Book 3^ Copyright N° COPYRIGHT DEPOSn^ THOMAS CARLYLE AS A CRITIC OF LITERATURE THOMAS CARLYLE AS A CRITIC OF LITERATURE BY FREDERICK WILLIAM ROE, Ph.D. ftfo fork THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1910 All rights reserved Copyright, 1910 By The Columbia University Press Printed from type January, 1910 Press of The New era printing Company Lancaster, Pa. 'n!.A256925 This Monograph has been approved by the Department of Eng- lish in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication. A. H. THORNDIKE, Secretary. It is a strange work with me, studying these Essays over again : ten years of my life lie strangely written there ; it is I, and it is not I, that wrote all that I They are as I could make them — among the peat-bogs and other confusions. It rather seems the people like them in spite of all their crabbedness. Carlyle to his Mother, 1839 (Ne7V Letters, I, 178). PREFACE The present study was begun some four years ago at the suggestion of Professor W. P. Trent and of the late Pro- fessor George R. Carpenter. It was thought that an account of Carlyle as a critic of literature would be of value, not only as an appreciation of a great personality on a different side from that usually considered, but also as a contribution to the history of literary criticism in England. In this belief, and with these ends in view, the following chapters have been written. The new interpretation in the first chapter of Car- lyle's so-called conversion has not been made without a search- ing examination of the published biographical material, and with the sole purpose of setting the facts in their right rela- tions. To the English department of Columbia University under whose direction I have worked my obligations are many. It is a pleasure to record my gratefulness to Professor Trent, whose criticism and encouragement have been constant and helpful. My thanks are also due to Professor Brander Matthews and to Professor W. A. Neilson, formerly of Columbia, now of Harvard University, for stimulating suggestions. To Pro- fessor A. H. Thorndike, who went over the entire work in manuscript with me, I am especially indebted for much valu- able criticism. I am grateful also to Professor J. W. Cunlift'e, and to Asso- ciate Professor H. B. Lathrop, of the English department of the University of Wisconsin, for kindly interest and counsel. In the preparation of this essay I have used the following books, besides others to which reference is made in the foot- notes: Carlyle's Works (especially the Critical and Miscellan- eous Essays in seven volumes, copyright edition, Chapman and Hall, London) ; Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle (2 vols., ed. Norton, New York, 1887) ; Early Letters (ed. Norton, New York, 1886) ; Letters, 1826-1836 (ed. Norton, New York, 1889) ; Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle (ed. Nor- ton, New York, 1887) ; Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (2 vols., rev. ed., Boston, 1886) ; New Letters of Thomas Carlyle (2 vols., New York, 1904) ; Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (ed. Froude, 2 vols., New York, 1883) ; New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (2 vols., New York, 1903) ; Collectanea, Thomas Car- lyle (ed. S. A. Jones, Canton, Pa., 1903) ; Lectures on the History of Literature (London, 1892) ; Two Note-Books of Thomas Carlyle (ed. Norton, New York, The Grolier Club, 1898) ; Last Words of Thomas Carlyle (New York, 1892) ; Thomas Carlyle (life by Froude, 4 vols., New York, 1882 and 1884) ; Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Carlyle (by Shepherd and Williamson, 2 vols., London, 1881) ; Edinburgh Sketches and Memories (by Masson, London, 1892) ; Bielschowsky's Life of Goethe (3 vols., by Cooper, New York, 1907-8). Madison, Wisconsin. CONTENTS Chapter I. The Foundation of a Literary Life i Chapter IL Carlyle's Ideals of Literature 26 Chapter IIL Carlyle's Ideals of Criticism 46 Chapter IV. Carlyle's Relation to the Literature of Romanticism. 72 Chapter V. Carlyle's Place in the Introduction of German Lit- erature into England 90 Chapter VI. The Essays on Goethe 99 Chapter VII. Carlyle and Voltaire 104 Chapter VIII. The English Essays 114 Chapter IX. From Criticism to Prophecy 139 Chapter X. Carlyle's Criticism 144 \ XI CHAPTER I The Foundation of a Literary Life It was an integral part of the faith of Thomas Carlyle that circumstances do not wholly determine human destiny. Like the belief of so many great men this of Carlyle's was rooted in personal experience. The struggles of his early life, prolonged and intensified' in exceptional measure, proclaim the power of the human will. Yet it is scarcely a paradox to affirm that upon Carlyle, perhaps the most conspicuous example of indi- vidualism in the nineteenth century, the influence of environ- ment was both powerful and permanent. " He knew the world profoundly," says Mr. Brownell, " but he viewed it from Eccle- fechan."^ His birth in this village of southern Scotland; his descent from Covenanter stock ; his boyhood among a sternly moral but narrow-minded peasantry, in the midst of a rigid, if not a harsh, domestic economy, all had their part in fashioning a character fairly steeped in racial and religious prejudice. These early surroundings left upon him an impress that edu- cation and contact with the world never effaced. Into all his writings, from essay to history, there went something of the narrowness and austerity, together with something of the harshness, of the Scottish peasant. Though his life at Ecclefechan was anything but joyful, Carlyle gratefully recognized its worth.- "I too," says Teufels- drockh, " acknowledge the ail-but omnipotence of early culture and nurture." James Carlyle, the father, was what the son might have become had he never left his native village. In intellectual, moral and religious temper there was a remarkable similarity between the elder and the younger Carlyle. Like his son, the stone-mason possessed a native strength of mind, a rough controlling force of will, a stubborn integrity in all his work and dealing, together with a frank contempt for life on ^Victorian Prose Masters, 94. ^ Rem., I, 44 (Norton's edition). its lighter sides. Though deeply religious, he was " irascible " and " choleric," and his grim taciturnity made his heart seem " as if walled in."^ He distrusted poetry and fiction as min- istering to worldly pleasures. " He never, I believe," says his son, " read three pages of Burns's Poems ; poetry, fiction in general, he had universally seen treated as not only idle, but false and criminal."* The speech of James Carlyle was bold, metaphorical, and humorously exaggerated — " he said a thing and it ran through the country."^ Mental characteristics prominent in the elder Carlyle reappeared almost without ex- ception in the son, though they were somewhat softened by the mild afifectionate nature of the mother. There was little enough of love in Thomas Carlyle, little enough of the gentle- ness that sometimes tempers great natures ; but there was very considerably more afifection in him than in his father. " The strongest personal passion which he experienced through all his life," says Froude, " was his affection for his mother."* The relations between Margaret Carlyle and her gifted son, as revealed in numerous letters, were touchingly sympathetic, and they go far to explain the depth and warmth of human feel- ing in the essay on Burns and in the Life of John Sterling. The boy's education began at home mainly under the direc- tion of his father.^ " He had ' educated ' me," says Carlyle, "against much advice, I believe, and chiefly, if not solely, from his own noble faith; James Bell (one of our wise men) had told him : ' Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents.' My father once told me this; and added: ' Thou has not done so, God be thanked for it !' "^ At about seven the lad was put into the village school, where he began Latin and where he was reported " complete in English."* " Swamped " here in the Latin, he was " pulled afloat " by the minister's son, when he made " rapid and sure " way. At ten ^Ibid., I, IS. * Ibid., I, 12, 14; cf. Conway, Thomas Carlyle, 32. "Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 281. 'Life, I, 188; cf. Rem., I, 16. ^ " Of my letters taught me by my mother, I have no recollection what- ever; of reading scarcely any" (Rem., I, 45). 'Ibid., I, 18. » Froude, Life, I, 13. he was taken by his father to Annan Academy. School hfe at this place " among those coarse tyrannous cubs " (the boys who tormented young Carlyle so long as he obeyed his mother's command not to fight) left embittered memories ; but there was real intellectual progress. " Latin and French I did get to read with fluency. Latin quantity was a frightful chaos, and I had to learn it afterwards ; some geometry. Algebra, arithmetic, tolerably well. Vague outlines of geography I learnt ; all the books I could get were also devoured. Greek consisted of the alphabet merely."^** The four years at Annan were followed by the university course at Edinburgh, where Carlyle satisfied his passion for knowledge in the midst of most discouraging conditions. Pro- fessor Masson's gleanings from old university records yield some definite information as to the studies which were there pursued. For the first session Carlyle was registered in a hu- manity class (which meant Latin) and a first Greek class; for the second, he took up mathematics and logic, since there was no second course in Latin. Greek and mathematics were con- tinued the third year, and moral philosophy was begun. The classics and philosophy were dropped in the fourth year, while mathematics was kept up, along with natural philosophy." Carlyle's class-work at the university ended in the summer of 1813, in his eighteenth year, when he was qualified for the M.A. degree. This he did not take ; " but in that," says Pro- fessor Masson, "he was not in the least singular."^^ If Car- lyle's fellow-students predicted his future on the showing he made in the class room, they must have reserved him for dis- tinction in mathematics ; for in this branch alone did he display enthusiasm and talent, chiefly because of the superior teaching of Professor Leslie. " For several years," he says, " geometry shone before me as the noblest of all sciences, and I prosecuted it in all my best hours and moods."^^ "/feid, "Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 230-236. "Ibid., 239. ^'Froude, Life, I, 21. Froude says that Carlyle carried off no prizes (I, 21) ; Masson (Edinburgh Sketches, 234) refers to a tradition that he took first prize in the second mathematical class. There is abundant proof, The account of his studies in Latin and Greek offers a sug- gestive contrast : *' In the classical field," he records, " I am truly as nothing. Homer I learnt to read in the original with difficulty, after Wolf's broad flash of light thrown into it; ^schylus and Sophocles mainly in translations. Tacitus and Virgil became really interesting to me ; Homer and ^schylus above all; Horace, egotistical, leichtfcrtig, in sad fact I never cared for; Cicero, after long and various trials, always proved a windy person and a wearisome to me, extinguished altogether by Middleton's excellent though misjudging life of him."^* Crippled in Greek in the preparatory stage, Carlyle did not much increase his knowledge of it at the university. He never made up this deficiency, and the little Greek he knew " must have faded from disuse," according to the opinion of Professor Masson.^^ Precisely how much his work in criticism suffered from this limited acquaintance with the language and literature of Greece it is of course not possible to say. No study could have removed the native bias of his mind, for Carlyle was born a romanticist. Still it is hard not to believe that a sound classical training would have much increased his appreciation of essentially literary values, such as individual beauties of thought and phrase, and have given to his critical faculties a balance and restraint which they so often failed to exercise. For we should not forget that apart from the poorly taught and wholly inadequate classics, Carlyle had no university study to in any case, of his excellence in mathematics. Philosophy under " the famous Brown " fell upon Carlyle as " mere dazzle and moonshine " (ibid,, 23s). " Froude, Life, I, 20. ^^ Edinburgh Sketches, 230. Carlyle's appreciation of Greek literature as expressed in his Lectures on the history of literature seems limited, cur- sory, and not enthusiastic. His remarks on the whole indicate that he was in a field which he neither knew well nor greatly cared to know (cf. Lectures, 36). A sentence here and there in the essay, records a liking for Homer (e. g., EsA^y^, xil, 161). " Plato he does not read," said Emer- son, "and he disparaged Socrates" (Emerson, Works, V, 16; cf. Conway, Life, 91 ; New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Intro., 81 ; Correspondence, Emerson and Carlyle, H, 218). Carlyle expresses but a feeble interest in the neo-classicism of Goethe. awaken his interest and cultivate his taste in the formal ele- ments of literature. His real university was the library, where he found the materials for laying the foundation of a literary life. His pas- sion for reading has already been referred to, but the time of its appearance it is not possible to fix ; probably Carlyle himself did not remember. He may have read the Arabian Nights, for example, before he went to Annan. His reference to his father's prohibition against this book indicates that there had been a copy at home.^*^ Many of the books that were devoured at Annan were novels, some of Smollett's being among them.^'^ But after Carlyle entered Edinburgh, a greatly expanded taste in reading developed. Professor Masson found a record of the following volumes, drawn from the University library dur- ing December and January of Carlyle's first term : " Robert- sons History of Scotland, Vol. H ; Cook's Voyages; Byron's Narrative, i. e., ' the Honorable John Byron's Narrative of the Great Distresses suffered by Himself and his companions on the Coast of Patagonia, 1740-6'; the first volume of Gibbon; two volumes of Shakespeare ; a volume of the Arabian Nights, Congreve's Works; another volume of the Arabian Nights; two volumes of Hume's England; Gil Bias; a third volume of Shakespeare ; and a volume of the Spectator."^^ For a youth of fourteen with no guide but his own instincts, this is, as Professor Masson points out, a remarkable list of books, espe- cially if we consider that probably not one of them had any- thing to do with the boy's academic studies. The next year he read with equal independence in the selection of titles. Besides several volumes of travel and voyages, he took from the library Fielding, Smollett, a translation of Don Quixote, and two or three works in philosophy.^" The records for the last two years are lost, but this youthful passion for reading must have rapidly increased. To the end of his life Carlyle felt that the one service Edinburgh University rendered him was " It is interesting to know that the crabbed grandfather, Thomas Car- lyle, had a liking for Arabian Nights. Rem., I, 29. "Conway, Life, 32. ^^ Edinburgh Sketches, 231. '° E. g., Reid's Inquiry and Locke's Essay. 6 the use of its library. " From the chaos of that Library," says Teiifelsdrockh, " I succeeded in fishing-up more books perhaps than had been known to the very keepers thereof. The foun- dation of a Literary Life was hereby laid ; I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and sciences ; farther, as man is ever the prime object to man, already it was my favorite employment to read character in speculation, and from the writing to con- strue the Writer."^'' In his inaugural address before the uni- versity in 1866, there is similar testimony : " What I have found the University did for me, is. That it taught me to read."-^ Scattered accounts of Carlyle's reading from 1813 to 1819, when he began to study German, show a steady trend toward a literary life and throw much light upon his intellectual develop- ment. While at Annan (1814-16) he read '* incessantly."-- We can judge of the range of this reading from his early let- ters which begin at this period and contain numerous allusions to books. " What books have you been reading ?" he writes to his friend Mitchell, *' And how did you like Shakespeare ? Since I saw you I have toiled through many a thick octavo — many of them to little purpose. Byron's and Scott's Poems [I have read] and must admire — though you recollect, we used '^Sartor, 79. ^Essays, VII, 174. If the passage quoted above from Sartor be under- stood to refer to Carlyle's four years at the University, it is undoubtely an over-statement. " Only in Latin and French, and to some extent in Greek," says Masson, " could he have ranged beyond English in his read- ings ; nor can his readings, in whatever language, have been so vast and miscellaneous as Teufelsdrockh's " (Edinburgh Sketches, 240). 'Carlyle probably included the browsings not only of four college years, but of a much longer period, extending down to 1820 and even later; together with the continual reading done in the library of Edward Irving and elsewhere. He was in Edinburgh as a divinity student, it will be remembered, during the first year after his college course. Then came the mastership in mathematics at Annan Academy for two years, followed by the mastership of a school at Kirkaldy, set up in opposition to one conducted by Irving. This position Carlyle threw up in disgust at the end of 1818, and again went to Edinburgh with Irving, where he lived for most of the time (broken by vacations at home and journeyings with the Bullers) until his removal to Craigenputtock in 1828. ^ Froude, Life, I, 29. to give Campbell a decided preference, and I still think, with justice. Have you ever seen Iloole's Tassof I have among many others read it, Leonidas (Glover's), the Epigoniad (Wil- kie's), Obcron/^ Savage's Poems, etc. Miss Porter's Scottish Chiefs and IVaverley have been the principal of my novels. With regard to Waverley I cannot help remarking that in my opinion it is the best novel that has been published these thirty years. "^* In addition to these works, many others were read during the two years at Annan. In English he read Akenside,-° Crabbe,-*' Miss Porter's Tliaddcus of Warsaw,^'^ Scott's Guy Manncring^^ and Watcrloo,^^ Chesterfield, The Spectator ("his jaunty manner but ill accorded with my sulky humours "),^° Plume's Essays ("as a whole I am delighted with the book"),^^ Berkeley's Principles of Knozvlcdge,^- to- gether with numerous works on travel and mathematics, in- cluding Newton's Principia.^^ Among French works, he read Voltaire's La Pucelle,^* Moliere's Co medics, '-^^ and some few extracts of Fenelon's Dialogues des Morts. Carlyle's efforts with Greek continued unfruitful. He writes to Mitchell : " I am glad to hear that you are getting forward so well with Homer — I know almost nothing about him — having never read anything but Pope's translation, and not above a single book of the original, and that several years ago. Indeed I know very little of the Greek at any rate. I have several times begun to read Xenophon's Anabasis completely ; but always gave it up in favour of something else."^" At this period there were also .Cicero's De Officiis and Lucan's Pharsalia;^'^ the lat- ter no doubt in translation. His life at Kirkcaldy was brightened by the companionship of the gifted Edward Irving, who possessed a good library. ^ " Doubtless Sotheby's version of Wieland's Oberon." Norton. ^ Early Letters, 9. -" Ibid., 32. =»"I like it"; ibid., 23. ""Ibid., 34. =»/&id., 35. ^'Ibid., 21. ^^ Ibid., 16. """Ibid., 25 ^ Ibid., 20. ^^ Ibid., 35. "* " V. is the most impudent, blaspheming, libidinous blackguard that ever lived." Ibid., 17. '■"^ Early Letters, 35. '"Conway, Life, 166. ^'' Ibid., 31. 8 " Irving's library was of great use to me ; Gibbon, Hume, etc., I think I must have read it ahiiost through. "^^ " We had books from Edinburgh College-Library too."^^ Mathematics was giving way to " history and other lighter matters,"*" while the books mentioned in the early letters indicate that he read with avidity whatever he could find in English and French. Gibbon and Hume were read through, and probably Robert- son, if he had not been read earlier.*^ " The whole historical triumvirate are abundantly destitute of virtuous feeling — or indeed of any feeling at all."*- Carlyle read fiction, but with diminishing pleasure, except in the case of Scott's novels, in which his interest was still keen. " You have no doubt seen the Talcs of my Landlord," he writes. " Certainly, Wavcrlcy and Mannering and the Black Dzvarf were never written by the same person."*^ The perusal of eight volumes of Smollett " and others, was a much harder and more unprofitable task,"** than the reading of history ; and yet in spite of his developing taste for more serious books the earlier pleasure in romantic stories was not wholly dead. " The other night I sat up till four o'clock reading Matthew Lewis's Monk. It is the most stupid and villainous novel I have read for a great while. "*^ Lalla Rookh, and Childe Harold, canto fourth, were also a part of the reading of this period. In French there were Pascal's Lettres Provincial cs,^*^ Mme. de Stael's Germany,*'' La Rouche- foucault,*^ and Montaigne,*" — if we may infer from a brief quotation from him. " On Irving's shelves," Carlyle says, " were the small Didot French Classics in quantity, with my appetite sharp. "'^'^ Everything, in fact, in English and French was greedily devoured by the maturing }'oung schoolmaster. Not books of literature only, but of mathematics, theology, philosophy, and travel filled the spare hours ; and the corre- ^^Rem., II, 28. *'Ibid., 58. "/fcfrf., 28. •"•/frf'd., 49. *" Early Letters, 61. *^ Ibid., 57. ^'■Ibid., 69. "/fctd., 61. *^Ibtd., 69. *^Jbid., 77. *^ Early Letters, 43. ^'' Rem., II, 28. **Ibid., 68. 9 spondence of these years alludes to considerable reading not specifically mentioned. It would be unsafe to generalize extensively on the basis of this early reading. Carlyle was not yet twenty-three and he read books rather with the uncritical enthusiasm of a youth, than with the discriminating taste of a man. Nevertheless he was able to interpret literature later on, partly because he read widely in it now. The range of reading is indeed significant. The books that he mentions do not belong to a single class, nor to one literature. He read poetry and mathematics, travel, fiction and philosophy. He was as curious to know French books as English, and he eagerly went through such transla- tions from other languages as came in his way. His curiosity was as insatiable as it was far-ranging. Essential to any critic, broad reading was perhaps doubly essential to Carlyle, whose prepossessions were already beginning to turn his mind into more restricted, if deeper currents of thought. From the Kirkcaldy collection of books he was, as we have seen, more and more likely to select the volumes of serious literature and to reject novels and even poetry, except that of the masters. His casual comments on literature now indicate the gradual emergence of a deeper and more serious spirit. The full and free outlet for this innate earnestness was al- ready at hand, for Carlyle was about to begin the study of German. Overcome with the miseries of school teaching, which he says " were known long before the second Dionys- ius,"^^ he left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh with vague, unformed ambitions. Not many months passed, however, before he had taken up German.^- A letter written to Mitchell from Edin- burgh, February 15, 1819, contains the earliest reference to the study of German to be found in the published writings o{ Carlyle. He has, he says, just now "no stated duty to per- form " except a little attention to mineralogy, " excepting also a slight tincture of German language which I am receiving '' Early Letters, 84. ^" Froude's statement leaves the erroneous impression that Carlyle began German in the summer of 1820 while at home on the Mainhill farm (Life, I, 72). 10 from one Robert Jardine of Gottingen (or rather Applegarth), in return for an equally slight tincture of the French which I communicate."^^ Six weeks later (March 29, 1819) Carlyle writes to his brother : " I am still at the German ; I am able to read books, now, with a dictionary. At present I am read- ing a stupid play of Kotzebue's — but tonight I am to have the history of Frederick the Great from Irving. I will make an azufu' struggle to read a good deal of it and of the Italian in summer — when at home."^* Not long after, he refers to " reading a little of Klopstock's Messias,"^^ still under the tutorage of Jardine. Then came the two poets who kindled his enthusiasm and awakened a new intellectual life — Schiller and Goethe. They occupy so large a place in the early literary life of Carlyle, and Goethe alone had so profound an influence upon his spir- itual development that it has been easy, apparently, for stu- dents to misconstrue the facts concerning his first acquaint- ance with them. Professor Norton, who did so much val- uable service for Carlyle, gives the usual explanation in his introduction to the Goethe-Carlyle correspondence. " Per- plexed and baffled," he says, " begirt by doubts," Carlyle " fell in with Madame de Stael's famous book on Germany." From her " he learned to look toward Germany for a spiritual light that he had not found in modern French and English writers. "°" The first reference to Mme. de Stael's book occurs in the Early Lettcrs,^'^ where Carlyle writes that he has read this work, together with others, and where the context indi- ^^ Early Letters, loo. " Regarding this mention of Italian I may add that Froude inaccurately says that Carlyle "had studied Italian and Spanish" (Life, I, 105), and " still unsatisfied, he had now fastened himself upon German ; " clearly placing both these languages in point of time before German. If Carlyle had any knowledge of Italian before he began German, it must have been slight ; for in the passage quoted above as well as in other passages (Early Letters, 110, 122), he clearly implies that he was beginning a new lan- guage. As for Spanish, he explicitly says that he was " learning Spanish " with his wife at Craigenputtock in the fall of 1828 (Letters, 129). Cf. also Japp, Life of De Quincey, 209. "^ Corrcsp., VIII. ''Early Letters, iii. "57; September 25, 1817. 11 cates that he read it with no more definite purpose than to gratify a curiosity daily growing more acute. At this time Carlyle was not plunged in " severe spiritual wrestlings," such as were to trouble him some years later; and there is no sure suggestion that he went to Mme. de Stael for light, or that she directed him where to find it. Yet the book evidently made a strong impression, for a year and a half later, apropos of an- other book by the same author, he says of her that " with all her faults she possessed the loftiest soul of any female of her time."''^ In 1822, after some progress in the study of Schiller and Goethe, he refers to " much sublime philosophy in the treatises of Madame de Stael. "°^ Again in the same year he writes : " the Miltons, the de Stael's — these are the very salt of the Earth. ""^^ Of these references only the first antedates Carlyle's beginning of German, though the second is in the same letter that tells of the tutoring under Jardine."^ This notice of Jardine suggests that Carlyle took up German in con- nection with his study of mineralogy ; and a passage in a letter to Goethe, dated November 3, 1829, sustains this view. He there says : " I still remember that it was the desire to read Werner's Mineralogical Doctrines in the original, that first set me on studying German ; where truly I found a mine, far different from any of the Freyberg ones."*'^ ,.- / While it is therefore a mistake to suppose that Carlyle had no interest in the German poets before he began to read in their language (he must have read magazine articles upon them, in addition to Mme. de Stael's Germany), the facts show that he came to them when he did partly by accident, and certainly not with any definitely formed purpose of seeking " spiritual light." Nevertheless, as the concluding clause in the letter to Goethe tells us, German literature did come to ^Ibid., 102. ^^Ibid., 209. '^ Ibid,, 230. Carlyle once thought of translating from the French a Life of Madame de Stael, and he refers to a proposed essay on her by Jane Welsh, ibid., 139, 217. " There is no reference to Schiller or Goethe, or to other German literary writers, in the Early Letters before 1819. '^^Correspondence, 157. For a much modified opinion on Mme. de Stael's Germany see essay on State of German Literature, I, 30. 12 Carlyle as an unlooked for revelation of spiritual truth.^^ And the rapturous outbursts about Schiller and Goethe in early letters add to the weight of this testimony. " I could tell you much about the New Heaven and New Earth which a slight study of German literature has revealed to me." " I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe and the rest; they are the greatest men at present with me."''* Several months later he was urging Miss Welsh to read these authors. " I still entertain a firm trust that you are to read Schiller and Goethe with me in October. I never met with any to relish their beauties; and sympathy is the very soul of life."^^ On the January previous Carlyle informed his brother that he had translated " a portion of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War and sent it off to Longmans and Company, London,"^^ together with proposals to translate the whole of Schiller." A year later he was at work on the criticism of Faust that ap- peared in the New Edinburgh Review for April, 1822. In 1823-4 the Life of Schiller came out in the London Magazine, and before this was finished Wilhelm Meister was well under way."* Thus it was that Gemian unexpectedly opened Car- lyle's path to a literary life. It revealed to him, as he said, a new heaven and a new earth, and gave him a gospel to preach to the English people. But long before he had read Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle had literary ambitions whose beginnings now become im- portant in the present study. Professor Masson tells us that during a walk he once had with Carlyle, he received the im- pression that Carlyle's passion for literature " came latish " and that his original bent was mathematics ; but, says Profes- sor Masson, " I think we are entitled to assume the literary stratum to have been the deeper and more primitive in Car- lyle's constitution, and the mathematical vein to have been a "^ Compare 2 and 34, Goethe-Carlyle Correspondence. ** Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 283, letters dated August 4 and October 22, 1820. "Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 307. ""Early Letters, 177. "^ Ibid., 283. *^ Ibid., 149. 13 superposition upon that."«« The early letters, however, the main source of facts concerning his development during these years, convincingly show that his deepest love was literature and that frequently he " could not help " exchanging " the truths of philosophy for the airy nothings of these sweet singers," as in one place he speaks of forsaking mathematics for Moore and ByronJ" His general reputation as a mathema- tician was not the reputation which he held among the few friends who knew him intimately. Among these his real orig- inality and ambitions were recognized, and he was set apart by them for a literary career. This is clearly shown in a letter from Thomas Murray in 1814. '' I have had the pleasure of receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humourous and friendly letter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of ex- pression, and an affectionate pathos, which indicate a peculiar turn of mind, make sincerity doubly striking and wit doubly poignant. ... A happy flow of language either for pathos, description, or humour, and an easy, graceful current of ideas appropriate to every subject, characterize your style. This is not adulation; I speak what I think. Your letters will al- ways be a feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast ; and the time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these our juvenile epistles will be read and probably applauded by a generation unborn, and that the name of Carlyle, at least, will be inseparably connected with the literary history of the nineteenth century." To which Carlyle replied: "Oh! Tom, what a foolish flattering creature thou art! To talk of future eminence in connection with the literary history of the nineteenth century to such a one as me ! Alas, my good lad, when I and all my fancies and speculations shall have been swept over with the besom of oblivion, the literary history of no century will feel itself the worse. Yet think not, because I ^^ Edinburgh Sketches, 246-7. The facts of Carlyle's early life support this opinion. Mathematics consumed much of his time in college and for four or five years thereafter; but, as we have seen, he was strongly in- fluenced in his choice of this subject by the superior instruction of Leslie, who appears to have been the only teacher to win Carlyle. '" Early Letters, 73. 14 talk thus, I am careless of literary fame. No ! Heaven knows that ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known has been foremost."^^ Such was Carlyle's dream of a literary life, when he was not yet nineteen and had been scarcely a year out of college. Each succeeding year strengthened his determination to be- come a literary man. At Kirkcaldy his intimate friends, among whom was the romantic Margaret Gordon, regarded Carlyle as a young man of great promise. Stimulated by such companionship, he longed more and more to enter literature, though never without melancholy misgivings as to his fitness. About this time he had " forwarded to some magazine editor in Edinburgh what, perhaps, was a likelier little article (/. e., than a review of Pictet's Theory of Gravitation) (of descrip- tive tourist kind after a real tour by Yarrow country into An- nandale) which also vanished without sign."'