The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
in 18 Volumes
(1907–21).
Volume XIII.
The Victorian Age.
Part I.
I. Carlyle.
§ 1. Goethe on Carlyle.
When Goethe, in 1827, declared Carlyle—the Carlyle of the Life of Schiller—to be “a moral force of great significance,” he showed, as often in his judgments of men, an insight which, at the same time, was prophetic; for Carlyle, unquestionably, was the strongest moral force in the English literature of the nineteenth century. In an age which dealt pre-eminently in ethical and religious ideas; an age in which the intellectual currency was expressed in terms of faith and morality, rather than of abstract metaphysics; when the rapid widening of knowledge was viewed in many quarters with suspicion and apprehension; and, especially, when the newborn science of biology appeared as a sinister force threatening the very foundations of belief—in such an age, Carlyle was a veritable leader to those who walked in uncertainty and darkness. He laughed to scorn the pretensions of scientific materialism to undermine man’s faith in the unseen; he heaped obloquy on the much vaunted science of political economy; he championed the spiritual against the material, demanded respect for justice and for the moral law and insisted on the supreme need of reverence—reverence, as Goethe had taught him, not merely for what is above us, but, also, for what is on the earth, beside us and beneath us. Nowadays, when the interest in many of these questions has ceased to be a burning one, when a tolerance, not far removed from indifference, has invaded all fields of mental and moral speculation, and when a calmer historical contemplation of human evolution has taken the place of the embittered controversy of Victorian days, Carlyle’s power over men’s minds is, necessarily, no longer what it was. But it is, perhaps, just on this account the easier to take a dispassionate view of his life and work, to sum up, as it were, and define his place in the national literature. Such is the chief problem which we propose to deal with in the present chapter.
§ 2. Carlyle’s early years.
Born in the little Dumfriesshire village of Ecclefechan on 4 December, 1795, when the lurid light of the French revolution still lit up the European sky, Thomas Carlyle came of a typical lowland Scottish peasant stock, and, to the last, he remained himself a peasant, bound by a thousand clannish bonds to his provincial home. The narrow ties of blood and family always meant more to him than that citizenship of the world which is demanded of a man of genius; and, in spite of his forty years’ life in the metropolis, he never succeeded in shaking off the unpliant instincts of the south of Scotland peasant. His prickly originality and sturdy independence had something Celtic about them, and these characteristics clung to him all his life, even although he had early found an affinity in the Germanic mind. In the Dichtung und Wahrheit of Sartor Resartus and the preternaturally vivid pictures of Reminiscences, a kindly light of retrospect is thrown over Carlyle’s childhood and early life; but, none the less, the reader is conscious of the atmosphere of oppressive frugality, through which, as a child and youth, he fought his way to the light. At the grammar school of Annan, to which, after sparse educational beginnings in his native village, he was sent in 1805, he was too sensitive a child to distinguish himself other than as the tearful victim of his rougher schoolmates; and, at the early age of fourteen, he passed to the university of Edinburgh, where he attended lectures through five sessions. The Scottish universities, still medieval in character and curriculum, were then veritable bear-gardens, where the youth of the land, drawn from every rank of the population, were let loose to browse as they listed; the formalities and entrance-examinations which now guard these institutions, and have destroyed their old democratic character, were, as yet, undreamt of: but the Scottish students of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a Lernfreiheit as complete as, if, in its opportunities, more restricted than, that of German students of our own time; and Carlyle, while following, nominally, the usual courses, availed himself of this freedom to the full. Ever intolerant of teachers and of the systematic acquisition of knowledge, he benefited little from his classes in Edinburgh. Like many of our men of genius, he—one of the least academically minded of them all—always stood outside the academic pale. He had no high opinion of centres of learning, from this, his first experience—which, doubtless, provoked the outburst in Sartor, “that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered universities”—to the day when he recalled to students of Edinburgh university, more than fifty years later, his dictum from Lectures on Heroes, that the “true university of our days is a collection of books.” Edinburgh had thus little share in Carlyle’s development; at most, he succeeded, like his own Teufelsdrockh, “in fishing up from the chaos of the library more books perhaps than had been known to the very keepers thereof.” He had begun his studies with certain vague and half-hearted aspirations towards the ministry; but these were soon discarded. His only tie with academic learning