he most certainly did not, — that would be 
 no shelter for Mr. Froude ; for no man 
 can depute to another the right of doing 
 what is in itself wrong. One comfort, 
 now that the wrong has been done, is that 
 time will to some extent repair that mis- 
 fortune. As these pungencies about poor 
 private persons have flavoured the books for 
 immediate interest, even in quarters where 
 the wrong has been condemned, so they will 
 continue to flavour the books after the poor 
 aggrieved victims have died off the scene ; 
 and they may then be acceptable, and 
 perhaps valuable, simply as characteristic 
 Carlyliana. In another matter, however, in 
 which Mr. Froude has exercised the same 
 indiscretion, the damage is not likely to be 
 so reparable. If Carlyle had a right to leave 
 himself for dissection, even he had no right 
 to leave his wife also for dissection. Yet 
 has not this also been part of Mr. Froude's 
 assumption as to the nature of the duty 
 
1 6 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 intrusted to him, and part of his perform- 
 ance ? With unlimited powers to omit 
 what he chose in Mrs. Carlyle's letters and 
 other memorial papers, not only has he re- 
 tained all the reiterated superfluities of the 
 letters in the shape of those domestic details 
 and descriptions of the disagreeables of 
 housewifery which are common to all house- 
 holds of small means, and a specimen or 
 two of which would have been enough ; but 
 he has made free with those most secret 
 self-communings of Mrs. Carlyle's spirit in 
 its hours of solitude which she had kept 
 under lock and key from Carlyle himself, 
 and which Carlyle himself had no right to 
 treat as property which he could assign 
 away. The bravest words yet spoken on 
 this subject are those of Mrs. Oliphant. 
 A woman spoke out here, where men were 
 too silent ; she spoke the truth in defence 
 of her friend and of her sex ; and there 
 has been, and can be, no sufficient answer. 
 One thing I will add in this matter. Let 
 it be supposed that Carlyle had given his 
 sanction : had Mrs. Carlyle given hers ? 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 1/ 
 
 Sanction ! I knew the lady ; and, if there 
 can be such a thing as indignation in the 
 unseen world over aught that passes here 
 below, O what a face I see, what a voice 
 I hear, as she looks down on this trans- 
 action ! 
 
 Another cause which has contributed 
 not a little to the unhappy general effect of 
 the nine volumes is the prevailing sombre- 
 \ness and lugubriousness of those portions 
 of them which come from Mr. Froude's 
 own pen. In the Reminiscences and the 
 Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Car- 
 lyle these consist, of course, but of casual 
 editorial notes and explanations ; but in the 
 four volumes of the Biography they form 
 the text of narrative and comment in which 
 the fragments of documentary material for 
 all the eighty-five years of Carlyle's life are 
 imbedded. Now, wherever Mr. Froude 
 himself thus becomes the narrator or com- 
 mentator, his mood is too uniformly like 
 that of a man driving a hearse. 
 
 The contrast in this respect between 
 c 
 
1 8 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 what is from his own pen and much of the 
 documentary material he digests and edits is 
 very remarkable. There is gloom enough, 
 seriousness enough, in the matter of the 
 documents ; but they are not all gloomy or 
 serious. They abound with the pictur- 
 esque, the comic, the startlingly grotesque, 
 or the quaintly pleasant ; some of them 
 actually swim in humour, or sparkle with 
 wit. These Mr. Froude faithfully prints, 
 and perhaps relishes ; but they do not 
 seem to have any influence on his own gait 
 or countenance in his office of biographer. 
 This is unfortunate. No mind not pro- 
 foundly in earnest itself could understand 
 Carlyle or represent him properly to others ; 
 but, if ever there was a life that required 
 also some considerable amount of humour 
 in the bystander for correct apprehension 
 and interpretation of its singularities, it 
 was Carlyle's. Those about him that knew 
 him best always felt that the most proper 
 relation to much that he said and did was 
 to take it humorously or suffuse it with 
 humour ; and that he himself had the same 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 19 
 
 feeling and authorised it in others appeared 
 \ in the frequency, almost the habitual con- 
 ' stancy, with which he would check his con- 
 scious exaggerations at the last point with 
 some ludicrous touch of self- irony, and 
 would dissolve his fiercest objurgations and 
 tumults of wrath in some sudden phantasy 
 of the sheerly absurd and a burst of up- 
 roarious laughter. Without a recollection 
 of this, many a saying of his, many a little 
 incident of his daily life, is liable even now 
 to misconstruction, or to interpretation out 
 of its just proportions. 
 
 Take for example Mr. Froude's story of 
 Carlyle's behaviour in the first days of his 
 wife's severe illness in 1864 from the efiects 
 of a cab accident in the streets of London. 
 " The nerves and muscles," says Mr. 
 Froude, " were completely disabled on 
 " the side on which she had fallen, and one 
 *' effect was that the under-jaw had dropped 
 " and that she could not close it. Carlyle 
 " always disliked an open mouth; he thought 
 " it a sign of foolishness. One morning, 
 " when the pain was at its worst, he came 
 
20 CARLYLE TERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 " into her room, and stood looking at her, 
 "leaning on the mantelpiece. 'Jane,' he 
 " said presently, ' ye had better shut your 
 " mouth.' She tried to tell him that she 
 " could not. 'Jane,' he began again, 'ye'll 
 \ " find yourself in a more compact and pious 
 " frame of mind if ye shut your mouth.' " 
 This story Mr. Froude received, he tells 
 us, from Mrs. Carlyle herself; and there is 
 no doubt as to its authenticity. What I 
 I am sure of is that Mr. Froude treats it 
 \ too gravely, or might lead his readers 
 to treat it too gravely, by missing that 
 sense of the pure fun of the thing which 
 was present in Mrs. Carlyle's mind when 
 she remembered it afterwards, however 
 provoking it may have been at the moment. 
 She used to tell the story, I believe, to 
 others, generally with the explanation that 
 Carlyle had been reading Catlin's book 
 on the North American Indians, and had 
 been struck with Catlin's observation that 
 the good health of the red men was owing 
 in great measure to their rule of keeping 
 their mouths always closely shut and 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 2 1 
 
 breathing only through their nostrils. 
 Indeed, it was one of Mrs. Carlyle's habits, 
 just because of her boundless respect and 
 affection for her husband, to play in imagina- 
 tion with his little eccentricities, and amuse 
 her friends and bewilder his worshippers 
 with satirical anecdotes at his expense. 
 One of the pleasantest sights in the 
 Cheyne Row household on a winter even- 
 ing was Carlyle himself, seated in a chair 
 by the fire, or reclining on the hearth-rug, 
 pipe in mouth, listening benignantly and 
 admiringly to those caricatures of his ways, 
 and illustrations of his recent misbehaviours, 
 from his beloved Jane's lips. 
 
 Insufficient appreciation of the amount 
 of consciously humorous, and mutually 
 admiring, give-and-take of this kind in 
 the married life of the extraordinary pair, 
 both of them so sensitively organised, has 
 had much to do, it seems to me, with that 
 elaborately studied contrast of them and 
 too painful picture of their relations which 
 Mr. Froude has succeeded in impressing 
 upon the public. There were, it is true, 
 
2 2 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 passages of discord between them, of 
 temporary jealousy and a sense of injury 
 on one side at least, from causes too deep 
 to be reached by this explanation ; but it 
 rubs away many a superficial roughness ; 
 and, if Mr. Froude had been more suscept- 
 ible of humorous suggestions from his 
 subject, he would not, I believe, have 
 found this married life of Carlyle and Jane 
 Welsh so exceptionally a tragedy through- 
 out in comparison with other married lives, 
 and would not have kept up such a uniform 
 strain of dolefulness in his own performance 
 of the part of the chorus. The immense 
 seriousness of Carlyle's own mind and 
 views of things, the apparent prevalence 
 of the dark and dismal in his own action 
 and monologue through the drama, even 
 required, I should say, an unusual power 
 of lightsomeness in the chorus, and this 
 not as mere trick for literary relief, but 
 actually for insight, correction, and com- 
 pensation. 
 
 Here, however, we touch upon what I 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 23 
 
 consider yet another fault in Mr. Froude's 
 biographic method. His method, it seems 
 to me, has been too exclusively subjective, 
 and too little objective ; which means that 
 he has confined himself too much to the 
 materials that were at hand for him in the 
 letters, journals, and other papers left by 
 Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle, and has not 
 supplemented the information derived from 
 these by any such amount of independent 
 inquiry and research as is usually ex- 
 pected from a biographer. 
 
 This complaint, so far as Mr. Froude is 
 concerned, is applicable, of course, only to 
 the four volumes of his express Biography 
 of Carlyle. The two volumes of Carlyle's 
 own Reminiscences, and the three volumes 
 of the Letters and Memorials of Mrs. 
 Carlyle, stand apart for their independent 
 [ biographic and autobiographic worth. They 
 I are necessarily to a large extent subjective, 
 inasmuch as they record the feelings and 
 moods of the writers through the periods 
 over which they extend ; but they are rich 
 also in objective interest. They are hist- 
 
24 CARLYLP: personally. [lect. 
 
 orical while they are autobiographic ; they 
 let us see the scenes in which the writers 
 moved, the physiognomies of those they 
 met ; they sketch for us characters and 
 incidents we are glad to know about, and 
 should have known nothing about, or less 
 about, otherwise. But, when we step into 
 the four volumes of Mr. Froude's Life of 
 Carlyle, what do we find ? Abundance of 
 new interest, both subjective and objective, 
 it is true, in the series of Carlyle's letters 
 which Mr. Froude has selected from those 
 to which he had access, and in the extracts 
 he has given from Carlyle's journals ; but, 
 for the rest, only a narrative digesting and 
 connecting this very material, with occas- 
 ional references back to the Reminiscences 
 and quotations thence, and all but entirely- 
 destitute of such additional information 
 respecting Carlyle's life, earlier and later, 
 as could easily have been obtained by 
 independent inquiry and investigation. 
 
 The result is that Mr. Froude's Biog- 
 raphy of Carlyle is little else than Carlyle 
 himself soliloquising and journalising. 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 25 
 
 Now, without such material as is afiforded 
 by private letters and journals, a biography 
 is apt to be unsatisfactory, and may even 
 be unauthentic or insipid ; and Carlyle's 
 sohloquies in his journals, and his quasi- 
 soliloquies in his letters to members of his 
 family and others, are exceptionally inter- 
 esting and impressive. But the mere 
 subjective soliloquisings and journalisings 
 of even the sincerest man over the facts of 
 his life are not that life itself, but only as it 
 were the drainage from that life in the after- 
 musings of solitary hours; and a biographer 
 who relies exclusively on such soliloquis- 
 ings, journalisings, and after-musings for 
 his representations of those actual passages 
 of the life of his subject to which they refer, 
 and does not supplement his information 
 derived thence by information from other 
 quarters, may well fall into mistakes, and 
 substitute, here and there, a factitious or 
 erroneous version of things for the reality. 
 What I mean may be made clearer by a 
 single example. 
 
 No event of Carlyle's life was more 
 
26 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 dazzlingly brilliant than his Rectorial Visit 
 to Edinburgh in April 1866. Well, I 
 declare that the brief account of this 
 event given by himself in the Reminis- 
 cences, and adopted by Mr. Froude in the 
 Biography, with some extension there 
 from the private letters, does not let us 
 see the thing at all as it really was, but 
 only a dull and dismalised blur of the facts 
 and circumstances. In that account, or 
 those accounts, Carlyle arrives in Edin- 
 burgh " the forlornest of all physical 
 wretches " ; he struggles through his 
 address to the students and the other 
 incidents of the chief day as through 
 ''noisy inanity and misery"; through the 
 remaining days of his stay in Edinburgh 
 he is still " wae, wae " ; and his only satis- 
 faction in the whole affair is that his wife, 
 whom he had left at Chelsea, had lived to 
 hear of this Edinburgh triumph, and so to 
 have "her painful, much -enduring, much- 
 endeavouring little history now at last 
 crowned with plain victory in sight of her 
 own people and of all the world." Now, 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 2^ 
 
 it SO chances that I have the whole of that 
 Edinburgh week and its incidents perfectly 
 within my own memory ; and I again de- 
 clare that this dismalised account of it gives 
 no idea whatever of the real facts. 
 