^- When he went to Edinburgh in 1818, it was really to try his fortunes in litera- ture;'^^ though he was too keenly alive to its uncertainties to trust to it alone. " Mineralogy is to be my winter's work," he writes to Murray, on leaving Kirkcaldy. " I have thought of writing for booksellers. Risum teneas; for at times I am serious in this matter. In fine weather it does strike me that there are in this head some ideas, a few disjecta membra, which might find admittance into some of the many publications of the day. To live by Authorship was never my intention. ... I have meditated an attempt upon the profession of a lawyer or of a civil engineer."'^ As Carlyle thus stoutly set his face toward the Scottish capital in pursuit of his ideal, his pros- pects were indeed " not the brightest in nature,"" but he had no suspicion that he was about to begin his " four or five most miserable dark, sick, and heavy-laden years."''' Because of the misconception that has obtained concerning this critical period in Carlyle's early life, we need to keep the facts accurately before us. He took with him to Edinburgh several introductions to men likely to help him, one of which " Froude, Li/^, I, 29-30. ''* Early Letters, 2,7. Ci. Rem., II, 60. "Rem., II, 23s. ""Early Letters, 88. "/biU, 222. '''Rem., II, 59. 15 was to Dr. Brewster, editor of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia.'''^ A little later he secured a letter to Baillie Waugh, a bookseller about to start the Nezv Edinburgh ReviewJ^ The door to lit- erature, however, did not open at once, and he was compelled to take up other and dreary employments. Irving got him some " private teaching,"^^ which lasted scarcely more than two months and which was followed by mineralogy, " a mourn- ful study."^** " Every prospect of writing," he says in Feb- ruary, 1819, "up to present date, has been frustrated by my inability to procure books either for criticising or consulting."®^ In the same month came a call from Brewster to translate a French paper on chemistry. " Have it more than half done," he writes home. " Before I began it, I was busied about some other thing; but what will be the upshot of it I cannot say."®^ Nothing, indeed, came of this " other thing," though reference to it is evidence that Carlyle was striving for expression in his original way. On finishing the translation for Brewster in March, he says, " I wish I had plenty more of a similar kind to translate ; and good pay for doing \t."^^ But there was no more work at hand, and the future looked dark. " My pros- pects are so unsettled that I do not often sit down to books with all the zeal I am capable of. You are not to think I am fretful."** These words are ominous of the deep depression that was fast fixing itself upon Carlyle's mind, a depression greatly aggravated all the while by the tortures of dyspepsia. It was soon after this that he removed his books to Mainhill farm for the summer, where as Froude says, he wandered " about the moors like a restless spirit."*'^ Returning to Edinburgh in the autumn, improved in health and unrelaxed in purpose, he not only continued to look for literary work, but enrolled himself in "the class of Scots '"Early Letters, 91. '"Ibid., 95. '"Ibid., 96. ^Ibid., 102. ^^ Ibid., 99. Carlyle's independence at this time is shown in his refusal to accept a tutorship because the price offered was not high enough. Ibid., 106. ^'Ibid., 105. ^Ibid., no. '^Ibid.. 108. «' Froude, Life, I, 55. 16 law"'''' thus signifying his intention to attach himself to a stable profession. But stable professions were never to his taste or habits; and just as he had renounced preaching and teaching, he soon quit the law, finding it " a vast and thorny desert " where there are " uncounted cases of blockhead A versus blockhead B."^^ During the winter he searched for literary employment, and ventured an anonymous paper for the Edinburgh Rcvieiv. " I have not been so diligent of late," he tells his mother, December 29, 1819, " on account of a paper I am writing, which I have a design to offer for pub- lication. No one is aware of it, so you need not mention the circumstances ; but I can see well enough that to this point my chief efforts should be directed."®^ In March, 1820, he reported himself at work upon articles for Dr. Brewster's Encyclopedia, the first instalment of the sixteen short bio- graphical papers beginning with Montaigne and concluding with William Pitt. He sought diligently for further em- ployment, for translating, for any kind of literary work, but without success. Failing to find substantial things to do or any "tongue" for his deepening intellectual life, thinking, in fact, that all avenues were closed against him, Carlyle's mind became a prey to gloom and despondency. " The thought that one's best days are hurrying darkly and uselessly away is yet more grievous [i. e., than solitude]. It is vain to deny it, I am alto- gether an unprofitable creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak, yet enthusiastic ; nature and education have rendered me en- tirely unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabi- tants of this planet."®" This account of his mental condition is followed a few days later by a letter to his brother Aleck, in which he says that he could enjoy the coming of summer if he '" £(ir/.v Letters, 119. "Ibid., 144. "^ Ibid., 125. A long letter of advice from Irving to Carlyle (see Froude, Life, I, 59) may have been influential in connection with this first effort to gain admission into the pages of the Edinburgh Review, Froude's comment is that " Carlyle was less eager to give his thoughts ' tongue ' that Irving supposed " (ibid., 62). But the letters of this period show that Irving was correct in regarding Carlyle's mind as made up to earn his living by writing. For Carlyle's allusion to this paper see Early Letters, 127, and Rem., II, 233. ^^ Early Letters, 134-5. 17 had " some stated job to work to keep " him in employment and to drive away the " vidtures of the mind."'''* Thus another winter of " successive fits of activity and low-spirits ""^ wore away, and Carlylc again took down to Mainhill the little work he had to do. During the following winter (1820-21) his despair dropped to its nadir, and the pictures that he drew of himself became painfully vivid. Not until close upon spring was there a single prospect of additional work, and meanwhile his misery of mind and body made him desperate. " I get low, very low in spirits," he says, " when the clay-house is out of repair." " If you saw me sitting here," he writes to his brother, " with my lean and sallow visage, you would wonder how those long bloodless bony fingers could be made to move at all."**" A gleam of light breaks in now and then, for in the same letter we read of cheering projects for writing and translating (probably from Schiller). Most of the time, however, the clouds were thick and black. Tortured with bodily pain and without work, Car- lyle now experienced a loneliness unfelt before. " To-night," he writes again to his brother (January 2, 1821), " I am alone in this cold city — alone to cut my way into the heart of its benefices by the weapons of my own small quiver.""'* These livid flashes from the clouded correspondence of this period show how stubbornly Carlyle held to his purpose to succeed in literature."* Deep in his nature was a conscious- ness of superior worth and power. " I know there is within me something different from the vulgar herd of mortals; I think it is something superior; and if once I had overpassed these bogs and brakes and quagmires, that lie between me and the free arena, I shall make some fellows stand to the right and left— or I mistake me greatly. ""° A few weeks later, i. e., March 18, 1821, he relates his fortunes to Mitchell: "I have tried about twenty plans this winter in the way of authorship ; ""Ibid., 137. "'Ibid., 149, i53- "^Ibid., 140. ""Ibid., 149. Cf. iS3, i73- " " If a man taste the magic cup of literature, he must drink of it forever, though bitter ingredients enough be mixed with the liquor." Ibid., 171. "'^ Ibid., 15s; to Aleck in February. 18 tlicy have all failed ; I have about twenty more to try ; and // it does but please the Director of all things to continue the mod- erate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding my petards will not burst, or make only noise when they do; I must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they shall burst and do execution too.""" Ikit opportunity for literary employment had already brightened the future and had caused him to write cheerfully to his father : " Matters have a more promising appearance with me at the present date than they have had for a long season.""^ Waugh had sent him Joanna Baillie's Metrical Legends to review, a task which he executed in the form of an article printed in the New Edinburgh Review for October of this year (1821). At the end of May Irving took Carlyle for rest and recreation upon a trip to Haddington, where he first met Jane Welsh. " Those three or four days," he says, " were the beginning of a new life to mc.""^ Thus the storm-clouds blew over and thus happily ended what has correctly been called the darkest period of Carlyle's life. It is in this period that Froude placed the spiritual con- flict, the " Raphometic fire-baptism" described in Sartor. The biographer says that " the doubts which had slopped Carlyle's divinity career were blackening into thunderclouds,""" and that he was passing through the struggle " \\hich is always hardest in the noblest minds, which Job had known, and David, and Solomon, and ^iLschylus, and Shakespeare, and Goethe."^"" Other biographers, probably echoing Froude, have likened this spiritual revolution to the sudden illumination of PituP"^ and of Constantine.'*'- They refer to the Everlasting No of Sartor, as the authentic record of Carlyle's mental changes at this time ; and Froude expressly refers to " the spiritual mal- adies which were the real cause of his distraction."^**^ But the published letters of Carlyle written at this period have no references to such profound spiritual unrest as is thus afc- '^Ibid., 160. ''"Ibid., 54. "'Ibid.. 156. "" Garnet, Life, 25. "^Rein., II, 87. Cf. Early Lcltcrs, 169. '"^ Nichol, Life, 32. "''Life, I, SI. '"^Life, I, 81. 19 tributed to him ; while they do refer frequently to bodily ail- ments and to failure to find the right work. It is true that his mind was changing, that he was steadily moving away from the faith of his fathers, and that Schiller and Goethe were revealing a new heaven and a new earth. In Carlyle intellec- tual advance was inevitable. But it is a mistake to fix upon this period as the crisis of the revolution and to maintain that the chief cause, or any really determining cause, of his distress was a questioning of the truth of revelation or of the existence of a moral Providence in the universe. 1°* Long before this time, Gibbon had torn from his mind " the last remnant " of his "orthodox belief in miracles"; ^"° and in 1817 he had sev- ered his " last feeble tatter of connection with Divinity Hall," because at that time he " was indifferent on that head."^^* The truth seems to be that lack of work, failure to advance toward the goal of his deepest ambitions and to find expression for the surging life within, were the main sources of Carlyle's harrowing discontent. And the unbroken progress of the next few years add to the evidence that his religious life underwent no convulsive transformation. Though no new task awaited him on his return to Edinburgh from Haddington, he resumed the old (probably the article on the Legends for Waugh and more biographies for Brewster) with a zeal that betokened new hope. " Within the last three weeks," he writes in August, " I have written almost as much "" Froude, Life, I, 54. "= Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 263 "" R<^m., II, 39 ; cf. ibid., 90. The conversion sketched in Sartor Car- lyle says is " symbolical myth all," with nothing literally true except " the incident in Rue St. Thomas de I'Enfer " (Froude, Life, I, 81). By "sym- bolical myth," I understand Carlyle to mean that the spiritual conflict there described is symbolic of the struggle that all inquiring minds have to en- dure at some period of their growth, and that he himself passed through in the general course of his early manhood. But conversion in the Pauline sense of change of religious belief, as Froude and others seem to infer, there was. none at this time ; and if there were any such it came at a later period in the manner described in the Reminiscences (II, 179), The incident in Leith Walk was a struggle of will, not of belief — a moral wrestle with himself as to whether he would continue the fight to make a living by literature in spite of the nearly overwhelming defeats of the past months. 20 as I had written before in the whole course of my natural life."^'*'^ " Nervous and spiritless " times there were, as there would always be for Carlyle ; but on the whole the succeeding months were passed in joyous industry. In November (1821) Brewster gave him Lcgendre's Elements of geometry and trigonometry to translate, a " canny job " when it was begun, but " thrice wearisome " when nearly finished. Of this task which brought him fifty pounds^"^ he writes: "I have set fairly to work, and am proceeding lustily ; not in the whimper- ing, wavering, feeble, hobbling style I used ; but stoutly."^"^ With the new year (1822) through the friendly help of Irving who was now in London, Carlyle obtained the tutorship of Charles Buller's two sons at a salary of two hundred pounds.^^*^ He liked the BuUers and continued his teaching for more than two years, finding it " a pleasure rather than a task " ; the more more so since it afforded him much time for his literary pro- jects, now multiplying encouragingly. He refused an ofl^er to edit a Dundee newspaper at one hundred pounds a year, and accepted from Waugh a commission to write a paper on Faust. He had good reason, therefore, to write ; " full of business even to overflowing, with projects of all sorts before me, and some few rational hopes of executing a definite portion of them, I feel very contented in my usual state. "^^^ But contentment for Carlyle was never of long duration, and he was the last man to rest satisfied with the hackwork he was now doing. An unrest settled upon him, the unrest of an original mind conscious of its powers but conscious also of its unf ruitfulness. For months he had been " riddling creation " for a congenial subject. Back in December, 1821, while work- ing upon Legendre, he wrote home : " The evenings I design to devote to original composition, if I could but gather my- self ."^^^ In the next February he said : " I designed to set about writing some Book shortly; and this (at which I must ultimately arrive, if I ever arrive at anything) will of necessity ^'''' Early Letters, 174. '"''Early Letters, 186. ">^Rem., II, 106. "Ubid., 190. '" Ibid., 206. Cf. 207. " I have plenty of ofifers from Booksellers." ""Ibid.. 186. 21 require to be postponed greatly."^^^ " It seems quite indispen- sable," he told Jane Welsh in May, " that I should make an effort soon; I shall have no settled peace of mind till then."^^* More sig-nificant are the words to his mother some weeks later : " I have also books to write and things to say and do in this world which few wot of. This has an air of vanity; but it is not altogether so; I consider that my Almighty Author has given me some glimmerings of superior understanding and mental gifts; and I should reckon it the worst treason against Him to neglect improving and using to the very utmost of my power these His beautiful mercies. "^^° In a study of Carlyle as a critic the character of this first proposed composition has considerable importance, since it dis- closes the direction of his originality. Earliest projected and longest deliberated was a book on a " historico-biograph- ical"^^" theme, for which he began reading early in 1822,^^^ and which he outlined several months later in a letter to Miss Welsh : " Four months ago," he wrote, " I had a splendid plan of treating the history of England during the Common- wealth in a new style — not by way of regular narrative — for which I felt too well my inequality, but by grouping together the most singular manifestations of mind that occurred then under distinct heads — selecting some remarkable person as the representative of each class, and trying to explain and illus- trate their excellencies and defects, all that was curious in their fortunes as individuals, or in their formation as members of the human family, by the most striking methods I could devise. Already my characters were fixed upon — Laud, Fox, Clarendon, Cromwell, Milton, Hampden; already I was busied in the study of their works ; when that wretched Philomath with his sines and tangents came to put me in mind of a prior engage- ment."^^^ This passage reveals the same essential character- istics in the man of twenty-seven that we find in the man who at sixty-three published his first instalment of the life of Fred- erick the Great. Unhappily withdrawn from his plans by the "^Jbid., 202. ""Ibid., 217. "*Ibid., 217. "''Note-Books, 23-29. ^"Ibid., 223. "^ Early Letters, 260. 22 call from I'iousUt for I .ci^^i'iuhi', CarlyU- Iiad, ucvi-rllicloss, no hope of riiulint;- " compk'to ri'sl," until " fairly ovorluad in llic C()niposilion of st)nic I'aluahlc nook.""" llis loUcrs lo JMiss Wi'Ish (Inrini;- this period I'onslanlly refer to literary hopes and aims, all i'''i wliii-li weie destined to he frnstrali-d lor a loni;' lime to eome. C )ne of his schemes, however, deserves special mention, since it strengthens the impression which we g'ct from the pieci-dinj;- acconnt nt then what knew 1 o\ this lower world? The nian mnsl be a hero, and 1 conld only draw the materials of him for myself. Kich sonices oi snch materials! besides, it wH're wi"ll that he died o\ love ; and yonr novel-love is become a perfect ih n<4 ; anil of the ijcnnine sort 1 conUl not inulertakc to say a woid."'"" l'\irtnnatel\ for the world and for C"ai"lyle, he was oblii^cil to i;ive up his schenu" o\ novel-writinj;' in {\\\o\- o\ other tasks now rapiilly acciunulalinj;-. Irving" opened the way in the London Mai^aciiir for a life of ."^chiller; and alnn^st at the same time (early in iSj,0 "' ln>yd the pursy j>ookseller" wishcil him io " translate (ioiihe's W'iUiclm Mristi-r," which he had toUl r.oyd was "very clever."''' r>ut these encouraging pros[H-cts, loqetlur with the Hnller tutorship, served in the end oidv to intensify his restlessness and to precipitate a secoud, tlu)Ui;h a shiMter peii<>d of despair. It was tu>w " the accursed hag" ilvsiH^psia rather than the want of ctni_i;enial literary oc- cupation that bi\nij;ht I'ailyle to the brink of suicide. Com- position, luarK always a liariowing toil with him, becatue a kind of nij;ht mare.'" In the midst oi snch distresses the year ""Jbiii., J.?s. '" IblJ.. .'00. '"//..•,/.. j6i. "" " I sit ilown to it (i. <\, Mcistrr) witl> tlio ferocity of a hyena" (ibid.. -'8.}'). •• 1 coiilil ticiiiu'Ully swoav tliat I ;un tin* ii^ioatost dtitu-o in creation; the ciioUii\o, 111 .1 iiai;iKvaiil) is lillle luMler ih.iu the l.iluif of a (.uiKliuakcr ; I swell .\iul loll aiul keep tedious viL-il, an.l .it Uui'.lh there riuiii out from llie tovlmeil im lliiii.; jiot an \\\\.\oi ol soliil iH-wier " (ibid., 269), 23 wore on. and the first and second parts of Schiller were fin- ished, while not long after (/. c, January. 1824) came from the r>oiuIon Tiiiu-s "(he //r,s7 puhlic uoA oi api)a)val " he had ever had.'-' The last of Schiller was soon oil his hands, fol- Icnvcd speedily hy the Mristi'i: With a draft of one hnmlred eii;hfy poinuls (the payment for Mristi-r) aiul a letter of intri>- tlnction to Thomas Camiihell. I'arlyle sailed, Jnne 5, 1824. from lulinhnri^h for London to join the llnllers. This first London visit did not fill him with respect for his fellow-craftsmen, nor diil it much improve his chances for snc- cess in literatnre. Irving- introduced him [o manv of the liter- ary celehrities. inclndinj;- Ciderid^v, the " faltish old man " on Iiij;hi;ate llill. who nunnbled mysteries about "Kant and Co."'-'* The first letter from (aiethe came at this time, and Carlyle received it with a mixture of sentiment and humor: "Almost like a message from I'airy Land." he tells Miss Welsh/'-'' " I was very glad (o hear from the old blade, in so kind though so brief a fashion." he tells his brother Aleck.'-" Ihit these llattering attentions did not mean soliil pudding and a start on the right road. The Schiller, gathered into book- form, was published in the late winter oi 1825 and brought ninety poumls ami great disgust to its author, expressed in his refus.d to attach his n;mie to the bcxik and in his willing- ness after he was paid, to "let the thing lie and rot till the day ot Doom."'-^ To disgust was aiUleil momentarv wrath when " a luckless wight of an opium-eater," De Ouincey, " wrote a very vulgar and brutish Review of Mcisti'r."^"'' By '-' Kt-jii.. 11. 114. •• 1 am very \vi;iU," he wrolo in liis notc-i)ouI< ; "it Ivcpt luc chccrlul for an hour" {Nolc-Books, 61). How welcome was this ray of light may be jiidt-cd from a passage in (he note-book written a few days before the one just .luoted. •' My eourse seems deeper and !)lacker than that of any man; to be ' immtued in a rotten earcass,' every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain; till my intellect is obscured and weakened, and my head and heart are alike desolate ;iud d.irk. How have 1 deserved this?" (\'ol<--lU'oks. 56.) '■■"See original sketch of Coleridge, Froudo, Life, I, 170. Others whom he met were Campbell, Crabb Robinson, Barry Cornwall. '"-^luirly I.rttcrs. 31S, '" JbiJ.. JJ4. ""Ibid., 322. ''■'Ibid., 323. 24 spring, therefore, Carlyle longed to leave London. " I desire to be ivorking honestly in my day and generation in this busi- ness which has now become my trade. I make no grain of doubt that in time I shall penetrate the fence that keeps me back, and find the place which is due to me among my fellow- men. We shall see : I am not at all in a hurry ; the time will come."^-" The time was almost at hand. During the succeeding period at Hoddam Hill (the summer of 1825), "perhaps the most triumphantly important of my life,""** Carlyle was not only busy translating his Specimens of German Romance (for which he had contracted before leaving London) ; but he was also again feverishly eager to produce an original work. *'Alas! the matter lies deep and crude, if it Hes at all, within my soul ; and much unwearied study will be called for before I can shape it into form. Yet out it shall come, by all the powers of Dulness.""^ The project of a literary newspaper"^ and a proposal to secure the editorship of the Scots' Maga- zine — left a wreck from the failure of the Ballantynes — were alike rejected. In tlie autumn of 1826 he married Jane Welsh and removed to Edinburgh, where the spectres of unrest still haunted him and the wish to begin " some book of my own " became a kind of demonic possession.^^^ He did in fact start a novel, the plan of which he had sketched four or five years previously. " Heaven only knows what it will turn to ; but I have sworn to finish it," he wrote."* But IVotton Reinfred (such was the book's name), though daily on the anvil, refused to be hammered into right shape and had to be set aside for a '" new enterprise. "^-'^ This came as the result of a visit to Jeffrey. From Barry Cornwall Carlyle had obtained a letter of introduc- tion to the great man, who received him " in his kindest style,"^^^ offered to introduce him to Scott, and " spoke about writing in his Review."^^'^ Carlyle asked Jeffrey to read the ^^ Ibid., 326. '" Early Letters, 339. ^^Rem., II, 179- '^"^ Ibid., 343. "'^ For various schemes of original writing see Note-Books, 77-80, and 1 19-120. ^^^ Ibid., 22. "* Letters, 20. "' Ibid,, 23. ''''Ibid., 46. 25 German Romance first, to see what manner of man he was, after which he would call again. Some months later accord- ingly he did call. "Where is the Article? seemed to be the gist of Jeffrey's talk to me ; for he was to all appearance an- xious that I would undertake the task of Germanizing the public — so I did not treat the whole Earth not yet Germanized as a * parcel of blockheads ' ; which surely seemed a fair enough request. Two days after, having revolved the thing, I met him again, with the notice that I would ' undertake.' The next number of the Revieiv, it appeared, was actually in the press, and to be printed off before the end of June ; so that no large Article could find place there, till the succeeding quarter. However, I engaged, as it were for paving the way, to give him in this present publication some little short paper ; I think on the subject of Jean Paul, though that is not quite settled with myself yet."^^^ Recalling tliis circumstance many years later, Carlyle had this to say of it : " I was now in a sort fairly launched upon Literature ; and had even, to sec- tions of the public, become a ' Mystic School ' ; — not quite prematurely, being now the age of thirty-two, and having had my bits of experience, and gotten something which I wished much to say, — and have ever since been saying, the best way I could."^39' '^^Ibid., 46. ^^"Rem., II, 237. CHAPTER II Ideals of Literature Our study of Carlyle's early life, with especial reference to his efforts to enter the field of literature, has brought to light certain important prepossessions. Environment, education, and early struggles combined to develop a Scottish nature hardly matched in its union of intellectual power with moral intensity. To whatever task he turned, Carlyle was almost sure to bring to the execution of it an earnestness so vehement as to deter- mine the direction of his intellectual energies. He loved litera- ture from the first and he read it widely and insatiably; but his liking for the literature of plcasnre soon gave place to a preference which in later days amounted to a prejudice for the literature of edification. It was the consuming ambition of his early manhood to write an original work, which was certain to be ethical in its purpose, whether it took the form of novel, verse or essay. This original bias of mind deeply in- fluenced Carlyle's literary and critical ideals. He always favored literature that carried with it an ethical or a spiritual content, and he was likely to be deficient in sympathy with a man or a book that did not arouse his moral nature. It was more from necessity than from deliberate intention that Carlyle became for a period of years a critic of literature. By long meditation and by intense study of German literature and philosophy, he had formulated a gospel which he wished to preach to the English people. Had he been free to choose his own time and method, undoubtedly Carlyle would not have selected the review article, or the critical essay, as the medium of his message. Necessity left him no alternative. But into compositions which were written to meet the needs of the hour, he poured so much of his heart and mind that they have survived to this day with scarcely diminished vitality and re- main as a notable achievement in English literary criticism. The message that he learned from literature and philosophy he 26 27 communicated in the form of a philosophical criticism of litera- ture. In all of his essays, therefore, from first to last, there will be found a consistent body of literary and critical doc- trine, which received an emphasis varying with the time when it was expressed and with the author to whom it was applied. It is the purpose of the present study to expound this doctrine, or body of literary and critical ideals. We shall first consider their nature and source, and their relation to contemporary criticism. We shall next show how these ideals determined Carlyle's attitude toward the literature of romanticism. These larger and more general aspects of the subject will be followed by some account of Carlyle's place as an introducer of German literature into England and by an exposition of five or six of his greater essays to show how he applied his principles to the interpretation of individual authors. Finally, we shall point out his change from criticism to prophecy and shall have a brief word to say concerning his strength and weakness as a critic of literature. Carlyle once declared that " all real ' Art ' is definable as Fact, or say as the disimprisoned ' Soul of Fact.' "^ Though he made this declaration in 1867, it expresses a faith which he held from the beginning of his literary career. Fact is synonymous with truth, or, as he says in Sartor, it is eternity looking through time. It is the function of art to reveal this truth. " We cannot but believe," says Carlyle, " that there is an inward and essential Truth in Art ; a Truth far deeper than the dictates of mere Mode, and which, could we pierce tlirough these dictates, would be true for all nations and all men. To arrive at this Truth, distant from every one at first, approach- able by most, attainable by some small number, is the end and aim of all real study of Poetry."- All poetry, or literature * Essays, VII, 220. 'Essays, I, 199. In Carlyle's essays the word art is used in three senses. First, as in the above passages, it means organized truth, seen and shaped m the mind's deepest recesses ; this is the usual meaning (Essays, II, 24 ; IV, 123). Secondly, it is used as synonymous with form, as referring to what are called " literary merits and demerits : " this use is not infrequent in the earlier essays {Essays, IV, 47). Thirdly, art is used to mean fine art, sculpture, music, or poetry ; this use is rare even in the earlier essays {Essays, II, 275). 28 (till' liTins an- sMioiiyinous in ("arlylc), is an apocalypse of man and of iialurc-. " It may wnll cmioii<^1i be named, in l<"iclitc's style, a 'contimions revelation' of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common." Poetry is thus identilied with philosophy, with wisdom, with religion, lis aim is to incor- porate "the everlasting" Reason of man in forms visible to his Sense." 'Hie trne poet is both a philosopher and a seer. Goethe is not a meie poet and sweet singer, but a " Moralist and riiiloso])her." In Kichter " IMiilosophy and I\:)etry are blended." Novalis is philosopher as well as poet, because he strives [o vvvva\ the iinsien. I'or a contrary reason Voltaire is only "a popular sweel Singer and 1 laranguer.""' lUit wliether Carlyle calls the literary artist a poet or a philosopher, he invariably thinks of him as a seer and not as a maker of abstract systems of thought. I'~ven when he goes so far in his essay on (ii-nnan pla\vvrighls as to declare that "a consis- tent philosophy of Wiv is the soul and essence of all poetry," he means only that the poii sliould consistently and habitually (U'al with ri'alilii's, not with fancies, with what has been lived, not with what has been dreamed. Literature is concerned witli Irnlh.' "Jli-iOi-s, 151 ; I'ss.iys. 1. jji ; II, .).) ; T, 198; III, 4; II, 162. * Essays, il, m.|. Tin- iiR'aninn of tlie word reality in Carlylo, or its e(|uivali'iil, siioli ;is trulii, fact, art, lifi- sooms to shift .somewhat as his iiitcrt'st: oIiatiKOS from liti'ralmo .niil ciilicisiii ti> liiof-rapliy and prophecy. Ill (he carlii-r issays Ihosi- (cnus Ki''"''ally liavc an cx.ict rcfcii'iicc to llu' (icrman critical philosophy and mean sonu-lhini; (r.-iiisccndcntal, wliile ill lilt' lalcr OIK'S reality scorns to mean only wh.il has hccn lit'i'd, that is, truth whicli lias passed lhrou);li human experience. Itnt even this C'adylc re^;;lrds as transcendental in the .general sense. The identil'icalion of iioelry and philosophy was common among the rom.antic writers holh in (iiruiany and I'liiKlaiul. It was the aim every- where to make poetry synonymous with life in its totality, the essence of social, ethical, reliKioiis and philosophical thought. To this effect Professor Boyesen quotes from I'riedrich Schleiiel's manifesto in the second number of The ytthrntruiii, the or^an of the Romantic School in Germany. (Essays on (7i'n)ton Literature, 280.) Tlu' writings of Richtcr and Novalis are full of this notion. The criticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Haz^tt fre- quently includes it {W'ordsu-orth's Literary Critieisiii, cd. Nicol, 25, 27, 165, 171; Coleridf^e's Literary Criticism, ed. Mackail, 173, 183; Hazlitt, IVorhs, V, Ott Poetry in Ceiieral, f^assiin, esp. 2, 6). It is in DcQuincey and Shelley. See also 1 lei ford's . I.i;.- 0/ /TonZ-wor///, Intro.. XV. 29 Carlylc somotiiiics idcMilifies this truth in art witli beauty, l)ut not l)v ciitoriii};- the mazes of jcsthetic theory as do Schiller and doclhc,'^ nor by bclievinjij, with Keats that "what the iinaL;ination seizes as Beauty must be Truth."" To delicately spun systems or formulas he was o])()()se(l. And we cannot think of him as seeking truth in art through the senses. Truth comes to us intuitively, by a synthesis of the reason. It is, as Wordsworth also held, a product of llie creative imagina- tion. This higher truth, originating from within, Carlyle often S])eaks of as beauty. We fmd him referring to a " universal and eternal Keauty," and defining taste as a "sense to discern and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness."^ Criticism, he says, pretends to "clear our sense" to discern " Eternal Jicauty." Under the inlluence of Goethe's poetry, the world once more has become a solemn temple " where the spirit of P>eauty still dwells."'^ The open secret is no longer a secret to the poet; he knows that the universe is full of good- ness and that " whatever has being has beauty." A " wizard beauty," Carlyle says, dwells in the fragments of Novalis, but in the art of Hoffmann there is none." Whereever it is named, beauty is thought of as the creation, not of a mind working from without among sensations, but of one working from within among ideas. I'eauty is therefore indistinguishable from transcendental truth and has the same spiritual value.'" It is an integral part of this doctrine that poetry and prose are the same, and that meter is an ornament not a necessity of poetry.