The Press. — London, England, 1858-10-09 00:00:00

it t a turt. Hi s tory of Friedrich 11. of Prussia, called Frederick the Great. By Thomas Carlyle. In Four Vols. Vols. 1. and 11. London: Chap man and Hall. - - - THE publication of these volumes may probably be considered as the great literary event of the present year. Their effect upon the public mind cannot fail to be great and lasting. A field of history from which inquirers have hitherto turned away with disappointment has suddenly become attractive. A blaze of light has fallen upon the darkness, a breath of genius has reani mated the corpse. The chaos of German history, to use Mr. Carlyle's own expression, has begun to become a Cosmos. For the first time a strong and practical genius has brooded over the wide confusion ; for the first time a competent critic has separated that which was worthy of remem brance m it from that which was worthy of oblivion. A large tract of the waste past has been inclosed and prepared for cultivation ; henceforth it may be expected to bring forth fruit : our painters, poets, and novelists may re sort to it for subjects, and a store of new images, vivid and instructive, henceforth make part of the common furniture of the English mind. So great are the effects which may be produced when a strong imagination, an indefatigable in dustry, and an earnest love of truth, are occu pied with a just division of labour upon the task of ascertaining, arranging, and interpreting facts. After thirty-five years of hard literary labour Mr. Carlyle shows no sign of exhaustion. His industry appears as plodding and patient as ever, his imagination as rich and glowing as ever ; his vein of grotesque humour is not less copious than in his younger days. Mr. Carlyle is not the hero we worship, but we are proud that our country possesses such a man. We confidently compare the great humorist of our age with those of past ages. As a moral preacher, we hardly know where to find his equal in power. His are almost the only sermons which men can read in these sceptical times, but his can always be read. Though tie repeats himself constantly, though he has fewer topics than the common declaimer of the pulpit, so racy is his eloquence, so irresistible the force of his language, so happy and abundant his illustrations, so fervent his faith and zeal, that he procures a hearing—nay, a hundred hearings—for the tritest platitudes of morality. Not that we can by any means subscribe to all the doctrines which he asserts with such energy of dogmatism. We do not think he is ever altogether wrong : such a mind as his may err indeed, and its errors will be dangerous, but they will generally be errors of excess, and dangerous not so often to himself; or to his worthy disciples, as to his servile and injudicious imitators. His errors will be more instructive, and more sugges tive of truth, than the truths of inferior men. As an example of this, we cannot do better than refer to that antithesis between talking and doing which, since the Latter-day Pamphlets, has been perhaps the favourite topic of his declama tion. It may even be considered as the text of this book. Mr. Carlyle's previous heroes were men in whom energy was one out of many distin guished qualities. His Oliver Cromwell is great in war and government, but he is also pious, and, if not a good talker, yet exceedingly fond of talking. His Mirabeau is even espe pecially and principally an orator. But his Frederick is naked energy and practical talent —not pious, not amiable, not eloquent—the hardest and least attractive of men. The choice of this hero shows how, in Mr. Carlyle's mind, every othe r f ee li ng is gradially becoming secon dary to this profound conviction of the insignifi .. • expressive words, and the infi the least expressive deeds. And of a hero intimates almost every book confirms. With that cease lich is so characteristic of his endless humorous illustration—with and sarcasm, and huddled Titanic tearing up of rocks and flinging the whole headlong business, through twelve hun labours to put deeds in contrast Certainly this doctrine, so impres. THE PRESS, OCTOBER 9, 1858. sively preached, ought to do good. We might all of us be much more practical than we are. We are, all of us, more or less under the slavery of words—more or less blind to facts. But the antithesis is not altogether a just one. Without a good deal of explanation, it is likely to mislead those who use it, and it has led Mr, Carlyle him self, as we believe, into monstrous extra- vagances. Talking is not properly opposed to doing ; it is included in doing. The man who talks does. The principal things which are done in the world are done by means of words. Napoleon was certainly a man of acts ; yet almost all his acts were achieved through the tongue. The literary man for whom Mr. Carlyle has so much contempt—Mr. Carlyle himself, for example— delivers lectures and writes books; Napoleon delivered directions to his officers and his troops, and wrote proclamations and despatches. Each is a talker to about the same degree as the other, and each is, or may be, a worker. It is not talk ing, but only a particulari kind of talking which can be opposed to doing. The antithesis which is really in Mr. Carlyle's mind is that between preaching and practising, between proclaiming what ought to be done and doing it. It appears, then, that Mr. Carlyle has no right to infer, as he constantly does, that the present age is not a working age, from the fact that it is a talking age. Before he can be allowed to draw such an inference he must show that the talk of the age is not of that kind which is itself work. A book of history, any book communicating useful infor mation, is a thing as strictly practical, and has as much right to be called an act, as a general order of the Duke of Wellington which may have decided a victory. On the other hand, a book which is of the nature of a sermon, which tells us what we ought to do, and eloquently adjures us to do it, is strictly a talking book, and comes under Mr. Carlyle's censure. Poor Dry asdust, who gets such hard measure in the book before us, is a worker in his way ; who shall be our example of a talker ? Really Mr. Carlyle himself is the best example we can find. It is a sad truth, he tells us, that every time a man expounds eloquently what ought to be done he becomes less and less disposed to do it. This is the penalty which Heaven inflicts upon talkers. If this be true, what must Mr. Carlyle's own case be by this time ? If there is any man living who has passed his life in eloquently expounding what ought to be done, it is Mr. Carlyle. Year after year he has gone on declaring our duty to us with an eloquence which seems inexhaustible — with an ingenuity of expression which, we verily believe, was never