was mathematics, for which he had a peculiar aptitude, and in which he even won the praise of his professor. He left the university in 1814 without taking a degree. On his return to Dumfriesshire, he was appointed a teacher of mathematics in Annan, in which post he succeeded a friend who was also to make some mark in the world, Edward Irving. From Annan, Carlyle, now in his twenty-first year, passed, with the help of a recommendation from his Edinburgh professor, to Kirkcaldy, whither Irving had preceded him—still as mathematical master, still without any kind of clearness as to what kind of work he was ultimatley to do in the world. In Fifeshire, however, he appears to have had his first experience of romance, which presented itself to him in the shape of a pupil of higher social station than his own; Margaret Gordon, Carlyle’s first love, may, possibly, have hovered before him as a kind of model for the “Blumine” of Sartor; although it seems hardly necessary to seek any specific model for so purely “literary” a figure. No doubt, this love-affair, which, through the timely interposition of a relative of Miss Gordon, came to an abrupt end, upset many of the presuppositions with which Carlyle set out in life. Another significant event was the chance reading, in September, 1817, of Madame de Stael’s De I’Allemagne, then quite new, which did more than all the treasures of the university library in Edinburgh to bring order and direction into Carlyle’s intellectual world. Considerable emphasis must be laid on this, the accident of his first introduction to the literature that was to mean much to him. Madame de Stael’s work, which opened up the wonderland of German thought and poetry, not only to Carlyle, but, also, to all Europe outside Germany, was a product of German romanticism, having been written, in great measure, under the guidance of August Wilhelm Schlegel, the chief critic of that movement; it was responsible for the fact that the impress which the new literature of Germany made on the European mind was, in the main, romantic. Even Goethe and Schiller are here seen essentially as Schlegel saw them; and Carlyle, all his life long, viewed the German writers whom he loved and looked up to as his masters from the romantic angle.
§ 3. Life of Schiller.
Heartily weary of school-teaching, Carlyle, once more, made an effort towards a profession; he returned with his friend Irving to Edinburgh, and, in September, 1818, took up the study of law. But he soon found that law had even less grip on him than had his previous studies for the church; and, gradually, he drifted into the undefined, and, for a man of Carlyle’s temperament infinitely disheartening and uphill, profession of the “writer of books.” His task was the harder, as he had already begun to be tortured by dyspepsia, and by the melancholy and depression which that disease brought in its train. Nevertheless, he made a beginning towards a literary activity with a number of articles contributed to Sir David Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia; this was the merest hackwork, but, at least, it was hackwork honestly performed. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1820, when at home in Dumfriesshire, he entered on a systematic study of the German language, and threw himself with passionate ardour into the works of the new writers, from whom Madame de Stael’s book had led him to hope that he would find guidance. And, in his early efforts to make money by his pen, it was only natural that he should have turned his German studies to account; while translating—again for Brewster—Legendre’s Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry, he found time to write an essay on Goethe’s Faust, which appeared in The New Edinburgh Review in April 1822. But his first serious task as an interpreter of German literature was a Life of Schiller, the German writer to whom, as was to be expected, he had been first attracted. This is an excellent piece of work, if it be remembered how meagre were the materials at his disposal; and it is hardly surprising that Schiller’s personality—in which Carlyle saw mirrored his own early struggles—and Schiller’s work as a historian, are more adequately treated than are his dramatic poetry or aesthetic studies. Carlyle’s Life of Schiller came out serially in The London Magazine in 1823 and 1824, and appeared in book form in 1825. Meanwhile, he had turned to Goethe, and translated, not without occasional secret misgivings, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which was published in 1824. This was followed by four volumes entitled German Romance, which included stories by Musaus—something of an intruder in this circle of romanticists—Forque, Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, as well as the continuation of Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, the translation of which was, naturally, more to his mind than that of the Apprenticeship had been. German Romance appeared in 1827, and found little favour with the reading public; but in that same year Carlyle had begun to write the remarkable series of essays on German literature, contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review and Foreign Quarterly Review, which now form a considerable part of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.