^ ^ Carlyle is not deaf to the melody and harmony in '^Note-Books, 36-41. ''Essays, I, 34; cf. ibid., 47. "Keats, Works, IV, 46. '^ Essays, I, 44, 55- "Essays, I, igs, 230, 260; III, 162. '"Carlyle is a mystic in his use of such concepts as truth, hoauly, good- ness. In the earlier essays these terms are used interchanKcnhly, and llic soul of the universe is at once good and beautiful and true. Laler and especially when the word beauty seemed to suggest dilettantism and fine arts, he generally employed the term truth (or reality) alone. Another instance of his mysticism is in his treatment of poetry as " musical thought " (Heroes, 77 ; cf. also the phrase " Music of the Universe," Essays, IV, 183). Shakespeare "is a Voice coming to us from the Land of Melody" (Essays, I, 212; cf. Shelley's phrase "Eternal music," Defense of Poetry, 9). '^Essays, II, 107. 30 the song of the poet (no critic has given higher or juster praise to the songs of Burns), but he thinks that the music comes from an expression of " Musical Thought."^^ He does not attribute it to the poet's mastery of measured language. In but a single instance does he use the name poetry when referring to Scott's poems. ^^ He usually speaks of them as rhymed or metrical romances and of Scott as a song-singer; making it appear on all sides that he does not consider Scott a poet in the sense in which the word is used in his criticism. Voltaire, the representative poet of the eightcendi century in France, is not a poet but a prosaist.^* The dramas of Grill- parzer, though written in verse, are not poetry ; and Grillparzer is not a dramatist, but only a playwright who " writes in prose. "^^ Writing that fails to carry truth to the reader is not poetry, whatever its form. Writing that conveys truth is poetry, whether its language is metrical or unmetrical. Car- lyle therefore regards Goethe's IVilhch)! Mcistcr and Boswell's Life of Johnson as poetry.^*^ Richter, who wrote no verse, is yet a " Poct."^'^ The " prose fictions " of Novalis arc poetry, and passages from HcinricJi von Oftcrdingcn illustrate him " in his character of Poet."^^ The true artist may use what speech he will ; but his position as poet is determined by the worth of his message.^" The theory that the sole function of poetry is to reveal truth or beauty carries with it the notion that the poet is a seer. "Heroes, 77-7^- ^^ Essays, VI, 55. "The discussion in Essays, II, 167-170 is really not an exception to this assertion. ^'Essays, II, 91; cf. II, 107. ^"Essays, I, 194-6; IV, 78, 81, 109. " Essays, III, 59 ; cf. Heine : " Jean Paul ist ein grosser Dichter und Philosoph " {IVerke, V, 330). ^^ Essays, II, 220. " In the deliverance of his message, that is, in the choice of his material, the poet is not limited to one class of subjects or persons. Reality may be found in the meanest places or among the humblest people. The essay on Burns may be regarded from one point of view as a defense (against the apologists of the school of Jeffrey) of humble material as proper for poetic treatment {Essays, II, 13-15; I, 17). Carlyle's doctrine implies all along that true literature is serious and that the literature of amusement is not literature in the legitimate sense {Essays, I, 47, 282; II, 98, 142, 184; III, 89; VI, 70). 31 This notion fills so large a place in Carlyle's literary creed that we must discuss it here, even though it was touched upon in a previous paragraph. A seer is an artist with the gift of vision, an artist, as Carlyle says in Goethe, " in the high and ancient meaning; in the meaning which it may have borne long ago among the masters of Italian painting, and the fathers of Poetry in England; [in whom] we trace some touches of that old, divine Spirit.'"^« "The true Poet," he says again, "is ever, as of old, the Seer; whose eye has been gifted to discern the godlike Mystery of God's Universe, and decipher some new lines of its celestial writing; we can still call him a Vates and Seer ; for he sees into this greatest of secrets, 'the open secret'; hidden things become clear; how the Future (both resting on Eternity) is but another phasis of the Present: thereby are his words in very truth prophetic; what he has spoken shall be done."^^ Like the poet, the man of letters also is a revealer of inner and essential truth, and Carlyle applies to him Fichte's characterization : " Men of letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in this life ; that all ' appear- ance,' whatsoever we see in the world, is but a vesture for the ' Divine Idea of the World,' for that which ' lies at the bottom of appearancc.'"^^ This power to see truth furnishes the criterion by which Carlyle estimates the worth and rank of every writer whom he seriously considers, from Musseus to Scott. This faculty of vision, as Carlyle conceives it, is the supreme gift. It means, in the first place, that its possessor is a thinker, not a dreamer. " At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift," he says, " as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough."-' " True "" Essays, I, i8o. -'Essays, IV, 44- -^Heroes, 145. Cf. the discussion on poets and poetry in Wot ton Rem- fred, Last' Words, 128-145. This lofty idea of the poet's nature and office was common to early romanticism, especially in Germany. Professor Boyesen says: "This exaltation of the poet above the rest of his kind, this assumption of the office of a prophet, priest and inspired seer, and the kindred claims to exemption from the rules of morals which govern ordinary men, are dominant features in the Romantic School." Essays on Ger. Lit., 328. "■'Heroes, 97. 32 poetry is always the quintessence of general mental riches, the purilicd result of strong thought and conception, and of refined as well as powerful emotion."-'' He calls particular attention to Shakespeare's " superiority of Intellect." and to Goethe's "all-piercing faculty of Vision."-'^ By intellect Carlyle did not mean, as did inan\- I'.iigiish critics of his day, some individual faculty or power working as it were in isolation to produce a pretty fancy or sentiment. lie meant the entire mind, as a single intellectual force, with all its faculties acting in concert to create artistic wholes. Goethe's poetry, he says, is the voice of the whole harmonious manhootl.-" When he speaks of mor- ality ill a poet, or of moral purpose in a poem, therefore, Car- lyle is never thinking of something iletached and apart. Art is moral because intellect and morality are indistinguishable in the sound miiul.-' Art is indeed the creation of the poet's whole mind in its moments of clearest vision, but it is at pre- cisely those moments that the mind is most moral. -'^ This facull}- of insight, or vision, means in the second place, that the poet or thinker works by processes m}sterious and incommunicable. Carlyle's notion of artistic creation is care- fully foniiulated and harmonizes with his entire philosophical theory of poetry. The best and fullest statement of it occurs ^in the essay called Cliaractcristics: " Of our Thinlvinp," he declares, " we might say, it is but tlie mere upper surface that we shape into articulate Thoughts ; — underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse, lies the region of meditation ; here, in its quiet mysterious depths, dwells what vital force is in us; here, if aught is to be created, and not merely manufactured and communicated, must the work go on. Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial ; Creation is great, and cannot be understood. Thus if the Debator and Demonstrator, whom we may rank as the lowest of true thinkers, knows what he has done, and how he did it, the Artist, whom we rank as the highest: knows not ; nuist speak of Inspiration, and in one or the other dialect, call his work the gift of a divinity."-'^' '*Lifc of Schiller, 169. -' F{ crocs. 98; Essays, IV, i;S. '^Essays, I, 180; II, 18; Heroes, 98, 73. ^ Life of Schiller, 171; Heroes, 41, 09; Lectures on the History of Literature. 150. '^Essays. I, 56. iSo: II, 19. 51 : IV, .'o, 48. ''Essays. IV, 4. 33 To this clear and stroiii;- declaration we need supply but a single comment. We may add that the distinction made be- tween manufacture and creation is fundamental in Carlyle's criticism underlying all that he has to say concerning the dif- ference between the prosaist and the poet. In the essay on German playwrights for example, he again and again distin- guishes the dramatist who is a creator, and therefore a poet, from the playwright who is a manufacturer, a mechanician, and therefore a prosaist.''" The same standards are applied to Vol- taire, whose world is called prosaic and whose order is not " Beauty, but, at best. Regularity."''^ The manufacturer works by means of " a knack, or trick of the trade " and manages consciously to construct what at best is but a semblance of art. The artist creates unconsciously, for he discovers truth by a process wholly transcending the process of logic. " Shake- speare's Art," says Carlyle, " is not Artifice ; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or contrivance.""''^ Unlike Scott, who is a fashioner and not a creator, Shakespeare and Goethe create their characters " from the heart outwards.""''^ Faust is em- phatically a work of art, " matured in the mysterious depths of a vast and wonderful mind."-'"' " Boswell's grand intellectual talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious one."*"* The man- ufacturer works with his understanding, but the creative artist is endowed with reason, that divine faculty, by which, accord- ing to the post-Kantians and the younger German romanticists, the poet and the thinker can penetrate to the heart of truth. But it is not to the content of art alone that Carlyle's theory of creation applies. It includes form and the relation of form to content. I'^orm, he holds, has a subjective origin and should be judged finally by a standard from within ; nothing in art is determined from without by established or conventional rules. " Genius has privileges of its own, it selects an orbit for itself." It is limited to one rule, that of seeing truth, of discovering meanings. The appropriate form will follow, the artist will not know how, and it is " to be judged by the inward qualities *> Essays, II, 88-107. '^Essays, VI, 69. "'Essays, II, 165; cf. 281. "* Essays, I, 131. "Heroes, 100. ''Essays, IV, 78. 34 of the Spirit which it is employed to body forth." " The ivord that he speaks is the man himself." " There is no uni- form of excellence," says Carlyle, " all Genuine things are what they ought to be."^° Again, therefore, Carlyle returns to an ethical standard. " In poetry," he says, " we have heard of no secret possessing the smallest effectual virtue, except this one general secret ; that the poet is a man of a purer, higher, richer nature than other men ; which higher nature shall itself, after earnest inquiry, have taught him the proper form for embody- ing its inspirations, as indeed the imperishable beauty of these will shine, with more or less distinctness, through any form whatever."^^ The process of artistic creation, whether we speak of form or of content, or of both, thus integrates with Carlyle's theory of poetry. The object of the poet is truth. He discovers it by his faculty of vision or insight. He bodies it forth by means of the creative process. This process — itself a product of the highest intellectual culture — works myste- riously within the innermost recesses of the mind, where it weaves the appropriate garment for the truth which has been revealed.^^ Now that we have before us the principles underlying Car- lyle's ideals of literature, it is proper to say something of their source. The doctrine thus far presented is a coherent one, but it is not original. Much of it may be paralleled in Aris- totle, in Horace, and in the critics of the Italian Renaissance.^® The idea of poetry as a higher philosophy, the idea that it de- pends for its vitality upon thought rather than upon form and that meter is not an essential and distinguishing characteristic, and the regard for poetry chiefly as an interpretation of life and a guide to conduct, these are ideas which were taught and believed hundreds of years before Carlyle gave expression to them. But there is no evidence that he was directly indebted ^^ Essays, I, 16-17, 128; IV, 62-63, 87; Heroes, 96-97. ^^ Essays, II, 115. ^^ Brandes points out that A. W. Schlegel learned from Goethe " that perfect technique has an inward origin " (Main Currents, II, 53). Cole- ridge says that "organic form is innate ". (Literary Criticism, 186). ^' Cf. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, II. 35 to critics and thinkers of a former age. His literary creed has a much later parentage. It owes its origin to romanticism and to some of the sources from which romanticism itself sprang. In its attitude of revolt from neo-classical standards, in its glorification of poets and poetry, in its declaration that genius has a right to choose its own path, Carlyle's romanticism ex- presses a general agreement with the new literary movements of the nineteenth century. It differs widely from much of the romanticism in England (that of Scott and Keats for ex- amples) in that it rests upon definite doctrines which go back to the transcendental philosophy of Germany.*" But it has much in common with romanticism in Germany, because romanticism began among the Germans as an organized move- ment, established upon principles derived mainly from Kant and from the writings of Schiller and Goethe. The original sources of Carlyle's doctrine, therefore, take us back to the transcendental philosophy. The German literature of his day, says Carlyle, owes its in- spiration to the critical philosophy created by Kant and devel- oped by Fichte and Schelling. " Such men as Goethe and Schiller," he says, " cannot exist without effect in any literature or in any century; but if one circumstance more than another has contributed to forward their endeavors, and introduce that higher tone into the literature of Germany, it has been this phil- osophical system."*^ The fullest interpretations of this system to be found in the essays are in The State of German Literature and in Novalis. Its general outlines are well known. It is opposed to the sensational philosophy of Locke and to the skeptical philosophy of Hume, because, as Carlyle says, it "commences from within. "^^ Space and time are forms and matter has no real existence. The visible world is but a *° Where Carlyle's ideals correspond with these of Wordsworth and Coleridge, a common origin may be found in German philosophy and literature. Carlyle had a low opinion of Coleridge as a thinker, but he certainly had read the Biographia Literaria (e. g., II, 184), and he must have profited by Coleridge's criticism (e. g., Heroes, 84) ; though I can find no indications of direct indebtedness. There are also some in- teresting correspondences between Shelley's theories and Carlyle's. *^ Essays, I, 66 ; IV, 36. ■" Essays, I, 67. 36 shadow of the eternal mind. The universe is therefore spirit- ual through and through. God and man are the only realities. Even the individual ego is only a light-sparkle floating on the ether of deity. Truth, reality or fact (it matters not which term we use) is apprehended by man intuitively, that is, by the *' inward eye " of reason, the mind's supreme faculty ; whereas all practical and material knowledge," such as comes within the ken of logic, is the product of the understanding, a useful but a lower organ of the intellect. In this transcendentalism there is a mystical or poetical mingling of the systems of Kant, Fichte and Schelling.*^ The terms reason and understanding, used so frequently by Carlyle in his criticism, are Kantian in origin, but the meaning which they carry in the essays is defin- itely Fichtean.** The notion of literature as a revelation of the divine idea, and of the poet as a seer, is also Fichtean.*^ From Fichte is derived the theory of artistic creation as an uncon- scious process. Since space and time are forms, " Deity is ommipresent and eternal "*® and apprehended by reason work- ing in its own mystical manner — a statement of Fichte's doc- trine of the infinite self. Trace Carlyle's speculations where we will, we are certain to emerge upon a path that leads straight to the transcendental philosophy. The thinker of Craigenputtock lived in a shadow-world far more real to him than the gray moors which surrounded his solitary home. ** Carlyle probably never read Kant's Critique through (Note-Books, 119), but he read about Kant on all sides. He quotes from Fichte's Uber das Wesen des Gelehrten (Essays, I, 50) and he refers to Fichte's Wissen- schaftslehre (Essays, II, 201, 204). Schelling is rarely referred to (Es- says, I, 71 ; Heroes, 75). Carlyle freely used the Kantian terms reason and understanding, but, as regards reason, not in a strictly Kantian sense. Kant never denied the existence of matter and he remained a realist. Car- lyle's thinking for the most part is identical with the subjective idealism of Fichte (i. e., he is all in all a Fichtean ; our me is the only reality, and nature is but the reflex of our own inward force; Sartor, I, 8, 9, lo), Sometimes he interprets the world in terms of Schelling's objective ideal- ism, as when he says that the universe is " the realized Thought of God." Heroes, 75. ** Reason in Carlyle's criticism is about equivalent to imagination in Hazlitt's and Coleridge's. "Essays, I, 50-52. *' Essays, II, 205. 37 But Carlyle's debt to Schiller, to Goethe and to the German romanticists was also very great. We should not be exceeding the truth if we said that he borrowed his ideas concerning the nature and function of poetry first from the poets, and after- ward traced such as were fundamental back to the philosophers. It is not, however, the purpose of this study to explore minutely the wide field from which Carlyle gathered his ideas. These ideas, strewn broadcast everywhere, acted as a powerful fer- tilizing influence ; and no important mind in German literature at that period came to fruition without receiving from them a quickening impulse. We shall therefore be content here to point out but a few of the literary origins, such as are unques- tionable and easy of access in the essays themselves, and leave others to be referred to in later chapters as occasion requires. The ideals of modern German poetry, as Carlyle interpreted them in his essay on The State of German Literature, are prac- tically identical with those which we have set forth in the pre- ceding pages. The passage which he quotes from Schiller's Letters on the Esthetic Education of Man is notable.*^ A few sentences from this will illustrate the close correspondence be- tween Schiller's doctrine and Carlyle's. After an artist has grown to manhood under a distant Grecian sky, says Schiller, let him return into his century, " not, however, to delight it by his presence ; but terrible, like the Son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present ; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature. ..." Let the artist " leave to. mere Understanding, which is here at home, the province of the actual ; while he strives, by uniting the possible with the necessary, to produce ' the ideal." " If to these sentences we add still others from The Life of Schil- ler (175-176), wherein Carlyle interprets the poet's ideas con- cerning the nature and function of literature, we may see that Carlyle must have received both ideas and inspiration from Schiller. The huge array of definitions and technical terms in Schiller's writings on aesthetics repelled Carlyle; but in certain " Carlyle quotes the passage twice elsewhere, either in part or as a whole {Life of Schiller, 176; Essays, III, 94). *^ Essays, I, 48. \ 38 fundamental articles, such as the transcendental origin of poetry and the exalted idea of the purpose of literature and of the character of the poet, he believed as devoutly as did Schiller. Important as was Schiller's influence it is hardly to be com- pared with that which Goethe exerted, for Goethe was to Car- lyle the highest representative of modern poetry and unlike Schiller, a poet born, not made. He was the complete man — poet, philosopher, teacher. The book of Goethe's to which Carlyle owed most is beyond a doubt Wilhclm Mcistcr. The opinions on art and conduct interwoven into this work were for him the bread of life. " I have not got as many ideas from any book for six years," he wrote to Jane Welsh in 1824.*^ Wherever, in his writings, he speaks intimately of it, there is something of reverence in his words. From the Apprentice- ship Carlyle learned that it should be the purpose of poetry to express the universal and the ideal, and that these should be found in the conditional world in which we live, not above it or under it. He learned that art should deal with wholes, that poetry and prose are not at variance, and that the poet is a sacred character, " a teacher, a prophet, a friend of gods and men."^" The second part of VVilhelm Meister, The Travels, moved Carlyle's spirit more deeply than did the Apprenticeship, but it could scarcely have taught him more of art or life. It contains, however, the kernel of his doctrine, and in a letter to Goethe he speaks of it as " an embodiment of all that is finest in the Philosophy of Art and Life," and he says it " has almost assumed the aspect of perfection in his thoughts. "^^ Erom the essential teachings of these two parts of Wilhelm Meister Carlyle never departed. He found Goethe's transcendentalism more congenial to his nature than he did Schiller's ; for Goe- the's ideas concerning literary art grew up from the rich soil of his own experience. He lived, so Carlyle thought, under the guidance of reason, not of passion ; and his mind, in unity with itself, dwelt serenely within the realm of " the Whole, the ** Froude, Life, I, 171. '"Essays, I, 194-197. °^ Corres., 66. For art theories in The Travels see Carlyle's translation, III, 123-131. 39 Good, and the True."°- Though these ideals received an un- goethean emphasis from Carlyle as time went on, they remained the animating heart of his message, ahke on poetry, on history and on society/'^ Next to Goethe and Schiller the German authors who most hifluenced Carlyle were Richter and Novalis. It was, how- ever, chiefly as literary interpreters of the critical philosophy that they had any appreciable influence upon his ideals of literature. In Richter he discovered a transcendentalist to whom nature was " a mysterious Presence." Richter was not a novelist, at least in the usual sense, but " a Philosopher and Moral Poet." He was a mystic v/ho clothed "his wild way- ward dreams, allegories and shadowy imaginings " in a style extravagant, metaphorical, complex and abounding in humor. He was Carlyle's brother Titan, preaching in a similar dialect against a skeptical and mechanical age.^* Jean Paul was the forerunner of another mystic, Novalis, who, as Professor Royce says, was " the true romantic interpreter of Fichte's doctrine." For a time at least Carlyle was much moved by the singular productions from the pen of this young dreamer. His various and extended quotations from the writings of Novalis, whether on poetry or philosophy, art or conduct, imply a large spiritual indebtedness. Novalis is the typical German mystic, the man steeped in Kantian metaphysics, who has in him " an un- fathomed mine of philosophical ideas " and who regards the visible world only as a manifestation of deity.^^ In so far as ideas are concerned, therefore, Novalis, like Richter, was for ^Essays, I, 279; IV, 50. ^^ A Spinozist rather than a Kantist, Goethe was all the more a believer in the transcendental origin of poetry, and in the unconscious process of poetic creation (cf. Meister, II, 188). He believed also in the essential oneness of the beautiful and the true, with which " the morally good is inseparably connected " (Bielschowsky, Life of Goethe, II, 392. For an interpretation of Goethe's ideas see also II, 161-2, 2,27, 391-2; III, 31-34, 51, 56, 61, loo-ioi). Sayings on art paralleling Carlyle's are abundant in Dichtung ttnd Wahrheit and in the Gespriiche. ^Essays, I, 8, 13 ; cf. II, 268-275. The humor and style of Richter were considerable influences upon Carlyle, but with these we are not here concerned. ^° Essays, II, 226, 206. . 40 Carlyle rather an inspiring interpreter of other men's doc- trines than a teacher of his own. Both these German roman- ticists immensely stimulated Carlyle, because they clothed their messages in a language that strongly appealed to his delight in humor and his love of the mystical ; but they did not furnish him vvitii ideas that he could not have found in the writings either of Goethe and Schiller or of the philosophers. Like the theories of Novalis, of Friedrich Schlcgel and other German romanticists, those of Carlyle not only* had their roots in the transcendental philosophy, but they grew and expanded until they embraced nearly every significant expression of the human spirit. Literature was regarded not as a manifestation of a phase of man's activities merely, but as the quintessence of the soul's life everywhere. Poetry, said the romanticists, is life ; poetry, said Carlyle, is the vital spirit of histories, con- stitutions, and creeds, as well as of epics and philosophies. Whatever voices the soul of humanity, that is poetry. The significance of this belief, in connection with a study of Car- lyle's mind, can scarcely be exaggerated ; for in his ideas con- cerning the relation of poets and poetry to society, his original- ity first finds expression, his independent moral convictions first rise to the surface. He drew freely upon Goethe and the romanticists for the social aspects of his poetical theories, but he did not develop these theories in the direction of the neo- classicism or symbolism of the later Goethe, nor did he sym- pathize with the voluptuous and sensual dreams, the religious vagaries and other fantastic excesses, into which Novalis and his brethren of the new school finally descended. Rathef, we hear more and more often the native Scotch voice and we feel the impulse of the rigorous puritan prophet. We are drawn into a current of thought that ultimately carries us away from literature into hero-worship and prophecy. Among the various ideas which imply the social side of Car- lyle's poetic theory, perhaps the most inclusive is one that Goethe impressed upon him, namely, the universality of the poet's mind. The poet is the embodiment of the highest intel- lectual achievements of the race. Lie is the oracle of the eter- nal longings and strivings of common humanity. In him, says 41 Carlyle, we see " a freer, purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves. "°*' Poetry is therefore universal in its nature and its appeal. Goethe often sought to impress Carlyle with its cosmopolitan character. " It is obvious," he writes, "that the efforts of the best poets and aesthetic writers have now for some time been directed towards what is universal in humanity." " What is truly excellent," he adds, " is distin- guished by its belonging to all mankind." To which Carlyle replies that these doctrines, so far as he has seized their full import, " command his entire assent." Goethe also impressed him with a sense of the great importance of a commerce of ideas between nations, and he seized every opportunity to preach to Carlyle the lesson that art is a matter of international concern.'^^ Carlyle was prompt to take up and apply this teaching. For a decade and longer, when literary England was more than usually insular in its spirit and when its attitude of moral and intellectual superiority was unwarrantably offensive, Carlyle defiantly asserted that art is independent of mode and true for all nations and all men. It was no longer possible, he urged, for a people to live exclusively within the narrow realm of their own ideas ; and he therefore welcomed the in- pouring of ideas from Germany, since this would mean a com- parison of "English with foreign judgment" and a renewal of intercourse and revival of intellectual life among civilized peoples.-'"'® Carlyle ardently advocated these notions, because he believed that art is universal, the message of the Time- Spirit to men. Mention of the Time-Spirit suggests a second phase of Carlyle's doctrines concerning the relation of literature to so- ciety. He learned from Fichte that " each age, by the law of its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of the Divine Idea, the essence of which is the same in all."^° He quotes Schiller to the effect that the medium of the poet's truth must come from his own age f° and the text of Goethe's greatest sermon was that the '"Essays, II, 6: cf. Essays, I, 212, 281. ''' Corrcs., 24-25, 33. '^Essays, I, 179, 199, 200, 282; III, 221. '''Essays, I, 50. '^Essays, I, 49. 42 ideal must be built upon the actual. From these sources he learned that literature which leaves a world of men to dwell apart in a visionary, romantic or supernatural realm is a litera- ture unsound and unsubstantial, unworthy of the name of art.''^ This notion grew to be the most important one in Carlyle's literary creed. It claimed the largest share of his interest and received from him an altogether original emphasis. Accord- ing to this theory of literary art, the poet should interpret his own age, he should be his age's highest and truest interpreter. Of all men he is the one in his time to sift the true from the false, the permanent from the transient. It is a man's highest enterprise, says Carlyle, " that of being the Poet of his Age."''- In this doctrine we find the explanation of Carlyle's almost ex- clusive interest in the great representative writers, who inter- pret national movements and who stand out as the intellectual leaders of their respective periods. " The great man," he says, "' does, in good truth, belong to his own age ; nay more so than any other man ; being properly the synopsis and epitome of such age with its interests and influences. "^'^ The critical essays throughout witness to Carlyle's genius for interpreting and portraying tlie representative mind. Goethe is the " high- est man of his time." and the " history of his mind is, in fact, the history of German culture in his day." In Voltaire, says Carlyle. we have "a European subject, or there never was one." \'oltaire is the " man of his century," '' the paragon and epitome of a whole spiritual period." Diderot, too, is " a sig- nificant epitome " of the age of Louis X\^. Johnson is the '' John Bull of Spiritual Europe," the ideal Tory. " Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages.""'* On the other hand Carlyle is not drawn to minds not of the first order, ^^ Essays, I, 195: II, 12, 13. ^Essays, II, 51; III, 2-4-5. ^Essays, IV, 91; cf. I, 39. Though Carlyle derived these ideas, in so far as they relate exclusively to poets, mainly from Germany, they really express an attitude towards life that was taken independently. The plan of treating certain leaders of the Commonwealth as " representative," mentioned in the previous chapter, shows that the historical method, as well as the idea of hero-worship, was of independent origin (E. Letters, 206, 260). ^Essays, IV, 175; I, 176; II, 124, 125, 128; V, 4; IV, 128; Heroes, 91. 43 nor is he attracted by the lesser, out-of-the-way influences originating- with such minds. The by-ways of literature do not lure him from its beaten high-road. He speaks of " the sonnet, elegy, song " as belonging to the " out-lying province of poetry." He says that the Vicar of Wakefield is a modern idyl " and nothing more." He thinks that no true poet will ever dwindle " into a man of Vers de Societe."^-' Truth in its fulness and in its representative character, he held, can be re- vealed only in minds of the first rank and not in minds of the second, except as "secondary symptoms."*"^ If it be asked why it was then that Carlyle showed so much interest in Rich- ter and Novalis and was so profoundly affected by the careers of Burns and Byron (two names which, next to Goethe's, occur most often in his essays), we may say that these writers scarcely furnish an exception to the rule. Richter and Novalis were for Carlyle literary exponents of transcendentalism, the one a humorist, the other a mystic; both were minds that re- vealed truth. Carlyle loved and reverenced Burns because Burns was a native Scotch product and a song-maker of Shakespearian and universal order. He and Byron were the two British men of their age who were born to be poets in the high and ancient sense, but whom fortune and an undisciplined will prevented from delivering their message to the world. They were praised by Carlyle rather for their promised, than for their actual, achievement ; and their tragical lives afforded him the texts of a hundred sermons. Carlyle's idea of the poet as a representative man includes also the idea of him as the highest man of his time. In the strict sense art is aristocratic. Spiritual truth is born to one man here, to another there, but not in the same degree or kind to all men.^^ Art has therefore no concern with popular- ity ; it makes no appeal to the popular ear, and is not dependent for approval upon the popular voice. Popularity affords no index, Carlyle says, of originality or greatness, for the favor of the many is no criterion of the value of literature. " In fact," he says, " the popular man, and the man of true, at ^'^ Essays, II, 90; I, 185; I, 36. ^ Essays, V, 47. *^ Essays, II, 246. 44 lc;isl of iMc;it oi ij;iii;ilil y, ;iit' seldom one .iiul llic s.iiiic. 'I'lir |)o|)iil.ii 111:111 sIjimIs oil oiif own level, llie ori}.;iii;il 111.111 sI.iikIs ;i hove 11;. I'lie iiiiill il mle ol' voiees i:, no .nil lioi ll \' " ; " l;iiiie is no sure le;,l ol llieill." To illlisliate .111(1 Mlppoll these ((pinions (iiilyle was loiid ol ( iliii;; llie popiil.nil y ol Kol/ehiie whose plays, ho says, li.id heeii ai le(| "in every llie.iire IroiM Kanilsch.