 On the night following Carlyle's arrival 
 in town, after he had settled himself in 
 Mr. Erskine of Linlathen's house, where 
 he was to stay during his visit, he and his 
 brother John came to my house in Rose- 
 bery Crescent, that they might have a 
 quiet smoke and talk over matters. They 
 sat with me an hour or more, Carlyle as 
 placid and hearty as could be, talking most 
 pleasantly, a little dubious indeed as to 
 how he might get through his Address, 
 but for the rest unperturbed. As to the 
 Address itself, when the old man stood up 
 in the Music Hall before the assembled 
 crowd, and threw off his Rectorial robes, 
 and proceeded to speak, slowly, con- 
 nectedly, and nobly, raising his left hand 
 at the end of each section or paragraph to 
 stroke the back of his head as he cogitated 
 what he was to say next, the crowd listen- 
 
28 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 ing as they had never listened to a speaker 
 before, and reverent even in those parts of 
 the hall where he was least audible, — who 
 that was present will ever forget that 
 sight ? That day and on the subsequent 
 days of his stay there were, of course, 
 dinners and other gatherings in Carlyle's 
 honour. One such dinner, followed by a 
 larger evening gathering, was in my house. 
 Then too he was in the best of possible 
 spirits, courteous in manner and in speech 
 to all, and throwing himself heartily into 
 whatever turned up. At the dinner-table, 
 I remember, Lord N eaves favoured us 
 with one or two of his humorous songs or 
 recitatives, including his clever quiz called 
 Shiart Mill on Mind and Mailer, written 
 to the tune of " Roy's Wife of Aldival- 
 loch." No one enjoyed the thing more 
 than Carlyle ; and he surprised me by 
 doing what I had never heard him do 
 before, — actually joining with his own 
 voice in the chorus. "Stuart Mill on 
 Mind and Matter, Stuart Mill on Mind 
 and Matter," he chaunted laughingly along 
 
I.] CARLYLE TERSONALLY. 29 
 
 with Lord N eaves every time the chorus 
 came round, beating time in the air em- 
 phatically with his fist. It was hardly 
 otherwise, or only otherwise inasmuch as 
 the affair was more ceremonious and 
 stately, at the dinner given to him in the 
 Douglas Hotel by the Senatus Academicus, 
 and in which his old friend Sir David 
 Brewster presided. There too, while dig- 
 nified and serene, Carlyle was thoroughly 
 sympathetic and convivial. Especially I 
 remember how he relished and applauded 
 the songs of our academic laureate and 
 matchless chief in such things. Professor 
 Douglas Maclagan, and how, before we 
 broke up, he expressly complimented 
 Professor Maclagan on having " contri- 
 buted so greatly to the hilarity of the 
 evening." Other things of that week are 
 still in my memory ; but this will be 
 enough for my present purpose. 
 
 In this particular case the gloominess 
 of Carlyle's recollection of what was really 
 one of the splendours of his life may be 
 accounted for by the fact that the splendour 
 
30 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 was darkened for him ere it was well over 
 by the terrible shock of his wife's death 
 in his absence, so that thenceforward he 
 looked back on all things as through a veil 
 of crape. In other matters, however, as 
 well after that calamity as before it, we 
 lose much, and are even led into miscon- 
 ception, by Mr. Froude's habit of implicitly 
 accepting Carlyle's own soliloquisings and 
 journalisings as always a sufficient record 
 of the facts of his real life, and spinning 
 the narrative out of these exclusively, 
 without quest of further information or of 
 other evidence. Indeed there are certain 
 fixed suppositions of Mr. Froude's own in 
 his narrative which could not have been 
 derived from the letters and journals, and 
 which a little research or inquiry would 
 have dissipated. If Mr. Froude had con- 
 sulted any person familiar with Scottish 
 society as it was sixty years ago, and still 
 is, would he have made so much turn on 
 the pivot of that conception of Carlyle as 
 the low-born man of genius, the Annandale 
 peasant, the mason's son of Ecclefechan, 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 3 1 
 
 who had married the high-born lady and 
 heiress of Craigenputtock, the surgeon's 
 daughter of Haddington ? His own docu- 
 ments could have told him that Carlyle's 
 wife was an " heiress " only in the sense 
 that, after she had been married to Carlyle 
 sixteen years, a property worth about ^200 
 a year was added on her side to their in- 
 come from his earnings ; and any Scottish 
 person could have told him that there was 
 nothing extraordinary whatever in the 
 match between the educated son of a 
 Scottish peasant and the daughter of a 
 Scottish provincial surgeon, and that, if 
 Jane Welsh had not married Carlyle, and 
 been promoted by that marriage to a 
 sphere far higher in the world's affairs 
 than would otherwise have been within 
 \ her reach, she would have probably lived 
 \ and died the equally drudging wife of some 
 ' professional Scottish nobody. Again, if 
 Mr. Froude had taken the trouble to in- 
 quire a little, or even to study the facts 
 before him, would he have so persistently 
 represented the whole of the Scottish 
 
32 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 portion of Carlyle's life as such an excep- 
 Vtionally severe struggle against external 
 hardships ? Positively, from the time of 
 his leaving the University to the Craigen- 
 puttock days, Carlyle's life was, in external 
 respects, one which ninety-nine out of any 
 hundred of his contemporaries at the Uni- 
 versity might have envied. Singularly 
 happy in his parentage and kindred, he 
 found occupation after occupation, and 
 threw off occupation after occupation, 
 such as must have seemed of satisfactory 
 respectability to other college-bred men 
 of his own age and standing, and which 
 many of them would have been glad to 
 get; and,- — thanks to his own integrity 
 and frugality, — he was even in those days 
 always master of more money beyond his 
 yearly needs than many of those college 
 contemporaries of his were ever to have in 
 bank in the whole course of their pilgrim- 
 age through the world. Then, in fact, just 
 as afterwards, the real misery, so far as 
 there was misery, was wholly of internal 
 origin. It was the fretting of such a 
 
T.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. * 33 
 
 sword in such a scabbard, or in any scab- 
 bard ; it was the irreconcilability of such 
 a soul with such a medium of circum- 
 stances, or with any medium of circum- 
 stances ; it was that " raal mental awgony 
 in my ain inside " about which Carlyle and 
 his wife used to jest with each other to the 
 last as his sole incurable ailment. 
 
 It is this lifelong agony of Carlyle's 
 own spirit, this strange constitutional grim- 
 ness and gloominess of his through all the 
 external changes of his life, that we have 
 now especially to consider. 
 
 The autobiographical letters and papers 
 in the nine volumes which Mr. Froude 
 has published are certainly, in this respect, 
 an astonishing revelation. Not that every 
 one who knew anything of Carlyle by ob- 
 servation or report since he first became 
 famous had not already heard enough 
 about his dyspepsia, his insomnia, and his 
 habitual wofulness of mood. — As long 
 ago as 1844 Mr. R, H. Home, in his book 
 of literary gossip called New Spirit of the 
 Age, had amused the world with the story 
 
 D 
 
34 CARLVLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 of a passage-at-arms between Carlyle and 
 Leigh Hunt at the close of a small evening 
 party in the house of a common friend in 
 one of the London suburbs. The story is 
 quite authentic ; for the late G. L. Craik | 
 told me that he was the host on the occa- I 
 sion, and that the scene of the affair was i 
 his house in Cromwell Lane, one of the • 
 quiet lanes in the then semi-rustic stretch 
 of cottages and garden -grounds that lay 
 between Brompton and Kensington. The 
 party had sat for some hours, Leigh Hunt 
 and Carlyle the principal talkers, and Leigh 
 Hunt insisting always on the bright and 
 cheerful view of every subject, while 
 Carlyle retorted and declaimed on the 
 gloomy side. When they took leave at 
 last, and came out on the doorsteps into 
 Craik's garden, it was one of the most 
 magnificent of clear starry nights. " Look 
 up, Carlyle," said Leigh Hunt, seeing his 
 opportunity: ''that at least, up there, you 
 will acknowledge to be beautiful." Even 
 that failed. "Ay, it's a sad sicht," replied 
 Carlyle, after his glance at the dome of 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 35 
 
 \ blue and all its twinkling emeralds. — But, 
 even with this and more of the same sort 
 lying in the public mind about Carlyle's 
 peculiar temperament through the forty 
 years of his living celebrity, the post- 
 humous letters and papers have come upon 
 most, as I have said, with all the effect of 
 a revelation. The Lamentations of Jere- 
 miah are not more continuously doleful. 
 They break down, for one thing, that 
 kind of apology for Carlyle's grimness and 
 gloominess which would maintain that, 
 like Timon's misanthropy, it belonged only 
 or mainly to his "latter spirits," the final 
 fifteen years of his extreme old age and 
 widowerhood, when his dead wife was 
 never out of his thoughts, and he saw 
 everything, for her sake, through a veil of 
 crape. There was certainly an accession 
 of dolefulness in this final period of his 
 life ; but essentially the same vein of gloom, 
 grimness, lamentation, and self-pity, as the 
 posthumous letters and papers now prove, 
 had been perpetual in his life from the 
 very first. " Wae, wae!'\ ''Ay de mi, ay 
 
36 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 de mi!'' , '' Shtpiditas stupiditatum, omnia 
 stupiditas !'\ is the burthen of the com- 
 munication from first to last. " Grim and 
 sorrowful"; "solitary, eating my own 
 heart"; "my curse deeper and blacker 
 than that of any man"; "bearing the fire 
 of hell in an unguilty bosom " ; "I could 
 read the curse of Ernulphus, or something 
 twenty times as fierce, upon myself and all 
 things earthly " ; "an unhappy mortal, with 
 nerves that preappoint me to continual 
 pain and loneliness, let me have what 
 crowds of society I like " : such are the 
 phrases that recur with appalling frequency, 
 and yet wonderful power of verbal varia- 
 tion, in his descriptions of his own mood 
 and mental condition in almost every stage 
 of his career from youth to old age, with 
 nothing to relieve the picture except his 
 avowal that he was conscious of having 
 had at all times a fund of " desperate hope " 
 in him, an invincible stubbornness of reso- 
 lution to go on and conquer, and except 
 also an occasional admission that his sad- 
 ness was "streaked with wild gleamings of 
 
r.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. '^'J 
 
 \ a very strange joy," and that he had 
 r' moments of inexpressible beauty, like 
 i auroral gleams on a sky all dark." What 
 I are we to say to this .'* 
 
 We can say, in the first place, that 
 Carlyle's melancholy, even in its fiercest 
 rages and paroxysms, was not a melan- 
 choly like that of Swift, fed at its roots 
 from contemplations chiefly of the infra- 
 human, the Yahooish, or the diabolic, but 
 was radically a melancholy of a diviner 
 kind. It was essentially a religious melan- 
 choly, touching the metaphysical on all 
 sides, and taking in not only the darkness 
 of the under-world, but also the stars and 
 the meteors. " One night, late," we find 
 him writing to Sterling from Scotsbrig in 
 July 1837, "I rode through the village where 
 " I was born. The old kirkyard tree, a 
 " huge old gnarled ash, was nestling itself 
 " softly against the great twilight in the 
 " north. A star or two looked out, and the 
 " old graves were all there, and my father 
 " and sister ; and God was over all." This 
 is the kind of melancholy into which 
 
38 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lkct. 
 
 Carlyle's mind settled when it was most 
 tranquil, as might be instanced by scores 
 of similar passages in the letters and 
 journals interspersed with the more stormy 
 outbursts ; and who does not perceive 
 \ the divineness of such a melancholy, and 
 I would not desire to be possessed by it in 
 ^ some equal degree ? Nor was it poetical 
 merely, the transient sensation of highly- 
 strung nerves, vanishing in beautiful and 
 musical expression, and without effect on 
 action and conduct. The notion of Carlyle 
 , as in any sense a misanthrope, a hard- 
 hearted man, a mere raging or railing 
 egotist, is one of those absurdities, those 
 perversions of the actual truth into its very 
 opposite, which arise not from mere in- 
 sufficiency of knowledge, but from a moral 
 incapacity of understanding anything un- 
 usually complex in character, and a male- 
 volent predetermination to resist evidence. 
 Mr. Froude's iterated and reiterated testi- 
 mony that Carlyle, with all his surface 
 \ asperities, all his wayward and sometimes 
 furious irascibility, all his dislike of senti- 
 
i.l CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 39 
 
 mentalism in every form, and all his resol- 
 uteness in letting those near him know 
 exactly what he thought about them or 
 their business in every case and never 
 prevaricating or flattering in the least, — 
 Mr. Froude's testimony that Carlyle, with 
 all this, was yet, essentially and practically, 
 \i one of the kindliest, most generous, and 
 rmost tender-hearted of men, could be con- 
 .firmed on affidavit by all who were within 
 the circle of his acquaintance. Miss 
 Martineau, in her description of him from 
 her own knowledge, actually singled out 
 for special note, as that in his character 
 which distinguished him most from all 
 other men she had seen, his enormous 
 power oi sympathy. It was a most correct 
 observation. No one who knew Carlyle 
 but must have noted how instantaneously 
 he was affected or even agitated by any 
 case of difficulty or distress in which he 
 was consulted or that was casually brought 
 to his cognisance, and with what restless 
 curiosity and exactitude he would inquire 
 into all the particulars, till he had conceived 
 
40 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 the case thoroughly, and as it were taken 
 the whole pain of it into himself. The 
 practical procedure, if any was possible, 
 was sure to follow. If he could do a 
 friendly act to any human being, it was 
 sure to be done ; if the case required exer- 
 tion, or even continued and troublesome 
 exertion, that was never wanting. I could 
 give striking instances out of my own 
 recollection ; and I rather regret that Mr. 
 Froude has not enforced and impressed 
 his general statement by more detailed 
 narratives of a few such instances. Per- 
 haps, however, it was hardly necessary. 
 He who can read the Reiitiniscences or the 
 letters and extracts from the journals in the 
 Biography without perceiving what depths 
 of tenderness there lay in this rugged man 
 has no heart for tenderness or power of 
 perceiving it anywhere. Take, from the 
 Reminiscences, this passage of tribute to 
 his wife's memory, and of mingled grief 
 and self-humiliation : — 
 
 " Here [in Cheyne Row] we spent our two-and-thirty 
 years of hard battle against fate, hard but not quite 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. ^' 4 1 
 
 unvictorious, when she left me, as in her car of heaven's 
 fire. My noble one ! I say deliberately her part in 
 the stern battle, — and, except myself, none knows how 
 stern, — was brighter and braver than my own. Thanks, 
 darling, for your shining words and acts, which were 
 continual in my eyes, and in no other mortal's. Worth- 
 less I was your divinity, wrapt in your perpetual love 
 of me and pride in me, in defiance of all men and things. 
 And I was Thomas the Doubter, the unhoping, till now 
 the only half-believing in myself and my priceless 
 opulences ! . . . Blind and deaf that we are ! Oh, 
 think, if thou yet love anybody living ; wait not till 
 1 death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds and idle 
 \ dissonances of the moment, and all be at last so mourn- 
 '^ fully clear and beautiful when it is too late ! " 
 
 / There were, I say, infinite depths of 
 ytenderness in this rugged man. Not even 
 in the partner of his Hfe whom he so 
 bewailed and commemorated, woman 
 though she was, and one of the most 
 brilliant of her sex and the most practically 
 and assiduously benevolent, were there 
 such depths and dissolutions of sheer 
 tenderness as there were in him. 
 
