English Literature for Boys and Girls Part 78

The book is full of humor and wisdom, of stray lightenings, and deep growlings. There are glimpses of "a story" to be caught to.

It is perhaps the most Carlylean book Carlyle ever wrote. But let it lie yet awhile on your bookshelf unread.

At the end of six years or so Carlyle decided that Craigenputtock was of no use to him. He wanted to get the ear of the world, to make the world listen to him. It would not listen to him when he spoke from a far-off wilderness. So he made the great plunge, and saying good-by to the quiet of barren rock and moorland he came to live in London. He took a house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea, and this for the rest of his life was his home. But at first London was hardly less lonely than Craigenputtock. It seemed impossible to make people want either Carlyle or his books. "He had created no 'public' of his own," says a friend who wrote his life,* "the public which existed could not understand his writings and would not buy them, nor could he be induced so much as to attempt to please it; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more neglected than he had been in Scotland."

*Froude.

Still in spite of neglect Carlyle worked on, now writing his great French Revolution. He labored for months at this book, and at length having finished the first volume of it he lent it to a friend to read. This friend left it lying about, and a servant thinking it waste paper destroyed it. In great distress he came to tell Carlyle what had happened. It was a terrible blow, for Carlyle had earned nothing for months, and money was growing scarce. But he bravely hid his consternation and comforted his friend. "We must try to hide from him how very serious this business is to us," were the first words he said to his wife when they were alone together. Long afterwards when asked how he felt when he heard the news, "Well, I just felt like a man swimming without water," he replied.*

*Life of Tennyson.

So once more he set to work rewriting all that had been lost. In 1837 the book was published, and from that time Carlyle took his place in the world as a man of genius. But money was still scarce, so as a means of making some, he gave several courses of lectures. But he hated it. "O heaven!" he cries, "I cannot speak. I can only gasp and write and stutter, a spectacle to G.o.ds and fas.h.i.+onables,--being forced to it by want of money."

One course of these lectures--the last--was on Heroes and Her Wors.h.i.+p. This may be one of the first of Carlyle's book that you will care to read, and you may now like to hear what he has to say of Samuel Johnson in The Hero as a Man of Letters.

"As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and n.o.ble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last; in a kindlier element what might he not have been,--Poet, Priest, Sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his 'element," or his 'time' or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad; well then, he is there to make it better!--

"Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable.

Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any of the favourablest outward circ.u.mstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful one. The world might have had more profitable work out of him, or less; but his effort against the world's work could never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his n.o.bleness, had said to him, 'Live in an element of diseased sorrow.' Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the n.o.bleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. . . .

"The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of 'fourpence halfpenny a day.' Yet a giant, invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford; the rough, seamy-faced, raw-boned College Servitor stalking about, in winter season, with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door, and the raw-boned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thought,--pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger, or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self- help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of n.o.bleness and manfulness withal.

"It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes, an original man;--not a second hand, borrowing or begging man.

Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;--On the reality and substance which nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has give another than us!-

"And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small souls are otherwise. . . .

"It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. . . . Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his 'sincerity.' He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,--of his being particularly anything!

A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or 'scholar' as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live,--without stealing! A n.o.ble unconsciousness is in him. He does not 'engrave Truth on his watch-seal'; no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. . . .

"Johnson was a Prophet to his people: preached a Gospel to them,--as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of moral Prudence: 'in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' do not sink yourselves in boundless, bottomless abysses of Doubt. . . .

"Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;--coupled with this other great Gospel. 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes: 'that will be better for you,' as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things joined together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time."

I give this quotation from Heroes because there is, in some ways a great likeness between Johnson and Carlyle. Both were sincere, and both after a time of poverty and struggle ruled the thought of their day. For Carlyle became known by degrees, and became, like Johnson before him, a great literary man. He was sought after by the other writers of his day, who came to listen to the growlings of the "Sage of Chelsea."

Carlyle, like Johnson, was a Prophet with a message. "Carlyle,"

says a French writer, "has taken up a mission; he is a prophet, the prophet of sincerity. This sincerity or earnestness he would have applied everywhere: he makes it the law, the healthy and holy law, of art, of morals, of politics."* And through all Carlyle's exaggeration and waywardness of diction we find that note ring clear again and again. Be sincere, find the highest, and wors.h.i.+p it with all thy mind and heart and will.

*Scherer.

And although for us of to-day the light of Carlyle as a prophet may be somewhat dimmed, we may still find, as a great man of his own day found, that the good his writings do us, is "not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to animate."*

*J. S. Mill.