-itk.'i lo ("adi/," hit! who loi ;ill llial w.is "a lifeless linndle (d (l\cd iaj.;s.""" 'The line po( I will rely wholly npoii himself, since Ihe inspiialion .is well .is Ihe t'lidiiriuj^' tiiiHi of his message oiiidnales in his own sold. Arl is ,'irislocral ie he cause it is the enalioii (d Ihe hijdiesl minds, .iiid hee.iuse il m.iKes ils appe.il indepeiideiil l\ s ; Vi, 17';; Sartor h'c.utrlus, 172, 175. CrTAPTI'.R TTT li)i;.\i.s t)K C'uriuiSM ((/) J'rincif'lrs and Mrlluxls Carlyk-'s tlu-ory of li(ci;iliiri' diiiTiuiiU'S llu' principles aiul methods of his crilicisin. 'Vhv slaiulaids oi jiuIjmikmiI which ho apphod lo the iiilciprctaliou of authors ami their work grew out of his ideas of the nature and function of poetry. These priiici])les are apphi-d in evi-ry critical essay from lirst to last but they are rarely stated in direct form in the later essays, in which the treatment is so larj^ely l)i(\i;raphical. They are to he found t-hii'ily in the criticism before iS^^J, in some in- stances expressetl in brief categorical assertions, and in a few others expandinl into something like a formal declaration or manifesto. The fullest statements occur in two essays, Tlu' State of (Jcnnan lAtcratiirc (1827) and Cocthc (i8jS). In stibstance both declarations arc> the same, but the earlier one fraukh professt\s to be no m*Me than an interpretation (>f Cler- nian i)rinciples. We shall therefore ([note ii\>m the second, in which ("arlyle's position is taken independently: " W'l- ;in' liiiii lii'licvc'ts in tlic iii;i.\im," lio .say.s, " tliat, (Hr all li^lit judKiiuiit itf any n\aii or liiiiiK, it is useful, nay essential, to see his good (lualilics iit'fore pronoiiiUMiiK on his l)ail. . . . l.et us consider what_ we mean l>y a laiili. Uy llu- wotil l.uilt wo dcsimiali' something that displeases us%, that i-iinliadii'ls us. IWil lii-rc (lie iiiicstiuM luinht arise: Who are -.vcf This r.iiill dispU-ascs, ronttadiiMs us; so I'ar is oli-ar ; and had .(•<•, had / and my pleasure and I'oiiluin.iliiin lucii the i-hicf I'ud ot the pi>et, then douhtless he has failed in thai cud, and his laiill ri-inains ii veniediably, and without defeiu-e. ihit who sh.dl say whether sueh really was his object, whether sueh oui;ht to have l)een liis ohjeet? and if it was not and ounlit not lo li.nc heen, what hecomes ol the t'aull ? It must Ikuik altogether uudieidiil ; we as yet know nothing of it ; perhaps it may not he the poet's, hut our own fault; perhaps it may be no fault whatever. To see rightly into this matter, to determine with any infallibility, whether what we lall a t.ndt is in very deed Ji fault, we must previously have st-ltU'd twii points, neither of which may he so reailily settleil. First, we 4f) 47 uiiisl have iiiadi' plain lo ourselves wliat the poet's aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stootl helore his own eye, and liow tar, with such means as it allorded him, he has fuliillcd it. Secondly, we must have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of his, accorded, — not with us, and our individual crochets, and (he crochets of our little senate where we give or take the law,— but with human nature and the nature of things at larRe ; with the universal principles of poetic lieauty, not as they stand wiitteii in our text hooks, hut in the hearts and imaj^in.itions of all men. Does the .inswer in either case come out unlavorably ; was there an inconsistency hetwi'cn the means .and the enf 48 unless he is himself a sccr. Next the critic must judge the work of a writer in terms of universal principles as they are revealed in the unfolding order of the world and are found written in the heart of man. In the accomplishment of this task, criticism has to regard wholes, not parts ; since the final beauty of a poem, its permanent message or meaning, resides in an organic unity, without which literature is dead, a lifeless bundle of fragments. The interpretative method of criticism thus leads into the philosophical. The critic must not only have imagination and insight, he must also possess philosophi- cal grasp and power of integration. When he has brought the poet's truth to light, it is his further duty to relate that truth to the larger environing world, both of general principles and of men and movements.- These two great methods of criticism — the interpretative and the philosophical — imply still others, the biographical, the historical and the compar- ative, the first two of which were defined and developed more completely by Carlyle than by any of his British contemporaries. It was a favorite saying of his, as we have pointed out, that the critic should see the poet's object as the poet himself saw it." To do this the critic not only has to grasp the form in its totality, but he has also to know as much as possible of the poet's mind, within and without, from which this totality has grown. He must ask, says Carlyle, whether the unity " has grown up naturally from the general soil of Thought." The i)rinciple stated in its simplest terms is this: a true poem is a unity, which in turn springs from a deeper unity of mind ; mind again is the result of two forces, alw-ays working together, and in great poets harmoniously together — '■'It is cverywluTc implied in Carlyle that in the unily of a iiocni resides its relation to, or rather its rcvcUition of, the infinite, or the transcen- dcntally real ; c. g., " I see some vague outline of what a whole is ; also how an individual delineation may be ' informed with the Infinite,' may appear hanging in the universe of lime and space (partly) : in which case is it a poem and a whole?" Froudc, TI, 70. 'In addition to the long passage quoted above see I, 283-4, 129; II, 128, 225 ; Life of Schiller, 2. Carlyle's method of procedure is like that of Sainte-Beuve, who, as Professor Harper remarks, " analyses the tempera- ments and characters of authors as a means of appreciating their works." Sciintc-Bcuvc, 335. 49 innate .si)irit and environment. Merc then is tlie jj^erni of the biogTaphical and historical methods of criticism. And inas- much as Carlyle held that a literary work does not develop in isolation, but rather side by side with many others of similar kind, all of which is it of advantage to consider together, he expanded his historical method to include virtually another ' that in later years has been widely known as the comparative. Let us examine each in turn. A passage from the essay on Gocihc contains the essence of the biographical method. Of Goethe's poetry Carlyle says that it " is no separate faculty, no mental handicraft ;• but the voice of the whole harmonious manhood : nay, it is the very har- mony of that rich manhood which forms his poetry."* Since the organic unity of a poem or of poetry .Springs from the total intellectual life of its author, since the total thought or mean- .ft ing of a work is in fact that intellectual life transmitted to it . (?5>/ by the poet's creative power, the poet's mind and the unity _ ij of his literary creation are one and the same. If you know \ the poet's mind, you know the poetry he has written; if you know the poetry in its totality, you also know the mind from which it originated, 'i'his principle, as Carlyle would say, applies in strictness only to poets and poetry of the first rank, to those writers who have succeeded in revealing some phase of the Divine Idea. U])on this principle, therefore, the relation between the man and the book is direct and vital : the writing is a rellex of the writer, just as the writer in turn is a "Reflex of the All."'"' This biographical method determines the general structure of nearly all of the critical essays. Carlyle first presents an account of the writer's life, emphasizing such facts as appear to him characteristic and offering some reflections upon the • man regarded as a living unity. The work of the author he re- gards as an expression of his character, as indeed an integral part of it, revealed now not in actions but in words. In the earliest of the collected works, the Life of Schiller we find an application of this method, though the nature of the work pre- vented a thoroughgoing use of it. " It would be interesting," 'Essays. I, i8o. " Jbid., V, 5. 50 Carlylo sriys, " to discover by what <;'ifts and what employment of tliem |Scliiller| reaclu'd the eminence on which we now see him ; to follow the steps of his intellectual and moral cul- ture; to leather from his life and works some picture of him- self. It is worth in(|nirinj;-, whether he, who could reiiresent noble actions so well, did himself act nobly; how those powers of intellect, which in philosophy and art achieved so much, applied themselves to tlie everyday emergencies of life; how the j^enerous ardour, which delii^hts us in his poetry, displayed itself in the common intercourse between man and man. Tt would at once instruct and strati fy us if we could understand him thorout;hly, could transport om-selves into his circum- stances outward and inward, could see as he saw, and feel as he felt."" These self-imposed (piesliral character. ''Life of Sihilh-r. 2. ' Cf. Essays, 111, o.). " Sdiillcr's intcIk-cliKil charactor has. as indeed is always the case, an accuralo conformity witti his moral one." "//)./,/.. I, iSH, .'7.). •-•'//./,/., II, --6. -"Ibid.. I, .15. "//'/,/.. I, 186. -"/?;i(/.. 1. 4.t. -" //)/(/., I, 2^6, 45 ; IT. 170. 56 ■' indivisible Unity." The true critic nnist be a psychologist, must have the power to decipher character, must be able to read the writing as an expression of the writer. He must possess the historical sense and have the rare faculty of putting himself into the position of the poet, into his age, his nation, his life, in order that he may understand the complex forces that have combined to mould the poet's life and work. Hut when he has done all this, the critic has perhaps his hardest task still to do. He must finally judge writer and writing in terms of universal principles of poetic beauty as they are unfolded in the cosmic process or are revealed " in the inmost Spirit of Man." The true critic, like the poet, is a seer and exercises the power of creation; for criticism "is in some s(M-t a creative art ; aiming, at least, to reproduce under a differ- ent sliapc the existing product of the poet.""" JLvery human being possesses in some measure the gifts and feeling of the poet;''^ but only he whose mind is richly cultivated can fully /, interpret the poet's meaning. "To apprehend this beauty of poctr)," Carlyle says, " in its full and purest brightness, is not easy, but difficult ; thousands on thousands eagerly read poems, and ;ittain not the' smallest taste of it; yet to all un- corrui)ted hearts, some effulgences of this heavenly glory are here and there revealed ; and to apprehend it clearly and wholly to acquire and maintain a sense and heart that sees and wor- ships it — is the last perfection of all humane culture."-'" The mind of the critic — that is to say — must be trained to relate tlie life of a poem to ])hilosophical principles, to measure the })oet's produce in terms of the highest generalizations reached by human knowledge. Criticism is thus in the final analysis not logical but intuitional in its methods;-" and though it deals only with serious literature, it is not didactic in its aims, ^be- cause it holds that literature teaches not by rules and precepts but by the communication of life.""* Criticism is thus not mechanical, but poetical. Lastly, though its criteria are subjective, criticism is not impressionistic in the latter-day "■ ""//'iut the new era in criticism started in »»/foiti., I, 33, 219. "" Ibid., I, 44. 5.3. " Winkelmann's Gesichichtc der Kunst dcs Alterthums, 1764; Lcssing's Ladcoon, 1766, and Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767-1769. "A French version was reviewed in tlie Quarterly for October, 1814. '"October, 181 4. 68 F.njjland several years before German criticism had j^^aincd even a sli^Iil foolhoUl. Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Hallads was |)ul)Hshe(l in 1800. antl \yo\u 180S lo 1818 Cole- ridge delivered his lectures on literature in live series. In 1817, with (he apiiearance of his Hido^raf^Iiia Litcraria, Cole- ridge heeaiiu- the iirsl of l''ni;lish ei'itics, and a pr(.>found in- terpreter of the new i)rinciples. Mis labors were ably sup- ported and sup]ileniented by the criticism of Lamb and Hazlitt, two i^\' (lie most soiisi(ive minds that ever g"ave themselves to (he aj^preciation of literature.'" In the earlier part of the ctn(ury also (he ,i;reat reviews were foundcil ; and these, wdiile often (K'stiuetive anil reactionary in (heir cri(ical tendencies, con(ribu(ed somediiii^- lo the new movement.*' Ry .1824, therefore, when Carlyle's translation oi U'ilhcliii jMcisfcr's Af>- f>rciiliccsliif^ was jniblished, romantic criticism was a settled thinj^ in Cermany and was rapidly gaining- ground in Eng- land under the leadership of Wordsworth. Coleridge, Lamb and 1 la/litt. (."hance comments in his early letters show that Carlyle, partly by (he ben( oi his own genius and partly by the directive force oi (he newer ideals, was nu>ving toward philosophical and historical cridcism, even before (.KX^the and the other Ger- mans ci>idd have nuich atTected his thought. In 1810 upon reading a ])ar( oi Uoiisseau's Confessions he remarks (ha( he vvouUl like (o see the remainder of it, in orilcr " to try, if pos- sible, [o connec( (he eharac(er *)f Jean Jacques wi(h my previous ideas oi human na(ure."'- lie proposes Madame de Stael (o Jane Welsh as a subject for an essay ;md asks: " What Is to hinder you from ilelineating your conception of her mind?"'*" In anodier le((er. commenting on U'illiclin Rfcister, he says: " 1 have accurately eopieil a s(riking por(rai( of Goethe's mind."" .Again in i8jj he (ells his hnnher (ha( (he essay on *" l.;iml)"s SlH'cinu'iis appeared in iSoS; lla/.litt's Lcctiiics on the Cltarac- Icrs of Shakespeare in 1817, his Lectures 011 the English Poets in i8i8, his Leetnres on the Comic Writers \n iSio, and a year later, his Dramatic l^iterature of lite . I,t,v of Elisabetli. "The Eiiinbiirj^h Ka'ieii' was estal>lislu-d in iSoj. the 0'""''"''.v i'> iJ^i'O, and lUackxcood's in 1817. *" E. Letters. 112. ** Ibiil.. 30S. "//..■egiiming with the assertion that he will give his opin- ion of Gocllie "as it is." the reviewer mildly i)raises the poet in a general way before he comes to ll-'ilhchii Mcistcr. In this work he condemns the critical dialogue " as so many impertinent interruptions"' which the reader is tc^ skip, whilst he follows tlie story of Mignon. 'i'he review concludes with a brief out- line of this story, interspersed with copious extracts which Carlyle would call " fragments." Such is a favorable review. "* Cartylf wi'll iimk'rstooil IIk' iiiiiid and ti'inpcr of JclTri'y and tlic spirit and method of Ids criticism, lie called JclTrcy " a ^ood man and l)ad critic" (Goethc-Corlyle Corr., 259) ; "a Inic newspaper critic on the great scale" (I'roiidc, II, 103); "I foimd," he says, "that essentially he was always as if spcakinR to a jury" (Rem., II, 253). In a well-known passage he calls JelTrcy's method the method of Moliere's maid, — " do you like it? Don't you like it? — a style which in hands more and more inferior to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has since grown gradually to such immeasurable lengths among us" {Ibid., IT, 271). See also E. Letters, ^^i?. "•See Essays, e. ^'., II, 186. ""Vol. XV. 619-632. 67 The essay by De Quincey in the Monthly Magazine of the same year ilhistrates a hostile attitude and is typical of i'^ng- lish opinion toward (loethe in 1824. After declaring that by the publication of this revolting book, Goethe's name must totter, and after severely and pedantically censuring Carlyle's translation, De Quincey opens his criticism with the remark that in the judgment of a novel there is one rule, " the golden rule of good sense and just feeling." He then turns to Goe- the's shockingly immoral creation and proceeds to exhibit its indecencies under the two heads of Gallery of Female Por- traits and History of Mr. Meistcr's Affairs of the Heart. Such is the manner in which that " cockney animalcule," as Carlyle duhhcd ]3e Quincey, reviewed a German book."'' Jef- frey's article in the Edinburgh for August, 1825, has already in part been referred to. It reveals the same method as De Quincey's critique though as compared with that, it is mild in manner and broad in scope. Yet Jeffrey cannot refrain from saying that Wilhelm Meister is " one flagrant offense against every principle of taste, and every just rule of composition.""" The book, he says, illustrates German extravagance and Ger- man vulgarity, mixed up with (ierman mataphysics. These wholesale condemnations the reviewer follows up by quota- tions tagged with likes or dislikes. Tt is no w(jndcr that Gar- lyle protests again and again against this style of criticism, a criticism by fragments and not by wholes,"" and everlastingly in terms of taste.''*' It is no wonder that he finds the Eng- lish reviewers' portrait of Goethe " resembling Goethe, as some unusually expressive Sign of the Saracen's I lead may resem- ble the present Sultan of Constantinople."''^ Jt is no wonder finally that with these reviewers and their reviews in mind he describes the critical period of his day as one of literary anarchy; " for the Pandects of J>lair and I>ossu are obsolete or abrogated, hut no new code supplies their place; and, author and critic, each sings or says that which is right in his own cyes."^^ His essay on the Stale of German Literature, for '" Do Quincey, Collected Writings, cd. Masson, XI, 226-256. ""Jeffrey, Essays, 106. ""Ibid., I, 173. '^^ Essays, I, 54, 220, 226, 283. '''■'Ibid., I, 246. ''"Ibid., I, 132, 221. 68 I)iit (•\;iin|»lc, is iml oiilv ;m cxposilioii of ( irniiaii iMJlirism, imii (I»l()iii;Ii<>lil .1 stdiil ;ill;nl< iipuii (lie iiicIIkkIs of |t-riic'\' ;iii(l llu' ii'vii'vvns, or upon ci ilii-isiit ;is ;i " St-ii-iuH- of Ni'i;;itioii."^'' 'I'lic jiisliru'.'iliou for dwelling ;il soiiu- Irii,L;IIi upon l\\v ideals ,111(1 iiiclliods ol lliis scliool (d iic!;.iliv'i' n'iticisiii lirs in tlio f.iit lliat (arlylr's own position as an innovator, his own sus- tanicd hattU' for tlic nrw iTiticisni. is tlu- nion- sharply l)ronj;lit lo vit'w, il wcclcailv disciM n the foiccs thai wt'ic allii-d a,i;ainsl liini. Ihit ('arlyii- did not li.^ht alone. Independent and fear- less as he was, he inarelu-d in tlu- ranks of men who followed the lla;.', ol roinanlic erilieisni, and he reeeived e\i'ii from the I'.nj^lish eonliiif^int a Uind of moral snpi)ort i;ieater than he was perhaps .aware of. 1 le did not eall the movc-menl romantie, hill he eleaiU' nndi rslood thai an ellorl was heini; made to re- eonslrnel erilieisni and that il was eommon lo ( lermany, h-iij;- laiid, I'Vanee and ltal\. " It is a I'lnropean lendenev," he says ol it, "and splines hum the i^eneral eondilion of intelleel in I'.nropi". We oniselvi\s have all, for tin- last thirty years, more or less distini'tlv fidt the neeessily of sneh a seienee: witness the ncfdeil into uhieh oni' I'dairs and Ilossns havi' silentlv falK-n ; oin' inereased and ine leasing' adniii-ation, not only of Shakes- spe.iri", hut of all his eontiMuporaries, .and of .all who hreathe an\ poilion of his spirit ; our eoulrovers\ whelhiM I'ope was a poet ; and so unieh vaj;ue ilforl on the part of our hesl erilies everywhere to express some still imexpressed idea eoneernintj' the nature of tine poetry; as il llu-y lelt in their hearts that a pure f;lory, nay a diyineness. heloiij;ed to it, for whieh they h.id jis yiM no name ami no intelleetual foriii."'^ " //)ii/., I, ,!,|. Il ilors nol seem <',s,siMili.\i lo llic l(>I(■^oill^; disoussiou to inchulr an iimilysis ol the iiiili\ i(lii;il ciilicism of Wilson, Scott, LocUhart. ntui (iilVoid. l'"or Wilson sec .Saiiitsliury's I'ssnys in l.itrtotutf. first scries, *70 ,l".l' t.nlvio lliouK.lil Wilson ;i "l;if liif.'.f,cr iiMii " 111. in lolTiry (l\Cin.. I, 7y). lull w.iiiliUK iIh- "tiiilr;il yjW." I'oi Svoll sec Sit ll'iillrr Sn'tl us «i Critic of l.itrtiiliii,- hv l!;ill, i,i.| i.|(<. riu- iuillior ooiuhulcs " lli;il .Scott WHS on tlic wlioli' .111 imiMcssioiiislii- I'lilic." l'"or l.iu'kliart sci" I. nun's Lift', csprvially \o\. II. iliaplors XIX ami \X. 1 .aiiR says that Lockluirt "had Rrcat povvovs. iiuuli Kiiowlrdnc clear iilcas, a Rood opjiortinuly, but the 'Imp of the I'ci vi'i sc ' li;id di>minioii over liim." (iilTord is discussed in Saiiilhury's llisl. of Crit.. 111. j8o j8S. '* /'.vvii v\. 1. -i;;. (^n the Howies eontvovctsy. see also III. 71. 69 Tlu' rlVoil lo «-sl;iltlisli (•rilirisin iipdii ;i iii'w l(>iiii(I:il ion, by illvi'Sli};;ilin|;' (iisl priiuipKs, sticli ;is (lie ii:iliiir ol" "liiu- ])Oc'lrv," was icprcsiiilcd in I'.njMaiid rliiclly 1>\ loni" naim-s, alrcatlv mentioned in the eail\' pari ol lliis elia])lei-, VVoi'ds- worlli, ( oleiidLH', lla/lill and I .anih. VVIiiK' il is impossible to point ont instances ii (>r Uicsc crilii's is JMinili.ii. I'or Wnrdswiii Mi hvc h'fin., II, J>)7 .|()<; : for CoIcridKO, hcsldos (In- r\y.U\\\ cli.ipli r in SlrrliHu. see I'voiiilr, I, i7<), aoS, 214, 23K ; ILisayx. II, iH.i; lli-nns, H.\ : lor ILi/lill, Essays. IV, -:K ; l-'roudc, il, 1 '><) ; Cmn-s. -.■cilli limrrsou, I. .|^, ; NoU- liooh-s, :ji,t: for Lamb, i'rDiidf, II, 17(1; Koii., I, Ibid., I, 18s. 74 tions of its phases in ever)'' other."^ Frequent parallels are drawn between Germany and England : the Utzes, Gellerts, Cramers, etc., of Germany rank with the Beatties, Logans, Wilkies and Glovers of England and Scotland. In such writers Carlylc professes to find '*' a certain clear, light, un- affected elegance, to the exclusion of all very deep or genial qualities."* Of a period earlier still he says that the Germans had " at best Opitzes, Flemmings, Logans, as we had our Queen Anne Wits; or, in their Lohensteins, Gryphs, Hoflf- mannswaldaus, though in inverse order, an unintentional parody of our Drydens and Lees."" His opinion even of some of the greatest of English writers of the eighteenth century is extreme. " Our English poet of the period was Goldsmith," he says ; " a pure, clear, genuine spirit, had he been of depth or strength sufficient."^" The poetry of Gray he calls a " laborious mosaic " in which life, feeling, freedom, are sacri- ficed to pomp and splendor. The prose of Johnson, though true and sound and practical, does not rise above a " prosaic " world." Even Burke is " a resplendent far-sighted Rhetori- cian rather than a deep sure Thinker."^- Gathered from various parts of the critical essays, these views point to a uniform attitude of mind. The literature of the eighteenth century everywhere was to Carlyle finished, correct and ad- mirably expressive of taste ; but it was likewise cold, conven- tional and shallow, dwelling remote from "the actual passions, the hopes, sorrows, joys of living men."^** Because, like the Schlegels or like Wordsworth in their several ways, he sought to liberate literature from this bondage of neo-classicism, Carlyle is always to be regarded as a romanticist.^^ In the second place Carlyle is to be classed as a member of the new school in so far as romanticism may be identified with 'Ibid., I, 57. 'Ibid.. Ill, 228. ''Ibid.. 42. ^^ Ibid., I, 185; cf. I, 42; n, 27. '^ Ibid., I, 185-6: cf. II, 26-27; VI, 52; Life of Schiller, loi. ''Ibid., IV, 119. '''Ibid.. I, 185. " In view of hostile attitude alike in Germany and England at this period toward French literature, it does not seem necessary to dwell on Carlyle's individual opinions (see Essays, II, 167-170). 75 metaphysical, as distinguished from medieval, mysticism. With a mysticism that spent itself in longings for a new Catholicism or dwelt apart in a misty dream-world of fairies and hobgoblins, he had nothing to do. But if we take mysti- cism in the sense of " natural supernaturalism," as it undoubt- edly was taken by many writers, we shall find that Carlyle was a devout worshipper at its shrine. His analysis of German mysticism, both in the essay on the State of German Literature and in that on Novalis, shows that to him it was identical with German metaphysics. " The chief mystics in Germany," he says, " are the Transcendental Philosophers, Kant, Fichte and Schelling."^-"' With these thinkers, Carlyle, in so far as he was philosophically minded, was allied from the very first, by nature and by study; and to the end of his life he did not cease to have many moments when the world seemed to him a place of shadows, an abode of flitting phantoms whose real existence belonged to another sphere. To think and to feel in this manner was to unite himself with the new order of thought, not with the old. Carlyle is romanticist again in his attitude toward the past. His position, however, is independent. He turned frequently and regretfully to the past, more and more indeed as his own age seemed to him mechanical and spiritually dead ;^'' but this backward glance was not because he wished to revive the forms and customs, the external life, of a bygone age, nor was it because he thought his own time potentially unromantic. "The Age of Romance," he says, ''has not ceased; it never ceases." " Romance exists in Reality alone. "^^ His own time, however, seemed to him to reveal only few and fitful glimpses of such romance, and he therefore reverted to the past as the only home of actualities, the realm where real men were to be found whose lives, large and heroic, might serve as patterns to a generation of sentimentalists and skeptics. It is for this reason alone that he praises the novels of Scott ; they make the past seem alive. Carlyle in fact does not wish to take his reader out of the present so much as to incite him to « Ibid.. I, 62. " Cf. Ibid., IV, 26 ; Past and Present is a document to show this spirit. "Ibid., V, 131, 136. ^ 4 76 " wed that old sentiment," of the past " to modern thoughts."^^ His romanticism in this regard, therefore, may be described as didactic-biographical, — certainty quite a different thing from the extreme romanticism of some of the German School.^" Finally Carlyle is a romanticist in his rejection of form as an external and fixed thing, determined by rules. As this ,\ matter has already been touched in the second chapter, only a brief mention is necessary here. The fullest declaration of the freedom of an artist to choose his own way occurs in the first Richtcr, where Carlyle asserts that while the "beaten paths of literature lead safeliest to the goal," genius after all has privi- leges of its own and selects its own orbit, which may be never so eccentric, if only it be celestial.-" A stronger statement to the same effect occurs in the Helena: "if an artist," he says, "has conceived his subject in the secret shrine of his own mind, and knows, with a knowledge beyond all power of cavil, that it is true and pure, he may choose his own manner of exhibiting it, and will generally be the fittest to choose it well."-^ Carlyle imposes one condition upon the literary artist — he must have a meaning to express, he must lend to his words the leaven of thought. And thus Carlyle's romanticism swings round to his literary theory. The writer's sole business is to see truth, fact, reality, whether in the past ^ or in the present, and he is not to be fettered in his efforts by any arbitrary standards whatsoever. Inasmuch as the literary man of the eighteenth century did not take to his task in this spirit and with this aim, he found little favor from Carlyle.-- In order to understand more clearly how it is that Carlyle, though a romanticist himself, is to be found in out and out opposition to so much that is characteristically romantic in German, French and English literature, it may be well to "/bu/., I, 242. " Professor Beers points out that Carlyle preferred the collectivism of the past to the individualism of the present. Romanticism in the Nine- teenth Century, 382. '"Essays, I, 16-17. -'Ibid., I, 128. ^ See Herford, Age of IVords^corth, XXIII, e. g., "Goethe founded that historical or relative jesthetic which measures the merit of a work of art not by its regularity but by its power of expression." 77 glance again at his position toward Goethe, who stood for him at all times both in literature and life as a " completed man."=^ Goethe is the embodiment of all the ideals which determined the attitude of Carlyle, whose interpretation of the German poet is largely that of a mind that has lived through the fever of doubt and discontent in all its stages and has come forth in "invulnerable health."-'' Regret for the past and despair of the present, as expressed in Gotz and Wertcr, finally give place to " freedom, belief and clear activity," as expressed in Wil- helm Mcistcr.'^ Goethe's mind in these struggles is typical, emblematic. He has passed from diseases common to im- mature, incompleted, or unhealthy minds, to a condition of mental equilibrium. He lives " in the whole " ;-" he is " king of himself and of his world.""'^ Hence he becomes " the Uniter, the Reconciler."^® Goethe's intellect lives and works now within the actual, his ideal rests " on the firm ground of human interest and business, as in its true scene, on its true basis."-" In the poetry of Goethe, says Carlyle, there is " no looking back into an antique Fairyland " ; the " mythologies of bygone days pass only for what they are ; we have no witch- craft or magic in the common acceptation"; and heroes are not brought from remote oriental climates, or periods of chivalry.-'" With Heine, Carlyle believed that Goethe's voice scattered the whole brood of ghosts, owls and ravens back to the castles and old bell-towers of the middle ages.^^ What Goethe has to say is valuable therefore for present-day life, a health-restoring medicine for the fevered condition of romantic Europe.^- The romanticism that Carlyle sets his face against is in every instance a romanticism that upholds ideals contrary to "^ Essays, IV, 49. ^ Ibid., IV, 175. -*Ibid., IV, 172. "^Ibid., I, 19s. "-^Ibid., I, 210. *»/btrf., I, 55. ^Ibid., IV, 50. '^Werke, V, 246, "" Ibid., I, 279. " Of course I do not mean to imply that Goethe's position toward ro- manticism is identical with Carlyle's. I mean only to say that Carlyle found in Goethe justification for his own opposition. See Bielschowsky, Life of Goethe, III, 143 ff. 78 those to be found in ll'illichii Mclstcr, or in tlio writini^s of Goethe's maturity. But though he dcrivod support and (hrec- tion from Goethe, his attitude was independent because it was temperamental, as is evidenced not only in one or two notable opinions in the early letters, but in the entire literary develop- ment of Carlyle as described in our first chapter. The early evidence comes out in connection with two men who stand as prophets or forerunners of the romantic movement in France, Rousseau and Chateaubriand. In 1819 Carlyle expresses dis- gust with Rousseau's Confessions and declares that the book "should teaeli a virtuous I'.riton to be content with the dull sobriety of his native country. •'•' Three years later he speaks of "the nonsense of .Itala" and of "the rude, melancholy vaslness oi that famous work."''' These early opinions, it may be added, are likewise fairly typical of all that Carlyle had to say of the movement in France. He did not much concern himself with b'^rench thoui^ht and literature, until he took up \'ollaire. when his interest led him into the field of history rallier than of literature, and expressed itself in the Diderot, the PiaDiond M ccklacc, the Mirabcan, and finally in the great I'vciich Revolution. Before the period of the essay on Vol- taire (1829), there is little to indicate more than a diffused ami conventional hostility to the literary and critical standards of b^rance — a hostility in which are heard echoes of the Ger- mans and of Coleridge and Wordsworth. In the preface to Gcrtnan Romance, Carlyle alludes again to the " thundery regions of . I ta/a, '"■'■' and in the introduction to Tieeh there is a clear recognition of literary atTairs in France.-'" In the J\}1- tairc wdiich appeared two years after Hugo's Croniiu'ell (1827) and a year before his Ilernani (1830). Carlyle expresses some sympathy with the literary revolution then proceeding on the other side of the channel. The French are, he says, " in what may be called the eclectic state ; trying all things, German. English. Italian. Spanish, witli a candour and real love of im- provement, which give the best omens of a still higher suc- ^E. Letters, 11 J. "//'i',/.. I, 229. "ifci(/., 215. '"//)!(/., I, 246. 79 cess."^' The interest here is friendly and not hostile, for Carlvle thinks that JM-anoe now " feels herself ealled to a more grave antl nohler destiny "' than she had shown in the previous ae-e. the aee of \\)ltaire and the classicists. But the interest is already late, and Carlyle is drifting from criticism into prophecy. From what we know of his opinion of German and English romanticists, however, we run no risk in affirming that had he discussed Victor Hugo or George Sand, he would have condenuied them and the spirit which they represented as heartily as he condenuied Byronism in England.'"* His few later references to Chateaubriand and Rousseau show that his attitude toward these men remained what it had been. Sartor RcsartKs may indeed be taken in one aspect as an indignant refutation of Rousseauism, a declaration that society will cast ofi* its old customs only to assume new ones.^*^ In the thought of these revolutionary writers Carlyle, early and late, pro- fesses to find a rosepink sentimentality, and he turns from them just as he turns from the romanticists in Germany and England. Toward the romantic movement in Germany his position is more clearly defined. Tiie literature of the storm and stress period excited his aversion, and he would gladly have swept it all into the dust-heap of oblivion. It was created and represented, he thought, by the Got;:: and JJ'crtcr of Goethe, and the Robbers of Schiller. It included " the Sentimentalists, the Chivalry-play writers, and the Power-man," and w^as a literature of desperation and disease.