 May we not, however, have something 
 else to say respecting that monotone of 
 grimness, gloominess, misery, and self- 
 -pity which runs so interminably through 
 Carlyle's soliloquisings and journalisings ? 
 
42 CARLYLE I'ERSONALLV. [lect. 
 
 We may recur to our question whether 
 this, after all, represents Carlyle's real and 
 total life with nearly such sufficiency as 
 is assumed for it in Mr. Froude's pages. 
 Even if the course of Carlyle's life, from 
 his youth to his old age, was the black 
 river he painted it to himself as having 
 been, — a river rolling on always black, 
 unchangeably black, — are we to take no 
 account of the perpetually changing 
 scenery along the banks on either side ? 
 Does not the real life include all that the 
 river flowed through, all to which it lent 
 effect ? But was the river itself so un- 
 changeably black and gloomy ? "I secretly 
 desire to compensate for laxity of feeling 
 by intenseness of describing," is one of 
 Carlyle's confessions about himself; and 
 may we not apply that confession in some 
 degree to the series of the journalisings and 
 soliloquisings ? In fact, must not all sub- 
 jective journals and letters, — all journals or 
 letters recording the feelings of the writer 
 and the succession of his spiritual states, — 
 run into a groove of monotonous self-com- 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY, 43 
 
 plaint and self-pity, representing not so 
 much the real daily life as the rebound 
 from that life, the reaction from it, in 
 relaxed hours of after-musing ? Is it not 
 in the very nature of the habit of subjective 
 journalising and letter-writing to generate 
 what may be called in a sense a factitious 
 self beside or underneath the real self, and 
 to collect as it were the mutterings and 
 groanings of this side-self, the surplus 
 drainings as it were of the unused acid 
 of the mind in the day's work, and offer 
 these too unreservedly as the real life 
 and personality ? On one occasion, when 
 the letters of the young Carlyle of Kirk- 
 caldy to his family in Annandale had been 
 in such a strain of despondency as to cause 
 real alarm among them, he had actually 
 forgotten the fact before the replies came, 
 was amazed at the trepidation he had 
 caused, and wrote back that they surely 
 knew him well enough by this time to 
 be aware that he was not being killed 
 every time he called out "murder." With- 
 out detriment to the truthfulness of all his 
 
44 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 subsequent soliloquisings and journalis- 
 ings in the same gloomy vein, or to the 
 value of such revelations of the ingrained 
 melancholy of such a man, may we not 
 subject the soliloquisings and journalisings 
 as a whole to some such abatement as this 
 anecdote suggests ? 
 
 Perhaps the last survivor of those who 
 knew Carlyle intimately in those Edinburgh 
 days when he was a householder in Comely 
 Bank was the late Dr. John Gordon. 
 Shortly before Dr. Gordon's death I had 
 a conversation with him about Carlyle 
 in those days, and put to him this ques- 
 tion, " Was he then the gloomy, morose, 
 woebegone and unsociable being he de- 
 scribes himself as having been ?" " Not a 
 bit of it, not a bit of it," was the immediate 
 and emphatic reply : " the pleasantest and 
 heartiest fellow in the world, and most ex- 
 cellent company." This, with an infusion 
 of the grander elements one reverenced 
 in the later Carlyle, corresponds with my 
 own experience, and, I think, with that 
 of all others who saw much of him. We 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 45 
 
 heard of the dyspepsia, and knew it was 
 there ; but which of us, in Carlyle's 
 company in his best days, ever thought 
 of the dyspepsia, or ever regarded it as 
 one hundredth of the actual man before 
 us ? Was it the dyspepsia that wrote 
 Carlyle's books ; or was it the dyspepsia, 
 or the results of the dyspepsia, that at- 
 tracted the affections of so many thousands 
 to himself personally with such fascination 
 while he lived ? Through nearly the whole 
 of his long London life his modest house by 
 the Thames at Chelsea was perhaps the 
 most celebrated habitation of a private man- 
 in all London, the rendezvous not only of 
 such admirers as professed to be his 
 disciples, but of all and sundry of all sorts, 
 all ranks, all creeds, that were touched 
 anyhow with a passion for beholding a 
 genius so extraordinary and could either 
 visit him at intervals or accomplish a single 
 interview ? And what went they out for 
 to see ? A dyspeptic, a misanthrope, a 
 railing or a raging egotist ? No ; but a 
 man of such powers of intellect and heart 
 
46 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 in such combination as bewildered and 
 enlarged all conventional preconceptions 
 of what a great man might be, whose 
 raiment as it were was of camel's hair and 
 his food locusts and wild honey, whose 
 words were thunders and lightnings round 
 your head, whose very truthfulness it was 
 that made some of them seem ferocities, 
 and who, in the midst of his utmost feroci- 
 ties, could dash in blazing grotesques of 
 humour, and amaze and shake you with 
 such a laugh. When I remember that 
 laugh of Carlyle's and all that it implied, 
 I cannot think, in consistency with any 
 definition of happiness above the low^est, 
 that his life was so very unhappy. 
 
 My own acquaintance with Carlyle 
 dates from as far back as the early months 
 of 1844, when he was still only in his 
 forty-ninth year. He was then a man of 
 tall erect figure, over five feet eleven 
 inches in height, very lean and spare, with 
 close-shaven lips and chin (for the fashion 
 of beards had not then come in), and with 
 
1.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 47 
 
 a complexion of such bilious ruddy as you 
 sometimes see in a Scottish farmer who is 
 much in the open air. Observing this 
 and other signs of his great natural 
 strength of constitution, it was not long 
 before I used to prophesy that, dyspepsia 
 or no dyspepsia, he would live to be over 
 eighty. He crossed that boundary by full 
 five years ; and I knew him well to the 
 end. I saw him enter on his fifties, and 
 pass out of these into his sixties, and again 
 out of his sixties into his seventies, and so 
 till he was a tottering octogenarian, his 
 lean figure latterly much shrunk from its 
 original stature with the stoop of advanc- 
 ing age, his hands shaking with palsy, and 
 his hair and beard (for he had been among 
 the first to adopt the new fashion) gradu- 
 ally turning to gray, though so very gradu- 
 ally that it seemed as if his head would 
 never grow quite white, and to the end 
 there was a thick matted grizzle from the 
 crown to the temples and neck, without 
 a sign of baldness. During the first one- 
 and-twenty years of my acquaintance with 
 
48 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 him, or from 1 844 to 1 865, my meetings with 
 him were very frequent, my own residence 
 being then mainly in London ; during the last 
 sixteen, or from 1865 to 1881, my removal 
 from London having separated us, my 
 sights of him were only in such periodical 
 visits as I paid to London or on the rarer 
 occasions when he chanced himself to come 
 to Edinburgh. All in all, few persons now 
 living can have seen more of Carlyle than 
 I did, or can have known him better. 
 What, then, is my final and general 
 opinion about him ? 
 
 Allow me to express it now publicly in 
 the exact manner in which I have ex- 
 pressed it more than once confidentially 
 among my private friends : — In the course 
 of my life, though I have seen a great 
 many people, and not a few celebrities, 
 there have been but two men among those 
 I have known thoroughly and intimately, 
 — only two, unless I allow for a possible 
 third in reserve, — to whom I could con- 
 scientiously apply the supreme epithet of 
 " great." One was Thomas Chalmers. /^ 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 49 
 
 Tongue cannot tell, pen cannot write, one 
 tithe of the admiration and affection with 
 which I look back to this teacher of my 
 first youth and still cherish his memory. 
 It was not discipleship even then, for even 
 then I could criticise, and could perceive 
 his defects in the matter of learning and 
 what not else ; still less is it discipleship 
 now, when one of my regrets is that so 
 many of Chalmers's fellow - countrymen 
 should always be thinking of him merely 
 as the ecclesiastic. It was, and is, because 
 in Chalmers I first came in contact with a 
 man from Nature's largest mould, who ful- 
 filled, somehow or other, morally as well as 
 intellectually, one's ideal of what human 
 greatness might be. The same was and 
 is my feeling about Carlyle. Unlike 
 Chalmers in almost every respect, and 
 especially with a range of historical know- 
 ledge and a depth and exquisiteness of lit- 
 erary culture to which Chalmers, splendidly 
 ;, I Scythian as he was content to be in such 
 things, made no pretension, Carlyle also 
 fulfilled for me, though in a most diverse 
 
 E 
 
50 CARLYLE PERSONALLY. [lect. 
 
 fashion, the same ideal of essential origin- 
 V^ality and greatness. No profession of 
 discipleship here either. I never could 
 adopt all the articles of Carlyle's creed ; 
 in the earliest days of my acquaintance 
 with him it was as often with dissent as 
 with assent that I listened to many of his 
 favourite objurgations; and even now, 
 when I think of him and Chalmers to- 
 gether, I cannot positively determine, such 
 is the survival of my younger admiration, 
 which of the two I regard as essentially 
 the greater. These two men, then, of all 
 that I have myself known personally and 
 intimately, — these two, with the possible 
 reserve of an unnamed third, — stand in my 
 category of the supremely great and good. 
 When you remember that Edinburgh 
 claims something of them both, — that 
 Chalmers was wholly an Edinburgh citi- 
 zen during the last portion of his life, and 
 that Edinburgh witnessed and contained 
 the critical beginnings of Carlyle's intel- 
 lectual history, — is it strange that my 
 fancy should always go back beyond both 
 
I.] CARLYLE PERSONALLY. 5 1 
 
 to that Other great and good Scotsman, 
 more properly an Edinburgh man than 
 either, whom we now link more im- 
 mediately with Carlyle in the special 
 series of our greatest Scotsmen of the 
 literary order, while Chalmers stands 
 aside on his own platform midway be- 
 tween ? Had Sir Walter Scott lived to 
 the ordinary age of man, I might have 
 seen, and perhaps known, him too ; as it 
 is, he lies beyond my memory, and I can 
 behold and touch him only in imagination. 
 But this I do, — O how fondly ! — every 
 time I walk in Princes Street ; and then 
 the reflection always comes how strikingly 
 the lesson that Nature never repeats her- 
 self in her greatest specimens is taught us 
 by the fact that the very next successor to 
 the genial, hearty, all-enjoying Scott in the 
 series of really great literary Scotsmen 
 should have been the man one of whose 
 faults it was that he could never do justice 
 to Scott, — the moody, agonised, and melan- 
 choly Carlyle. 
 
CARLYLE'S LITERARY LIFE 
 AND HIS CREED 
 
/ 
 
 LECTURE 11. 
 
 carlyle's literary life and his creed. 
 
 A peculiarity of Carlyle's literary life is 
 that it was so late in beginning, or at least 
 in arriving at the stage of success and 
 notoriety. 
 
 Keats, who was born exactly in the same 
 year with Carlyle, had done all his work, 
 and gone to his grave in Rome, at the age 
 of five-and-twenty, before Carlyle had been 
 so much as heard of. Shelley, who was 
 but three years Carlyle's senior, died in 
 1-S52, the year after Keats, at the age of 
 not 'quite thirty ; and Byron, who was 
 Carlyle's senior but by eight years, died in 
 1824, at the age of thirty-six. In British 
 Literary Chronology all these three had 
 been strictly Carlyle's coevals ; each of 
 
Oi- '-^ 
 
 56 CARLYLE's literary life. [lect. 
 
 them had blazed Into celebrity within sight 
 of Carlyle after he was old enough to take 
 !^ note of them and be interested ; and yet, 
 1^ -in 1824, when the last of them had gone, 
 Carlyle, though in his twenty-ninth year, 
 was an unknown man. To those closest 
 about him and most intimate with him he 
 was but a restless Annandale eccentric, 
 who, having given up the church, and given 
 up schoolmastering, and given up the law, 
 and taken farewell also of those mathema- 
 tical studies to which he had been originally 
 inclined, was living on in Scotland, and 
 mainly in Edinburgh, in a lucky private 
 tutorship which had come in his way, and 
 was struggling obscurely into literature by 
 translations from the German and by anon- 
 ymous articles in several Edinburgh and 
 London periodicals. Had Carlyle died in 
 1824, the tradition of his existence would 
 have been of the faintest. To us, looking 
 back now, and aware of all that was to 
 come, it is as if Carlyle's unusual longevity 
 had been already decreed, and there was 
 no need felt for hurry. In fact, in British 
 
II.] 
 
 CARLYLES LITERARY LIFE. 
 