§ 4. Carlyle’s marriage.
The beginnings of Carlyle’s career as man of letters, all things considered, had been auspicious; perhaps, indeed, more auspicious than was justified by subsequent developments. But, at least, all thought of the bar as a profession was given up. Through Edward Irving, who, in the meantime, had settled in London, Carlyle became tutor to Charles Buller in 1822, and had the opportunity of getting to know something of a social world much above his own and of seeing London and even Paris. Before this, however, a new chapter in his life had begun with his introduction, in the early summer of 1821, to Jane Welsh of Haddington. Again, it was Irving whom he had to thank for this introduction, which formed a momentous turning-point in his life. Irving had himself been attracted by Miss Welsh, and she by him; but he was under other obligations; and the friendship between her and Carlyle was free to drift, in spite of many points of friction, into love. In 1826, the many difficulties and scruples which had arisen were successfully overcome, and she became Carlyle’s wife. After a short spell in Edinburgh, the young couple took up their abode amid the solitudes of the Dumfriesshire moors, at Craigenputtock, “the dreariest spot in all the British dominions,” where Mrs.Carlyle, born, if ever woman was, to grace a salon, spent six of her best years in oppressive solitude added to household work. With these years, which produced the essays on German literature, as well as Sartor Resartus, Carlyle’s apprenticeship to literature may be said to have come to a close. It will be convenient, at this stage, to consider what these literary beginnings under German influence meant for Carlyle. He was by no means, as has been often asserted, a pioneer of German studies in this country; he rather took advantage of an already existing interest in, and curiosity about, things German, to which many translations and magazine articles—Blackwood’s Magazine, for instance, had, since its inception in 1817, manifested a strong interest in German poetry—bear witness. Carlyle, however, had an advantage over other writers and translators of his day, in so far as his work is free from the taint of dilettantism, the besetting sin of all who, in those days, wrote on German literature in English magazines; he spoke with the authority of one who knew, whose study had been deep and fundamental, even although his practical knowledge of German at no time reached a very high degree of proficiency.
§ 5. His relation to Goethe.
Carlyle was never weary, all his life long, of proclaiming his personal debt to his German masters, above all, to Goethe; and, no doubt, the debt, especially to the latter, was a very real one. It was Goethe who helped him out of the Slough of Despond in the early twenties, when he was searching for a solution to the problem: “What canst thou work at?”—Goethe who showed him how to work his way through blank despair to the “Everlasting Yea.”
“If I havebeen delivered from darkness into any measure of light,” he himself wrote to the German poet, “if I know aught of myself and my duties and destination, it is to the study of your writings more than to any other circumstance that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always thank and reverence with the feeling of a Disciple to his Master, nay of a Son to his spiritual Father.”
Carlyle has himself said that the famous incident in Sartor Resartus, where the light breaks on Teufelsdrockh in the rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer, really took place in his own life one June afternoon in 1821, as he went down Leith walk to bathe in the firth of Forth. He, too, like his hero, had dwelt with the “Everlasting No”; difficulties of all kinds had beset him, religious difficulties, moral difficulties, above all, the racking problem of the end of life—happiness versus renunciation. He had, perhaps, also to face problems of a more practical kind than those which assailed his Teufelsdrockh; for it was only a few weeks before the crisis that he had met Miss Welsh; and, doubtless, in a dim way, he felt that the problem of life was now, or would become for him, not merely what canst thou work at, but what canst thou work at with sufficient worldly success to allow of sharing thy life with another. Moreover, the spiritual crisis, when it did break over Carlyle, assuredly did not come and go with the dramatic vividness of the chapters in Sartor; Carlyle’s struggles with the powers of darkness extended over years, and it may be questioned if he ever found complete deliverance, ever succeeded in setting the “Everlasting No” completely and finally at definance.