*** With the new school as a separate and organized movement, of which Tieck and the Schlegels w^ere high priests, Carlyle had a curious, and in some respects a sympathetic interest ; and he was w^ell aware of its various manifestations in the literature of the period.''^ He wrote essays on two members of the school, Werner and Novalis, he wrote introductions to the romance of Tieck, Hoffmann and Fouque, and he discussed in a full-length paper ^nbid., II, I/O, ^^Froiidc, III, i77- ^Sartor, 40. See also Essays, VI, 54; V, 28; Heroes, 172-173. *»Cf. Essays, I, 58, 183, 189, 273; IV, 169. "Cf. Ibid., I, 46, 1 01, 246. 80 the Nibelungen Lied, the medieval poem perhaps most lauded by the romanticists. He asserts that the principles of the new school were derived from the transcendental system ;*^ and in so far as they were he of course finds them nourishing. From this philosophy the romanticists drew their fundamental doctrine of the identity of poetry and life — a doctrine upon which Carlyle's own poetic creed is erected. Poetry, said they, is an expression of the spirit of man wherever it may be found, in ethics, religion, politics, education. All human in- terests culminate in poetry, and a writer's literary creed must be broad enough to take in man's social relations.** Inter- preted liberally, this belief commanded Carlyle's support, but his application of it to actual social conditions was widely different. In fact Carlyle did not follow the movement beyond the sphere of philosophical principles. His introductions to Tieck, Hoffmann and Fouque show an indifference to their work, or at most a very lukewarm interest in it.** Though these writers belonged to the new school, Carlyle does not attempt to relate them to it, and there is confessedly something second-hand in many of his judgments upon their books. He has not read Tieck's William Lovell, a production highly typical of certain tendencies, nor does he even mention such out and out ro- manticists as Brentano or von Arnim. He is interested in Friedrich Schlegel not as the author of Lucinde, another book steeped in romantic extravagances and not mentioned by Carlyle, but as the interpreter of transcendentalism and as in some sense a religious mystic.*^ As for Werner, Carlyle con- fesses that he seeks " chiefly for his religious creed,"**' and looks for some glimmering of truth through the confused jungle of Werner's writings.*^ We cannot think of Carlyle as ^ Ibid., I, 44, 246. "See Brandes, Main Currents, II, 68; Beers, XIX Century, 135. ** Essays, I, 242-3, 249, 261-2. *® Characteristics was in part inspired by Schlegel's Philosophische Vor- lesungen; see Essays, IV, 28, 31. ^^ Ibid., I, 88. " The Catholic tendencies of Werner, of the younger Stalberg and F. Schlegel, Carlyle nowhere sympathizes with, but he rather lamely tries to explain them; see Essays, e. g., I, 123; also I, 31, loi, 118. 81 sympathizing with the excesses into which the younger roman- ticists descended. He who speaks of the dissolute Hfe, the "Asiatic reverie"*^ of Werner, and of the jack o'lantern per- sonages in his dramas ;'*® he who in spite of his Hking for the metaphysical mysticism of Novalis, can yet speak of that typical young romantic dreamer as passive, as coming before us " in a sort of Asiatic character,"^*' would be little likely to find pleasure in the wilder flights of these and other members of the school. What in Novalis and Hoffmann was Rosen- schein and Purpurglut to Heine^^ would be charmed moon- shine and rosepink bedizenment to Carlyle. It was not in him to share in the desire of the romanticists to hold a festival of the senses, to play fast and loose with the ego, or to disin- tegrate the spiritual self into a hundred fantastic or grotesque shapes. Carlyle held fast to the unity of the higher self. His romanticism kept to the deeper channels of thought and was not drawn into the eddies of psychology or the muddy flats of pathology, as much of the German romanticism came to be. How strictly Carlyle's interest is limited to the interpretative side of romanticism is shown in his treatment of Goethe's Helena and Mdhrchen, Werner's dramas, and the Nibcluiigeii Lied, in one and all of which, though romantic in different ways, he looks for " meanings.""- Perhaps his attitude is no- where more strikingly displayed than in his contrasted handling of the Heldenbuch and the Lied. The first, Carlyle calls a shaggy wilderness and enchanted wood where haunt " a chaotic brood of Fire-drakes, Giants, and malicious turbaned Turks."^^ The Lied itself, which Heine says was once all the talk of the romantic school,^* is a " fair garden of poesy," a " free field open for legitimate perennial interests," in which the marvels are few and there is " a real, rounded, habitable Earth."^' *'Ibid., I, 123. ^Ihid., II, 227. ** Ibid., I, 109. "Heine, Werke, V, 302. ^^ Essays, I, 98, 128; III, 129; IV, 222. With the symbolism of Werner Carlyle has no sympathy (I, 109). With that of Goethe he has what I should call but a feeble sympathy. Cf. I, 171, 225. Though a symbolist himself in the transcendental sense, he was generally averse to literary symbolism. ^ Werke, V, 315. "Ibid., Ill, 127-129. ^^ Essays, III, 129-130. 82 I Tli;i( is (i) say, in so far as rinuanticism socks io hriiis;- the iilcal clown to the actual, not to lift the actual \u{o a lunar world of fantasy and t;rotosciucry. Carlyle will be found in hearty agree- ment with it, for then its mission corresponds exactly with his idea i'>i the mission o\ all literature. The romantic movement in I'jii^land was nearer to Carlyle, it \ was ereati\'e rather than interpretative, it steei-ctl clear of tran- scendentalism, and it did not. except inelTectually in Words- worth and .Shelley, attempt to relate itself as a constructive*^" force [o life and sin-ietN. I'or all these reasons as well as for reasons o\ temperament, Carlyle took a far more iletermined stand a.^ainst Kui^lish romanticism than he did against Ger- man, llis position is showti in scattered remarks upon nearly all ot (he chiet acti>rs in the new drama, hut it is most evident in what he has to say oi Scott and r)\ron. wlu^se works he freqnentl\' refers to as the leading proihuis of the " Moss- trooper and Satanic Schools."'"' Ne\t to (loethe and r>urns, r^ron. as has been saiil, was the poet who most drew the attention of Carlyle. lie is referred to again and again in the Jissays. and his brilliant and wayward career is the \vearisomel\ iterated text I'or a lUveu sermons. Carlyle was fascinated by r>yron's genius, h^xnule quotes an extract ivoiw a letter to Miss Welsh, in which Carlyle laments in a highly emotional strain the death of the poet and speaks (vf him as the "noblest spirit in haux^pe," who had sunk before his course was half run.'' .\ few years later (iS^^o) he writes to Napiei'. then editor of the luiinbiiriih Ixi^i'icw, otYering an essay on r>yron as soon as Moore's second vohuue of the Life shouUl appear. Carlyle urges the matter again after two years, but Napier, fearful of what Carlyle might say, turned the subject over to Macaulay.""' Thongh we have lost what probably wmdtl have been a notable contribution to the stud\' oi P.yron and certainly a l"arl\le document oi extreme interest, we can be pretty certain from numerous incitlental opinions what directicMi the proposed review would have taken.'*"'' Some ""7;-h/.. l\'. 160. ^'FroiuU'. I. 173. ^^SheClicrd, I, 74-75, 104. '"'In his second letter to N;ipioi-. Carlyle says of l>yron : " tlis fame has liceti very ,i;reat, l>ut 1 see not liow it is to endiue : neither does that of the (ipiiiioiis in tlu' earlier essays testily to an interest tem- pered with s\nipalli\. In the introihietion to 'Tieek. C'arlyle sa)s thai "our own nohle anil hapless ilyron perished from anioiii;' us at the instant wlien his dehveranee seemed at liatid.""" In the niirns \\c asserts that " r>\ ron has a poet's soul, and strives towards the Inrmite and the Ivternal."'" Such favor- able comments are all alike in one r(.\spect they express C'ar- hle's judi^nient that Hyron's life was ineomiWete and that he died before he could solve the eniL^nia of existence as it was solved by (u)ethe in W'ilhchii Mcislcr. Unlike Schiller and Goethe. I'.yron did not survive his storm and stress period, but perished while passing;' through it."- That he was des- tined to C(Mi(iner hiniself and his world. C'arlyle seems to have had no doubt; as is ])roved b\ his tre(|uent praise n\ jiyron's poetical endowment and by his sii;nilicant critical remark on the last of Hyron's poems, Hon Jiiaii, of which he says thai it is, especially the latter part of it, perhaps " the only thint:^ approach ins;- to a siiiciTc w(»rk. he ever wrote."'' i''xcept (loc- thc, Hyrou was the only one of his contemporaries of whom Carlyle s]ioke with so nuicli favor. r>ut while be was deeply moved by the tra,i;ed\- in lUron's life and work, and rellecled reL;'ret fully upon what the poet niij^i'ht have accomplished. C'arlyle's opinion of his poetr\-, of Ryrouism that is, rarely varied from what he wrote as early as iSji in a review of Joanna Uaillie's Metrical l.ri^nids. Though he does ni>t there mention the poet by name, he unmis- takably refers to Byronism in such phrases as ruffiaus, oriental g'orjicousness, diseased melanchoK. frenzies of despair, etc. — all manifestations of the Urilish Werter. Later opinions are more extreme, and sometimes violent, but to the last they in- dicate that r>yron was the prototype of those l'aii;lisb senti- inakc him i;''^"'''. No i;i'iiiiiiK" productive llmunlit w.ts ever reve.iled l)y liiiu to niankiiul ; iiulecil. no clear iiiulistorted vision into anytliinj^;. or picture of anytliing ; l)ut all had a certain falsehood, a l)rawling, theatrical, insincere character." ""//))■v was the main singer.""" Inevitahl)' the man who i-arrii-d the " readi-r hack to roui^h strong- times, wherein those maladies of otus had not yet arisen," was hailed with warm wi,-Ict>me and hccamr the " sonj^-siuj^er and pleasant tale-teller to r.ritain and l'"nroiH', in the hej^iiuiini,' of the artilicial nineteenth century.""^ I'.ut since "literature lias other aims than that of harndessly anuising indolent languid men," the sick heart of the a.i;e will lind no healint;- in the romances of Walter Scott, 1 le w ho has no messai^e to j^ive cannot be trusted to cure the fever of the soul.'"* JMtim Sc()tt, out and away kinj;- of the romantics, as Ste- venson named him, the transition is easy to the romantic drama and to lictiou in general ; for Carlyle ret;arded the Waverley "'Last Woidx. i-'S; lissays, \, iSy; 11, lo ii, --48; 111, js ; IV, 177; VI. S-\- •"CollrftiiHi-tt. 1)1 ; /:.v.vuth', III, 384. lastiiiK a glance at Keats, Carlyle says that "Johnson was no man to he killeil by a review" (Es- says, IV, 114). For Shelley see 1\', jS (also Uazlitt). and Kcni.. II, 293; for Coleridiie (C'arlyle every wlieie regards the later Coleridge not the author ol I'lir .liu-irnt Murim-r ai\d Cliristnlu-I), see Life of Schiller, 100; Stcrliiij:, eh. \' 1 1 1 ; lor Wordsworth see Life of Schiller, 153; Essays, 1, 181; l\eiit.. \'o\. 11, -'o; .!oi). Note the phrases, "poor, moaning, mon- otonous Maepherson" (Essays, III, 242); "slight bravura dash of the Jair tuneful Hemcns," "truthful severity of Crabbe's style" (Ibid., IV. io»). 85 Novels as only a Iuj^Iut s])cTic-s of lln' wliolc {j^cmis callcf] litera- ture of aimisenienl. Mr did not rare for plays and lie raiely went to llu' (lieali-r. When he was Iranslatinjj^ IVi/liclm Mcislcr in iSj^^ he vvrole in dis^^iisl to a friend of the endless talk in lli.il hook abonl i)layers and their sorry ])asteboard ap- paralns ; and evc-n in his preface he did not shrink fioni icfer- rin<^' to the " I'verlaslinj^' discpiisilions ahonl pla\s and play- ers.""" In the same year he n-eords llial he eoiild not read a sinjjfle play of tlu- old dramatists — " Massin^er, lU-ainnont an) \2<)). " Bssays, II, 88. '■'Jhul., II, 118. '^ /hid., Ill, 2.1s ; ef. VI, 32. 86 and Shees " — are of the same sort, though their popularity is a little run out and they stand forlorn " like firs on an Irish bog."^* Carlyle would have been glad to banish romantic novels to a place more forlorn than an Irish bog, had it been in his power to do so. Their name was legion and their baleful in- fluence penetrated everywhere. To guide us to his position toward the fiction of his day and earlier, we have nothing better than a paragraph in the preface to German Romance. wherein the opinion is both early and characteristic. The novel is the work, he says, not of an artist but of a manufac- turer, and is therefore " among the simplest forms of composi- tion." Though there are a few novelists of high order, " a few Poets " among them, there are " whole legions and hosts of Poetasters," who in Germany and elsewhere have made the sentimental novel and the Gothic romance a " mountain of falsehood."'^'* Carlyle regards the novels of Goethe and Richter as the product of poets, and he excludes these from the condemna- tion he was so ready to bring down upon the rest. His opin- ions of their work in fiction are especially valuable as show- ing how he considers it hardly at all from the point of view of what we should call legitimate novel-interest — plot, charac- ters, situations — but for entirely different reasons. " The two Books named Novels," he says of the two parts of Wilhelm Meister, " come not under the Minerva-Press Category, nor the Ballantyne-Press Category."^" Not for their " romance interest," but for their philosophy, their literary criticism, their varied and deep thoughts on religion and life, are these celebrated German fictions esteemed." It is the same with Richter, except that in Richter Carlyle finds also a congenial humor which he describes with a good deal of minuteness. He does not like what in Jean Paul's day constituted the " novel interest " of these strange pieces, their oriental extravagance, their fantastic exaggeration, overflowing abundance and lyrical 'Ubid., II, 86. '° Ibid., I, 229. The separate introductions, especially to Tieck, Fouque and Hoffmann, reveal no liking for their fiction. Cf. I, 32. '"Ibid., I, 286; cf. I, 198. "^ Ibid., I, 225, 226, 284. 87 diffuseness; but he likes the Hfe in them, their never-omitted meaning.''* < Carlyle's firm and unchanging insistence upon reahsm in art''° explains his faint and his sometimes less than faint sym- pathy with two English novelists of the eighteenth century, Fielding and Sterne, to whom we may turn for a moment in passing on to the romantic fiction of the next century. Field- ing's Tom Jones seems to have stood to him as the highest type of what he calls " our common English notion of the Novel. "^"^ Sterne he places higher than Fielding, if we may judge from the more frequent and more favorable notices of him. The humor in Tristram Shandy awoke answering echoes in Carlyle's nature and he warmed to Uncle Toby and the other members of that eccentric family." It was the English romantic fiction of a later day that came under Carlyle's censure, a censure sometimes ironical, often savage, but always vigorous and earnest. He divides all fic- tion of this type into three or four groups, whose names recur often in his criticism — the Minerva, the Ballantyne and the Col- burn novels (so called from the name or proprietor of the press), and the fashionable novels. Lowest in their kind were the works of the Gothic school, those of Mrs. Radcliffe, Mrs. Shelley, Monk Lewis and Beckford, together with Tom and Jerry, a dramatized version of Pierce Egan's popular cockney production.**- A little less low, perhaps, were the fashionable novels, of which Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826) and Bulwer's Pelham (1828) were the most shining and popular examples. These fictions were all the rage when Carlyle was writing Sar- tor, and he unmistakably refers to them as the sacred books of ''Ubid., I, 267, 265; cf. II, 183-4. '"'Ibid., IV, 58. ^ Ibid., I, 231. It is in this sense that the word novel is applied to Richter. For Fielding, further, see I, 229, 284 ; IV, 58. ^^ Ibid., I, 15, 237, 266; II, 20, 167. Cervantes was a favorite of Car- lyle's; he calls him "the purest of all humorists" (I, 15). Rabelais he does not appear to have liked (I, 261) ; Montaigne he did (I, 15). Rich- ardson he considers sentimental, and he dismisses Goldsmith with a casual comment or two (I, 22^, 42, 185 ; see also on Richardson and Defoe, II, 17). '"Ibid., I, 32, 261; II, 12-13; III, 6s, 242; VI, 70. V' 88 dandies who haunt Ahnacks, a " Jewish temple " where the Icadin^c;- prcaclu-r and teacher Pclham holds forth. '^^ Still liif^iKT up, but not entering the ranks of literature, were the Waverley Novels. Hut even Soolt, when he attempts the heroic, " which is but seldom the case, falls almost at once, into the r()se-])ink sentimental — descries the Minerva Press from afar.""' ( )u all sides Carlyle regards the novelists of his day as dealing- with sham and unreality, and he deliberately brands their work as false. In his essay on Biography he says signifi- cantly that the " highest exercise of Invention has, in very deed, nothing to do with h'^iction ; but is an invention of new Truth, what we can call a Revelation."**" With invention in the sense used in iniaginalive fiction Carlyle has next to no interest, whether we take his work of 1823, when he was translating IVillu'hn Mcisicr, or of 1837, when unhappily he was criticising the novels of wScott. It matters not wliere we look into the writings of Carlyle, his fundamental attitude remains fixed. Our survey of the field oi romantic literature so far as it was explored by him — and he knew pretty clearly what was going forward in Ger- many, I'^rance and F.ngland — shows that he searched his field, as he searched all others, for some traces of transcendental truth, and that where he found none he regarded the territory as barren or nearly so. 'fhe earliest and most extreme mani- festations of romanticism, whether the oriental reveries of Werner and Novalis, the operatic sentimentalities of Rousseau, or the spectral and bloody business of the (lothic novels, Car- lyle never spoke of but to ridicule or condcnui ; and liyronism first and last rousetl him to something like invective. Hut when roiuanticism in its later stages developed in the direction of realism, and shook off some of the earlier extravagances, he expressed now and again a feeling of sympathy. For Carlyle was, as he himself says in Sterling;, a stubborn realist.^" We have seen that he foimd some merit in the great realists of the "^Sartor, 192-,^. Sec also Essays, 1, 184; II, 126; IV, 63, 163. Carlyle once proposed to Napier to write " a sort of sally on Fashional)lc Novels." Shepherd, 1, 80. "* Ibid., VI, 70. ""Ibid.. IV, 50. ""Life of Sterling. i8o. 89 eighteenth century, and wc may contrast if we will his opinions of Schiller's early and later dramas.**'^ He believed that IJyron at the time of his death was emerging from Byronism, and he referred to the sincerity of Don Juan. Almost his only word of praise for Scott was that Scott made the past seem a reality and not merely a place for lay figures dressed in antiquated clothes. Let literature show some glimmer of truth, and Car- lyle finds in it something to praise ; let it dally never so little with what he regards as sham or falsehood and he is swift to pronounce his sentence of blame. "Life of Schiller, c. g., 19 and 153. CHAPTER V Carlyle's Place in the Introduction of German Litera- ture Into England Before considering certain of Carlyle' essays as illustrations of the application of his ideals to individual writers, it will be necessary to take some preliminary notice of his position as an introducer of German literature into England. If we even faintly appreciate the ignorance, not to say the stupid prejudice, of the English mind toward German literature for the first quarter of the century, and if we remind ourselves of the great and almost unaided efforts of Carlyle for nearly fifteen years thereafter to break down prejudice and leave no excuse for ignorance, we shall understand how incomplete the present study would be without some consideration of his place among the English pioneers who made the names of Schiller and Goethe known to their countrymen. Beyond a doubt Carlyle was the first really great interpreter of German thought to the English people. Out of thirty-four separate titles in the critical essays dow^n to 1839 (that is, to Chartism), half are upon German subjects : and to these must be added not only several articles now figuring as appendices, but also the Life of Schiller, the translation of Wilhelm Meister and of speci- mens of German Romance. Much of this work was done in spite of criticism so sneering as to dismay a purpose weaker than Carlyle's. Pie was called a German mystic, and was laughed at for worshipping strange divinities from over the seas. And yet he went on writing German reviews, partly of course because he made a living in that way, but partly because he was determined to prove to his readers that a new literature had grown up, so great, so life-giving, that they could not afford to remain in ignorance of it. Plow much the England of his and a later day owes to his literary labors in this field 90 91 will become clearer if we glance at the situation as it was be- fore Carlyle's influence began to tell. Up to the time of William Taylor of Norwich, German lit- erature was little better than unknown in Great Britain. A few translations had appeared, most of them from lesser writ- ers and many in mutilated versions from the French, but these failed to awaken a deep or permanent interest. Brandl speaks 1 : { Gcssner's Idyls as the " first offspring of the German muse which, under the Royal House of Hanover, found a welcome in England."^ At the same time (1762) there appeared the Death of Abel by the same author, followed a year later by a translation of Klopstock's Messiah and Death of Adam. Bod- ner's Noachide belongs to 1767, and there were versions of Wieland in 1771 and 1773. The latter year saw also a transla- tion of Lessing's Fables, which was succeeded in 1781 by a prose version of Nathan and in 1786 by a production of his Minna von Barnhehn on the London stage as the Disbanded Officer. Lessing won no popularity however before 1800. In 1779 came the first English translation of Wcrter from the French. This novel was twice translated during the next ten years, and between 1784 and 1792 no fewer than nine con- tinuations and paraphases were published.- More than ten years elapsed before Schiller became much known, and by this time the influence of William Taylor and others was beginning to be felt.^ ^ Life of Coleridge, 123. ' Herzf eld, William Taylor von Norwich, 11. ^ Taylor refers to an English translation of the Robbers, " executed, it is believed, by H. Mackenzie, Esq., of Edinburgh " ; and he quotes from "the original edition of 1781 " (^Historic Survey, III, 174). I can find no mention of such a translation by Mackenzie, who certainly did not know German in 1781, and probably not even in 1788 (see Diet. Nat. Biog., Vol. XXXV, 151). Lockhart speaks of the services to German of Alexander Eraser Tytler, " His version of Schiller's Robbers," says Lockhart, " was one of the earliest from the German theatre " (Life of Scott, I, 234, ed. Boston, 1861). It is possible that Taylor has mistaken Mackenzie for Tytler, though I have not been able to verify Lockhart's statement. In 179s came Schiller's Cabal and Love, in 1798 his Don Carlos, and in 1800 his Wallenstein (by Coleridge). 92 Taylor deserves the distinction of being the first man in England to awaken any interest in modern German literature. His critical ability was slightly above mediocre but he exerted an important influence upon some of his contemporaries, whose united efforts contributed not a little to open the way for Car- lyle. Taylor spent the summer of 1782 in Germany, visited Weimar (though it is uncertain whether he saw Goethe), gained a sound knowledge of the language of Germany and came back with a love for its literature that continued through life. It was his unpublished translation of Burger's Lenore which stirred Scott's interest in German ballads of the diablerie kind ; and which, when published in 1796, played so interest- ing a part in early romanticism. In 1791, Taylor's versified version of Lessing's Nathan appeared, and two years later his Iphigenie, the first translation of Goethe's classical drama into English — which as late as 1828 Crabb Robinson regarded as the best English version of Goethe's longer poems.* For more than five and twenty years Taylor was a contributor to the Monthly Magazine and Monthly Reviezv, writing some hundred and thirty articles of all sorts. Many of these were transla- tions from the German and were subsequently collected in the Historic Survey. For a considerable period after 181 1, Tay- lor's interest in German literature lulled somewhat, though he was now recognized even by the Edinburgh Reviezv as the " head of all our translators " from the German.® In 1830 he published his Historic Survey of German Poetry in three volumes, a work which his friends had long urged him to produce and which remains a record of his contribution to the spread of German literature in England. The Survey has a unique interest, for it is the most important representative of English opinions on German literature prior to Carlyle. Tay- lor's literary judgments rarely rise out of the commonplace and they are sometimes absurdly erroneous, as in the case of Kotze- bue, whose popularity in Europe, however, about 1800, was so dazzling as to blind nearly every critic to his faults. To Kotze- bue Taylor devotes almost as many pages as to Goethe, and he gives more to Wieland than to both together. In order to taste "■ Diary, II, 53. ^ Ed. Reviezv, VIII, 154. 93 his quality and to understand what PhiHstine opinion it was that Carlyle tried to break down, we may call attention to one or two of Taylor's comments concerning the work of Goethe. Of Faust he says: " Though not the best work of Goethe, it is the most singular, fantastic and impressive. The pious complain of its profaneness, the modest of its obscenity, the virtuous of its moral indifference, and the studious of its contemptuous satires on learning and acquirement : yet all allow that it has attraction and significance; that it displays a deep insight into the causes and motives of human conduct; and that, in the midst of its farcical marvels, it preserves a naturalness of delineation, which gives even to the impossible a certain impression of reality. Everyone forbids it to be read, yet each in his turn reads it."" Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship he calls a " tedious planless novel," and Meister's ''Peregrinations," he says, shows a " senile garrulity,"^ phrases which seem also to reflect the judg- ment of a day much later than Taylor's. Among those whom Taylor's zeal inspired to study the ^Survey, III, 323. '' Ihid., 348, 362. Taylor was probably administering an antidote to what seemed to him the infatuated eulogy of Carlyle, who is alluded to farther on : " The more recent works of Goethe have been surveyed with copious elegance, and exuberance of detail, by a contributor to the early numbers of the Foreign Revietv. To me they do not appear to merit so unqualified a panegyric, such lofty praise, as is there given " {Ibid., 378). The influence of Monk Lewis and Scott deserves mention. The services of Lewis are limited to his tales of wonder and terror and to a few plays and romances adopted or translated from the German. He visited ■ Weimer in 1792 and was introduced to Goethe. For a time he was a most important stimulator of the great vogue of German ghost, robber, and knight-romances and tales, but his place in the promotion of the higher class of German literature does not appear to be significant. He must have exercised some influence, however, in a personal way, as for example in his reading Faust to Byron. Scott's relations to Germany are well- known and of more account perhaps than those of Lewis. But even Scott can scarcely take rank among the enthusiastic students of German. His translation of Goethe's Gotz is referred to by Taylor "as admirably translated into English in i799 at Edinburgh by William Scott advocate," etc. {Survey, HI, 243). Aside from his ballad translations and that of Gots, his relation to German literature is to be found mainly in some few traces in his novels,— T/te Monastery, Kenikvorth, Ivanhoe, Peveril of the Peak for examples— and not in any work of a critical character, except an article on Hoffmann in the Quarterly Reviezv for July, 1827 (see Ball, Scott as a Critic of Literature, 104-5). 94 higher German Hterature was Henry Crabb Robinson, a name to be remembered for its place among the early ad- mirers of Schiller and Goethe. In 1798 Robinson records that "the most eventful occurrence of the year was an introduction to William Taylor of Norwich, who encouraged me in a grow- ing taste for German literature."^ Two years later he made his first trip to Germany, where he remained five years, study- ing at Jena and enjoying there and elsewhere contact with cultivated Germans. He was much at Weimer during its most flourishing peroid and saw Goethe, Schiller, Wieland and Kotzebue. He heard Wallenstein's Death at the Weimer theatre and apparently was favored with many opportunities to view the intellectual circle at close range. While at Weimer during this first visit, Robinson became a contributor to the Monthly Register. " The subjects on which I wrote," he says, "were German literature, the philosophy of Kant, etc. I also gave many translations from Goethe, Schiller and others, in order to exemplify the German theory of versification." But for the most part " I unaffectedly declare that they attracted no notice, and did not deserve any."" It was not indeed what he wrote but what he talked that made Robinson's influence im- portant in the introduction of German thought to England. No other Englishman of his time could boast of so much acquaintance with the higher literary circles of Germany. He made in all six visits, upon the third of which in 1829 he spent five evenings with Goethe.^" He met Tieck and later A. W. Schlegcl, when they were in London. He was there- fore solidly equipped to talk on German subjects, and he did so most assiduously for many years, if we may judge from the conversations on Schiller, Goethe and others recorded in his Diary. English opinion, as he seems to have encountered it, was almost uniformly hostile, and it was not until well into the thirties, that is to say when Carlyle's essays were beginning to be read, that Robinson began to find the old prejudice giving way. His recorded talks with Coleridge, for example, show Coleridge's rather habitual attitude of opposition, especially to * Diary, I, 24, " Ibid., 72. '" Goethe had previously sent Robinson two medals in testimony of his devotion to German literature. 95 Goethe. The general tenor is suggested in a single instance: Coleridge conceded to Goethe, says Robinson, " universal talent, but felt a moral life to be the defect of his poetry."" Coleridge might have done for German literature what Carlyle did later. He possessed the genius and the equipment. In 1797 he had begun to learn German and a year later he made his trip to Germany with the Wordsworths. There he plunged into Lessing's works, first for theological purposes, and read him through, and very soon proposed to translate him into English.^^ But most of Coleridge's plans ended in talk, except his splendid translations of Schiller's Piccolomini and Wallensteins Death, which, though neglected by the many, showed to the few what he was capable of doing for German literature in England. His activities in literature soon gave way to a wide wandering in the fields of German philosophy, and for the last twenty-five years of his life he was not an influence favorable to Schiller and Goethe. At no time in fact was he an influence at all commensurate with his genius and knowledge. Besides Coleridge there was another man who possessed genius and had considerable knowledge of German, De Quincey. Two papers by him on Lessing's Laocoon, and another on Kant appeared in Blackwood's in 1826 and 1827. But he first announced himself as a student and critic of German writers in the pages of the London Magazine, in which in 1821 he published an essay on Richter and some " analects." In 1823 he brought out a short paper on Herder, and more " analects " from Richter. De Quincey has undis- puted claim to the title of introducer of Richter to the English public, his first paper antedating Carlyle's by six years. But whoever wishes to test at first hand the superiority of Carlyle over De Quincey as an interpreter of Jean Paul should compare the solid, orderly opinions of the one with the jumbled, capri- cious opinions of the other. De Quincey and Coleridge were the two men, it should seem, who ought to have done more than any others before Carlyle to win a secure place for Ger- man literature in England. But Coleridge's plans and promises evaporated in talk, and De Quincey's brilliant detached efforts were not backed by the requisite firmness of mind. It is ^^ Ibid., 160. ^- Brandl, 239-249. 96 doubtful, therefore, if the actual contemporary influence of these writers among cultivated people was anything like so great as that of Taylor and Robinson. ^^ Nothing so well shows how difficult it was to make a gap in the "Chinese Wall of antiquated prejudices" which divided England from Germany as the attitude of the great periodicals. For the first thirty years of the century the review that held most aloof from German thought was the Edinburgh. If not actually hostile, it maintained a position of condescension, sup- ported by inexhaustible ignorance. In its pages appeared re- views of Madame de Stael's Germany, Schlegel's Lectures, Lord Gower's translation of Faust, Goethe's Dichtting und Wahrheit and Carlyle's translation of IVilhclm Meister. From its high place it looked down and sneered at the so-called exagger- ation, clumsiness, and barbarity of German writers, and it never failed to be shocked at that " monster in literature," Goethe's Faust}*^ The ignorance, the " blessed self complacence " and the "do haut en has" position of the Edinburgh was vigor- iously opposed by Blackwood's.