 57 
 
 Literary Histor 
 Literary Chron 
 ation, or to t 
 that of Byre 
 altogether d' 
 
 For, V 
 1824, th'. 
 to 18;^. \ 
 
 distinct from British 
 
 '^ t belongs to a gener- 
 
 '"^/^^y itions, later than 
 
 ...y'l and Keats, and 
 
 '/rk 
 
 mv 
 
 \ 
 
 leap ten years from 
 ron's death, and come 
 ;le, now in his thirty- 
 aimself finally in Lon- 
 j. ? No lack of industry, 
 fruits of industry, during 
 te years of his continued 
 n Edinburgh and his 
 varied by his two 
 ^ ^on before his deci- 
 cuere. Those ten years, the 
 or eight of which were the first 
 . his married life, and were divided 
 b^tit^een Edinburgh and the solitude of 
 Craigenputtock, had been abundantly pro- 
 ductive ; and, when he settled in London, 
 he was no longer a mere hack -contri- 
 butor to obscure periodicals and serials. 
 He had published, in substantive book- 
 form, his Translation of Wilhelm Meister 
 
5^ CARLYLE's literary life. [lect. 
 
 them had blazed into celebrity with' nt 
 of Carlyle after he was old enc \ '^e 
 
 10/^ note of them and be interests ot, 
 
 13 \ ^^ 1824, when the last of then iC, 
 
 YZ^i* Carlyle, though in his twenty- \ ^r, 
 
 was an unknown man. To tb .t 
 
 about him and most intimate v 
 was but a restless Annandal* 
 who, having given up the churc 
 up schoolmastering, and given 
 and taken farewell also of thost 
 tical studies to which he had h^ 
 inclined, was living on i^ 
 mainly in Edinburgh, 
 tutorship which had col 
 was struggling obscurely into Ik 
 translations from the German and . 
 ymous articles in several Edinbur^ 
 London periodicals. Had Carlyle dL t>> 
 1824, the tradition of his existence w&md 
 have been of the faintest. To us, looking 
 back now, and aware of all that was to 
 come, it is as if Carlyle's unusual longevity 
 had been already decreed, and there was 
 no need felt for hurry. In fact, in British 
 
II.] carlyle's literary life. 57 
 
 Literary History, as distinct from British 
 Literary Chronology, he belongs to a gener- 
 ation, or to two generations, later than 
 that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and 
 altogether different. 
 
 For, when we overleap ten years from 
 1824, the year of Byron's death, and come 
 to 1834, when Carlyle, now in his thirty- 
 ninth year, planted himself finally in Lon- 
 don, what do we find ? No lack of industry, 
 certainly, or of the fruits of industry, during 
 the ten intermediate years of his continued 
 restlessness between Edinburgh and his 
 native Dumfriesshire, varied by his two 
 tentative visits to London before his deci- 
 sion to settle there. Those ten years, the 
 last seven or eight of which were the first 
 years of his married life, and were divided 
 between Edinburgh and the solitude of 
 Craigenputtock, had been abundantly pro- 
 ductive ; and, when he settled in London, 
 he was no longer a mere hack -contri- 
 butor to obscure periodicals and serials. 
 He had published, in substantive book- 
 form, his Translation of Wilhelm Meister 
 
58 CARLYLE's literary life. [lect. 
 
 (1824), his Life of Schiller (1825), and his 
 Specimens of German Romance (1827) ; he 
 had written about three -fourths of those 
 articles in the Edinburgh Review, the 
 Foreign Review, the Foreign Quarterly 
 Review, and Frasers Magazine, which are 
 now read with admiration as his " Miscel- 
 lanies"; and his Sartor Resartus, which 
 he had written at Craigenputtock, but which 
 he could get no publisher to undertake as 
 a book, was appearing in instalments in the 
 pages of F^'aser. There had necessarily 
 been some corresponding growth of repu- 
 tatipn, Jeffrey had taken Carlyle in tow ; 
 Goethe, before his death in 1832, had re- 
 cognised Carlyle and entered into cordial 
 correspondence with him ; and Emerson, 
 in his first visit to Britain in 1833, had 
 gone on pilgrimage to Craigenputtock ex- 
 pressly to see such a remarkable hermit. 
 Both in Edinburgh and in London, also, 
 partly from the effects of Carlyle's writings, 
 partly from his personal impressiveness 
 and extraordinary powers of talk in what- 
 ever company he had entered in either 
 
II.] CARLYLES LITERARY LIFE. 59 
 
 town, there had been formed a little knot 
 of persons who admired him greatly and 
 had the highest expectations of what he 
 could achieve. Still, nothing like a general 
 or national fame had gathered round his 
 name, nothing of such fame, for example, 
 as had already grown round his fellow 
 
 \ Edinburgh- Reviewer, Macaulay, who was 
 by five years a younger man. In short, 
 not till 1 83 7, when Carlyle was in his forty- 
 second year, and had been three years 
 resident in London, — or, rather, not till be- 
 tween 1837 and 1840, when he was advanc- 
 
 ' ing from his forty-second year to his forty- 
 fifth, — did he burst fully upon the public. 
 His History of the French Revolution, pub- 
 ilished in i8^, began his popularity, not 7^ 
 only evoking applauses for itself, but lifting 
 up the unfortunate Sa^^tor Resarttts into 
 
 1 more friendly recognition ; the first collected a 
 edition of the Miscellanies followed in 1838 ; 
 the additions to these Miscellanies by his 
 continued contributions to Magazines and 
 Reviews, including his " Diamond Neck- 
 lace" and his Essays on Mirabeau and Sir 
 
 vC' 
 
6o CARLYLE's literary life. [lect. 
 
 Walter Scott, increased the inipetus ; the 
 pubb'cation in 1839 of his little book or 
 V pamphlet entitled Chartism called attention 
 \ to him in a new character ; the four Courses 
 of his Lectures to select London audiences 
 in the seasons of 1837, 1838, 1839, and 
 1840, had aroused among the Londoners 
 generally an interest in him as a strange 
 Scottish phenomenon ; and the publication 
 of the last of these Courses of Lectures in 
 1840, in the form of his volume entitled 
 Heroes and Hero- Worship, completed the 
 effulgence. About the year 1840, we may 
 say, and not till then, Carlyle had shone 
 out in his full British celebrity. 
 
 The causes of this " belatedness " of 
 Carlyle's literary life, to use an expression 
 of Milton's, were various. There had, 
 certainly, been no original defect or slug- 
 gishness of genius. The young Carlyle 
 who had just completed his classes in 
 Edinburgh University, the young Carlyle 
 drudging at schoolmastering in Kirkcaldy, 
 the young Carlyle of the next few years, 
 again walking in the streets of Edinburgh] 
 
II.] carlyle's literary life. 6 1 
 
 and living by private tutorship and hack- 
 writing, was essentially the same Carlyle 
 that became famous afterwards, — the same 
 in moodiness, the same in moral magn- 
 animity and integrity, the same in intel- 
 lectual strength of grasp. One is aston- 
 ished now by the uniformity of the testi- 
 monies of his intimates of those early 
 days to his literary and other powers, the 
 boundlessness of the terms in which they 
 predicted his future distinction. His own 
 early letters are also in the evidence. 
 They are wonderful letters to have been , 
 written in the late teens and early twenties-^^ 
 of a Scottish student's life, and paint him 
 as even then a tremendous kind of person. 
 As respects Carlyle's " belatedness," then, 
 may not the fact that his element was to 
 be prose and not verse count for something } 
 It would seem as if that peculiar kind of 
 poetic genius which tends to verse as its 
 proper form of expression can always 
 attain to mastery in that form with less 
 of delay and discipline than is required for 
 mastery in prose ; and, at all events, the 
 
62 CARLYLE's literary life. [lect. 
 
 traditions of literature are such that the 
 V^ appearance of a new genius in verse is 
 always more quickly hailed by the public 
 than anything corresponding in prose. 
 Now, much as Carlyle struggled after the 
 faculty of metrical expression, ease in that 
 \ faculty had evidently been denied him by 
 nature, and it was in prose or nothing that 
 he was to manifest his superiority. Nay, 
 in his earliest prose-writings for the press 
 one observes something of the same stiff- 
 ness, hard effort, and want of fluency that 
 characterise almost all his verse-attempts. 
 This, however, must have been in great 
 part accidental ; for we have only to go to 
 some of his private letters, dashed off in 
 his twentieth year or thereabouts, to see 
 that he had already acquired his marvellousXV 
 ■ power of picturesque and eloquent expres-^^ 
 sion, and was master of a swift, firm, and 
 musical style. But, for such a literary 
 career as his was to be, mere gift of ex- 
 pression, however fluent and eloquent, was 
 not enough. It was not enough that he 
 should be able to write fluently and elo- 
 
II.] carlyle's literary life. 63 
 
 quently in a general way, by the exercise 
 of mere natural talent, on any subject that 
 turned up. He had to provide himself 
 amply with matter, with systematised know- 
 - ledge of all sorts, and especially with sys- 
 tematised historical knowledge. Hence the 
 depth and extent of his readings, the range 
 . and perseverance of his studies in French, 
 \ German, Italian, and Spanish, in addition 
 to Latin and English. For writings so 
 full-bodied as those he was to give to the 
 world, it was necessary that he should step 
 into literature as already himself a poly- 
 histor or accomplished universal scholar; 
 and, when he did step conspicuously into 
 literature, it was in fact as already such a 
 polyhistor. — In connection with which it is 
 worth while to note how completely by 
 that time Carlyle had emancipated him- 
 self from the common idea of so many of 
 his literary contemporaries that literature 
 ought to consist in writing about literature. 
 To this day what are the chief subjects of 
 the essays and books continually sent forth 
 by our professed authors ? Why, the lives 
 
64 CARLYLE's literary life. [lect. 
 
 and writings of previous authors, the per- 
 sonages and phenomena of the past literary 
 history of the world. We have Homer, 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and 
 the other literary dii majorum gentium, 
 over and over again, with descents to as 
 many of the literary dii minorum gentium 
 as may be necessary for variety ; and the 
 public is thus deluged with an eternal, 
 ever-flowing literature merely about Liter- 
 ature. Now, though Carlyle began in this 
 way too, — as witness his essays on Jean 
 Paul Richter, on Goethe and Faust, on 
 Burns, on German Playwrights, etc., — 
 there were premonitions even then, both 
 in his mode of handling these subjects and 
 in the fact that such essays were inter- 
 spersed with others of a more general and 
 philosophic kind, that he would not dwell 
 long in the element of mere literary history 
 and aesthetic criticism, or be satisfied with 
 adding his own contributions, however 
 excellent, to the perpetual conversation 
 about " Shakespeare and the musical 
 glasses." Accordingly, before he had 
 
II.] carlyle's literary life. 65 
 
 fully established himself, he had taken 
 final leave of the mere literature about 
 literature, and had moved on into a litera- 
 ture appertaining to human society and 
 human action generally, to war and states- 
 manship, to poverty and crime, to the 
 quicquid agunt Jiomines in all lands and 
 ages, literature as but one of the interests. 
 As the capacity for this had to be included 
 in his polyhistoric preparation, we have 
 here also perhaps one of the causes of his 
 comparative " belatedness." — But there 
 was another, and the chief of all. It lies 
 in that fundamental characteristic of Car- 
 lyle's literary genius which Goethe had 
 detected as early as 1827. "It is admir- 
 " able in Carlyle," said Goethe to Ecker- 
 mann in the July of that year, " that in his 
 " judgments of our German authors he has 
 " especially in view the mental and moral 
 " core as that which is really influential. 
 " Carlyle is a moral force of great import- 
 " ance; there is in him much for the future, I 
 " and we cannot foresee what he will pro- 
 '■ duce and effect." Goethe here struck the 
 
66 CARLYLE's literary life. [lect. 
 
 keynote. It was the depth and strength 
 V of the moTal element in Carlyle's constitu- 
 
 X^tion that was to impart to his Hterary 
 career its extraordinary importance and its 
 special character of originality. Precisely on 
 this account, however, — precisely because 
 he was to be no ordinary man of letters, 
 turning out book after book as anr-artist 
 turns out picture after picture, but a new 
 moral force in the British community and 
 
 K the whole English-speaking community of 
 the world, — he had to bide his time. He 
 had to ascertain and reason out his prin- 
 ciples ; he had to form his creed. When 
 he did burst fully upon the public it was to 
 be not only as the polyhistor, not only as 
 the humourist, not only as the splendid 
 prose - artist, but also, — to use a cant 
 phrase which I do not like, though Carlyle 
 himself rather favoured it, — as the Chelsea 
 Prophet. 
 