When, however, we scrutinise Carlyle’s relation to Goethe more closely, we see how strangely few points actually existed between the two men. Carlyle’s Goethe was by no means the whole Goethe, not even the real Goethe. Carlyle’s hero and saviour was a fantastic, romantic Goethe, on whom was grafted a modern individualism that was assuredly not Goethe’s. Carlyle attributed to Goethe a disharmony between the emotional and the intellectual life, which the German poet had never really known; for Goethe’s “storm and stress” crisis, which had been lived through, once and for all, years before Carlyle was born, was of quite another kind. The “Everlasting Yea” of Sartor, tinged, as it was, by puritanic abnegations, had not been Goethe’s solution to the inner dissonance of his early years; and Entsagen, to the “Great Heathen,” was a very different thing from the drab and austere interpretation which Carlyle put on the English word “renunciation.” In truth, Carlyle was no true Goethean, but a romanticist to the core; not in the vague English sense of that word, but as it is used in Germany, where it connotes a particular school of thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He drew his spiritual transcendentalism from Novalis, who is the theme of one of the most beautiful of his German essays; he sought his philosophic and political inspiration in Fichte; he regarded Richter’s Sterne-like genius, his fantastic and often incongruous mingling of crude melodrama, eccentric humour and soaring imaginative flight, as something divinely inspired; and Goethe, to him, was no calm Olympian, but a hero of self-abnegation, who had emerged, scarified and broken, from a “sanctuary of sorrows.” And yet, in a kind of dim way, even if much of Goethe’s life and thinking was a closed book to him, Carlyle realised that the German poet had solved the riddle of the spiritual life which tortured himself, and had arrived at a peace and serenity to which it was never his own lot to attain. Carlyle’s interest in German literature virtually came to a close with Goethe’s death and the end of romantic ascendancy in Germany. For the later men and movements of that literature he had no sympathy or understanding; and the chief German friend of his later life, Varnhagen von Ense, was, preeminently, an upholder of the traditions of the past. Thus, it is to Carlyle, rather than to Byron, or to Coleridge and Wordsworth, that we must look to find the analogue in English literature of continental romanticism, that movement which, built up on a faith in the spiritual and the unseen, had risen superior to the “enlightenment,” as well as to the Weltschmerz, of the previous century. This was what Carlyle’s English contemporaries endeavoured to express when they said that he belonged to the “mystic” school. At the same time, he by no means represents romanticism in all its variety and extent; he stands rather for its ethical and religious side only; while, to find an English equivalent for the no less fruitful aesthetic side of the romantic movement—with which Carlyle had no sympathy—we have to turn to the later pre-Raphaelites and to Carlyle’s disciple Ruskin.
The romantic stamp on Carlyle’s work is nowhere more clearly apparent than in his critical writings. His method as a literary critic is summed up in the title of one of his essays, Characteristics, a title which had been used for a volume of criticism by the two leaders of German romanticism, the brothers Schlegel. The older ideals of criticism, which had held uninterrupted sway in Europe from the renascence to the end of the eighteenth century, had been established on the assumption that the critic was a man of superior knowledge and juster instincts; the critic, according to this view, sat in judgment, and looked down on the criticised from his higher standpoint; or, as Carlyle himself put it: “perched himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulders of his author, and therefrom showed as if he commanded and looked down upon him by a natural superiority of stature.” This type of critic persisted in England in the school of Jeffrey and The Edinburgh Review; its most brilliant representative among Carlyle’s contemporaries was Macaulay. It was Carlyle’s mission, as a literary critic, to complete the revolution already tentatively foreshadowed by Coleridge, and to establish the new standpoint which had been ably maintained by the Schlegels. According to these writers, the first function of the critic is not to pass superior judgments, but to “characterise”; to interpret, in humble respect for the higher rights and claims of creative genius; to approach poetry through the personality of the poet. This is the attitude which Carlyle consistently maintains in all his essays. He insists that it is the critic’s chief task to get into sympathy with his author, to understand and appreciate his aims and intentions, not to impose on him purposes which may have lain entirely outside his plan. It was this ideal, Carlyle’s adaptation of the interpretative method of the Schlegels to English needs, that makes his critical essays a landmark of the first importance in the history of English criticism.