^^ Lockhart's early connection with the review is the source of much of its friendliness to the Germans and to Goethe in particular. In 1817, the year of Blackzvood's inception, Lockhart made a tour to Germany, met Goethe, and returned with something like reverence for the best German literature.^^ In the early numbers of the maga- zine there are many traces of Lockhart's hand in translations from Schiller, Burger, Korner, Haller and Goethe, as well as in various critical remarks which not only show the young reviewer's liking for Faust, but also his fondness for picking a quarrel with the Edinburgh}'' Blackwood's did indeed do more by translations than by critical reviews to dispel English " Robinson's enthusiasm for the Germans was as coldly received by Lamb, Southey and Wordsworth as it was by Coleridge, Cf. Diary, II, 137; 79; Knight, Life of Wordsivorth, II, 324; Wordsworth's Prose Works, Gosart ed., Ill, 436. Shelley had doubtless little to do with the spread of German literature in England, but he was himself a reader of German works and was deeply moved by Faust. He read Schlegel's Lectures in 1818 (Dowden, Life, I, 472; II, 187). "£. Review, Vol. LII. 252. "" Blackzcood's, III, 213. "Lang, Life of Lockhart, I, 11S-119. " Blackicood's, e. g., IV, 211 ; VII, 235. 97 ignorance of German writers. These translations appeared in a series called Horcu Gcrmaniccc which up to 1830 ran to 25 numbers. But even these papers could not have done much to foster sound intelligent notions of the great works of Ger- many, for they were mostly concerned with the romantic dramas of Milliner, Grillparzer, Korner and the romances of Baron and Baroness Fouque. Tiic Quarterly Rcviczv must have done even less, as should be inferred from its Tory sympathies. It takes a somewhat middle ground between the EdinbiirgJi and Blacktcood's, neither opposing nor favoring, but condescendingly tolerating German literature in perfunc- tory criticism. From 1809, a year after its establishment, to 1831. it published but three articles on German subjects worth mentioning, a review of Madame de Stael's Germany, of Schlegel's Lectures and of Lord Gower's translation of Faust and fragments of Faust by Shelley. It witnesses to the wide- spread ignorance of German literature, and it does not hesitate to say that Faust " may be read without danger though not without a painful feeling."^* Turn in what direction we will for light upon German litera- ture in England during the first quarter of the century, we find that the intellectual horizon is heavily clouded with ignor- ance and prejudice, only an ineffectual ray breaking through here and there. In the highest circles knowledge on this sub- ject was in most cases little better than superficial; worse still, such knowledge was so steeped in condescension and cant as to be of little help in diffusing any genuine admiration for the greatest writers, Lessing, Richter, Schiller and Goethe. A gap in the dead wall of English insularity was made by a foreign book, Madame de Stael's Germany, of which Carlyle said that it "must be regarded as the precursor, if not parent, of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists among us."^^ But the greatest force of all was undoubtedly Carlyle himself, whose essays on German subjects, for this service alone, ought to entitle him to a secure position in English ^' Quarterly, Vol. X, 390. For a brief analysis of the positions of the earlier periodicals — the Monthly Review and the Anti-Jacobin — see Perry, German Influence in English Literature, Atlantic Monthly for August, 1877. 98 literary criticism of the nineteenth century. He it was who possessed the insight, knowledge and necessary courage to fight against a many-voiced and persistent opposition. From the first he understood the attitude in England toward German literature, as the introductory paragraphs in his preface to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship clearly show.^" He offers his German Romance as a small taper in total darkness.^^ He complains in 1827 that German literature is not only generally unknown, but misknown, since false and tawdry instead of genuine wares have been imported. ^^ But by 1830 we note a change, for, though Carlyle then and thereafter complained of English ignorance, he now began to discover a certain recogni- tion of Germany. Richter has " his readers and admirers,"^^ and knowledge of Schiller's works is " silently and rapidly proceeding."-* In 1832 he claims for Goethe some shadow of recognition, notably among the " younger, more hopeful minds."-^ And as late as 1838 he hopes that Germany is no longer a land of gray vapor and chimeras, " as it was to most Englishmen, not many years ago."-^ His hopes were indeed beginning to be realized, for both England and America through the influence of his efforts, were becoming interested in Germany. His position as a prophet, if not as a critic, of Goethe is preeminent. For years England looked to Carlyle as its greatest interpreter of the German poet, and men so different as Matthew Arnold and George Henry Lewes acknowledged their obligation. And if in recent times methods of criticism as to Goethe have changed greatly (since it has been the fashion to approach his work on different sides rather than as a whole) no critic can fail to recognize the substantial and pioneer service which Carlyle rendered to make his favorite poet known to his countrymen.-^ ^^ Essays, II, 265. '^ Ibid., Ill, 3. '^Ibid., 1, 223. "^Ibid,, 71. ''Ibid., 231. ''Ubid., IV, 14s. "^Ibid., 26; cf. 131, 176. "^Ibid., VI, 81; cf. Ill, 219; I, 286. '■'' John Sterling in an essay on Carlyle for the London and Westminster Review (1839), says: "It is not too much to say, that to these and other labors of the same hand (f. e., Carlyle's Essays and miscellaneous papers), is due almost all the just appreciation of Goethe now existing in England (Sterling, Essays and Tales, I, 294). CHAPTER VI The Essays on Goethe To show how Carlyle appHed his criticism to Goethe, we shall briefly analyze the two essays of 1828 and 1832.^ The extended introduction to the first essay and the great critical manifesto at the end of it, to which we have so often referred, evidence his sense of the immense difficulty of making Goethe understood to English readers of 1828. They declare too his purpose to remove, if he can, the distorted portrait drawn by the reviewers and to substitute another painted after his own ideals and in harmony with principles that are constructive. Here is "the highest reputation over all Europe," he says, "here is a poet whose spiritual progress symbolizes not only individual but national development." The business of the critic is to see this imposing figure as it is, to account for its exalted position, to "trace its history, to discover by what steps such influence has been attained." For this reputation, the essayist declares, is deserved and its influence is beneficial, because in Goethe we discover an artist in the old sense, a seer in whom wisdom, speaking from a harmonious manhood, delivers its message with a voice of authority. Carlyle handles his subject in his customary manner, con- sidering first the literary character and second the mind of this character as disclosed in its works. The present essay how- ever shows a modification of method as regards the biograph- ical section. Carlyle clearly understood that Goethe's personal life, at all events the most important part of it, namely, the moral and spiritual struggles, was interwoven in the written works ;2 and being interested above all else in Goethe's spiritual ^The separate criticisms and notices of Goethe are: Preface to William Meister's Apprenticeship (1824), introduction to Meister's Travels in Ger- man Romance (1827), Goethe's Helena, Goethe (1828), Goethe's Portrait, Death of Goethe, introduction to a translation of Das Mdrchen, Goethe's Works (1832). "Essays, I, 177. 99 100 development, he omits entirely the outer biographical facts and confines his treatment to the moral history of the poet as it is set forth in three or four prose pieces.-' h^irst is the period of Gots z'oit Bcrlichingcn and Werter. When these ajipcared, the mind of Europe, Carlyle says, was cold and conventional in literature, sensational and materialistic in philosophy, skeptical in religion. After Voltaire had set his torch to the jungle of superstition, nothing remained but doubt and unrest. This fever of discontent found an expression in these early works of Goethe. They remain as the record of a mind not yet freed from the slavery of self. In IVilhclm Meistcr's Appren- ticeship) Carlyle finds the second period of Goethe's growth. Here the outer and inner worlds have been reconciled, ideals now have their firm basis in actualities, the goal of human endeavor lies straight ahead. From this book the critic turns to its sequal, Meistcr's Travels, a work which he praises, nay almost worships, for the message it carries, and from which he extracts the greater number of passages quoted in the essay.* These two ])arts of W'ilhclm Meister together show Goethe's " change from inward imprisonment, doubt and discontent, into freedom, belief and clear activity,"^' and therefore prove him to be the representative modern man. The critical section is hardly one fifth as long as what pre- cedes, and the analysis is necessarily condensed and highly generalized. Ihit even here the method is typical, since Carlyle in his greater essays seldom regards individual pieces, but rather the author's mind as refiected in his work as a whole. Two general characteristics of Goethe are pointed out, his emblematic intellect" and his universality. As to special (|uali- ties Carlyle adds nc^thing to those described in his introduction to the I'rai'cls, from which he ([notes a passage on Cioethe's 'The magnitude of his sulijcct, the limits of his space, and the fact llirit ho had a year before furnished a short biography were also factors in llie problem iif strueture. * The tenth and eleventh chapters in the Travels arc praised and are quoted from, on account of their thoughts on religion. »/{)/ Essays, II, 132. "^ Essays, II, 162. 110 ual realities. Voltaire makes no appeal to man's highest faculty, his reason. Whatever claims he has to distinction must be defended upon other grounds, upon the ground of under- standing, the second term which Carlyle takes over from Kan- tian philosophy. In the realm of the understanding, Voltaire is preeminent ; his works have the superficial, practical, logi- cal, unimaginative character which gives to them the highest value in the world of business relations. They exhibit expert- ness, superficial extent, humanity ; their consummate order declare Voltaire to be the " most intelligible of writers." If he is not a genius, he is at least an unrivalled talent ; if there is in him no gleam of the divine idea, he is able to display his intelligence in a thousand protean forms.^^ In this interpretation of Voltaire as a writer Carlyle has given us eight or ten pages of brilliantly generalized criticism, perhaps unequalled elsewhere in his writings, unless it be in the essay on Burns. Nowhere else in the same space, certainly, has he thrown out more or better summaries and suggestions as to literary values. And to the Anglo Saxon mind at least, most of his criticism seems fundamentally sound. ^^ Voltaire's writings open no vista to realms of the spirit, drop no plummet into the abysses of the human heart. With some of the world's truest interpreters of the soul, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Pas- cal, he had little or no sympathy. Jesus, Peter and Paul were names which he could not dissociate from ecclesiastical wars and from superstition through all the centuries. Had Carlyle's master, Goethe, been Voltaire's contemporary, Voltaire would not have understood his message and would have ridiculed much of the form in which it was conveyed. Faust must have been to him no voice from the skies, but the unintelligible utterance of a rude foreigner. When thought left the daylight world of practical wisdom, when it strayed from the path of good sense and good taste, as these were understood in the France of the eighteenth century, Voltaire laughed at it as the vagary of a superstitious or an uncultivated mind. His con- ^^ Ibid., 162-170. " Cf. Brunetiere, Etudes Critiques, I, 248-253 ; Fagnet, Dix-Huitieme Steele, 247. 11] temporary Rousseau was to him only a celebrated ignoramus who used his intellect to prove men beasts. It is not strange that Carlyle could find no poetry in Voltaire ; there was none to seek, at least of the kind he looked for. Interpretative and philosophical criticism must therefore come to negative con- clusions. But Voltaire is perhaps the most conspicuous example of a class of writers who suffer from a too exclusive application of this method — men of letters who live by their pen and who exert a prodigious influence upon their immediate contempo- raries. Carlyle's criticism leaves Voltaire the man of letters too much in the background. The literary history of France in the eighteenth century without Voltaire, would be Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Upon every field of thought he left his impress. In history he was a progressive force ; in the drama a conservative one. He could write a story or a poem that would stir the salons of France to laughter. His letters, ex- pressed in phrases of matchless limpidity and grace, carried messages of power to all parts of Europe and brought down ridicule upon imposters and quacks, or won justice for those who had suffered from the want of it. Voltaire's pen was literally mightier than the sword of Louis the Well-Beloved. Of this Voltaire, Carlyle's interpretation gives but an indistinct picture and yet perhaps the one portrait that the world would care to preserve, fresh and clear, is that which presents Vol- taire as the incarnated Spirit of French letters in the Eight- eenth Century. It is as a religious polemic rather than as a man of letters that Voltaire figures most prominently before the world, in the opinion of Carlyle. In other words Voltairism, or warfare upon revealed religion, is greater than Voltaire. Here too we find intellectual unity. " We may say in general," says Car- lyle, "that his style of controversy is of a piece with himself; not a higher, and scarcely a lower style than might have been expected from him."^* Voltaire is ingenious and adroit, not noble and comprehensive. In his battle with unreason he fights with borrowed weapons ; he marches under the ^* Essays, II, 171. 112 flag of English thinkers and the French Bayle. More than this, his knowledge is shallow, since it turns wholly upon the inspiration of the Scriptures and regards Christianity as a book-made religion ; whereas religious truth is revealed to man not through books, but by intuition, is born not to the under- standing, but to the reason. Voltaire's faults, says Carlyle, are also the chief faults of his time and country. " It was an age without nobleness, without high virtue or high manifestation of talent ; an age of shallow clearness, of polish, self-conceit, skep- ticism and all forms of Persiflage." It is little surprising, he adds, that Voltaire in such an age " should have partaken largely of all its qualities. "^^ His task in this epoch was not one of affirmation, but of denial. Voltairism then, according to Carlyle's formula, is negation.^® In this final appreciation it will be seen that Carlyle applies once more the same high standards of criticism: true religion, like true literature or true life, is not a creation of the under- standing, but of the reason. And once more it may be said that Carlyle's position, from the point of view of the unchanging realities of the inner life, is unassailable. Voltaire was not an original thinker, but a popularizer of other men's thinking. His work, interpreted from so exalted a position, is irreverent in spirit and negative in results. The man who for twenty years and more, in the Philosophical Dictionary and in hundreds of letters, relentlessly fought established religion, or the In- famous as he called it, is little likely to yield to later genera- tions much of the real spirit of Christianity, or of religious reverence, in Carlyle's meaning of the word. But again Car- lyle's criticism needs to be supplemented with a criticism that takes fuller account than does his, of the positive results of Voltaire's work as regarded from the point of view of Vol- taire's own age and country. For while the critic is swift to condemn the era of Louis XV and frankly recognizes its life as something to be torn down and swept away, he cannot heart- ily praise Voltaire and Voltairism for their large part in the labor of destruction. He does not make sufficiently clear what Christianity stood for in the old regime ; how for the most part ^^ Ibid., 179. ^^ Ibid., 171-179. 113 it was identical with a corrupt and superstitious sacerdotalism, how it compromised and coexisted with all forms of vice, fet- tered the press, fought enlightenment and strove to hold the people of France down to an ever debasing ignorance. Nor is Carlyle just in declaring that the age of Voltaire was not one of creation and discovery, and that the French philosophers came to criticise and quarrel and rend to pieces, but not to invent and produce.^^ In natural, economic and political science the period was constructive in many directions and did much to build the foundations for the religious and political liberty of a later age. But it is not our purpose to supply the omissions in Carlyle's interpretation. We wish rather to point out here, as we have earlier in connection with other divisions of the essay, that the ideals of criticism by which he measures the polemical work of Voltaire, work so largely contemporary and therefore transient in character, are far too high, if applied exclusively ; since in the application of such standards the im- mense influence for good of Voltaire upon his own day and generation is not appreciated at its full worth. Had Carlyle praised for its positive result the death-stab which, as he so finely says, Voltaire gave to modern superstition, his interpre- tation of this third phase would scarcely need to be qualified.^* ^^ Ibid., 178-179. " The essay on Voltaire, as has been pointed out, shows Carlyle's failure to " perceive that the positive achievements of Voltaire could not have been won in any age by a man not truly great in a positive sense." This, of course, is to measure Voltaire by other standards than Carlyle's. CHAPTER VIII The English Essays Carlyle wrote but three essays on English subjects, Burns, BoswcU's Life of Johnson and Sir Walter Scott. He proposed to write others, notably one on Byron and another on " Fash- ionable Novels," but they never appeared, chiefly because Napier, the successor to Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review, to whom they were offered, was warned that Carlyle was a man to be feared as an intense radical and a hysterical worshipper of German divinities. The three essays, which therefore constitute his deliberate appreciation of English au- thors, cover a decade of time and roughly mark the end of three critical periods in Carlyle's literary fortunes. The essay on Burns was the first work executed at Craigenputtock, whither in 1828 he had moved from Edinburgh in order to toil and think and be beyond the reach of interruptions. His critical interest was now at its height, and he had entered the field of letters far enough to be recognized as a new force. But as we have said so often, reviewing in no long time gave way to prophesying; Sartor succeeded Signs of the Times, and Char- acteristics followed Sartor. Carlyle became restless to deliver his personal message to the world. His letters during this per- iod show that he was considering great moral subjects, — Luther and the German reformation, John Knox and the Scottish reformation. Finally in 1831 he went up to London to try his fortunes with Sartor, but the publishers would not print it. Carlyle remained in the metropolis through the winter, a lonely crabbed mystic, sneering and sneered at, a man whose literary and material fortunes still hung in the balance. In the spring before returning to Craigenputtock, at the request of James Eraser, the publisher, he wrote a review of Bos well's Life of Johnson. This great essay, like the second one on Goethe written a few months later, may in one sense be regarded as the 114 115 lyrical cry of a lonely prophet who felt that he must preach heroism to an unheroic, distracted age. After this essay was written there followed another period of struggle, uncertainty and ill-fortune. Carlyle became absorbed in a study of the French Revolution and in 1834 he moved to London where he could get books to carry on his work. Amidst the harrowing labor of these years the voice of the critic became silent. But in 1837 when the History was completed, this voice was heard once more, not indeed passionate and melodious, as it had been a decade ago, but still strong and commanding, fit to win at- tention even from those who denied its authority. The essay on Sir Walter Scott, published in 1838, was the last of the criti- cal essays, and with it the career of Carlyle the critic may be said to have come to a close. (a) Burns Of all the essays from Carlyle's pen that on Burns is the best known and most admired. As Dr. Garnett so well said, it is the " very voice of Scotland." In Burns Carlyle found a subject that fired his heart, a native poet whose songs and whose tragical life alike stirred him to passionate sympathy. To his eyes the Ayrshire poet appeared not as a vulgar wonder to be stared at from the heights of literary Edinburgh, but as Scotland's most original genius and as one of the song-makers of the world. The affinities between Burns and Carlyle were numerous and special. Both were sons of Scottish peasants, both w^ere poor, proud, independent, gifted and ambitious. Like Carlyle, Burns was born to wage war with a hostile en- vironment, unlike him he was destined to be defeated because his will was not as Carlyle's, the will of a Titan. His tragical fate, together with his origin and environment, moved the critic to love and pity. Instead of the turbid stream of declamation that was sometimes poured into the later essays, there flows through this interpretation of Burns a tenderness almost fem- inine and a spirit of devotion almost sentimental. Even down to his closing years Carlyle would recite or hum over to him- self the verses of Burns with the deep delight born of real community of spirit. 116 He makes no apology for giving up two-thirds of his essay to the life of Burns. " It is not chiefly as a poet," says Car- lyle, " but as a man, that he interests us and affects us."^ Here was a tragical career peculiarly alluring to the moralist, here was a gifted genius gone to ruin because he failed to rec- oncile the ideal with the actual, failed, that is, to put into prac- tice the great Goethean doctrine of renunciation. Into his account of Burns's waverings between inner and outer condi- tions Carlyle has put the sum-total of his own ethical philosophy. He measures the " inward springs and relations " of Burns's character in terms of the high ideals he applies to all other men. Burns, he says, was born a true poet and therefore should have been a prophet and teacher to his age.^ He should have fitted himself by rigorous discipline, by self-denying toil, to deliver his message to his generation. But a man born to be a vates or seer must live a whole life, he cannot be anything by halves. The grand error in Burns's life was " the want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims." It was " a hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly."^ In discussing the want of harmony between the clay soil of Mossgiel and the soul of Burns, Carlyle takes large account of circumstances, the poet's material condition and the influences of the period. He recognizes the pressure of the external fact in the form of poverty, lack of education, early tempta- tions to depart from the right path. He thinks too that Burns's religious quarrels were a " circumstance of fatal import."* But of all the outer forces that helped to wreck the poet's life, Carlyle regards the visits to Edinburgh as strongest. These did him great and lasting injury and maddened his heart " still more with the fever of worldly ambition." Had the patrons of genius left Burns to himself " the wounds of the heart would have been healed, vulgar ambition would have died away." "These men, as we believe, were proximately the means of ^Essays, II, 6; cf. 29. ^ Ibid., 47. ''Ibid., 46. *Ibid., 33. 117 his rtiin."^ But it would have been contrary to Carlyle's phi- losophy of Hfe to place the final blame elsewhere than upon Burns himself. " Plis was no bankruptcy of the purse," says the moralist, " but of the soul."*' It lay in the power of the poet to have lived true to his higher self, to have listened to the voice of the poetic spirit within him, to have made all else save himself and his art a small matter.' For the reason that Burns did not live upon this high level, did not bend his soul to the work of revealing the divine idea, Carlyle pronounces his life a fragment. The general truth of this concluding judgment may pass un- challenged. Burns's life was partial and incomplete. It is idle too to question Carlyle's opinion that the cause of failure lay ultimately with the poet himself. Those whose philosophy of life differs from that of Carlyle may place the blame upon a cruel environment, but, as our entire study has shown, his opinion follows necessarily from the ideals which he held. We may, however, point out that he does not treat the great critical period in Burns's life, the visits to Edinburgh, with strict jus- tice. Cynicism and prejudice seem to have deflected his judg- ment. It was inevitable that Carlyle should seize upon this pic- turesque and dramatic episode and make much of it. It was equally inevitable, perhaps, with his hatred of " gigmanity," that he should add to his final opinion a special condemnation of the upper classes. We may admit at once that the poet's two visits to Edinburgh unsettled him for a time. He saw, as he had not seen before, the pitiless divisions between the upper and lower strata of society, and he learned for the first time that genius without habitual refinement is not a sure guar- antee of social equality. But the subsequent tenor of Burns's life shows very plainly that his Edinburgh visits did not madden him with the fever of worldly ambition. The higher classes moreover did help him to answer the question what next to do. More than all else we must not overlook, as Carlyle appears to have done, the fact that Burns's ostracism from society at Edin- burgh and later at Dumfries really came as the result of his 'Ibid., 37-40. ''Ibid., 46, 49, 51. 'Ibid., 39. 118 own evil courses. The convivial poet, alternating between the tables of the high and the taverns of the low, and fast descend- ing to the lowest, could not expect to retain the favor and social patronage of refined people. Such important phases of the ethical question at all events Carlyle does not seem to have treated quite candidly, or rather he is prone to give to the Edin- burgh visits an active part in the tragedy of Burns's life, when at most it was seductively passive. As with the life, so with the writings of Burns. His moral nature was at war with itself and therefore his work remains without the unity of a great idea — remains " a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete."^ " We can look on but few of these pieces," says Carlyle, speaking of the poetry of Burns, " as, in strict critical language, deserving the name of Poems : they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poet- ical."" Burns therefore is " not perhaps absolutely a great poet " ; he " never rose, except by natural effort and for short intervals into the region of great ideas. "^*' Since the poet attained no mastery in his art, the critic thinks it would be " at once unprofitable and unfair" to try him, his imperfect frag- ments, by the " strict rules of Art."" In these opinions, how- ever, the final judgment is implicit. Burns is not a great poet because he has no idea to reveal, because he speaks no word of authentic truth. But if not absolutely great, he is " a poet of Nature's own making,"^^ and " one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century."^^ His work has an en- during quality, a rare excellence that merits high appreciation. The source of its sustained vitality, Carlyle finds to be sincerity, graphic phrasal power, vigor and fineness of mind, as shown in the poet's love, indignation and humor. Nowhere else in the considerable mass of Burns criticism is there an interpre- tation so sympathetic, so illuminated with flashes of inspired comment as this which Carlyle has given us in a few short ^Ibid.. 8. ^Ibid., 5, 8. "Ibid., 23. ^Ibid., 13. ''Ibid., 13, 18. '^Ibid., 4. 119 pages. The treatment is critical in the best sense. Carlyle's insight, knowledge and sympathy are nowhere used to better results, and he evidences an appreciation of the phrasal beauty and emotional value of poetry all too rare in his critical essays. Perhaps the strongest proofs of his original capacity for criticism are the few paragraphs on Tarn O'Shanter, The Jolly Beggars and the songs of Burns. Here criticism shows itself to be truly a creative art, as Carlyle said it was. Tarn O'Shan- ter, he says, is " not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric." Its parts, its naturalism and supernaturalism, are not properly fused ; it is not strictly comic, but farcical ; it is not organically, but artificially, alive. Carlyle, we observe, is here applying his test of unity or central truth, with negative results ; and to him therefore Burns's Tain O'Shanter lacks uni- versal, symbolic significance ; is not poetry but rhymed farce.^* He measures The Jolly Beggars by the same standard. This poem rises " into the domain of Art," because it " seems thor- oughly compacted; melted together, refined," because its char- acters are at once " Scottish, yet ideal," because it expresses a " universal sympathy with man." It has, in other words, inner and outer correspondence, a universal appeal, and is a self-supporting whole, " the highest merit in a poem." In these few passages we have a theory of art of Aristotelian breadth applied to concrete material with suggestive results.^'' The songs are considered " by far the best that Britain has yet pro- duced." Carlyle ranks Burns as " the first of all of our Song- writers," and thinks that Burns's chief influence as an author will ultimately rest upon his songs. The second paragraph in this section is the very poetry of criticism, worthy to be classed with the appreciations of Charles Lamb at their best. Had Carlyle chosen to develop the vein that shows itself here, it " Considering the time of its deliverance, this criticism shows Carlyle's independence of judgment perhaps better than any other that we can point to. All the critics before him, Jeffrey, Scott, Lockhart, Hazlitt, Byron, Wordsworth, regarded Tam as Burns's masterpiece. So did Burns. (Wallace, Life, III, 254.) ^^ The Jolly Beggars was not much noticed by the early critics. It was not indeed published in complete form till 1802. Scott praises it highly. Matthew Arnold with Carlyle ranks it higher than Tam O'Shanter. 120 should seem that he might have become one of England's two or three great critics.^" It is when we consider the treatment of the poet's relation to the literature of his own day that we must deduct some- thing from our praise of Carlyle as a critic, especially in his use of the historical method. He touches lightly, though masterfully, upon the literary revival in Scotland and upon Burns's share in it. " In this brilliant resuscitation of our ' fervid genius,' " he says, " there was nothing Scottish, noth- ing indigenous." Culture was exclusively French and at- tenuated. But after Burns's day a spirit of nationalism sprang up, and literature became native, domestic, democratic. In this change Scott's influence is acknowledged, but the influ- ence of Burns also, says Carlyle, " may have been considerable," for *' his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic sub- jects, could not but operate from afar." Historical criticism in so far is sound. But Carlyle makes a mistake in regarding the work of Burns as the beginning of a new movement rather than as the culmination of an old. His casual and depreciating notices of Ramsay and Ferguson, the predecessors of Burns, and his apologetic reference to the Scottish dialect, together with various remarks on Burns's lack of proper education, indicate that he did not correctly appreciate the relation of the poet to the vernacular school of poetry. Had Burns written exclusively in English, following the models and literary in- fluences of that day, he would now belong to the school of Shenstone, Thomson and Pope; for his English poetry is admitted on nearly all sides to be his weakest — stiflf, imitative, Augustan. The true way is to interpret the poetry of Burns as the flowering of a spirit transmitted through Ferguson and '* In relating this bit of criticism of the songs to Carlyle's general theories, we should not forget that to him a song belongs after all to the outlying province of poetry, is " a brief simple species of composition " (Ibid., 23- 26). " Had Carlyle been able to take the modern point of view of the student of genres and if he had considered the power of the lyric in all ages to go, as scarcely any other form of art does, straight to the heart of man, and then had noted that Burns had gone to the heart of Scotland and indeed of the world, he might have had doubts with regard to his denial of Burns's greatness as a poet " (comment made upon my manuscript). 