 The three years between 1837 and 
 1840, I repeat, when Carlyle was advanc- 
 ing from his forty-second year to his forty- 
 fifth, are to be remembered as the time 
 
ir.] CARLYLE's literary LIFE. 6/ 
 
 of his fully established celebrity. It is the 
 more necessary to remind people of this 
 because, forty- five years having elapsed 
 since then, and the majority of the present 
 generation having made their first ac- 
 quaintance with Carlyle and gone through 
 the Carlyle phrenzy in comparatively 
 recent times, they are apt to forget that 
 their predecessors had the advantage of 
 them and went through that experience 
 before the present generation was born. 
 That is the fact. In and from 1840 
 Carlyle's name was running like wildfire 
 through the British Islands and through 
 English-speaking America ; there was the 
 utmost avidity for his books wherever 
 they were accessible, especially among the 
 young men ; phrases from them were in 
 all young men's mouths and were affecting 
 the public speech ; and, though he was 
 living frugally in his small house in 
 Chelsea on an income of not more yet 
 than ^200 a year, that house was already 
 looked at by many Londoners, and 
 thought of by many at a distance, as 
 
68 CARLYLE's literary life. [lkct. 
 
 the home of the real king of British 
 Letters. True, he was then but midway, 
 or hardly midway, in his total career of 
 literary production. There were to come 
 from him yet his Past aiici Present 
 (1843), his first labour of Hercules in his 
 Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell 
 (1845), his Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), 
 his Life of John Sterling (1851), and his 
 second great labour of Hercules in his 
 History of Frederick the G^'eat (1858-65), 
 besides his various new additions to his 
 " Miscellanies " in the shape of scattered 
 papers in periodicals, and his volume on 
 The Early Kings of Norivay, published 
 as late as 1875, with an Essay on the 
 Portraits of John K710X. Doubtless, 
 these additional publications, each coming 
 as a new stroke from the great Carlyle, 
 increased his fame ; and, doubtless, it was 
 not till a comparatively late point in his 
 life that the increased sales of his writings 
 began to bring him in anything like 
 wealth. He himself attests, with a kind 
 of grim sarcasm, that his Rectorial Visit 
 
n.] CARLYLE's creed. 69 
 
 to Edinburgh in 1866 and the pubHcation 
 of his Rectorial Address in all the news- 
 papers marked an epoch of change in 
 this respect. There was nothing in that 
 Address, he said truly, that was not a mere 
 mild dilution of ideas he had expounded 
 again and again, and in far better and 
 stronger form, in his books ; but somehow 
 the Rectorial jubilation had stirred even 
 the multitudinous asses. The fact is that 
 the effects of this Rectorial jubilation were 
 entirely of a commercial kind, suggesting 
 that the time had come for an issue of his 
 books in cheap editions. For the rest, our 
 representation is historically correct. 
 
 No need at this time of day to dilate 
 on the literary merits of Carlyle's works. 
 There they stand on our shelves, as extra- 
 ordinary an array of volumes for com- 
 bined solidity and splendour, all the pro- 
 duct of one pen, as can be pointed to in 
 the Literature of English Prose. It is 
 with the creed running through the 
 volumes that we are now concerned, that 
 
70 CARLYLE S CREED. [lect. 
 
 system of ideas by virtue of which Carlyle 
 became, as Goethe predicted he would 
 become, a powerful moral force in his 
 "^ generation, and on account of which his 
 * contemporaries styled him latterly the 
 Chelsea Prophet. 
 
 The first name affixed to Carlyle to j 
 signify a perception of the difference of his 
 ways of thinking from those of other people . 
 
 was Mystic. This was the name given to \ 
 him long ago in that Edinburgh circle 
 round Jeffrey which he first stirred by his 
 personal peculiarities when he was a 
 resident in Comely Bank, and by his 
 articles on German subjects. He seemed 
 to be the apostle of an unknown something 
 called " German Mysticism," and to be 
 trying to found a school of " English 
 Mystics." He dallied with the term him- 
 self for a while, and even took it with him 
 to London. Intrinsically, however, there 
 could have been no more absurd designa- 
 tion. By the whole cast of his intellect 
 Carlyle was even the reverse of a mystic-r — V^ 
 constrained as he was always to definite- 
 
11.] CARLYLE S CREED. 7 1 
 
 ness of intellectual conception and to 
 optical clearness of representation ; and, 
 though he had a kindly eye towards the 
 Mystics, he could make nothing of them 
 except by unmysticising them,^ — his essay 
 on Novalis, for example, being an unsatis- 
 factory attempt to extract gleams out of 
 the opaque. It was the novelty of Carlyle's 
 principles to those among whom they were 
 first propounded, the strangeness of the 
 objects he tried to bring within their ken, 
 that occasioned the resort to such a mis- 
 fitting epithet. A far fitter designation 
 would have been Transcendentalist. Par- 
 don me if I detain you a little with this 
 word from the scholastic nomenclature and 
 its applicability to Carlyle. It is easy 
 enough to understand, and we have really 
 no other name so suitable for the thing. 
 
 A Transcendentalist in philosophy is the 
 very opposite of what we call a Secularist. 
 He is the opponent of that system of 
 philosophy which " apprehends no farther 
 than this world and squares one's life 
 according," that system of philosophy 
 
72 CARLYLe's creed. [lect. 
 
 \^ which regards the visible universe of time, 
 ^ space, and human experience as the sum- 
 total of all reality, and existing humanity 
 \1 in the midst of this universe as the topmost 
 \ thing now in being. Beyond, and around, 
 and even m this visible universe, the 
 Transcendentalist holds, — this world of sun, 
 moon, and stars, and of the earth and 
 human history in the midst, — there is a 
 supernatural world, a world of eternal and 
 infinite mystery, invisible and inconceiv- 
 able, yet most real, and so interconnected 
 with the ongoings of the visible universe 
 that constant reference to it is the supreme 
 necessity of the human spirit, the highest 
 duty of man, and the indispensable condi- 
 tion of all that is best in the human genius. 
 In this sense Carlyle was a transcendental- 
 ist from the very first. He believed in a 
 X- world of eternal and infinite realities tran- 
 scending- our finite world of time, space, 
 sense, experience, and conceivability. 
 
 In the scholastic nomenclature, however, 
 there may be recognised two distinct vari- 
 eties of Transcendentalism. There is, first, 
 
II.] CARLYLES CREED. J T, 
 
 what may be called Idealistic Transcen- 
 dentalism or Transcendental Idealism. By 
 this idealistic theory all the apparent uni- 
 verse of known external realities, — sun, 
 moon, stars, rocks, clouds, earth, and human 
 history and tradition,— is resolved or reduced 
 into mere present thinkings of your mind or 
 my mind, a mere complex phantasmagory 
 of the present human spirit ; and therefore 
 it is through this present human spirit that 
 one has to seek the all-explaining bond of 
 connection between the real world of finite 
 nature and the real and infinite super- 
 natural world. Now, though Carlyle was 
 acquainted with this idealistic theory, had 
 evident likings for it, and now and then 
 favoured it with a passing glance of ex- 
 position, I cannot find that he had ever 
 worked out the theory in all its bearings, 
 — an enormously difficult business, — or 
 adopted it intimately for his own behoof. 
 He remained to the end what may be 
 called a Realistic Transcendentalist or 
 Transcendental Realist. By this is meant 
 that he was satisfied to think of the world 
 
74 CARLVLE's creed, [lect. 
 
 of space and time' and of all physical and 
 historical realities, as having substantially 
 existed, in its essential fabric at least, very 
 much as we imagine it, by an independent 
 tenure from the Infinite, distinct from that 
 of all past or present conceiving minds 
 inserted into it and in traffic with it. 
 
 Here, however, we may note an inter- 
 esting peculiarity of his special form of 
 Realistic Transcendentalism, which latterly 
 gave him some trouble. Though he talks 
 of "rude nations," "rude times," etc., and 
 recognised perhaps a certain progress in 
 human conditions and even in the human 
 organism, he seems essentially to have 
 always thought of humanity as a self-con- 
 tained entity, fully fashioned within itself 
 from the first, and cut off from all its 
 material surroundings and from any priority 
 of material beginnings. Hence his op- 
 pugnancy in his latter days to the modern 
 scientific doctrine of evolution as brought 
 into vogue more especially by the reason- 
 ings of Darwin. For a transcendentalist of 
 the idealistic sort the doctrine of evolution 
 
II.] carlyle's creed. 75 
 
 can have no terrors. If the world of 
 space, time, and history is but a fabrication 
 of our present thinkings, a phantasmagory 
 of the present human spirit, what does it 
 matter how much our present thinkings 
 may change, or how many aeons of so- 
 called time and imagined processes and 
 marches of events we may find it necessary 
 to throw into our phantasmagory ? For 
 the transcendental realist the difficulty is 
 greater. Though he has the ultimate 
 relief of believing that the entire proces- 
 sion or evolution of things physical as 
 modern science would represent it, — from 
 the Universal Nebula on to the dispersed 
 starry immensity, and so to the solar 
 system, our earth as a planet in that 
 system, and the history of that separate 
 earth through the ages of its existence 
 since it became separate, — is but one vast 
 forth-putting or manifestation of the incon- 
 ceivable Absolute, he does not like to 
 think of himself, the paragon of animals, 
 or of the human mind and soul, as in any 
 way really derived from this antecedent 
 
76 CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 physical evolution, and more especially 
 from those nearer portions of it which 
 concern our separate earth, and lead from 
 protoplasmic slime, through differentiated 
 ^ bestialism, to a special ancestry in the ape. 
 Some transcendental realists do get over 
 the difficulty; but Carlyle never could. In 
 ■"V June i§68 he wrote in his Journal as 
 follows : — 
 
 " Surely the speed with which matters are going on in 
 this supreme province of our affairs is something notable 
 and sadly undeniable in late years. . . . 'All descended 
 from gorillas, seemingly.' ' Sun made by collision of huge 
 masses of planets, asteroids, etc., in the infinite of space.' 
 Very possibly, say I. 'Then where is the place for a 
 Creator ?' The fool hath said in his heart there is no 
 God. From the beginning it has been so, is now, and to 
 the end will be so. 'Y\iQ.fool hath said it, — he and nobody 
 else ; and with dismal results in our days, — as in all days ; 
 which often makes me sad to think of, coming nearer my- 
 self and the end of my life than I ever expected they 
 would do. That of the sun, and his possibly being made 
 in that manner, seemed to me a real triumph of science, 
 indefinitely widening the horizon of our theological ideas 
 withal, and awakened a good many thoughts in me when 
 I first heard of it, and gradually perceived that there was 
 actual scientific basis for it, — I suppose the finest stroke 
 that ' science,' poor creature, has or may have succeeded 
 in making during my time : welcome to me if it be a 
 V truth, honourably welcome ! But what has it to do with 
 ,\ the existence of the Eternal Unnameable ? " 
 
II.] CARLYLES CREED. 77 
 
 The speculation as to the genesis of the 
 sun and the probable duration of his heat 
 here adverted to by Carlyle with such 
 recognition of its real importance came 
 before him first, I believe, in the form of 
 a paper by Sir William Thomson of Glas- 
 gow, which I had myself the honour of 
 inserting in Maanillans Magazine. He 
 was much struck with the paper at the 
 time and often mentioned it to me after- 
 wards. It is characteristic that he should 
 have had less objection to this speculation, 
 assigning a definite beginning to the whole 
 solar system, and pointing perhaps to its 
 ultimate collapse and the cessation of all 
 terrestrial life, humanity included, with the 
 extinction of the sun's heat, than to the 
 nearer scientific speculation as to the evo- 
 lution of species on the earth itself and 
 man's descent from the gorilla. It is as if 
 he found the imagination of a wholesale 
 crash, whether of formation or of annihila- 
 tion, in the far-back vast of physical im- 
 mensity, or the far-future vast of the same, 
 more cleanly, and therefore more endur- 
 
78 CARLVLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 able, than any imagination of a material- 
 istic derivation of the human organism, 
 through the ape and what not, from 
 earthly protoplasmic slime. On the whole, 
 one may say that he lived too late to 
 be able to accept the modern scientific 
 doctrine of evolution and work it into his 
 philosophy, and remained therefore at the 
 last a transcendental realist of the old 
 school. Or perhaps, with the foregoing 
 passage to enlighten us, it might be fairer 
 to say that, whatever conceptions of a 
 cosmic evolution science might bring in, 
 he found them irrelevant to the main 
 matter, and did not care a rush about 
 them in comparison with the main matter, 
 — which was that men should continue to 
 believe that all thinofs had oricjinated in a 
 supreme and infinite eternal, the reality of 
 all realities, and should walk in that belief 
 as their reliQ^ion. 
 
 One may be a Transcendentalist in philo- 
 sophy, however, whether of the Idealistic 
 or of the Realistic sort, and yet go through 
 the world calmly and composedly. Not so 
 
It.] CARLYLE S CREED. 79 
 
 with Carlyle. Jeffrey's laughing complaint 
 about him in the first days of their acquaint- 
 ance was that he was always "so dreadfully 
 in earnest " ; and no one can study the re- 
 cords of his early life without seeing what 
 Jeffrey meant. Carlyle's vitality from his 
 youth upwards was something enormous. 
 There was nothing sluggish, or sleepy, or 
 cool in his constitution, and no capacity for 
 being sluggish or sleepy or cool. He was 
 always restlessly awake ; to whatever sub- 
 ject he addressed himself, he grasped it, or 
 coiled himself round it, as with muscles all 
 on strain and nerves all a-tingling ; and, 
 when he had formed his conclusions, he 
 was vehement in announcing them and 
 aggressive in their propagation. Neces- 
 sarily this was the case most of all with his 
 conclusions on subjects the greatest and 
 most fundamental. "Woe to them that 
 are at ease in Zion " was a text quite after 
 his own heart, and which he was fond of 
 applying to those who seemed to him to 
 be sufficiently right in the main in their 
 private ways of thinking on the deepest 
 
8o CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 problems, but not to be sufficiently earnest 
 ^ in fighting for their conclusions and rousing 
 
 , and agitating society to get them accepted. 
 Plato himself, the supreme transcendentalist 
 of antiquity, and to this day unapproached 
 among mankind for the magnificent sweep 
 of clear intellect and the beauty and gor- 
 geousness of poetic expression with which 
 he expounded Transcendentalism once for 
 all to the philosophic world, was in this 
 \ category with Carlyle. "He was a gentle- 
 man very much at ease in Zion " was Car- 
 lyle's definition of him. In fact, with the 
 
 y exception of Shakespeare in Elizabethan 
 England and of Goethe in more recent 
 times, the calm and composed type of 
 character, in matters of sublime concern, 
 was not that which won Carlyle's highest 
 regard. 
 