In practice, criticism of this kind is, obviously, at the mercy of the personal attitude of the critic to literature; it allows freer play to subjective likes and dislikes than is permitted to the critic who proceeds by rule of thumb. One might say that it postulates an original sympathy between critic and criticised; at least, it is to be seen at its best where such sympathy is strong, as, for instance, in Carlyle’s essays on his German masters, Goethe, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Novalis, and in his masterly essay on Burns. But, where such sympathy does not exist, the method may be responsible for an even greater unfairness than is to be laid at the door of the older, objective criticism. This disadvantage, to some extent, is apparent in Carlyle’s essay on Scott; it comes out with dis agreeable emphisis in his presonal utterances on men like Hiene, on the leaders of the French romantic school and on many of his English contemporaries, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb. On the other hand, one must not overlook the eminent fairness wiht which Carlyle has written of the eighteenth century—a century which appeared to him only as an age of paralysing scepticism and unbelief—and on writers so far away from his own way of thinking as Diderot and Voltaire.
§ 6. Sartor Resartus.
Apart from his essays, the work Carlyle takes his place as the English representative of German romanticism is Sortor Resartus, an immediate product of his affectionate study of Jean Paul. The ideas, form, the very style, of this work, which repelled many when it first appeared and had made the search for a publisher dishearteningly difficult, have all the stamp of Jean Paul on them. But, into the German Fabric, which has more consistency of plan, and a more original imaginative basis than iot is usually credited with, Carlyle wove his own spiritual adventures, which had already found expression in a cruder and more verbose form in an unfinished autobiographicial nove, Wotton Reinfred. Sartor Resartus falls into two parts, a disquisition on the “philosophy of clothes”— which, doubtless, formed the original nucleus of the book— and an autobiographic romance, modelled, to a large extent, on the writings of Jean Paul. The philosophy of clothes left most of Carlyle’s contemporaries cold; and indeed, to his early critics, it seamed lacking in ornigality, as a mere adapta- tion of an idea from Swift’s Tale of a Tub; in their eyes, it was overshadowed by the subjective romance, as it seemes to have been in the case of Carlyle himself as he proceeded with it. The German village of Entepfuhl took on the colouring of Ecclefechan; the German university, the name of which Teufelsdrockh forbears to disclose, was suggested by what Carlyle had experienced in Edinburgh; the clothes-philosophy made way, more and more, for a vivid depiction of the spiritual and moral crisis in the author’s own life. The three chapeters, “The Everlasting No,” “Centre of Indifference” and “The Everlasting Yea,” were have seen, an epitome of what Carlyle had himself come through actuely in 1821. Here, moreover, and not in its metaphysics, lay the significance of Sartor Resartus for more than one generation of young Englishmen; in Carlyle era of defiance—for defiance it was, rather than meek resignation—in his “Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe!” “Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Ever- lasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whose walks and works, it is well with him,” they found a veritable finger-post pointing to the higher moral and spiritual life. Here was a basis for that new spiritual idealism, based on suffering and resignation, but “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,” which, later was to pass into the poetry of In Memoriam, and into the more assured optimism of Browning.
In 1833, the Carlyles’ six years’ exile in their Dumfriesshire Patmos came to an end; after a few months’ trial of Edinburgh, which proved unsatisfactory, the migrated—with no more than two hundred pounds to thrift credit—to London. “the best place,” as he realised, “for writing books, after all the one use of living.” In many, 1834, they took up their abode at 5 Cheyne row, Chelsea, which remained their home for the rest of their lives. Although London meant an assession of new friends, and the stimulus of congenial intercourse, Carlyle, life had by no means yet passed into smoother waters. For the first time, in fact, financial difficulties began seriously to press on him. Sartor had begun to appear in Frase’s Magazine before the move was made; but, owing to what the editor regarded as its dubious quality, it was not paid for at the full rate, and the result went far towards justifying the editorial attitude. The publication met, indeed, with a storm of disapprobation, one critic even dismissing it as “a heap of clotted nonsense.” There seemed little hope that it would ever attain to book-form at all; and it might have taken much longer to do so had not Emerson taken the initiative in America; Sartor Resartus appeared as a book in New York in 1836, in London in 1838. Meanwhile, however, Carlyle, having more or less turned his back on German literature and German though, was deep in a historical work, the subject of which was the French revolution.
