The Press. — London, England, 1856-02-02 00:00:00

JANUARY 2, 1856• Passages Selected from the Writings of Thoma s Carlyle. With a Biographical Memoir by Thomas Ballantyne. London : Chapman and Hall. WHEN an author has arrived at that popularity which justifies his " beauties " being selected, it augurs success of a particular kind. To books, indeed, of this sort, made of fragments from a writer's extended pieces, we have a great objection. They are only patchwork, without a pattern. We may, however, seize this opportunity for commenting on the author whose shreds are before us in this volume. Mr. Carlyle, whatever may become of him afterwards, is now one of the literary cele brities of England. His works are widely read, and he finds many to extol his fame. On the subject of no personal reputation within our experience (with the exception of the later pictures of Turner) have we seen such violent contrasts of opinion between disputants as in the claims of Mr. Car lyle to being honoured as a great genius. Panegyrics and invectives have been equally intense in the case of this affected writer. We have ourselves been present when professed philosophers reduced themselves to the common level while debating the pros and eons. of Mr. Carlyle. The last subject that we should like to moot for a friendly critical in terchange of thought over the convivial board is the question of Mr. Carlyle's merits. Some rationalists of a low school have supposed that " fanaticism " and "prejudice" bud their roots in religion. Any one conversant with human nature must know that the violence of sympathies, properly called fanaticism, is a morbid action of the mind, to which it is prone upon all subjects when the feelings are engaged. Colloquies on Carlyle exhibit that truth plainly to any calm auditor. For our own part, we think that there is nothing extraordinarily difficult in criticising Mr. Carlyle. He is a degenerate Scotch Puritan, Germanised after Jean Paul Richter. In psychology Scotch, he is by education of Berlin and Leipsie Fair. He had strong moral qualities, perseverance, industry, and self-reliance. He worked hard at German literature in days when its exponents in this country were a clique of critical hierophants, secluded from the public eye. His writings ►lid not depend entirely on his own words ; his grotesque mannerisms had the effect of novelty, and were accepted as representative of German thinkers; and the strong appeals to feeling in all his writings were a relief after the sparkling and shallow " criticism " of Lord Jeffrey. Benthamism was then taken as the profoundest exposition of modern philosophy. It seems now like recalling a dream to think of the idolatry once paid to Jeremy Bentham. Reviews and newspapers were devoted to the honour of "the sage of Queen's-square." Sir Samuel Romilly, Lord Brougham, and other men of no small mark, paid homage to that amiable but strangely conceited recluse. The law has been largely altered since his days, but only in a few instances (and those of doubtful utility) has his advice been deferen tially followed. Some of his multitudinous suggestions are worthy of being studied ; but "Benthamism " as a creed has long since passed away. And, let Carlylists rave as they please, why should not Carlylism also? " The Life of Schiller" was not Mr. Carlyle's first real introduction to the English pt.nlic. We date it ourselves from his essay on "Characteristics," where his whole " No-sys tem" may be found. Put into plain homely English, he meant to say, that literature, and the morals of life, should always aim at in wardness. In ethics and religion we met with his precursors long ago in the propounders of Quietism, under its various forms. " The light within" has been touchingly written of by Pension, and strangely disserted on by George Fox. Classical readers do not require being reminded, also, of the spiritus intus, which runs through so many of the heathen systems of reli;ion. Mr. Carlyle's text in all his "earnest" and uncouth literature has been that " inward tae a." From first to last it is the cue on which ha has written, and upon which he strove to bo accepted as a prophet. THE PRESS. Whenever we hear Mr. Carlyle's name men tioned, we think of the dictum upon his merits, or demerits, attributed to a distinguished leader of fashion. " Mr. Carlyle," said the fair critic, "always seems like a clever " mad Quaker, who wishes to pass for a pro " phet." Lady mot pleasantly de scribed the convulsive, spasmodic strain which runs through all Mr. Carlyle's writings. He is fierce in attack ; he rails, as George Fox and others, against all the authorities ; he gives the whole world a great scolding, but— he does nothing perfect. He writes no drama appealing to the universal heart, and fit for translation into the tongues ; he invents no characters, no new types of unrecognised human nature ; he produces no beautiful poetry ; in oratory, his gasping, stuttering words, and agonised throes, imploring the obstetric aid of scientific rhetoric, would render him impotent in the Senate. What would Mirabeau, Danton, or the Girondins have done with his choking, ineffectual speech ? What would he have been at any time before those strong natures, with harmonious utterances, who have ruled the haughty Senate of England without the help of Mr. Macaulay's " model Titan" ? We can speak with some degree of authority on this point, for we took the trouble to attend a whole course of Mr. Carlyle's lec tures on " Hero-Worship." The impression left on our minds was that he was a counter feit genius, and that " he had the contortions " of the Sybil, with little of the inspiration." He left upon us the impression that he was a man of secondary power, struggling with the sublimities of a lofty theme. He stood on tiptoe, and tried to prophecy, but he could not do so; and he revealed in the flesh his gaspings to the audience. Ho tried to talk about the whole problem of life, its intuitions, mysteries, and aspirations ; and his words tumbled out like those of a half-educated pupil in neology attempting to repeat backwards a lecture from the late Mr. Coleridge. We often heard his admirers compare him to a rhetorical Rembrandt, but the compliment is too flattering , for Mr. Carlyle scouts all artistic analogies. He hates critics ; he makes a wry face when we talk of " style." So did George Fox, and Whitfield, and Ed ward Irving; and what those