exhibited in the world before. And what does he declare to be our duty ? Above all things not to talk, not to study fine language, not to be eloquent ! Perhaps a humorist like Mr. Carlyle may be amused by this singular incongruity. If, however, he makes any defence, we suppose that he alleges in excuse the want of room and opportunity for action in our overcrowded country. The excuse does not seem satisfactory. England may be crowded, but emigration is open ; vast tracts of country wait to be tilled by enterprizing Englishmen ; new States are springing up, bar barous races are being civilized. Is there not a field for the man who would be practical ? Such a field as Adalbert found in his day, such as the Teutonic Knights, the objects of our author's admiration, found in theirs. It is open to Mr. Carlyle, if literary work is so useless and idle, to become the Adalbert of New Zealand or the Boniface of India, or to take the predatory Kaffir by the hand and say to him, "'This earth is a shadow. What is a few oxen more or less ? Listen to the Eternities. Acquaint thyself with the Silences." This is Mr. Carlyle's opinion of' the Teutsches Ritterthum, or Order of Teutonic • Knights : On the whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom for the first cen tury and more was a grand phenomenon, and flamed like a bright blessed beacon through the night of things in those northern countries. For above a century we perceive it was the rallying place of all brave men who had a career to seek on terms other than vulgar. The noble soul, aim ing beyond mcney, and sensible to more than hunger in this world, had a beacon burning (as we say) if the night chanced to overtake it, and the earth to grow too intricate, as is not uncommon. Better than the career of stump oratory, I should fancy, and its Hesperides apples, golden and of gilt horse-dung. Better than puddling away one's poor spiritual gift of God (loan, not gift), such as it may be, in building the lofty rhyme, the lofty review -article, for a discerning public that has sixpence to spare ! Times alter greatly. 983 The Teutonic knight had certainly a more prosperous career than the modern reviewer. Besides the pleasure of spitting upon his lance a few Paynims and inducing a few more through dread of the same fate to receive baptism, he might look to make a handsome fortune on this temporary earth, not to speak of his prospects in the other world. A pleasant method truly for the modern reviewer " when the world grows too intricate "; but conversion at the point of the lance, the lands of the party converted being con signed over to the party converting, is not a fashionable practice in these squeamish and degenerate days. For the rest, we do not see why the reviewer's work, if conscientious, should not be as honourable and as useful as that of the niedimval knight ; it is probably equally laborious and more unpretending. Into such extravagances may Mr. Carlyle be led by a seductive antithesis. Still, as we inti mated above, he is generally saved by his shrewd practical discernment from the result of his own errors. however violent his declamation against talking and talkers, no one knows better than he that the talker may be a most useful and prac tical worker. He has not, in fact, wasted his eloquence upon New Zealanders or joined Livingstone in his attempt to civilize the Kaffirs; he did not, in fact, go out to fight in the Crimea. He knows very well that his business is to write books, to set great examples before our eyes, to pour scorn and ridicule upon every form of effeminate weakness, to preach obedience to eternal laws. And so it comes to pass that we see a man who declares it to be his deepest con viction that eloquence is a thing useless at the best and generally mischievous, ushering into the world, as we compute, about sixty square feet of eloquence to prove it. The studies of Mr. Carlyle's life must con stantly have brought Frederick the Great beffire him. In contemplating Goethe and Schiller, and the great period of German poetry, he must often have been led to consider the awakening influence of the victories of Frederick upon the German mind. Voltaire brought Frederick before him in another aspect. When he con sidered the deep disease of European society which issued in the French Revolution, the effeminate weakness which had infected all the continental nations, the lack of political energy and genius, Frederick again presented himself as the single conspicuous exception. Once more and especially, when he maintained his favourite position that national greatness is rooted in virtue and belief in God, the case of Frederick, the infidel and profligate, yet at the same time the consolidator of an empire which still grows and prospers, must often have been adduced against him by others, and often, too, have occurred to his own mind as a difficulty requiring solution. Some one, perhaps, may have reasoned with him thus—" You say, and grandiloquently "assert, that injustice never prospers in this um " verse ; that all nature is leagued against it ; that " the triumph of the wicked is short, and so on. " A fine theory ! much in favour with poets and "moralists. But look at facts. Does not history " rather teach us that a course of steady and " prudent self-aggrandisement is what prospers "in the long run ; that strict honesty generally " proves the ruin of those who practise it ?" " Look at Prussia," this reasoner might go on to say, " what State has been more uniformly " prosperous ? And what has been the secret of " its prosperity ? This : that its rulers have " always pursued a course of cautious encroach " ment ; that they have devoted themselves ex " elusively to the aggrandisement of the empire "by fair means and foul. The history of Prussia "is the history of villany rewarded. First, the "Teutonic Knights took possession of it, under " pretence of mtroducing Christianity. Then " Hochmeister Albert seized it for his own family, "calling himself Duke of Prussia. Then Frede rick the Great robbed Maria Theresa of Silesia. " Finally, the same successful knave appropriated "a slice of Poland. And the whole mass of "stolen property now bears the sounding name "of the Prussian Empire, and is, in fact, one of "the most flourishing States in Europa. With a " fact like this before your eyes, can you venture "to repeat the old saw of 'honesty the best " policy ?'" Or again, " You say that heroism " springs from belief in God. It may be true " that Cromwell's success in war was due to his "faith and to that of his God-fearing cance of the n most rite significance of what the choice of paragraph in the bi less iteration whi style—with endle torrents of rant, abuse --with Tita trees—in short, Carlyle into the Bred pages he lab with words Cert A .111. 1 . 1 ...