§ 7. The French Revolution.
The labour on this new book meant even more self-abnegation than that on Sartor had implied. On the lonely Scottish moors at Craigenputtock there had been little or nothing to tempt Carlyle to deviate from his singleness of purpose; but London opened up alluring avenues to a literary life which might have led to freedom from material cares, to comfort, perhaps even to affluence. Had Carlyle stooped to journalism and adapted himself to the every day routine of the professional man of letters—The Times, for instance,was thrown open to him—he might rapidly have won an assured position for himself. Instead, he buried himself in French history, laboured unremittingly at his French Revolution, while months passed when not a penny came into the domestic exchequer. And, as if the struggles to produce the book were not enough, the work of many weeks, the manuscript of the first volume, was accidentally destroyed in the early part of 1835, when in the hands of John Stuart Mill. Rarely has the virtue of “the hero as man letters” shone in fairer light than the manner in which Carlyle received the terrible news, and grimly determined to sit down and rewrite the volume. At last, in January 1837, the History of the French Revolution was finished. The English reading world did not, at first, know what to make of this strange history, and more than it had known what to make of Sartor; but it was, at least, quicker to feel the power of the book; and enthusiastic recognition soon began to pour in from the most unexpected quarters. Fame come at last, the right kind of fame, a fame, too that, in course of time, brought reasonable remuneration in its train.
§ 8. On Heroes.
Carlyle’s French Revolution is, again in the continental sense of the word, a “romatic” work; once more, as in his literary criticism, he stands out in sharp antagonism to Macaulay, the heir of rationalism, whose History of England began to appear some ten years later. The French Revolution is individualistic history, interpretative history on a subjective basis, it is as far-removed form the sober ideals of a scientific age of faithful chronicling of “things as they were,” as it is from the “enlightened” history-writing of the eighteenth century. Carlyle's work is essentially, a personal “confession.” “You have not,” he declared to the world, “had for two hundred years any book that come more truly from a man’s very heart.” The French
revolution, as Carlyle sees it becomes a vindication of the ways of God to man; a sermon on the text:
“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” on the nemesis that follows the abuse of power or the
neglect of the duties and responsibilities of those in whom power has been placed by Providence. And
Carlyle ranges himself unmistakably on the side of that nemesis; he makes no attempt, so to speak, to write
“fair” history, to hold the balance between the two great antagonistic forces that clashed in the revolution.
The French Revolution, rightly read, is a declaration of its author’s convictions on problems of his own
time; a solemn warning to the England of his own day to avoid a catastrophe which Carlyle believed, and
never ceased to believe all his life long, was imminent. But this work is, also, something more precious than a
subjective history combined with a tract for the times; it is a prose epic, a work of creative genius, in which
the facts of history are illumined by the imagination of a poet. Light and shadow, colour and darkness, are
distributed over the picture with the eye and the instinctive judgement of an artist. Carlyle does not dilate on
motives or on theories of government; he does not even, in a straightforward way, narrate facts; he paints
pictures; he brings before us only what, as it were, he has first seen with his own eyes. Setting out from the
conviction that biographies are the most precious of all records of the past—or, as he put it in lectures On
Heroes, “the History of the World is the Biography of Great Men”—he writes a history which is a collection
of marvellously clear-cut portraits; more than this, he deals with the history of a nation itself as if it were a
human biography; distils, so to speak, the life of the whole from innumerable lives of individuals. Thus, the
events he has to narrate are overshadowed and dominated by the men that were responsible for them;
Danton, Mirabeau, the “sea-green incorruptible” Robespierre, are masterpieces of historical portraiture; and
the imaginative literature of Carlyle’s age knew nothing more graphic and unforgettable than the description
of the royal flight to Varennes.
15
Meanwhile, until the material harvest of the labour on The French Revolution came in, Carlyle was
induced, in order to keep the wolf from the door, to give several series of popular lectures in London. For
the first of these, delivered in May, 1837, he utilised the materials he had gathered for a history of German
literature; the second course, in the following year, was also on literature, but t...
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