 Dropping now all terms of scholastic 
 nomenclature, we may say, more simply, 
 
 \i that Carlyle went through the world as a 
 fervid Theist. God, the Almighty, the 
 Maker of all, — through all the eighty-five 
 years of Carlyle's life, all the seventy of 
 
II.] CARLYLES CREED. 8 1 
 
 his speech and writing, this was his con- 
 U stant phrase to his fellow-mortals. " There 
 \zs a God, there is a God, there z's a God," 
 — not even did the Koran of Mahomet 
 fulminate this message more incessantly in 
 the ears, or burn it more glowingly into 
 the hearts, of the previously atheistic 
 Arabs whom the inspired camel - driver 
 sought to rouse than did the series of Car- 
 lyle's writings fulminate it and try to make 
 it blaze in a region and generation where, 
 as he imagined, despite all the contrary 
 appearances of organised churches and 
 myriads of clergy and of pulpits, the 
 canker of atheism was again all but uni- 
 versal. When he avoided the simple name 
 "God" or "the Almighty," and had recourse 
 to those phrases, — "the Immensities," 
 "the Eternities," "the Silences," "the In- 
 finite Unnameable," — ^which we now think 
 of, perhaps smilingly, as peculiar forms of 
 the Carlylian rhetoric, it was, as he himself 
 tells us, because "the old Numen " had 
 become as if obsolete to " the huge idly 
 impious million of writing, preaching, and 
 
 G 
 
82 CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 talking people," and he would employ any 
 synonyms or verbal shifts by which he 
 could hope to bring back the essential 
 notion. In his latter days, and always in 
 his own pious self-communings, he seems 
 to have preferred the simple old name 
 he had learnt from his father and 
 mother, with its heart-thrilling and heart- 
 softeninof associations. But on this sub- 
 ject we have his own words in June 1868, 
 thus : — 
 
 " No prayer, I find, can be more appropriate still to 
 express one's feelings, ideas, and wishes in the highest 
 direction than that universal one of Pope : — 
 
 ' Father of all, in every age. 
 
 In every clime, adored 
 By saint, by savage, and by sage, 
 
 Jehovah, Jove, or Lord ! 
 Thou great First Cause, least understood, 
 
 Who all my sense confined 
 To know but this, — that Thou art good, 
 
 And that myself am blind.' 
 
 Not a word of that requires change for me at this time, 
 if words are to be used at all." 
 
 To the general fact of Carlyle's intense 
 
 -4 — religiousness in the form of a fervid general 
 
 theism has now to be added, as every one 
 
II.] carlyle's creed. 8 
 
 J 
 
 knows, the equally certain fact that he had 
 detached himself from all particular re- 
 ligions, past or present, so far as they had 
 clothed this general theistic creed with 
 miraculous theologies and mythologies. 
 As early as his twenty-fourth year, when 
 he was a schoolmaster in Kirkcaldy, he 
 had abandoned, as he tells us, all belief in 
 t j miraculous interposition in the affairs of this 
 vT universe, except in so far as the universe 
 Mtself, existence itself, is a miracle, and had 
 concluded that he himself must face the 
 world, and must teach his fellow-men to 
 face the world, with the conviction that 
 the laws of its procedure are inwrought 
 irrevocably in its very texture and con- 
 stitution, and with no other faith than that 
 radical and indestructible theistic faith upon 
 which, as he thought, all the historical 
 theologies and mythologies had been but 
 so many incrustations. The historical reli- 
 gions, — Indian, Semitic, Greek and Roman, 
 Teutonic or Norse, or whatever else, — had 
 all been respectable and interesting, though 
 some better and some worse, as imagina- 
 
84 CARLYLe's creed. [lect. 
 
 tive constructions prompted by the one 
 essential and permanent faith, attempts to 
 feature forth the inconceivable ; but they 
 had served their time, had lost their hold 
 on the changed conditions and necessities 
 of the human reason, and must all go. 
 ^ Most important under this head, of 
 s course, is Carlyle's attitude towards the 
 Christian religion. Here it is necessary 
 that I should be precise. Christianity, as 
 it has been professed by all the greatest 
 spirits that have really believed in it any- 
 where on the earth through the nineteen 
 centuries of its duration, has consisted of 
 two things, united but distinguishable, — a 
 \ metaphysic, or system of doctrines respect- 
 I ing the relations of God to man, and an 
 ■•i etJdc, or system of instructions for human 
 \ conduct. Now, the essence of Christianity, 
 when it offers Itself as a supernatural revela- 
 V tion, lies, I hold, in Its metapkysic. It lies 
 in the belief that at a particular time in the 
 history of mankind a miraculous shaft of 
 light out of the unseen Infinitude struck 
 our earth in Judaea, revealing to the Jews 
 
ir.] CARLYLe's creed. 85 
 
 first, and afterwards to the Gentiles, certain 
 things about the Divine Being and His 
 procedure with men which men could 
 never have found out for themselves, in 
 the form of certain definite doctrines or 
 propositions astonishing and almost stun- 
 i ning the mere human reason. The ethic 
 (without this metaphysic may call itself 
 ^'Christianity, but is not, I hold, Christianity 
 in any sense worth so special a name. To 
 tell men, however earnestly, not to tell lies, 
 not to commit fraud, to be temperate, 
 honest, truthful, merciful, even to be 
 ihumble, pious, and God-fearing, is very 
 good gospel ; but it did not require the 
 events of Judaea, as Christian theology 
 interprets them, to bring that gospel into 
 ttie world. The modern preacher who 
 sermonises always on the ethic and omits 
 the accompanying metaphysic may sophisti- 
 cate himself into a belief that he is preach- 
 ing Christianity, but is preaching no such 
 thing. Wherever Christianity has been of 
 real effect in the world, and has made real 
 way for its own ethic, it has been by its 
 
86 CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 metaphysic, — that set of doctrines respect- 
 s' ing things supernatural which was to the 
 Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks 
 foolishness. 
 
 Now, as Carlyle had wholly given up 
 the metaphysic of Christianity, he cannot 
 be classed among the Christians, and 
 thought it honest to avow that he could 
 not be so classed. Indeed, more and 
 more, his attitude towards Christian 
 theology in any of its known and ortho- 
 dox forms settled into positive antipathy, 
 till at last he declared it to be inconceiv- 
 able to him that any man of real intellect 
 could be found in that camp without some- 
 thing of conscious insincerity, and looked 
 askance therefore on even such ecclesi- 
 astical friends of his own as Bishop Thirl- 
 wall and Bishop Wilberforce. This feeling 
 found vent in such violent phrases as sJiovel- 
 hattedness, the Jew-God, etc.; and he had 
 even been so daring as to project a book 
 or pamphlet to be called Exodus from 
 Ho2indsditcJi, the purport of which was to 
 be that people ought universally, as fast as 
 
II.] carlyle's creed. Sy 
 
 they could, to come out of the land and 
 atmosphere of all Jewish forms and tradi- 
 tions, older or later, only taking care to 
 pack up what was really their own and 
 bring ^Aa^ along with them. Strange to 
 observe all the while his passionate sym- 
 pathy with the old Hebraic spirit as mani- 
 fested in the Hebrew Prophets, the inten- 
 sity of his fascination for the life and 
 ^character of Christ as it is represented in 
 the Gospels, and the depth of his recogni- 
 tion of the originality and beauty of the 
 Religion of Sorrow and the power of the 
 symbol of the Cross among the nations 
 hitherto. He seemed, however, to think 
 that this power had pretty nearly stopped, 
 for the highest and most cultivated intel- 
 lects, somewhere in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, about the time of the English Puritans 
 and of Oliver Cromwell. So far as it had 
 survived that time, it was, he seemed to 
 think, in individual spirits here and there 
 of the humbler and less instructed order, 
 such as those Scottish ministers of the best 
 type he had known in his childhood and 
 
88 CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 his own pious father and mother. In all 
 this, surely, Carlyle was in serious error. 
 Had he not been too hasty in judging 
 what might honestly coexist with what 
 
 Kelse in a strong human mind of his own 
 ^generation ? Had he not underestimated 
 the durability of the Christian metaphysic 
 in the world, whether in its Puritan 
 form or in another, the power of that 
 metaphysic even yet to find noble souls 
 susceptible of it, to pierce these souls and 
 lodge itself in them even to the dividing 
 asunder of the joints and marrow, and 
 so to zigzag in unexpected fire over the 
 earth and disseminate itself in great new 
 expanses ? 
 
 Can we be more precise as to Carlyle's 
 
 \Own religion than by merely describing it 
 as a fervid Natural Theism ? I believe 
 that we can. His religion, it appears to 
 me, was a compound of two elements, one 
 furnished from within, the other found 
 without. In the first place, he held, there 
 was the divine within man himself, that 
 extract or inspiration of Deity which is in- 
 
n.] CARLYLE's creed. 89 
 
 corporate with the very structure of the 
 human soul, and always throbs there in 
 the form of conscience, upward tendency, 
 the sense of right and wrong, of the noble 
 and the ignoble. No human soul, even 
 the meanest, but had this structural equip- 
 ment, and knew, by the very fabric of its 
 constitution, what was right or wrong, good 
 or bad, at any particular moment. The 
 structural faiths of the soul of man, there- 
 fore, the constitutional postulations of the 
 human spirit, made towards a religion, and 
 did not leave man in a state of agnosticism. 
 We walk by faith, — i.e. by necessary con- 
 stitutional postulation and imagination ac- 
 cordingly. But, further. In the actual 
 
 M world out of ourselves through which we 
 walk, in our experience of that world at 
 present and in the history of that world as 
 it comes to us by record, we meet that 
 which rushes into union with this faith 
 within. The world without, as well as the 
 
 V spirit within, was made by God, and is 
 governed by God ; what we see there, all 
 that we see, is God working. "What are 
 
90 CARLVLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 all our histories and traditions of actions 
 
 in former times," asked Cromwell in one 
 
 U of his speeches, " but God manifesting 
 
 ' Himself, that He hath shaken, and tumbled 
 
 \down, and trampled upon, everything that 
 He hath not planted ?" This expresses 
 exactly one part of Carlyle's religion. The 
 superiority •of the right and noble over 
 \ the wrong and ignoble, the conquering 
 power of the right and noble in the long 
 run, and the futility or nothingness of evil, 
 \ were evident in the actual rule and history 
 of the world, preached in disaster, ruin, retri- 
 bution. Divine justice stared upon you out 
 of the very fact of things. Hence Carlyle's 
 fondness for the phrase "the fact of things," 
 his hammering repetitions of the word 
 "fact," "fact"; hence his continual asser- 
 tions that more of genuine instruction and 
 spiritual nutriment is to be found in the 
 7 observation and study of realities than-4n 
 • all fiction of so-called ideals ; hence his 
 preference of History over all other forms 
 of Literature, or indeed contention that 
 History includes them all, even Poetry 
 
II.] CARLYLE S CREED. 9 I 
 
 itself. All real wisdom, all sound morality, 
 all that is good in private thought and 
 conduct, or in public action and statesman- 
 ship, consists, he maintained, in accurate 
 perception of God's will as revealed in the 
 fact of things, and in zealous co-operation 
 therewith and with nothing else. The im- 
 assioned going out of the divine within 
 man to grasp and clasp the divine in the 
 world of phenomena around him, the im- 
 passioned consent of the human spirit to 
 J subserve the ascertained workings of God, 
 — that, according to Carlyle, was true re- 
 ligion, a sufficient religion, and the only 
 religion a man could have. Here was 
 certain knowledge, and to this extent there 
 was a remove for us out of any torpid 
 inane of so-called Agnosticism. 
 
 In secondary points, however, Carlyle 
 did not refuse the name of an agnostic, 
 but maintained that, by necessity, all men 
 are and must ever remain agnostics. 
 " We know nothing and can know nothing 
 about ^/m^ ; it is for ever and by necessity 
 beyond our ken " : so he would say again 
 
 I 
 
92 CARLYLE S CREED. [lect. 
 
 v; 
 
 and again respecting this or that meta- 
 physical question propounded to him. He 
 retained a regard for Prayer, provided it 
 nvere not formal, but only secret and ir- 
 ' repressible ejaculation and sighing to the 
 Supreme. He had a lurking fondness 
 % for the notion of Particular Providence, 
 though confessing to it only as a super- 
 stition which could not stand in logic. 
 That in his original and inherited creed 
 which he was slowest to part with was 
 \ the doctrine of the immortality of the 
 individual, of a life beyond the graiLe. 
 This also, however, survived in him at 
 last only as an occasional flicker, a great 
 perhaps. Here is what he wrote in his 
 journal on the 14th of October 1869, when 
 he was close on seventy -four years of- 
 age:— 
 
 " Three nights ago, stepping out after midnight, with 
 my final pipe, and looking up into the stars, which were 
 clear and numerous, it struck me with a strange new kind 
 of feeling, — ' Hah ! in a little while I shall have seen yoii 
 also for the last time. God Almighty's own Theatre of 
 Immensity, the Infinite made palpable and visible to me, 
 that also will be closed, flung in my face; and I shall 
 
11.] CARLYLE S CREED. 93 
 
 never behold that either any more!' And I knew so 
 little of it, real as was my effort and desire to know. 
 The thought of this eternal deprivation, — even of this, 
 though this is such a nothing in comparison [with the loss 
 of his wife, which had been the subject first in his mind], 
 — was sad and painful to me. And then a second feeling 
 rose in me, ' What if Omnipotence, which has developed 
 
 V in me these pieties, these reverences and infinite affections, 
 A should actually have said ' Yes, poor mortals I Such of 
 
 J you~as4iaj^e_gone so far shall be permitted to go farther. 
 