Carlyle went steadily on with his writing. In the summer he would have his table and tray of books brought out into the garden so that he could write in the open air, but much of his work, too, was done in a "sound proof" room which he built at the top of the house in order to escape from the horror of noise.

The sound-proof room was not, however, a great success, for though it kept out some noises it let in others even worse.

When visitors came they were received either indoors or in the little garden which Carlyle found "of admirable comfort in the smoking way." In the garden they smoked and talked sitting on kitchen chairs, or on the quaint china barrels which Mrs. Carlyle named "n.o.blemen's seats."

Among the many friends Carlyle made was the young poet Alfred Tennyson. Returning from a walk one day he found a splendidly handsome young man sitting in the garden talking to his wife. It was the poet.

Here is how Carlyle describes his new friend: "A fine, large- featured, dime-eyed, bronze-coloured, s.h.a.ggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy; who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an articulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great, now and then when he does emerge; a most restful, brotherly, whole-hearted man." Or again: "Smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between. I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe. We shall see what he will grow to."*

*Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Life of Tennyson.

Although Carlyle was older than Tennyson by fourteen years, this was the beginning of a friends.h.i.+p which strengthened with years and lasted when they were both gray-haired men. They talked and smoked and walked about together often at night through the lamp- lit streets, sometimes in the wind, and rain, Carlyle crying out as they walked along against the dirt and squalor and noise of London, "that healthless, profitless, mad and heavy-laden place,"

"that Devil's Oven."

The years pa.s.sed and Carlyle added book to book. Perhaps of them all that which we should be most grateful for is his Life and Letters of Cromwell. For in this book he set Cromwell in a new light, a better light than he had ever been set before. Carlyle is a hero wors.h.i.+per, and in Cromwell as a hero he can find no fault. He had of course his faults like other men, and he had no need of such blind champions.h.i.+p. For in his letters and speeches, gathered together and given to the world by Carlyle, he speaks for himself. In them we find one to whom we may look up as a true hero, a man of strength to trust. We find, too, a man of such broad kindliness, a man of such a tender human heart that we may love him.

Another great book was Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great.

It is a marvelous piece of historical work, and as volume after volume appeared Carlyle's fame steadily rose.

"No critic," says his first biographer, Froude, "no critic after the completion of Frederick, challenged Carlyle's right to a place beside the greatest of English authors, past and present."

He was a great historian, but in the history he gives us not dead facts, but living, breathing men and women. His pages are as full of color and of life as the pages of Shakespeare.

The old days of struggle and want were long over, but the Carlyles still lived the simple life in the little Chelsea house.

As another writer* has quaintly put it, "Tom Carlyle lives in perfect dignity in a little 40 pound house in Chelsea, with a snuffy Scotch maid to open the door; and the best company in England ringing at it."

*Thackeray.

Then in 1865 Carlyle was chosen Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and although this could add little to his fame, he was glad that his own country had recognized his greatness.

Fifty years before, he had left the University a poor and unknown lad. Now at seventy-one, a famous man, he returned to make his speech upon entering his office as Rector.

This speech was a splendid success, his reception magnificent, "a perfect triumph," as a friend telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle waiting anxiously for news in London. For a few days Carlyle lingered in Scotland. Then he was suddenly recalled home by the terrible news that his wife had died suddenly while out driving. It was a crus.h.i.+ng blow. Only when it was too late did Carlyle realize all that his wife had been to him. She was, as he wrote on her tombstone, "Suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out."

The light indeed had gone out. The rest of his life was a sad twilight, filled with cruel remorse. He still wrote a little, and friends were kind, but his real work in life was done, and he felt bitterly alone.

Honors were offered him, a t.i.tle if he would, a pension. But he declined them all. For fifteen years life dragged along. Then at the age of eighty-five he died.

He might have lain in Westminster among the ill.u.s.trious dead.

But such had not been his wish, so he was buried beside his father and mother in the old churchyard at Ecclefechan.

BOOKS TO READ

Stories from Carlyle, by D. M. Ford. Readings from Carlyle, by W. Keith Leask.

Chapter Lx.x.xIII THACKERAY--THE CYNIC?

A LITTLE time after Carlyle's French Revolution was published he wrote to his brother, "I understand there have been many reviews of a very mixed character. I got one in the Times last week.

The writer is one, Thackeray, a half-monstrous Cornish giant, kind of painter, Cambridge man, and Paris newspaper correspondent, who is now writing for his life in London. . . .

His article is rather like him, and I suppose calculated to do the book good."