121 Ramsay from the older Scottish Makers. Burns was greatly indebted to this vernacular literature, for language, meters, subjects, even for ideas, phrases and entire verses. What now seems fulsome praise of Ramsay and Ferguson in the preface to the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems, was a sincere, if grandiloquent, tribute to the lesser poets who kindled his own purer flame. ^^ The truth is, Carlyle gives little hint of Burns the craftsman, a subject that would compel consideration of the poet's predecessors in vernacular song, of his ways of handling that older literature, and of his magical power of creating an immortal song from some rude, popular jingle. Burns was an uneven and often a slovenly craftsman, but at his best he was a deliberate and consummate artist, sifting his material with anxious care and fashioning it to suit his high technical demands. Carlyle's essay, therefore, while great as an interpretation of the life of the poet and of the substance of his poetry, must be supplemented by the work^® of later scholars and critics, if Burns is to receive his full measure of justice. (b) Boszvell and Johnson In the second English essay, Boszvell's Life of Johnson, Carlyle is both critic and prophet. The changed style and thought proclaim the prophet. Peculiarities of language which found full expression for the first time in Sartor appear in this essay in considerable profusion. Hero-worship, the prophet's special message, is thrust forward in two or three expressions and in connection with the main subject itself. Johnson and his biographer, Boswell, are indeed cogent illustrations of a doctrine increasing in favor with Carlyle ; for in them he found both hero and hero-worshipper, each by a kind of divine at- traction, drawn to the other for the edification of succeeding generations. From this point of view, moreover, it is difficult to avoid regarding the entire essay as a tract for the times. In 1832 reform agitation was at its height. The conditions of " Though Carlyle speaks in an apologizing tone of the Scotch dialect, all the songs and poems that he cites, except two, are from the Scotch. "£. g., the Centenary Edition of Burns by Henley and Henderson. 122 English life, political and social, were alarming to many minds. The tide of innovation was strong and men feared that the old landmarks were in danger of being swept away. Carlyle, then in London, watched the current of affairs with eager interest, in fact with apprehension ; for reform never meant to him, what it did to the utilitarians, a change in external condi- tions merely. Unless reform reached the individual and lifted him to a better life, Carlyle distrusted and condemned it, he even feared it. The only way the individual can be bettered, he said, is by contact with another greater individual ; soul is kindled only by soul. His remedy for the distracted times of 1832, therefore, was the gospel of hero-worship. But the prophet does not quite usurp the place of the critic. No other essay displays deeper discernment or more thorough knowledge of subject than this, and it is only below the first Goethe and the Burns in sympathy. In epithet and phrase, from the first page to the last, there are flashes of keenest insight. Illuminating suggestions on literature and life are strewn lavishly along the way. We find Carlyle, moreover, measuring Boswell and Johnson, the men and their work, by precisely the same standards which he applied in earlier essays to Richter and to Goethe. The critical method remains un- changed, because the principles upon which it was established are in 1832 what they were in 1828. A telling proof of the sustained vitality of Carlyle's critical powers is his treatment of Boswell. To say aught in 1832 in defense of Johnson's biographer was to fly in the face of all literary opinion. From 1768 when Gray, commenting on Bos- well's first literary venture, the book on Corsica, said that " any fool may write a most valuable book if he will only tell what he heard and saw with veracity,"^^ down to 183 1 when Macaulay in the Edinburgh Reviezv launched his notorious paradox that Boswell would never have been a great writer if he had not been a great fool, Boswell had been the object of unmeasured ridicule. His only title to public recognition seems to have been his many-sided folly. Carlyle clearly saw the position which Boswell occupied before the British public, but he re- "Gray, Works, III, 310. 123 fused to believe that a great biography had been written by a fool, or that good work could be done by reason of weaknesses or vices. His entire theory of life and of literature was against such a false paradox. He did not shut his eyes to Boswell's follies and foibles, he saw them with a keener vision than did Macaulay, and his portrait of the exterior Bozzy ranks as a masterpiece in a gallery of great paintings. But to laugh at a man's fantastic freaks and to catalogue them is not the same as to interpret the man. Macaulay's Boswell was not for Carlyle the biographer of Johnson. In the place of a false paradox he supplied a true one. Here he said is a man who " has provided us a greater pleasure than any other individual . . . ; perhaps has done us a great service and can be espe- cially attributed to more than two or three ; . . . yet no written or spoken eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists." This situation existed because critics had seen the visible vices of Boswell, but had no insight into his hidden virtues. Boswell is correctly understood, says Carlyle, only when we think of him as a disciple, a hero-worshipper. He had in him a " love of excellence " invisible to the general eye. In an unspiritual eighteenth century when " Reverence for Wisdom " had well- nigh vanished from the earth, Boswell was raised up to be " a real martyr to this high everlasting truth " that " Hero-worship lives perennially in the human bosom." True to his biograph- ical method, Carlyle finds in this interpretation a key to the greatness of Boswell's work. " Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth ; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Openminded- ness. None but a reverent man could have found his way from Boswell's environment to Johnson's." The critic men- tions insight and talent as a part of the biographer's equipment, but he lays stress upon certain unconscious powers, like rever-. ence and love, as the greater part. Carlyle indeed finds in Boswell a capital illustration of his theory of art as an uncon- scious process. " We do the man's intellectual endowment great wrong," he says, " if we measure it by its mere logical outcome ; though here too, there is not wanting a light in- 124 genuity, a figurativeness and fanciful sport, with glimpses of insight far deeper than the common. But Boswell's grand in- tellectual talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious one." He is, therefore, " one of Nature's own Artists," and his book is great because of its " import of Reality," because it is " wholly credible." Upon these terms Carlyle's praise of the Life be- comes poetical, one of the sunny spots of interpretation that proves the illuminating presence of the critic. His final judg- ment is expressed in a sentence : " In worth as a Book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth cen- tury : all Johnson's Writings stand on a quite inferior level to it."-° This interpretation of Boswell is one of the highest services that the criticism of Carlyle has done for English literature. Because of it, England's greatest biographer has been lifted from a place of ridicule and contempt to one in which his real greatness is recognized. Since 1832, critical opinion has not only regarded the Life of Johnson as the first of biogra- phies, but it has more and more come to understand that Boswell himself is one of England's truest literary artists who knew perfectly well the richness of his material and who knew how to shape it in obedience to the aim of a supremely self- conscious purpose. But if Carlyle's portrait, brilliant as it is, had remained untouched by later criticism, we should to-day fail to understand the real Boswell. The fact is, Carlyle at- tempts to strain his theory of Hero-Worship farther than it will go. When he says, for example, that it was reverence for wisdom which drew Boswell to Johnson, he has to plac^ both Boswell and Johnson in a somewhat false position in order to support his claim. He seems to forget that when Tom Davies introduced them in 1763 Johnson was not so much "a poor rusty coated scholar," as the foremost literary figure in England. All of Johnson's important work, except the Shakespeare and the Lives, was done ; he had received a pension the previous year for literary merit alone, and he was to establish the famous " Club " a year later. With all his peculiarities, Johnson was a man to know. Now Boswell, "^ Essays, IV, 73-83. 125 beyond most men of his time or of any other, had " a rage for literature," as Hume called it ; or, to use the phrase of Horace Walpole, he had " a rage of knowing anybody that was ever talked of." He deliberately sought out literary celebrities. He visited Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Mortier, and in London he was never vainer than when dining with Reynolds, Garrick, Goldsmith, Beauclerk or Hume. To be with the great Cham himself, greatest of them all, was Boswell's highest felicity ; then it was that the satellite shone most brightly. So far from having all to lose in seeking out Johnson, as Carlyle implies, Boswell had everything to gain. Nor does Carlyle's explanation of Boswell's art tell the whole truth. Hero- worship and Carlyle's general theory of art, as, in the deepest sense, an unconscious process, led him to keep out of sight the skilled and untiring craftsmanship that went to the making of the Life. Of course, in the deepest sense the art of Boswell, like that of any other craftsman, was unconscious; for he could not have explained, nor can we explain, why the gift of biography came to him and not, let us say, to Hawkins. Love and reverence for Johnson were also an indispensable part of Boswell's equipment. But unless he had cultivated these gifts, as we know he did, with the greatest patience and in obedience to the most deliberately determined ideals, he would not have produced a masterpiece which the reading world has never ceased to praise. The Life of itself proclaims the craftsman- ship of Boswell in every chapter. But we know from numer- ous external sources how he labored for seven years, collecting materials, sifting, selecting, quizzing this person and that, ceaselessly searching for the least bit of information that would add to the completeness and lifelikeness of his portrait. If we think of these efforts, we may find it difficult to believe that Boswell's love and reverence, unsupported by a hundred follies and foibles and all manner of disgusting assiduities, would ever have been equal to the great and prolonged task which he set himself to do. The true interpretation of Boswell is best reached, perhaps, by a compromise between Macauley and Carlyle. It was by reason of his follies as well as his virtues — if one keeps to these terms — that Boswell realized his artistic 126 ideals. He was neither the unquaHfied fool of Macaulay's portrait, nor the martyr-hero of Carlyle's ; he was something of both, it is true, but he was also a craftsman of the first rank, working by conscious processes, toward self-appointed ends. But whatever be the true interpretation of the processes by which Boswell achieved his art, there can be no two opinions of its accomplishment. For Carlyle at any rate the case was clear; he found Boswell's work good because it revealed to him a personality which aroused his deepest interest and sym- pathy. We have already implied in the previous section of this chapter that the unique and profound relationship between Carlyle and Burns was spiritual ; and now at the risk of con- fusing language we wish to point out that the remarkable sympathy between Carlyle and Johnson was largely intellectual. Affinity with Burns moreover was partly a matter of pity; it was the feeling of the strong man toward the weak. Affinity with Johnson was wholly due to the liking of one strong man for another. The mind of Carlyle indeed touches that of Johnson at so many points that at times it is hard to avoid fancying that a great spirit of the eighteenth century became reincarnated in the nineteenth. Johnson, like Carlyle, was a stoic, a hater of cant and sham, a man who renounced happi- ness as his rule of life. Both were passionately interested in human nature, delighting in biography and believing in the power of a really great man to turn his abilities to any account. In political principles as in ethical, the two men were singu- larly alike. To Johnson the doctrine of political equality was mere moonshine. He despised the teachings of Rousseau and he regarded agitators of the Wilkes type with contempt. He cherished a superior disregard of the people and (to use the words of Mrs. Piozzi) he expressed "a zeal for insubordina- tion warm even to bigotry." While these political opinions would apply more obviously to the Carlyle of 1850 than to the Carlyle of 1832, they are in reality true of him at any period of his manhood, for he was ever as full of " intuitive aver- sions " as was Johnson. We might extend the parallel into the less tangible realm of temperament, for each life was over- 127 shadowed with melancholy or lighted at intervals with flashes of saturnine and ironic humor, and in each there dwelt a religious seriousness toward every human interest. Both Johnson and Carlyle were " characters " in their time, bold, independent, dominating, original ; and both will live for future generations as men rather than as writers. In all or in nearly all of Carlyle's writing there is the " deep lyric tone " which he confesses to find in Johnson the man. It is because of this manifold and intimate sympathy that Carlyle, after Boswell, is the most inspired interpreter of Johnson. His essay, though not so well balanced as some earlier ones, deserves the praise of Edward Fitzgerald, who thought that it judged Johnson " for good and all." The interpretation of Johnson rests upon essentially the same ideals of biography as those set forth in the essay on Burns. It is not the outer but the inner Johnson that is presented ; not the eccentric, deformed giant of Macaulay's pages, but the " best intellect in England," a man belonging to the " keener order of intellects " such as Hume and Voltaire, a man " not ranking among the highest, or even the high, yet distinctly admitted into that sacred band." That is to say, Johnson is a priest and prophet whose life Carlyle frankly holds up as an answer to the question how to live, as the text to a sermon on hero-worship. The heroic aspects of Johnson's life are there- fore brought forward and exhibited in the most favorable light, while the essentially literary sides are left somewhat obscured. Carlyle sings a kind of paean over the early struggles of Johnson, and from the facts concerning Johnson's first days in London he selects material for some of his strongest para- graphs. As Carlyle saw it, the life problem of Johnson was two-fold, how to live and how to live by speaking only the truth. The problem was made doubly difficult, because the age was transitional in literature, in politics, in religion ; and because Johnson himself possessed a contradictory temperament. " It is not the least curious of the incoherences which Johnson had to reconcile," says Carlyle " that though by nature contemptu- ous and incredulous he was, at that time of day, to find his 128 safety and glory in defending with his whole might the tradi- tions of the elders." But Johnson kept a straight path through these tangled times, because he had " a knowledge of the tran- scendental, immeasureable character of Duty, the essence of all Religion." This is his great glory, this is the central fact of his life beside which all others are secondary and circum- stantial. In thus placing Johnson the moralist high above Johnson the man of letters, Carlyle exalts the hero at the expense of the man. He scarcely more than glances at the interesting figure who gathered the wits about him at the " Club " and who was celebrated as the first talker of London, the perennially delightful personality whom the world knows to-day through the pages of Boswell. We may infer from Carlyle's slight notice of Johnson as a man of letters that his interest in Johnson's writings is like- wise slight. Such is indeed the case. Intent upon interpreting Johnson as a moralist, the critic cares only for the spirit which shows through the Ramblers, the Idlers and the Lives. This spirit he finds to be an expression of Johnson's moral nature. Johnson " by act and word " was a Tory, " the preserver and transmitter of whatsoever was genuine in the spirit of Tory- ism." The motive of his life was duty, or truth in the tran- scendental sense; the work of his life was Toryism.^^ In a time of change, when even the foundations of society were in danger of being swept away, Johnson served England by re- sisting the rising tide of innovation. The moral endowment by which he effected this work was mainly courage, a belief in the " everlasting Truth, that man is ever a Revelation oi God to man," and, lastly, mercy and affection. Johnson's affection, Carlyle points out, manifested itself both as courtesy and as prejudice. Prejudice, again, was the virtue by which Johnson accomplished his mission — the mission of serving as the " John Bull of spiritual Europe." ^ It should be understood that though he preaches duty and truth, Carlyle does not unconditionally preach the " Doctrine of Standing-Still." He does not glorify stagnation either in the individual or in the state. He says that " Johnson's aim was in itself an impossible one ; this of stemming the eternal Flood of time. The strongest man can but retard the current partially and for a short hour." 129 Sound and solid for the most part as is this appreciation, it suffers not a Httle from Carlyle's determination to see in Johnson only the hero. It is because prejudice was so colossal in Johnson and because he set himself in wilful and violent op- position to nearly every tendency of enlightenment of his times, that most critics cannot place him as high as Carlyle has done ; for we are to remember that Johnson was a tory, not alone in politics, but in religion and literature. He was not, moreover, a greater influence than Burke in checking the revolutionary spirit in England. Johnson died four years before the fall of the Bastile, having shown scarcely more than a churlish in- difference to France, while Boswell, at work on the biography from 1784 to 1 79 1, has no word concerning the social and polit- ical convulsion across the Channel.-- But we should remember that Carlyle himself was at all times prejudiced against polit- ical agitators and was not likely to distinguish beween a Burke and a Wilkes. We should remember also that this interpreta- tion of Johnson was written for readers of 1832 by a man who, though a radical in the philosophical, literary and religious sense, was on precisely the same fundamental principles a de- termined reactionary in politics and political economy. It was inevitable therefore that he should lift up the heroic figure of Johnson as an example to the men who were drifting through the distracted days of 1832-3. Of literary criticism in the restricted sense the essay has little more than a suggestion, though the suggestion indicates clearly enough how Carlyle regarded and ranked Johnson's work. " To Johnson's Writings, good and solid, and still profitable as they are, we have already rated his Life and Conversation as superior." " His Doings and Writings are not Sliozvs but Performances. Not a line, not a sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be." Measured by Carlyle's stan- dard Johnson is not a poet. " Into the region of Poetic Art he indeed never rose ; there was no ideal without him avowing itself in his work." He could not reveal through his writings, -" Johnson's indirect influence must have been strong and far-reaching, making itself felt through literature and conversation to the remotest parts of great Britain. 130 as true poets can throup^h theirs, the Divine Idea. Johnson was a prophet because his character was a medium for tran- scendental duty ; but he was neither a seer nor a poet because his intellect could not transmit truth. From such judgment there is nothing to deduct. Critical opinion from the time of Burke and Coleridge does not differ essentially from Carlyle's as to the value of Johnson's writings. Even the late Dr. Bir- beck liill has declared that Johnson lives not in his writings but in his talk.^-"* Carlyle's sin in his interpretation of Johnson the writer is one of omission. He has failed to take account of Johnson as a literary influence, just as he failed to consider, except in a few sentences, Johnson as a man of letters. And it was in the literary sense, of course, not in the political, that Johnson was the dictator of the British public. We must go to other interpreters and critics, therefore, for an account of Johnson's place in literature from Pope to Wordsworth, even as we must turn to Boswell if we wish to know Johnson as a literary personality. But if we are content to know him as a moralist, as a great ethical force in the total English life of the eighteenth century, we shall find that Carlyle is Johnson's truest interpreter. (c) Scott The essay on Sir Walter Scott has increased the number of Carlyle's enemies and apologists. His enemies, or rather those who dislike the man and distrust his criticism, refer to this essay as a spiteful attack of one Scotchman upon his more favored and famous countryman. Mr. Lang, Scott's -most recent biographer, asserts that Carlyle was embittered against Scott " on a matter of an unanswered letter."-* On the other hand hVoude apologizes for Carlyle's unsympathetic tone on the ground that he was not yet recovered from the exhaustive labors on the French Revolution.-^ So much has been said at one time or another in way of censure or extenuation that we are justified in the present study in briefly reviewing the facts regarding the genesis of the essay and the relations of Carlyle with Scott. ■'Dr. Johnson, His Friends and his Critics, 129. ^ Life of Scott, 129. ^ Froude, Life, III, 103. 131 Carlyle was teaching mathematics at Annan Academy when Scott's novels began to appear. He declared that Waverley was the best novel that had been published " these thirty years,"-*' and he read many others with youthful pleasure and admiration. His attitude toward them, however, was not at all different from that toward nearly everything he read at this time. But during the next five or six years a great change took place. Carlyle's intellectual life was expanded and deepened by hard struggle with fortune and by a study of Goethe. In his crystallizing philosophy of life there was little or no place for minor poetry and fiction. It is perfectly consistent with this new turn, that Carlyle should make the following entry in his note-book : " Sir Walter Scott is the great Restaurateur of Europe : he might have been numbered among their Conscript Fathers ; he has chosen the worser part, and is only a huge Publicanus. What is his novel, any of them ? A bout of champagne, claret, port or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, better, holier, stronger ? No ! We have been amused. O Sir Walter, thou knowest too well, that Virtus laudatur et alget." A few months later occurs this entry : " Not one of Scott's Fairservices or Deanses, etc., is alive. As far as prose could go, he has gone ; and we have fair outsides ; but within all is hollow." " These private opinions were written down many months before there was a word of correspondence with Goethe concerning medals, and ten years before the essay was composed, and yet they might serve as texts for nearly everything that Carlyle ever said against the life and work of Scott. ^^ With this attitude of Carlyle's before us, let us turn to the unlucky episode of the unanswered letter. Goethe had long been an admirer of the author of Waverley. In testimony of his esteem he sent in 1828 two medals to Carlyle to be delivered to Scott. It was very natural for the German poet to suppose '^ Early Letters, lo. "Two Note-Books, 71, 126, years 1826 and 1827. ^ In 1827 Jeffrey offered to introduce Carlyle to Scott, if Carlyle would present himself at the court room, Carlyle declined, but he wrote his brother, apropos of this incident, that Scott was no " mongrel," but a sufficient " hodman." Letters, 23, 67. 132 that the two Scotchmen were acquainted, though he had indeed expressed surprise to Eckermann that Scott had had nothing to say of Carlyle. Obviously Carlyle was flattered to be chosen the messenger between the most famous writer of Germany and the most famous writer of Great Britain, and he wrote Goethe that he expected to present the medals to Sir Walter in person. ^"^ Unhappily the meeting never took place, for Scott was in Lon- don at the time.^° Carlyle was disappointed not to see Scott and probably piqued not to hear from him. But was he so re- sentful and even so embittered as to allow his private feelings to condition his published criticism of Scott ten years later? Partisan friends of Sir Walter will probably continue to say that he was, even if they have to disregard the early note-book comments which we have quoted. They will continue to assert that Carlyle vented a " private bitterness," to use Mr. Lang's phrase, though to do so they will have to overlook entirely the complete conformity of the individual judgments in the essay to Carlyle's theory of literature and philosophy of life. On the other hand those who know Carlyle's habits of thought from 1827 to 1837, and have examined the literary relations of Scott and Carlyle during these years will always find it hard to believe that the essay contains a critical opinion that it would not have contained had there been no incident of an unan- swered letter. Carlyle's central position toward Scott did not change after the incident, as certain privately expressed opin- ions fully show.^^ What he believed in 1827 he believed and expressed in 1837. If Carlyle's essay is to be interpreted " Goethe and Carlyle Corr., 83. 30 " Walter Scott, I did not see, because he was in London ; nor hear of, perhaps because he was a busy or uncourteous man ; so I left his Goethe- medals to be be given him by Jeffrey" {Letters, 115). In correction of Norton's note to this passage it may be said that Carlyle must have known of Scott's financial troubles {Early Letters, 344). It was unfortunate that Carlyle never met Scott. He had more than one opportunity and he might have been won by Scott's personality. A regard for the man might have softened Carlyle's tone in the essay. But I do not believe that friendly relations would have caused Carlyle to alter opinions growing out of fundamental beliefs. Such relations did not alter them in the case of John Sterling. " Tzt'o Note-Books, 214-215; Froude, Life, II, 251. 133 fairly, therefore, we should regard it not as a piece of work inspired by resentment or jealousy, but as a deliberate criticism based upon ideals consistently held and consistently applied to literature for a period of ten years or more. In structure the essay is not so regular as many others, but in the main it shows an application of the biographical method to the interpretation of Scott's life and work, Carlyle, however, raises the question of Scott's greatness before he comes to systematic criticism. His answer furnishes us with a key to his whole position. Popularity, even the select popular- ity of Scott, he says, is no measure of greatness. The standard is quite other than that : it is spiritual power and the genius to reveal an idea that makes a man great. Scott is unspiritual because he has no deep passion and expresses no ideas. On the other hand he is " one of the healthiest of men." In a sick and artificial age this robust borderer was appointed by destiny " to be the song-singer and pleasant tale-teller to Britain and Europe. This is the history of the life and achievement of our Sir Walter Scott."^^ Carlyle's formula thus becomes clear at the start. Scott is not great, because he does not reveal the " Divine Idea " either in life or in work. He is, however, healthy in nearly all of his relations, and healthiness is the word by which his life and work are properly appreciated.^^ ^^ Essays, VI, 38. ^^ To show how repeatedly these standards are applied to man and author, I subjoin two groups of passages, (i) Want of ideas, want of spirituality; (a) "Friends to precision will probably deny his title to the name ' great.' One knows not what idea worthy of the name of great, what purpose, instinct or tendency, that could be called great, Scott was ever inspired with." (b) " The great Mystery of Existence was not great to him." (c) " A great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed with an idea." (rf) " Perhaps no literary man of any generation has less value than Scott for the immaterial part of his mission in any sense." (e) " Our highest literary man . . . had, as it were, no message whatever to deliver to the world." (/) " The candid judge will, in general, require that a speaker, in so extremely serious a universe as this of ours, have something to speak about." (g) Scott's letters " do not, in any case whatever, proceed from the innermost parts of the mind," ..." the man of the world is always visible in them." (h) The Waverley Novels " are altogether addressed to the everyday mind ; for any other mind there Subsequent judgments are made on the basis of this prelimi- nary estimate. Carlyle passes in rapid review the earlier periods of Scott's life, giving an undue prominence perhaps to certain " questionable doings " connected with the " Liddesdale raids." He regards the portentous Ballantyne connection as natural in a worldly man like Scott. He criticises Scott's poetry in a desultory manner and seems to consider it as an incident in the author's career and an explanation of this worldly success rather than as literature which merits serious appreciation. At all events, though he does not deny real worth of a kind in the metrical romances, Carlyle explains their immense vogue more on external than on internal grounds. His interest reaches its highest point when he discusses the culminating period of Scott's life, the period of the Waverley Novels. This was the critical time in the career of Scott, when it was to be seen whether he was guided by inner ideals or ex- ternal considerations. Carlyle's judgment of Scott's character at this point is significant. Though he pronounces the picture presented in the copious extracts from Lockhart's Life to be "very beautiful," he unequivocally asserts that Scott, at this period, " with all his health, was infected." Scott wrote im- promptu novels to buy farms with and his tragedy was due not to bankruptcy, but to false ambition. " His way of life," says Carlyle, " was not wise." Thus as in the case of Burns, the is next to no nourishment in them ; " " not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for edification, for building up or elevating in any shape ; " " they do not form themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial ones." (2) Healthiness; (a) Not a great man but " the healthiest o^ men." (b) " Were one to preach a sermon on Health, Scott ought to be the text." (c) The happiest circumstance of all is, that Scott had in himself a right healthy soul." (d) " Scott's healthiness showed itself decisively in all things, and nowhere more decisively than in this : the way in which he took his fame." (e) " If no skyborn messenger — a substantial, peace- able, terrestrial man." (/) " Letters they are of a most humane man of the world." (g) " Scott's rapidity is great, is a proof and consequence of the solid health of the man, bodily and spiritual." {h) "... in general healthiness of mind, these Novels prove Scott to have been amongst the foremost of writers." In connection with so many praises of Scott's health this passage should not be forgotten : " Alas, Scott with all his health, was infected." 