 Y Hope ! despair not.' I have not had such a feeling for 
 Vmany years back as at that moment." 
 
 All in all, when one examines Carlyle's 
 religion, one does not find that it differs 
 very much from that Hebraic or Semitic 
 Theism on which he commented some- 
 times so contemptuously, and to which he 
 thought he had bidden farewell. Mimis 
 the ceremonialism and the miraculous 
 particulars, it is the religion of the Old 
 Testament, the religion of Job, Isaiah, and 
 Ezekiel. If Carlyle individually had made 
 the exodus he wanted to see general, what 
 he had packed up and brought with him as 
 his own out of the deserted land and its 
 detested comradeship had a very consider- 
 able resemblance to the peculiar growths 
 generally supposed to be there native. 
 
94 CARLYLE S CREED. [lect. 
 
 Herein he was not so very different from 
 many of his fellow-countrymen who are 
 credited with having made the same ex- 
 odus, though in a different and more 
 \ orthodox direction, — to wit from Judaism 
 to Christianity. In English and Scottish 
 Puritanism to this day the influence from 
 \|^ the Old Testament prevails visibly, almost 
 overwhelmingly, over the ingredient from 
 the New. True, Carlyle's curious anti- 
 pathy to the Jewish race led him to an 
 avowed preference for the old Teutonic 
 or Norse mythology over the Hebrew 
 religion, and even to the wildly exag- 
 gerated assertion that everything best 
 and highest in the modern world is of 
 Teutonic or Norse origin ; but his own soul 
 was more Hebraic essentially than it was 
 Norse. The intensity of his theism was 
 Hebraic ; and one is not sure of anything 
 more specially Norse in him than the broad 
 general strength of manhood which he 
 united with his earnestness, and the riotous 
 humour which flooded that strencjth and 
 mitigated its fierceness. 
 
n.] CARLVLE's creed. 95 
 
 It would not be difficult to show that 
 Carlyle's main doctrines in social and 
 political matters, his well-known moral and 
 historical Carlylisms, were all deductions, 
 in one way or another, from his theory of 
 religion. 
 
 While God is always working, while 
 the quantity of the divine flowing on in 
 the external fact of things is perhaps always 
 constant, may not that counterpart element 
 of the divine which consists in a parallel 
 flow of the noblest constitutional faiths of 
 the human spirit be of varying strength in 
 different ages, lands, and peoples ? To 
 this question Carlyle answered emphatically 
 " Yes," with an evident preference on his 
 own part for the past generally over the 
 present, a special sympathy with certain 
 portions and populations of the Oriental 
 and Mediterranean past, and above all, as 
 we have just hinted, an admiration of the 
 Teutonic race and its function in the 
 mediaeval and more modern world. 
 
 Then what of the famous Carlyle 
 doctrine of '* Hero-worship," — a word, by 
 
 y 
 
96 CARLVLe's creed. [lect. 
 
 the bye, which was not of Carlyle's own 
 . invention, but which he found in Davdd 
 /^^^....--'''T^ Essays, and probably borrowed 
 
 ""thence ? Every one can see how radically 
 different was this Carlyle doctrine of Hero- 
 worship from Comte's wretched Culte 
 systdmatique de P Humanitd. In Comte's 
 scheme of a theatrical substitute for 
 religion you are called upon to worship, 
 — what the soul of no man can worship, 
 I — humanity itself, as represented in so 
 many images of deceased specimens of 
 it, expressly on the ground that the 
 universe is vacant of anything greater or 
 higher, that it is "an empty, black, im- 
 measurable eye-socket," with beings like 
 yourself somehow living and dying on an 
 earthy orb in the middle of it, but tenant- 
 less throughout all its ranges of any thing 
 or power nameable as God. In the 
 Carlyle hero-worship, so far as you may 
 care to adopt it, your reverence for those 
 of your fellow-creatures that seem worthi- 
 est of reverence is invoked expressly on 
 the principle that they were servants of 
 
t II.] CARLYLES CREED. 97 
 
 iGodjand may be regarded as manifesta-u-^ 
 Ntions of God. The real God who made 
 them, and who made you, still fills the 
 universe ; and it is He that is walking on 
 the wings of the wind. Though, if you 
 adopt the Carlyle hero-worship on these 
 terms, you may save your theism, there is 
 the further difficulty,. however, of his own 
 particular choice of heroes for you. His 
 supreme heroes in the world's history, 
 those for whom his own admiration, so far 
 as I could ever make out from his pri- 
 vate talk, approached the boundless, and 
 would admit of no carping or fault- 
 finding even from himself, were Dante, 
 Luther, John Knox, Shakespeare, Crom- 
 well, and Goethe ; and, as respects these 
 six, or several of them, the objection 
 to go along with him need not, in our 
 quarter of the world at least, be very 
 general. But among his minor heroes 
 some have been voted more questionable, 
 especially those in whom, despite his re- 
 commendations of them, the ordinary mind 
 could see nothing but a representation of 
 
 H 
 
98 CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 J( energy, and even of brutal energy. One 
 of the complaints against him, as you all 
 know, has been on the ground of the fre- 
 y quency in his books of this deification of 
 ^imere force, and the incessant propagation 
 / there of the paradox that might is right. 
 He took the trouble at last to explain that 
 he had been misunderstood in this matter, 
 and that, if his teachings on the subject 
 were properly investigated, it would be 
 found perhaps that the maxim as it lay in 
 J his own heart was the reverse, — to wit 
 'Cthat right in the long run is always might. 
 But, without this transposition of the terms 
 of the maxim, one can see how he could 
 have defended its consistency with his 
 central theory of things, and so his ad- 
 miration for a great many historical per- 
 sons whom others did not find at all 
 admirable. Was not large quajitity of 
 existence or vitality in any individual a 
 sufficient certificate, according to Carlyle's 
 central theory of things, of the presence 
 also in that individual of a corresponding 
 amount of the excellent in quality, — i.e. of 
 
II.] CARLYLES CREED. 99 
 
 genuine insight into the real " fact of 
 things " at that time, adaptation to the 
 divine in their tendency, and power of exact 
 co-operation therewith ? Must not the 
 inner deep always answer to the outer 
 deep; and in the real "fact of things" at any 
 moment is there not always a great deal 
 that cannot be interpreted or managed by 
 sentimentalism, however beautiful, but only 
 by force and sternness ? In some such 
 explanation, though it may not seem of 
 much worth, Carlyle did take refuge in 
 some of his estimates of men. 
 
 Very notable in the same connection, 
 and explicable in the same manner, was his 
 charity or indifference to the indubitable 
 'moral delinquencies and weaknesses in the 
 lives of some of his heroes. For a man of 
 such irreproachable honour and rectitude in 
 his own conduct, so strong in every form of 
 self-command save that of temper, his toler- 
 ance of aberrations from the standard of strict 
 respectability in the lives of persons of the 
 past he found reason to admire otherwise, 
 — hardly, however, in those of contempor- 
 
lOO CARLYLE S CREED. [lect. 
 
 aries living round about him, — was really 
 extraordinary. He construed the part by 
 the whole in such cases, counted the frail- 
 ties and sins of passion in such lives but as 
 deflections in a great orbit, could condone 
 on such a reckoning even the "blackguard- 
 ism of a Mirabeau, and would have torn 
 to pieces any resurrectionary wretch that 
 should have dared to snivel too sancti- 
 moniously in his presence about the im- 
 moralities of Robert Burns. 
 
 One might pursue further the ramifica- 
 tions of Carlyle's root-theory into its par- 
 ticular social applications. Enough just to 
 note his vehement oppugnance throughout 
 his whiile life, and especially in his later 
 ^life, to the modern faith in Democracy, 
 the equality of all men in respect of 
 natural and political rights, and govern- 
 ment by suffrage and the representation 
 of majorities. In this also we see his 
 fidelity to his root-theory. There always 
 had been, and always would be, he thought, 
 a radical inequality, amounting even to 
 ncommensurability, among human beings 
 
 'A 
 
 --\r^- 
 
r 
 
 n.] CARLYLES CREED. lOI 
 
 ' In respect of the amount of wisdom and 
 \goodness possessed by them individually, 
 — i.e. in respect of that amount of the 
 divine in themselves by which they are 
 fitted to apprehend the external fact of 
 things and promote God's purposes there- 
 in. Hence it had been eternally pre -ap- 
 pointed that the wiser everywhere should 
 rule over the less wise, by guidance when 
 possible, by compulsion when necessary ; 
 and that system of social conditions and 
 arrangements was the best everywhere for 
 any community which gave the greatest 
 chance that the ablest and wisest persons 
 in that community should be found in the 
 governing places. 
 
 In any criticism of Carlyle in his char- 
 acter of a moral force working in and 
 through literature, the most obvious con- 
 sideration is that he had constituted him- 
 self from the first, and remained to the 
 last, a preacher of just such structural 
 faiths of the human spirit, as he conceived 
 them to be, and just such immediate deri- 
 
I02 CARLYLE S CREED. [lect. 
 
 vatives from these, as we have been describ- 
 ing. In other words, he kept chiefly in 
 1 his teachings to what he himself called the 
 \dynamics of human nature, — " the primary, 
 unmodified forces and energies of man, the 
 mysterious springs of love and fear and 
 I wonder, of enthusiasm, poetry, religion, all 
 ^ which have a truly vital and infinite char- 
 acter," — and did not concern himself so 
 much with the vtechaiiics of human nature, 
 or that complexity of practical details and 
 processes which one meets with in daily 
 life and in the actual society of every body- 
 politic. In still other words, perhaps 
 more acceptable to some, it may be said 
 that he drove through the world on the 
 wheels of certain cardinal asseverations of 
 y his own constitution, which he took to be 
 ;\ cardinal asseverations also of the human 
 \ constitution in general, and therefore to be 
 of universal, eternal, and <a;/;'z^r/ validity. 
 No reason on that account to challenge his 
 title to the distinction of even extraordin- 
 ary greatness among his contemporaries. 
 More than is imagined, the world is gov- 
 
11.] CARLYLES CREED. IO3 
 
 erned and always has been governed by 
 asseverations ; and by what asseverations 
 can it be better governed than by those 
 put forth by its most gifted and noblest 
 minds as expressing their own constitu- 
 tional beliefs, their own deepest and most 
 structural forms of faith ? The region of 
 the dynamics In human affairs, though It 
 may be vaguer In the sense of containing 
 fewer objects and origins of power, is 
 higher than the region of the mechanics, 
 filled though that may be with a vaster 
 multiplicity of more tangible Interests. 
 There is an elemental In the moral world 
 as well as in the physical ; and, just as 
 man's soul is moved most by contempla- 
 tion of the great elemental objects and 
 forces of the physical world, so those that 
 can and will bring before their fellows im- 
 pressively again and again the objects and 
 forces of the morally elemental, less visible 
 by kind, and apt to fade out of thought In 
 the toil and bustle of life, are benefactors 
 to their race and servants of the really 
 highest. The simple generalities that 
 
I04 CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 clothe themselves in such phrases as God, 
 Truth, Justice, Right and Wrong, are per- 
 \ petually in need of being refreshed among 
 us ; and it is but a poor criticism that 
 would object to those who minister in this 
 function that they teach nothing new and 
 'y give no precise instructions for ordinary 
 human conduct. Such men affect the very 
 roots and foundations of our being, rein- 
 vigorate the total frame ; and that is surely 
 higher work than giving practical instruc- 
 tions in detail. To feel afresh in one's 
 own soul, and to be able to reimpress 
 upon others, the great moral and intel- 
 lectual generalities of the universe, which 
 are older than all the hills, is as essentially 
 greatness, and of as high a kind, as the 
 power to feel afresh and to reissue poeti- 
 cally the impressions of nature's largest 
 physical appearances, — the sun, the starry 
 heavens, the gloom and stillness of prime- 
 val forests, the roaring thunder, or the 
 rolling sea. To this high and rare order 
 of functionaries, regarded in all ages as 
 moralists and spiritual teachers of the 
 
11.] CARLYLES CREED. IO5 
 
 supreme type, Carlyle, whatever else we 
 may find in him, most certainly did belong. 
 That there was a certain vagueness in his 
 teaching in comparison with that of the 
 only other men of his generation whom we 
 can recognise as having been of any note 
 as contemporary functionaries of the same 
 order, — I mean the chiefs of the Christian 
 clergy, — arose from the fact that his creed 
 consisted only of a fervid natural theism 
 with its immediate moral derivatives, while 
 \theirs included all the more definite articles 
 of the Christian Theology or miraculous 
 Biblical Metaphysic. On the other hand, 
 , did he not excel them all, or almost them 
 I all, in the intensity and tremendousness 
 s; with which he inculcated and disseminated 
 his creed, such as it was ? Did he not 
 stand out for fifty years as, in this respect, 
 a living rebuke to' the lukewarmness and 
 lassitude of many of those whose express 
 profession was that his creed was but 
 naught at its best, and that they them- 
 selves were the accredited messengers of 
 one so much richer and fuller ? In com- 
 
I06 CARLYLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 parison with him how many thousands of 
 his contemporaries were hable to the charge 
 of being dreadfully at ease in what they 
 maintained to be their own better Zion ! 
 From what British pulpit, from what 
 thousand British pulpits, has there been 
 poured into the veins of the British com- 
 munity and of kindred peoples, within 
 existing memory, a tide of more stimu- 
 lating and rousing influence than that 
 which came from the humble house of 
 Carlyle at Chelsea ? 
 