preachers were to true devotion, the same is Mr. Carlyle to genuine thinking on genius, poetry, and that " oversoul " under which he reels. Indeed, we cannot but think that Whitfield is a singularly close type of Mr. Carlyle. Crowds were astonished and much moved by his pas sionate language ; his theme was sublime, his words intense, his manner rivetting, and he spoke to an age of formalists tranced in stupifying custom. At first he produced a sensation by his eccentricity and his enthu siasm, by his apostrophes to his audiences, and by his aspirations after an indefinite per fectibility. So also with Mr. Carlyle. In 1820 logic was enthroned with great pomp at Oxford by Dr. Whateley and his contempora ries. Political economy, and churlatanic schemes of Parliamentary Reform, were be lieved in by " Whigs, and something more ;" and Bentham and the Mills (senior and junior) were believed in by the Radicals at large. Those were what has been wittily called " the days of the Screw anti Lever Magazine, edited by Young First Principles, the cleverest man of the age, all whose contri butors were under two-and-twenty years of age ; while Old First Principles was perpetually canvassing for places in the lobbies of the Lords and Commons." In such times Mr. Carlyle had great oppor tunities. He saw, as hundreds of others did, that the Liberals had taken to a Holloway's ointment school of moral philosophy. He divined that they would get sick of it, and while they were suffering from their mental nausea he offered them his own new Germanised invention of " Carlyle's Earnest Grotesque Inwardness Elixir," a spiritual compound, warranted to cure all psychological maladies. He vilified all other practitioners in philo sophy, and was not sparing of hard words. He got up a cant of calling orators " parlia mentary logic•mills." and another favorite phrase of his was " half-men." Against sncli 113 he cried "no quarter," though in some things he was not even a half-man himself. For there are two terrible charges which posterity with deadly effect will urge against Mr. Carlyle—he has neither a system nor a style. He upsets the English tongue into chaotic sentences, and produces effects singular, not original ; in running after the great, he tumbles into the grotesque—for there is always bathos in the Carlylian sub lime. Mr Carlyle has no fine appreciation of moral harmony. Strangeness he confounds with novelty ; vehement words he mistakes for fiery eloquence. His style is a convulsive pro test against sense and grammar, and it makes us think that Edward Irvin g had been his tutor. We recollect such sentences of poor Irving as " abolishing pulses," " evacuating the uses " of a law," " the quietus of torment," " erect " ing the platform of our being upon the new " condition of probation "—sentences of as good Babel as if they were in the Carlylese language. We should like to see some parallel passages from Mr. Irving printed side by side with " beauties " from Mr. Carlyle. A man's mind may be a quarry of materials for art, and yet he may never become an artist ; he may have voice, appearance, words, and argument, and yet never be an orator. So with an author like Mr. Carlyle, he may have topic, knowledge, purpose, and popular effect, and yet he may never become a classic. We believe that Mr. Carlyle's vogue is destined to pass away. There is no calm catholic beauty in his writing, no soothing utterances of serenely wholesome philosophy. His lan guage, like his thinking, is, as the actors say of ill-written dialogue, " breaky " ; its irregular fitful jets of thought flare up in the reader's face with the coarse flashy effects of gaslight on a windy night. His mannerism, iu short, is just as fatally hard and artificial as that of the class of writers against whom ho has His tautology, also, is enormous. We do not think that any one of his contemporaries has so often repeated himself. An author appealing to wide sympathies ought to be various. Horatio—Dorax—Falsldf—still was Quin, wrote Churchill in the " Rosciad ;" and Mr. Carlyle is unable to discuss any sub ject without perpetually elbowing his reader, and bawling into his ears " I am Thomas Car " lyle." He ever hectors the reader, and rails at his tastes and habits, and intimates that Thomas Carlyle thinks him " a re " spectable goose ;" and in the Carlylese tongue " respectable " means something terrible. It always brings down the stereotyped story of Thurtell's trial, and the man who was " respectable, for he kept a gig ;" and then Mr. Carlyle mounts upon " gigmanity," ties the reader to his Pegasus, and soars into " cloud land." We do not think, therefore, that Mr. Carlyle will last. Sciolists in philosophy, strong minded women who are not yet up "in Ger man, and pretentious undisciplined young men, are his chief admirers. We do not believe that he has any genuine inspiration, and he certainly has not attained to any pm found moral creed. Stripped of his oddity, his Jean-Paulism, and his infinite number of harsh, rough words, what is left ? We suspect that he is little better after all than a clever criticaster, disguised under travestied grammar and burlesqued rhetoric. His " Life of Ster ling " shows that his obscure esotericism completely decei►ed the simple dupes who beheld in him a profound Christian sage, with some novel conceptions on Christianity. Mr. Carlyle is little more than a perplexed Pantheist, half stunned with his own whirl wind of cacophony. The " Revelation " of Richter is all that he has to urge, and whoever follows his iynus fatuus will soon be lost in a mirage of metaphorical phrasemaking, which persons unskilled in words would mistake for symbolism of an unapprehended inspiration which the prophet of Chelsea has yet to reveal. The worst effect of his example in scorning all rules of language is, that young persons imitate Mr. Carlyle with perfect suc cess, and without the least difficulty. There is a great brood of writers abroad in the land wildly defiant of grammar in their slipshod sentences, owl the parentlige of all the-.c J Pa wh it bra fro gre wit thi aut Toll aftl Uri' rca On wit the sue dis 13 . 1( inti hfty phi COII eon she ten is t rati thu roo but syn No pro env tru not Mr. Pui In Bei In 0 sell lite con sec did gro not of l feel spa Jet prc lt of t Re' r , hot Sat the 11111 luty but dot tial sug "B pas ple firs 'Ye "C tell En the NVal hie Qll wit Fei Fo: ren thr reli an 4 nee wh stri