135 critic pierces to the soul of Scott and interprets his failure solely upon spiritual grounds. This searching judgment of course carries with it the corollary that the Waverley Novels were in large measure the product of a commercialized mind. It was inevitable that this appreciation of the life and work of Scott should have aroused the anger of those who honored him as one of the most lovable and manly of men and as the most delightful story-teller of their day. But Carlyle's judg- ment is the expression of higher standards than the average critic is wont to apply to life and literature. He measured Scott in 1837 by exactly the same standards which he had ap- plied to Richter in 1827 and to Johnson in 1832. However manly or delightful Scott was he was not great or noble be- cause he did not dedicate his character and his art to the ex- pression of truth. In saying or implying this opinion, Car- lyle of course does not mean to suggest, as some seem to have supposed, that truth is a barren formula or thesis, or that it is synonymous with the Thirty-nine Articles. We have gone with him too far to suspect him of such shallow thinking. He hated the doctrinaire even more heartily than do some of his unfriendly critics. But he never departed from his belief that the life of a truly great man, whether poet or prophet, must be felt to be under the direction of some central purpose or idea, through which it becomes related to the vast invisible potentialities of the universe. Whether you call this inner force an idea, or a message, it is something which the great man will ever strive to utter and for the sake of which he is willing to sacrifice all else in life. Scott was not born for this kind of greatness. His mind was not spiritual in this lofty sense. It was not even intellec- tual, if by intellectuality we mean a passionate interest in abstract truth or in the deeper things of character and art, such as Browning had, for example. To Scott the world was not the vesture of an idea, as it was to Carlyle. Dreamer though he was, his dreams were always of a romantic, never of a mys- tical world. He was a medisevalist through and through, but he delighted in the mediasvalism of Ariosto, not of Dante. He was also an unaffected man of the world. " I have been no 136 sigher in the Shades," he said. " I love the virtues of rough- and-round men." He was human on every side, his nature was patriotic, paternal, social. What philosophy he pretended to have, he exercised in managing his everyday life. Carlyle is not indeed indifferent to these splendid qualities in Sir Wal- ter. He praises the good sense and sanity, the manliness, bravery and genial humanity of Scott, in passages of great beauty and power. But running through this golden character he saw a streak of baser metal, which in his opinion lowered its worth. He could no more approve of the building of Ab- botsford than he could approve of the ethics of Bentham or the political principles of the American people. Scott and Carlyle as men lived in different worlds and according to different standards. In art as well as in life their realms were widely sundered. Scott's literary ideals, as expressed in his own writings and in Lockhart's Life, are well known. He wrote to amuse, not to edify or to convey transcendental truth. He would not have understood, or if he had understood he would not have taken seriously, the Fichtean notion of the man of letters as a re- vealer of the " Divine Idea." He had no illusions concerning his position as a writer. Like Moliere he felt that his art served its ends if it brought applause from his audience. He considered literature a profession, not a martyrdom. He re- garded his ability to write books very much as a man to-day regards his business ability, as a means with which he may make a success of life both financially and socially. Author- ship as a calling to which one solemnly dedicates himself was farthest from Scott's thought ; that, as he said, was for the Shakespeares and the Molieres, but not for him. With these ideals, accompanied with such gifts as he had, Scott was for Carlyle a minor writer, not an artist of the first rank. And for minor writers the criticism of Carlyle has virtually no place, because they do not add new meanings to our conception of life. While Carlyle's interpretation of Scott reaches therefore negative conclusions and is expressed, we must- own, in a spirit sometimes needlessly harsh, it is as a whole entirely in harmony with his literary and critical doctrine. 137 The individual opinions or estimates which follow upon Car- lyle's general judgment are nearly all adverse, and some of them are so unbalanced as to indicate that his want of sym- pathy with the literature of amusement and with the kind of life that Scott lived got the better of his judgment. When, for example, he lumps Scott's characters together and says that they are created " from the skin inwards," he sees no differ- ence between the conventional heroes and heroines of the Waverley Novels and the genuine, if not heroic, figures drawn from humble life. When, again, he says that these novels are melodramatic and mechanically constructed, he lays the blame partly upon Scott's habits of extempore composition, without giving him any recognition for the labor of those early years when Scott was filling his mind with an inexhaus- tible store of material for his books. The truth is that Car- lyle is too ready to explain not only Scott's shortcomings as a man but his limitations as a literary artist upon the ground of his worldly ambitions as shown conspicuously in the building at Abbots ford. The critic gives way to the moralist, for in this instance he fails properly and fairly to correlate Scott's mind and temperament with his work, or carefully to con- sider Scott's whole view of literary craftsmanship. Undoubt- edly Scott's financial affairs and worldly ambitions influenced his work in literature. But considering his habitual attitude toward his art, before and after Abbotsford v/as built, it is safer to say that his work would not have been essentially different had there been no decorating of walls and no collect- ing of old armor. But Carlyle's waning interest in literature considered apart from ideas is responsible for many gaps in his appreciation of Scott. Scott's greatness as a story-teller, his amazing fertility in invention, his skill as a scene-painter are passed over. So, too, are his place and influence in the history of English litera- ture. Carlyle does indeed refer lightly to Scott's rela- tion to the "buff-belted watch-tower period of literature." But this is quite inadequate in the case of a far-extending in- fluence like Scott's. The essay therefore in spite of numerous flashes of inspired opinion and many brilliant word-pictures is 138 never likely to satisfy the reading world as an interpretation of Scott. As an analysis of the man it over-emphasizes his worldliness and in consequence fails to bring into proper relief the really great moral qualities of his character. As a critique of the author it fails even more decidedly because it is so largely incomplete and negative and because it explains Scott's defects as a writer too largely in terms of his moral weakness in building Abbotsford. But as a Carlyle document the essay is invaluable and it is likely to live as long as an interest in Carlyle endures. It is on all sides an exact expression of the man. In the study of Carlyle as critic it is of peculiar im- portance, for it is the best illustration we have of the applica- tion of his ideas of life, literature and criticism to a distin- guished writer whose works he regarded as of minor value, fit only to amuse the indolent or languid mind. CHAPTER IX From Criticism to Prophecy Although the essay on Sir Walter Scott was the last formal criticism that Carlyle wrote, it by no means marks the end of his interest in literature and in men of letters. Forty years from that time he read Gibbon through again and dipped into Swift, Sterne and Voltaire, and during all the intervening period, even while he was wrestling with his Cromzvell and his Frederick, his eye was keen to see the movements of men in the field of letters. In the earlier years of this later period he lectured on heroes and on the history of literature, and he wrote a life of his friend John Sterling; and in each instance he gave much evidence of his critical interest in literature. Evidence of a similar kind is abundant too, in reminiscences, letters, political pamphlets, and even in the ponderous histories themselves. Moreover Carlyle himself had now become one of the foremost figures in a great age of literature and he numbered among his friends and acquaintance nearly every English writer of high rank. He breathed the air in which great literature was created. He could not altogether escape it, if he would. Froude remarks that Carlyle read more mis- cellaneously than any man he had ever known, that he was as familiar with English literature as Macaulay and knew Ger- man, French and Italian literatures infinitely better. "His knowledge," says Froude, " was not in points or lines, but com- plete and solid."^ His views, however, remained essentially what they had been, though his language often became ridic- ulously extravagant in its expression of them. Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning he knew and liked as men but not as poets. He once spoke of Wordsworth's poetry as "pastoral pipings,"^ and Tennyson's Princess he thought ^Froude, IV, 218. ^ Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle, 55. 139 140 "had cvcrythin}:^ bnt common sense, "•'* while in the Idylls he recognized " the inward perfection of vacancy."* He admired Browning's intellectual and spiritual power, but urged him to write in prose. The early Ruskin he did not care for, though he expressed high appreciation of Ruskin's later works. Emerson was a life-long friend and Carlyle praised the " tone of veracity " in his essays, though in later life he came to regard the American sage's writings as thin and moonshiny, like the articles in the Dial. Newman, Keble and Jowett, churchmen all, he spoke of in contemptuous terms. The novelists for the most part be dismissed in disgust, espe- cially Trollopc, Jane Austen, George Sand and Balzac. Thackeray, whom he disliked as a man, he rated higher than Dickens, whom he liked ; " Thackeray," he said to Sir Charles Duffy, "has more reality in him, and would cut up into a dozen Dickenses."''' His standard was the same in all cases. He praised the literature that seemed to him truthful, vera- cious, faithful to fact and reality, but he generally complained that the books of his day were either false or shallow and trifling, and that literature had fallen from its position of power. The fact is Carlyle was too deeply absorbed in his own work and mission and had gone too far along his own appointed path to appreciate fairly the work of his contemporaries. While a great and enduring literature was being created all about him, he stood apart as a prophet to preach to his generation his gospel of hero-worship and work. This posi- tion by which he is best known to the world Carlyle began to assume at a period that is coincident with his work upon Sartor Resartus, that is to say, from the fall of 1830 onward. From this time we may date the beginning of his change from criticism to prophecy. The causes of this change were several. When he went to London in 1831, for the second time, he found literature, as he believed, to be either dying or dead and offering no hope to one of his belief and purpose. His slight acquaintance with the foremost literary men of that day, Cole- " ICsijinassc, Literary Recollections, 214, * EincrsoH-Carlyle Corr., II, 340. ^Conversations, 76. 141 ridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and De Quincey, Godwin, Lockhart and Leigh Hunt, left him for the most part disheartened and dis- gusted with the profession of letters. It was indeed a time of transition. The age of romantic literature had culminated and the Victorian era was yet to come. Politics, too, and the state of society excited his gloomy apprehension. It was the time of reform agitation and Carlyle looked out upon a world adrift on change. He could not be content to write reviews when he saw, as he said in Sartor, " a world becoming dismantled." It was a time for the deliverance of his own message, the message he had learned partly from experience but largely from German literature and philosophy. It was not a time for reviewing a moribund English literature. Moreover Carlyle was tired of reviewing, he was wearied, he said, with scribbling for capricious editors for uncertain pay. He therefore went up to London in 183 1 with the manuscript of Sartor. He was about to abdicate the office of critic and to assume the role of prophet. Unable to find a publisher for Sartor, he wrote Char- acteristics for the Edinburgh Reviezv and his essay on Johnson for Frascr's Magazine, both articles announcing a change from criticism to prophecy.® J This change in office implies no alteration in Carlyle's phi- losophy of life or theory of poetry. Philosophy is poetry and ^ poetry is philosophy and both are life and reality: from this creed he never departed. It was no part of his literary theory that meter or rhyme is essential to poetry. He always laid the great emphasis upon the message, the meaning, the truth ex- * pressed. Upon this theory, it is the same if you say that poetry is life or that life is poetry; and Carlyle did declare in his first essay on Goethe that " all good men may be called poets in act, or in word."^ It is the same if you say that the poet is the highest man of his time or that the highest man of his time is a poet. The poet is he who expresses life, whether ® Carlyle struggled for years to find a suitable form for his original work. As early as 1822 he experimented unsuccessfully with verse, but, as Froude says, he could not " master the mechanical difficulties of the art" (Froude, Life, I, 138, 205), He had tried the novel, but this also proved too refractory. ''Essays, I, 180. L 142 y in rhymes or in deeds. In an age, therefore, in which, as Carlyle sees it, life is not to be found in Hterature, he will turn for it to biography and to history. From 1831 he finds poetry, reality, that is, less and less in literature and more and more in the lives of great men. Goethe the poet becomes Goethe the hero. Transcendental truth, no longer discoverable in the books that men write, is to be found in the lives that heroes have lived. Evidences of this transition from criticism to prophecy are to be seen everywhere in the essays written after 1830. Even "t^ in one essay of 1830, the second Richtcr, Carlyle points out that he is now looking from the poem to the poet.^ In the Schiller (1831) he disgresses to discuss happiness and to condemn utilitarian ethics. From 1830 onward he refers more and more often to "our age." Hardly an essay but echoes the reform movement or contains references to the French Revo- lution. Some essays, for example Mirabeau, are wholly biographical and historical, while others, as Diderot, show that Carlyle has greater interest in history and biography than in literature. The message is the thing. We hear now from Sauerteig, Smelfungus, Teufelsdrockh, who are introduced to give harangues on the great man and his uses. It would be possible indeed to regard all the later and greater essays as tracts for the times, though to do this we should be laying emphasis upon certain features at the expense of others. In Voltaire, which is a little earlier than the period of prophecy, Carlyle is declaring against skepticism and denial; in Diderot he preaches against mechanism and a mechanical age. Even ^. the essay on Scott, last of the critical essays, is from one point of view a declaration against worldliness. On the other hand the essay on Boszvell's Life on Johnson is written partly for the purpose of presenting to a drifting social order the figure of a man who held fast to duty ; while the second Goethe holds up the true prophet for the time, the man who builds, who has lived a whole life, in contrast to the man of Carlyle's time, who destroys and who has lived only a half life. The change from criticism to prophecy becomes more apparent still, if we con- * Essays, III, 5. 143 trast the first with the second essay on Goethe, the essay on ^^ Voltaire with that on Diderot. In the earher essays the treat- ment is distinctly more literary, more critical, the men are more broadly discussed as men of letters and the critic is interested in the men and their work more for their own sake and less for the purpose of advancing a message. In the later essays _J the prophet frequently replaces the critic. " For us in these days," wrote Carlyle, "prophecy (well understood), not poetry, is the thing wanted. How can we sing and paint when we do not yet believe and see?"^ Therefore Carlyle stands apart to preach against Coleridgean philosophy and shovel- hattism, Benthamite Ethics and the whole doctrine of utili- tarianism, against reform and the new democracy, against in- dustrialism and laizaez faire. At exactly the time when Tenny- son was leading in a new age of poetry, Carlyle was " throwing down his critical assaying balance."^'' He now began to ^ declare that not the poet only, but every worker " bodies forth j^' the forms of Things Unseen. "^^ ./ ' Froude, Life, II, 299. ^"Essays, IV, 184. See the opening paragraph to Corn-Law Rhymes \j Id^' for Carlyle's farewell to criticism. "Past and Present, 176. -7 CHAPTER X Carlyle's Criticism Carlyle's literary criticism, like all human products, has its defects and its merits, its weakness as well as its strength. Of the four great requisites of a critic — insight, knowledge, sympathy and detachment — he possessed the first two in large measure, but he was often wanting in sympathy and he was seldom able to maintain the judicial attitude towards his ma- terial. If he is in sympathy with his writer, as in the case of Goethe, his position is confessedly that of an advocate. Like the lawyer he is for or against the question at issue: if in an author he discovers merits, it is to praise them; if he finds defects, it is to condemn them. He does not sit apart and coolly exercise the function of a judge. In truth as Carlyle grew older, he showed less and less of the ideal temper and taste of the critic. Where his taste and sympathy were not ap- pealed to, he was apt to become intolerant and sometimes frankly antagonistic. His tastes and sympathies, moreover, excluded a large area of literature from the field of his interest, and hence his services to criticism were very considerably limited. Carlyle was by nature deficient in sympathy with two great forms of literature, the novel and the drama. Of the novel regarded as a medium for the communication of a philosophy of life or a theory of education and culture, such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, he of course made an exception. The dramas too of Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller, con- sidered apart from the theatre and solely as interpretations of life, he read and wrote about with enthusiasm. But interest in story, plot, or character-development he had little, even from the first. His theory of art, as well as his taste and sympathy, left but a small place for purely imaginative, as distinguished from interpretative, literature. He did not care for the sensu- ous poetry of Keats, for the ethereal music of Shelley, or for 144 145 the witchery in the poetry of Coleridge. He found Httle good and much harm or frivolousness in the poetry of Byron and Scott. Carlyle went to poetry for ideas, and in the imaginative poetry of Enghsh romanticism he declared that he found none. Such poetry was therefore beyond the reach of his criticism. The rhythm, the music, the phrase, in short the form of liter- ature, did not much interest Carlyle. -^As we have pointed out in a previous chapter, it was no part of his doctrine that poetry should be in metrical language. He delighted in the songs of Burns and in some of Goethe, but these were exceptions. With almost the single exception of the essay on Burns, his criticism takes no notice of what Coleridge praises in the poetry of Wordsworth, the "strength and originality," ^the " curiosa felicitas" of single lines and paragraphs. (This attitude is shown also in his want of interest in minor writers, whose appeal is so apt to be one of lines or stanzas, but not one of solid meanings and a single body of ideas. ' So intent was he : to discover ideas and to proclaim them when found that Carlyle sometimes indeed goes to the very opposite extreme to sestheti- cism. He becomes didactic. Even the earlier essays are not entirely free from this tendency and the later ones show a good deal of it. He steers clear of the dangers of neo-classic j^ criticism, but he does not wholly escape the perils of a criticism ■ that emphasizes the moral value of ideas. Over against these shortcomings are to be set certain merits in Carlyle's work as a critic. He possessed knowledge and _ insight not surpassed by any critic of his period. In knowl- edge alone he was superior to Lamb or Hazlitt and hardly equalled by Coleridge, whose knowledge, at all events, was „ far less coherent than Carlyle's. His insight, his sheer power ^_ to interpret the vital values of literature, was at its best ^'ery great. He believed with Hazlitt that a critic should fix his \^ ideas at the center, not at the circumference, of life and litera- ture. Goethe, acknowledged Carlyle's ability in this direction. He thought it remarkable that Carlyle in his criticism of Ger- man authors should seek out the spiritual and moral kernel; the Scot, he said, seeks to penetrate the work. Carlyle's knowledge and insight are amply displayed in the massive 146 essays that he wrote. He was drawn to great writers, he delighted to study them in relation to their age and to extract from the volume of their writings the sum-total of their criticism of life. To do this great knowledge and great inter- pretative power are necessary. The critic must have interests bcyong the merely literary, he must be competent to under- stand and interpret influences, social and political, religious and philosophical, that have united to shape great minds, tsuch for example, as Goethe, Voltaire and Diderot. Carlylc resembles Goethe(himself \in his ability to bring to the interpretation of men and books a wide knowledge and a rare power of penetra- tion. If to this insight and information we add his spirit of independence, his moral force in breaking away from tradi- tion and convention, we must admit that Carlyle was fitted to perform a substantial and permanent service for English lite- rary criticism. . ! r This service may be summarized briefly. In the first place Carlyle defined more clearly and accurately than contemporary English critics the aims and methods of the new criticism. He was the first to define the historical method, and he carried the use of it further than did other critics of his day. He prepared the way for the criticism that has gained so much , favor and currency in recent years, a criticism in which litera- '■ ture is interpreted in relation to the life of its creator and to the age in which he lived. Carlyle saw more clearly than his contemporaries the value of the comparative method ; and in his German essays he made much use of this method in tracing parallel streams of influence in German and English roman- ticism. Secondly, Carlyle deserves a permanent place in Eng- lish criticism as an introducer of German literature, especially that of Goethe, into England. From 1828 to 1850 he was the best, indeed almost the only, interpreter of German thought in England, and he was recognized as the critic who had done most to spread the knowledge of it among English people. Goethe's first great critic in England was Carlyle. Thirdly, Carlyle at his best was (apart from his pioneer service for German literature) a really great interpreter of men of letters and of literature. He was the first to recognize the genius of 147 Boswell and he was the first Englishman of importance to interpret Voltaire. His essays on Burns and on Johnson are • still the best of their class. These are services of themselves substantial enough to entitle Carlyle to a worthy place in the ; history of English criticism. Finally we must add the work that he did in common with otlier English critics of romanti- cism. He lent his knowledge and his insight, his moral courage and his intellectual independence, to the establishment of the cardinal principle in all modern criticism, that literature is to be judged, as Professor Saintsbury expresses it, "not by adjustment to anything else, but on its own merits."^ ^ Hist, of Criticism, III, 4. INDEX Aeschylus, 4, i8 Age of Wordsworth, 28, 76 Akenside, Mark, 7 Alison, Archibald, Rev., 63 Anabasis, 7 Anti-Jacobin, 97 Arabian Nights, The, 5 Ariosto, 13s Aristotle, 34 Arnim, von, Ludwig, 80 Arnold, Matthew, 98, 119 A tola, 78 Austen, Jane, 140 Baillie, Joanna, 18, 83 Ball, Margaret, 68, 93 Balzac, 140 Batteaux, 62 Bayle, Pierre, 112 Beaumont and Fletcher, 85 Beckford, William, 87 Beers, Henry A,, 76, 80 Bentham, Jeremy, 136 Bielschowsky's Life of Goethe, 39, 77 Biographia Literaria, 35, 58 . Biography, Carlyle's Essay on, 88 Black Dwarf, The, 8 Blackwood's Magazine, 57, 58, 66, 9S, 96, 97 Blair, Hugh, 62, 67, 68 Blair's Lectures, 62 Boileau, 62 Bolingbroke, Henry Saint John, Vis- count, 104 Bossu, 62, 67, 68 Boswell, James, 30, 33, 121-130, 147 Boswell's Life of Johnson, 30, 114, 121, 142 Boyesen, H, H., 28, 31 Brandes, Georg, 34 Brentano, Clemens, 80 Brewster, Dr., 15, 16, 19, 20, 22 Brownell, W. C, i Browning, Robert, 135, 139, 140 BuUer, Charles, 20, 23 Burger, Gottfried August, 92, 96 Burke, Edmund, 74, 130 Burney, Fanny, 104 Burns, Carlyle's Essay on, 83, 114, 122 Burns, Robert, 2, 30, 43, 51, 54, 55, 82, 115-121, 126, 14s, 147 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 6, 13, 43, 82, 84, 89, 93, 119 Calderon, 85 Campbell, Thomas, 7, 23 Candide, 105 Carlyle, Alexander, 23 Carlyle, Margaret, 2, 21 Carlyle, Thomas, Conway's Life of, 2, 4 Carlyle, Thomas, Froude's Life of, 2, 3, 4, 10, IS, 16, 18, 19, 23, 38, 48, 66 Carlyle, Thomas, Garnett's Life of, 18 Carlyle, Thomas, Nichol's Life of, 18 Cervantes, 87, 108 Characteristics, Carlyle's Essay, 32, 44, 80, 102, 114, 141 Chateaubriand, 78, 79 Chaucer, 54 Childe Harold, 8, 84 Cicero, 4, 7, Clarendon, Edward Hyde, first earl of 21 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 23, 28, 34, 35, 36, S8, 69, 70, 71, 78, 84, 94. 95, 96, 130, 140, 145 Coleridge, Life of, Brandl's, 91 Condorcet, de. Marquis, 109 Confessions of Rousseau, 58, 78 Congreve, William, 5, 104 Constantine, 18 Conway, Moncure D., 2, 7 Cook's Voyages, 5 Corneille, 85 Cornwall, Barry, 23, 24 148 149 Cromwell, Oliver, Carlyle's, 139 Cromwell, Hugo's, 78 Cromwell, Oliver, 21 Dante, 42, 54, 110, 135 David, 18 Davies, Tom, 124 Defense of Poetry, Shelley's, 29 Defoe, Daniel, 87 De Quincey, Life of, Japp's, 10 De Quincey, Thomas, 23, 67, 84, 95, 141 Dial, The, 140 Dialogues des Marts, 7 Diamond Necklace, The Carlyle's Essay on, 78 Dichtitng und Wahrheit, 39, 96, 102 Dickens, Charles, 140 Diderot, 42, 51, 53, 54, 146 Diderot, Carlyle's Essay on, 52, 78, 142 Dionysius, 9 Disraeli, Benjamin, 87 Divine Comedy, The, 54 Dryden, John, 74 Duffy, Sir Charles, 140 Eckermann, J. P., 132 Edinburgh Address, Carlyle's, 72 Edinburgh Encyclopedia, The, 15, 16 Edinburgh Review, 16, 24, 25, 57, 58, 62, 63, 66, 67, 82, 96, 97, 114, 122, 141 Edinburgh Sketches, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 19 Egan, Pierce, 87 Emerson, R. W., 140 Emerson Works, 4 Epigoniad, 7 Essays, Hume's, 7 Essays in Literature, Saintsburg's 68 Faust, Goethe's, 20, 93, 96, 97, 100 Fenelon, 7 Ferguson, Robert, 120 Fichte, J. G., 28, 31, 35, 36, 41, 57, 59, 75 Fielding, Henry, 5, 87 Fitzgerald, Edward, 127 Ford, John, 65 Foreign Review, 93, 105 Fouque, Baron de la Motte, 79, 80, 86, 97 Fox, George, 21 Eraser, James, 114 Eraser's Magazine, 141 Frederick the Great, 10, 21, Froude, J. A., 139 Garnett, Richard, 115 Garrick, David, 125 Gates, Prof. L. E., 64 Gay, John, 104 German Influence in English Liter- ature, Perry's, 97 German Playwrights, Carlyle's Es- say on, 28 German Romance, Carlyle's trans- lations from, 24, 25, so, 52, 60, 78, 86, 98 Germany, Madame de Staels', 8, 11, 57, 58, 96, 97 Gespr'dche, Goethe's, 39, 61 Gibbon, Edward, 8, 19, 104, 139, Gifford, William, 68 Gil Bias, 5 Godwin, William, 141 Goethe, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 22, 23, 28, 29, Z2, 3Z, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 49, SI, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 72, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83, 8s, 86, 90, 92-95, 97-103, 106-7, 131, 142, 144-6 Goethe, Carlyle's Essays on, 31, 46, 49, 122, 142 Goldsmith, Oliver, 74, 87, 125 Gordon, Margaret, 14 Gotz von Berlichingen, 77, 79, 84, 93, 100, 102 Gray, Thomas, 74, 122 Grillparzer, Franz, 30, 85, 97 Haller, 96 Hamlet, 60, 61 Hampden, John, 21 Harper, Prof. G. H., 48 Hayley, William, 84 Hazlitt, William, 28, 36, 58, 69, 70, 71, 84, 105, 119, 141, 145 Heine, Heinrich, 30, 77, 81 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 30 Heldenbuch, 81 150 Helena, Carlyle's Essay on, 76 Helena, Goethe's, 81 Hemens, Felicia, 84 Herder, von, J. G., 57, 62, 95 Herford, C. H., 76 Heroes and Hero Worship^ Carlyle's 44, Hernani, Hugo's, 78 Hill, George Birbeck, 130 Historic Survey of German Poetry, Taylor's, 92 History of Criticism, Saintsbury's, 62, 68, 147 History of England, Hume's, 5 History of English Poetry, Warton's, 54 History of Frederick the Great, 139 History of the French Revolution, Carlyle's, 78, 115, 130 History of Scotland, Robertson's, 5 History of the Thirty Years War, Schiller's, 12 Hoffmann, 29, 79, 80, 81, 86, 93 Homer, 4, 7 Horace, 4, 34 Hugo, Victor, 78, 79 Hume, David, 7, 8, 35, 64, 104, 125 Hunt, Leigh, 141 Idylls of the King, Tennyson's, 140 Irving, Edward, 7, 8, 22, 23 Jardine, Robert, 10, 11 Jeffrey, Francis, 24, 25, 30, 61-68, 70, 114, 119, 132 Job, 18 Johnson, Samuel, 42, 51, 54, 61, 74, 84, 107, 121-130, 147 Jolley Beggars, The, 119 Jowett, Benjamin, 140 Kames, Lord, 61, 62, 75 Kant, 2Z, 35, 36, 57, 59, 94, 95, 108 Keats, John, 29, 35, 84, 144 Keble, John, 140 Klopstock, 10, 91 Kotzebue, von, A. F,, 10, 44, 85, 92, 94 Korner, K. T., 96, 97 Knox, John, 114 La Henriade, 104 Lalla Rookh, 8 Lamb, Charles, 58, 69, 71, 96, 119, 141, 145 Lang, Andrew, 130, 132 Lang's Life of Lockhart, 68 Lang's Life of Scott, 130 La Pucelle, 7, 109 La Rouchefoucault, 8 Laud, William, 21 Lectures on Dramatic Literature, A. W. Schlegel's, 57, 96 Leonidas, 7 Leslie Professor, 3 Lessing, 57, 91, 92, 95, 97 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 37 Lettres Provinciates, 8 Lewes, George Henry, 98 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 8, 87, 93 Litterary Criticism in the Renais- sance, Spingarn's, 34 Locke, John, 35, 64, 109 Lockhart, John Gibson, 66, 68, 91, 96, 119, 141 Lockhart' s Life of Scott, 134, 136 London Magazine, 12, 22, 95 London Times, 23 Lope de Vega, 85 Louis the Fifteenth, 104, 108, iii, 112 Lucan, 7 Lucinde, F. Schlegel's, 80 Luther, Martin, 114 Lyrical Ballads, 58. , Macaulay, T. B., 82, 122, 127, 139 Mackail, J. W., 28, Macpherson, James, 84 Mahrchen, Goethe's, 81 Main Currents in Nineteenth Cen- tury Literature, Brandes, 80 Manfred, Byron's, 62 Masson, David, 12 Massinger, 85 Messias, 1 Metrical Legends, Joanna Baillie's 18, 19, 83 Milton, John, 11, 21 Mirabeau, 142 Mirabeau, Carlyle's Essay, 78 Mitchell, Robert, 6, 9, 17 151 Moliere, 7, 66, 85, 136 Monk, The, 8 Montaigne, 8, 16, 87 Monthly Magazine, 67, 92 Monthly Register, 94 Monthly Review, 92, 97 Moore, Thomas, 13, 82 Miillner, 97 Napier, 82, 88, 114 New Edinburgh Review, 12, 14, 18 New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, 4 Newman, 140 Niebelungen Lied, 80, 81 Norton, C. E., 10, 132 Novalis, 29, 30, 39, 40, 43, 73, 79. 81, 88 Novalis, Carlyle's Essay, 35, 75 Oberon, Wieland's, 7 Oedipe, 104 Orleans, Duke of, 108 Pascal, no Past and Present, Carlyle's, 44, 75, 143 Paul, 18 Pelham, 87, 88 Pharsalia, Lucan's, 7 Philosophical Dictionary, 112 Piozzi, Mrs., 126 Pitt, William, 16 Plato, no Plato, no Pope, Alexander, 61, 68, 104, 120 Porter, Jane, 7 Princess, The, Tennyson's, 139 Principia, Newton's, 7 Principles of Knowledge, Berkeley's, 7 Quarterly Review, 57, 58, 104 Rabelais, 87 Racine, 62 Radcliffe, Mrs. Anne, 87 Ramsey, Allan, 120 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 125 Richardson, Samuel, 87 Richter, Jean Paul, Carlyle's Es- says on, 50, 76, 142 Richter, Jean Paul, 25, 28, 30, 39, 43, 57, 73, 86, 95, 97, 98, 122, 135 Robbers, The, Schiller's, 79, 81 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 2;^, 92, 94, 95, 96 Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century, Beer's, 76, 80 Royce, Josiah, 39 Rousseau, J. J., 57, 58, 78, 79, 88, III, 125, 126 Ruskin, John, 140 Sainte Beuve, 48 Saintsbury, George, 61, 68, 147 Sartor Resartus, Carlyle's, 6, 18, 27, Z(>, 45, 79, 87, 102, 114, 121, 140, 141 Sand, George, 79, 140 Schelling, 35, 36, 75 Schiller, 10, 11, 12, 17, 19, 29, 35, 37, 40, 41, 57, 59, 61, 62, 83, 8s, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 144 Schiller, Carlyle's Essay on, 142 Schiller, Life of, Carlyle's, 12, 22, 23, 37, 48, 49, 63, 85 Schlegel, A. W., 35, 36, 59, 79, 94 Schlegel, F., 28, 40, 59, 80 Scottish Chiefs, 7 Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 8, 30, 31, 33, 51, 54, 68, 75, 82, 84, 88, 92, 93, 107, 119, 130-138, 14s Scott, Sir Walter, Carlyle's Essay on, 114 Scott, Sir Walter, as a Critic of Literature, 68, 93 Shakespeare, 18, 29, 32, 33, 54, 68, 8s, no, 144 Shelley, Mrs., 87 Shelley, P. B., 29, 35, 82, 84, 96, 97, 144 Shenstone, William, 120 Signs of the Times, Carlyle's, 114 Smollet, Tobias, 5, 8 Solomon, 18 Sophocles, 4 Southey, Robert 96 Spectator, The, 5, 7 Spingarn, J. E., 34 Stael, Mme. de, 8, 10, 65 152 State of German Literature, The, Carlyle's Essay on, ii, 35, 37, 46, 60, 67, 75 Sterling, John, 98, 132, 139 Sterling, John, Life of, Carlyle's, 2, 88 Sterne, Laurence, 87, 139 Stevenson, R. L., 84 Swift, Jonathan, 104, 139 Tales of My Landlord, 8 Tarn o' Shanter, 119 Tasso, Hoole's, 7 Taylor, William, 62, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96 Tennyson, 139, 143 Thackery, 140 Thaddeus of Warsaw, 7 Thomson, James, 120 Tieck, 59, 78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 94 Tom Jones, 87 Tristram Shandy, 87 Trollope, A., 140 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 43 Victorian Prose Masters, 1 Virgil, 4 Vivian Grey, 87 Voltaire, 7, 28, 30, 42, 51, 54, 62, 78, 79, 100-2, 104-13, I2S, 139, 146, 147 Voltaire, Carlyle's Essay on, 51, 78, 142 Walpole, Horace, 104, 125 Warton, Thomas, 54 Waugh, Baillie, 18-20 Waverley, 7, 8, 62, 84, 131 Waverley Novels, 84, 88, 134, 13s, 137 Welsh, Jane, 11, 12, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 38, 82 Werner, Z., 79, 80, 81, 88 Werter, Sorrozvs of, 51, 77, 79, 91, 100, 102, 103 Wieland, 7, 91, 92, 94 Wilhelm, Meister, Carlyle's transla- tion of, 12, 22, 23, 58, 66, 85, 88, 96, 98 Wilhelm Meister, Goethe's 30, 38, 51, 58, 60, 61, 6s, 67, 77, 78, 83, 86, 93, 100, loi, 103, 144 Wilkes, John, 126 Wilson, John, 68 Winkelmann, 57 Wordsworth, William, 28, 29, 35, 58, 69, 70, 71, 74, 78, 82, 84, 95, 96, 119, 139, 14s Wotton Reinfred, 24, 31 Xenophon, 7 Zaire, 105 STUDIES IN ENGLISH Joseph Glanvill A Study in English Thought and Letters of the Seventeenth Century By Ferris Greenslet, Ph.D., Cloth, i2mo pp. xi4-23S $i.So net The Elizabethan Lyric By John Erskine, Ph.D., Cloth, i2mo pp. xvi + 344 $i-5o net Classical Echoes in Tennyson By Wilfred P. 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