 What faults are to be set against these 
 merits ? Still attending to Carlyle's moral 
 and spiritual teachings as they are to be 
 found in his books, and leaving aside such 
 questions as to his own behaviour and 
 demeanour as have been started by Mr. 
 Froude's revelations, I would point out as 
 among Carlyle's greatest faults one into 
 which he was carried, especially in later 
 life, precisely by his acquired habit of 
 , making asseverations so vehemently and 
 instantaneously out of his own constitution. 
 He mixed up with those constitutional 
 
II.] carlyle's creed. 107 
 
 asseverations which he could feel to be 
 necessary and structural faiths of the 
 human spirit, and which might pass for 
 such, a great deal of asseveration, about 
 various and sundry important things, that 
 could not be so vindicated. A good many 
 of his asseverations had no character of 
 necessary or structural faiths of the human 
 spirit at all, but were mere expressions of 
 his own inherited prejudices, his casual 
 likings and dislikings, his momentary 
 tempers and irritations, his pugnacity and 
 love of contradiction, the limitations of his 
 private tastes, or even perhaps his revenge- 
 ful recollection of slights and offences done 
 to himself or to those in whom he felt an 
 interest. With all his wonderful physio- 
 gnomic insight and eye for character, there 
 are certain gross misjudgments of his as to 
 persons of eminence in his own time, some 
 in literature and others in public life, not to 
 be accounted for otherwise. 
 
 Further, though constitutional assevera- 
 tion, when it is pure, may justly go very 
 far, yet, even when it is purest, even when 
 
I08 CARLVLE's creed. [lect. 
 
 the asseverations are the nearest possible 
 to what will be admitted to be structural 
 , faiths of the human spirit, they do not 
 \always go the necessary length for human 
 needs and uses. They do not serve for 
 everything. Though the dynamical may 
 be all -important, the mechanical has to 
 follow. There is no structural faith of the 
 human spirit, no constitutional assevera- 
 tion, for example, that provides complete 
 instruction as to the best method of shoeing 
 a horse. That it ought to be done honestly, 
 carefully, and according to the best method 
 of horse-shoeing that may have been ascer- 
 \ tained by experience, — constitutional assev- 
 eration may go as far as this, and it is most 
 valuable a priori direction ; but the best 
 actual method of shoeing is still in doubt, 
 except in the mind of the required artist, 
 and meanwhile the horse is waiting to be 
 shod. So in higher matters. Once a 
 celebrated lawyer and judge, chancing to 
 be in a company where Carlyle was 
 descanting in his usual style on eternal 
 justice and the horrible forgetfulness of 
 
\ 
 
 II.] CARLYLE S CREED. IO9 
 
 the laws of eternal justice in modern 
 society, tried to bring him to a stand-still 
 , by this very suggestion. " Pray, Mr. Car- 
 lyle," he said, "will you be so good as to 
 define justice ? " Carlyle, as you know, 
 was never brought to a stand-still by any 
 thing or any mortal. " I do not know, 
 sir," he replied, " that I am provided off- 
 hand with any definition of justice ; that 
 belongs rather to you and the other gentle- 
 men of the robe here ; all that I know is 
 that there is such a thing, and that your 
 ancestors and mine knew it too, and 
 believed that, if they did not do it, they 
 would be roasted for ever in sulphur." This 
 was very well by way of colloquial retort ; 
 and indeed there was much more in it than 
 mere dexterity in colloquial retort ; but the 
 lawyer's query did point to one of Carlyle's 
 weaknesses. 
 
 Prevailingly dynamical though Carlyle's 
 teachings were, he was by no means desti- 
 tute of the mechanical talent in matters to 
 which he chose to set his mind or hand. 
 He was, if I may mention such a small 
 
no CARLYLE S CREED. [lect. 
 
 particular in such a context, one of the 
 neatest-handed men I ever knew in tying 
 up a parcel, — say a book-parcel, to go by 
 post, — always doing it with the utmost 
 economy of paper and string, the utmost 
 security of knot, and yet the finest elegance 
 of shape and general effect. A good deal 
 of this deftness ran through his daily life. 
 His love of order and accuracy was con- 
 spicuous even in trifles ; he was eminently 
 shrewd, prudential, and clear-headed, and 
 'could be very resolute, in his own eco- 
 nomics and business transactions ; and, in 
 any case of practical difficulty that might 
 be submitted to him by others, his advice 
 never failed to be sound, deliberate, exact, 
 and sagacious. Of that higher sagacity 
 which depended on the acuteness of his 
 dynamical perceptions, and the strength of 
 his faith in the constant operation of the 
 great dynamical laws in human society, 
 there were some striking examples in 
 political predictions of his, so verified 
 beyond ordinary anticipation that people 
 had to exclaim simultaneously "After all. 
 
II.] CARLYLE S CREED. I I I 
 
 Carlyle has turned out right." Nor must 
 we forget that in his purely Hterary char- 
 acter, his character of historical writer 
 above all, he was so far from avoiding 
 details that he actually revelled in them, 
 employing his unmatched powers of word- 
 painting on the minute and particular in 
 every form as well as on the massive and 
 spacious, with the result that his books are 
 now storehouses of research available for 
 those very purposes of practical cunning 
 and Machiavellian statecraft for which he 
 did not seem himself to care. 
 
 All this remembered, one cannot but 
 remark as a defect in Carlyle's own direct 
 moral and social teachings, and sometimes 
 as a provoking defect, his contentedness to 
 remain always within the region of the dy- 
 namical generalities, and refusal to concern 
 [himself with the specific practical problems 
 of the when, the where, and the how. For 
 example, incessantly though he preached 
 his great general doctrine that the only 
 heaven-appointed principle of government 
 is that the ablest and best men in a state 
 
112 CARLYLE S CREED. [lect. 
 
 ought to possess the governing power and 
 to keep it, guiding the rest, and if necessary 
 compelHng them to obey, I remember but 
 one place in his writings where, — in the 
 shape of a suggestion that there might be 
 a staff of so many permanent or ministerial 
 members or assessors in the House of 
 Commons, not elected by suffrage and 
 irresponsible to any constituency, — he ever 
 addressed himself to the practical question 
 of how ^ur modern British society could 
 possibly be so manipulated, or possibly 
 so jumbled, as to bring to the top, and 
 keep there, the true and heaven -qualified 
 governing atoms, or any proportion . of 
 such. Hence, even those who would go 
 with him heartily in his main principle, 
 and can find real and useful direction so 
 far in remembering that principle and 
 constantly repeating it to themselves, are 
 stopped by the block of things about them, 
 and can only stare at each other. 
 
 What was even worse, Carlyle not only 
 refused the trouble of considerations of the 
 merely mechanical kind himself, but re- 
 
II.] CARLYLE S CREED. II3 
 
 garded too generally with contempt the 
 labours and speculations of others in 
 that region. His impatience of reasoned 
 political science in any form, and especially 
 in the form of that modern Political 
 *^ Economy which he derided as " the dismal 
 ^science," really shut him out, more than he 
 was himself aware, from that intimacy with^^ 
 the "fact of things" which he defined so 
 energetically as the all -essential necessity 
 for men of all sorts and the sole attainable 
 wisdom. It is by science only, by reasoned 
 investigation only, that we can know, in 
 .any department, what is the real " fact of 
 things" ; and till we know, from the teach- 
 ings of strict political science, whether in 
 its present form of so-called Political 
 Economy or in some larger and better 
 form, all that we can know of the real 
 "fact of things" in that department, our 
 practical efforts in politics and philanthropy 
 will continue to be, as they have too much 
 been heretofore, mere knocking of our 
 heads against stone walls, mere pourings 
 of water into sieves. Not less in all 
 
114 CARLYLES CREED. [lect. 
 
 matters and contemplations physical and 
 cosmological must we receive our instruc- 
 tions as to the real "fact of things" from 
 the sciences thereto appertaining. If 
 science tells us surely and conclusively 
 that such and such was and has been the 
 course of actual physical nature, then we 
 are bound, whether we like it or not, to 
 imagine the past physical course of things 
 precisely in that manner; and, if we persist 
 in imagining it one whit otherwise, we 
 incur the guilt of opposing the light and 
 are untrue to the " fact of things." Carlyle, 
 as we have seen, acknowledged this ; but 
 it was but a passing acknowledgment. He 
 was too old, his inveteracy in the consti- 
 tutional faiths of his own spirit was too 
 confirmed, to permit him to adjust these 
 faiths to the new cosmological conceptions 
 which science was making imperative in 
 his later days, or even to perceive that it 
 was of any great consequence that this 
 should be done. 
 
 On this ground, as well as on the others 
 that have been stated, may we not expect 
 
II.] carlyle's creed. 115 
 
 that, when Nature shall see fit to produce 
 another British man of letters with any- 
 thing like coequality of general faculty 
 with Carlyle, anything like coequality 
 with him in strength in the great struc- 
 tural faiths, the new product will, by 
 Nature's rule of never repeating herself 
 in her highest specimens, be a man of 
 very different type from Carlyle, — of more 
 Goethe-like composure, more cheerfulness, 
 wider sympathies with forms of Art other 
 than his own, and more patient openness 
 tp abstract reasonings and to all that 
 the sciences can teach ? Let such a 
 man come, and welcome ; but it will be 
 many and many a day before those who in 
 the future shall speak the English tongue, 
 in our British Islands or elsewhere, will 
 cease, when they look back on the his- 
 tory of these Islands from 1795 to 1881, 
 to think with veneration of the noble 
 labours and great personality of Thomas 
 Carlyle, 
 
 Will it be a weakness if, while remind- 
 
Il6 A REMINISCENCE. [lect. 
 
 ing you that this man was born in our 
 Httle Scotland and went through the world 
 with an unmistakeably Scottish accent, I 
 readvert for a moment to his special 
 connections with Edinburgh ? Of the 
 few public honours he accepted in his life 
 two were from this city. One was the 
 Lord- Rectorship of the University of 
 Edinburgh, which he held from 1865 to 
 1868. The other was the Presidency of 
 this Philosophical Institution, held by him 
 from July 1868 to the day of his death. 
 Though he held this honorary office for 
 nearly thirteen years, only once, so far as I 
 know, was he within your walls. Itwas 
 early in September 1870. He was then 
 passing through Edinburgh from Dumfries- 
 '\ shire on one of his periodical visits to his 
 wife's grave at Haddington ; and through 
 the three or four days of his stay, — which 
 he wanted to be as private as possible, — 
 he was my guest in Regent Terrace, where 
 my house then was. One of the mornings 
 of his stay with us the news arrived of the 
 collapse of the French Empire of Louis- 
 
ir.] A REMINISCENCE. I17 
 
 Napoleon by the surrender of the Emperor 
 after the Battle of Sedan ; and you may 
 imagine with what interest he heard and 
 read this news at the breakfast-table, and 
 welcomed the assured transference of the 
 \Dolitical leadership in Continental Europe 
 to his favourite Germans. It may have 
 been on the evening of the same day, — it 
 was certainly on an evening about that 
 date, — that we went out together, rather 
 late, for a stroll through the streets. At 
 the latish hour, in that season of the year, 
 few persons were about ; and I do not 
 think that any one we met recognised 
 Carlyle, though his venerable and feebly 
 stooping figure, in his usual brownish 
 dress, with his broad felt hat, and a pair of 
 easy shoes of a somewhat glaring buff 
 colour which he had put on for the occa- 
 sion, was sufficiently remarkable, and did 
 attract some attention. By some chance, 
 we took our way at last along Queen 
 Street. As we were passing No. 4, it 
 occurred to me to ask him whether he 
 would not step in, and see at least the 
 
Il8 A REMINISCENCE. [lect. 
 
 shell of the Institution of which he was 
 President. He consented, and we went 
 in. I led him first to your news-room, into 
 which he only glanced, hardly advancing 
 beyond the door. Then I took him to the 
 reading-room of the library. We went 
 completely round that ; and, besides glanc- 
 ing generally at the surrounding shelves of 
 books, he noted in passing the several 
 busts in the room, his own included. The 
 only bust he seemed to look at with any 
 special curiosity was that of Adam Black. 
 Opposite this he did linger for a moment 
 ', or two, as if, though the man was known 
 \ and interesting to him from reputation, the 
 face was new. We were not more than 
 three or four minutes in the room alto- 
 gether ; there were very few readers at 
 the tables ; and we came away without any 
 sign that he had been recognised here 
 either. This was, I believe, his one and 
 only visit to your Institution ; and I have 
 thought it but natural, in our present 
 circumstances, to bring it to your recollec- 
 tion. It is but one of hundreds of little 
 
11.] A REMINISCENCE. II 9 
 
 incidents now very dear to myself in my 
 retrospect of the seven -and -thirty years 
 through which I knew Carlyle. " For I 
 loved the man, and do honour his memory, 
 on this side idolatry, as much as any." 
 
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