' I often
inwardly
exclaim, 'and is
this the literary world?
this the literary world?
Thomas Carlyle
handle.
net/2027/hvd.
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? CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 7
is none the less (perhaps, rather, the more)
sad, for all the wide and shining landscape.
A few lines later Carlyle says: "You perceive
me sufficiently at this point of my Pilgrimage,
as withdrawn to Hades for the time being;
intending a month's walk there, till the
muddy semi - solutions settle into sediment
according to what laws they have, and there
be perhaps a partial restoration of clearness. "
The voice of 1865, though early in the in-
terim it gained its individual accent, is still
the voice of 1822.
Malice was operant in this choice of a pas-
sage from one of Carlyle's letters to Emerson,
to show the frequent hue of his spirit. For
not only is the mere thought of Emerson a
cause of cheer to most men,--to Carlyle him-
self it usually brought comfort, -- but Carlyle
had adopted Emerson, or more nearly adopted
him than any one else except Sterling, into
the close communion of his own family, to-
ward whom he generally showed compunction
in the matter of invective and lament. Yet
in writing to Emerson and to them he would
sometimes forget his restraint, and, while eat-
ing his heart, would invite them to the same
repast. It has been said that Froude made
an exceptionally gloomy selection from Car-
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? 8 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
lyle's correspondence, and that Mr. Norton's
volumes give a fairer view of the habitual
tone of his spirits. So far as they are con-
cerned with Emerson and with Carlyle's kin-
dred, an explanation of the higher average of
cheerfulness has already been offered. But
even in these letters, and still more in the
rest of Mr. Norton's selections, one is tempted
to inquire whether he did not intend (and
very properly) to redress the balance which
Froude had unduly weighted on the other
side. For the essence and gist of Carlyle's
published writings -- books, letters, and jour-
nals -- is that " it is not a merry place, this
world; it is a stern and awful place. " Much
that is meat to other men was poison, or tinc-
tured with poison, to him. "My letter, you
will see" (he wrote to his brother John in
1828), "ends in sable, like the life of man.
My own thoughts grow graver every day I
live. " He could, and did, suck melancholy
from his own successful lectures, from his
own books and the books of others, from the
state of the nation and the state of his own
health, from society, from solitude. Craig-
enputtock, high on the moors between Dum-
friesshire and Galloway, and sixteen miles
from the town of Dumfries, has always seemed
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WHITER 9
to me the right scenic background for Car-
lyle. The stone farmhouse, surrounded by a
few acres of land reclaimed from peat bog,
stands in the midst of bleak hills, seven hun-
dred feet above the level of the sea. This is
the right scenery for Carlyle, and many of
his most characteristic letters, from whatever
places written, carry with them a feeling of
the north, November, and the moors. Had
Froude left any gaps in his biography, they
might be bridged with sighs.
Persons who talked with Carlyle, or who
heard him talk, often received a different im-
pression. This was, no doubt, partly because
his pentecostal gift excited him to a variety
and fire of speech for which he afterward
paid the penalty of a natural enough reac-
tion ; partly, also, because the sense of humor
never deserted him at those moments, and
rich gusts of laughter swept away boding
prophecy, fierce invective, and the whole sym-
bolic apparatus of Carlylean denunciation.
Humor, indeed, is always to be reckoned with
in Carlyle; and his letters, like his books,
abound in a range of it -- seldom genial --
that extends from the grim to the farcical.
But you cannot hear a man laugh in print;
and where in a Carlyle conversation the stage
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? 10 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
direction would be, "Exit laughing," in a
Carlyle letter it appears, "Exit groaning" or
"Exit swearing. " The writer "laughs off,"
as Macbeth and Macduff "fight off;" and
the reader hears but the ghost of a laugh, --
a faint, imagined reverberation.
Hence, loathed Melancholy, and a truce to
sable. I have, perhaps, made too much of a
striking characteristic, however indubitable,
of a great writer. The famous rat was not
always gnawing at the pit of his stomach;
and when neither the mood of vituperation
nor the mood of lament was upon him, he
was of too vigorous and too honest a mind
not to discuss with comparative calmness
many subjects that interested him. What
did interest him and what didn't, what ap-
pears in his letters and what is never seen
there, would make a catalogue fairly descrip-
tive of Carlyle's intellectual and moral consti-
tution. Food and raiment he seldom writes
of, save as necessities of life. No Christmas
gastronomy in his letters, no rule for "cook-
ing a chub," no incipient essay on roast pig.
As Carlyle's pen is never occupied with cards,
one concludes that "old women to play whist
with of an evening," so much desired by a
certain delightful letter-writer, were not a de-
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? CAELYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 11
sideratum with him. Women, in fact, play
no dominantly feminine part in his life.
Love, as a passion, he apparently does not
understand. He gave no more sensitive re-
sponse to the fine arts than Emerson, in whose
books there are many "blind places," -- so
says Mr. Chapman in his original and im-
portant essay on Emerson, -- " like the notes
which will not strike on a sick piano. " To
name the theatre is, with Carlyle, to scorn
it. Goethe himself could not make him care
for plays or play-acting. Goethe's Wilhelm
Meister he learned to admire, although, had
any other written it, the book would have
had from him the treatment it got from
Wordsworth. If we may believe Froude,
Carlyle called some of the most noteworthy
French novels " a new Phallus worship, with
Sue, Balzac, and Co. for prophets, and Ma-
dame Sand for a virgin. " Poetry, art allied
to his own, interests Carlyle only through its
thought or its lesson. In the actual affairs
of life, he desires neither money, rank, nor
political power. He gives no adherence to
any religious creed, political faith, or party
leader. He often feels himself in a " minor-
ity of one," but on a certain occasion doubles
the number, to include Emerson.
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? 12 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
Here may end, without special reason for
ending, the catalogue of negatives by which
people learn to know Carlyle in his letters.
Shorter, not less impressive or informing, is
the list of positives. Words Carlyle must have
had at least a sneaking fondness for. He
does not admit it, but he uses words and
phrases in a way that tells its own story to
those upon whose ears his noblest strains fall
like music. Very often, as he intended, the
words stand for facts, which he loved, and
for which he was proud to tell his love. Pu-
rity, honor, and truth are dear to Carlyle, and
he celebrates them in his letters. "Poor and
sad humanity," although it often moves him
to scorn, never quite loses its hold upon him:
his letters are a crowded thoroughfare of
human beings, who live again at his touch.
Good sayings -- pious, shrewd, sage, or hu-
morous, as the case may be -- this eloquent
talker rolls under his tongue, especially when
they are in the speech of the Scottish peo-
ple. His taste for humor is catholic enough
to relish jokes; and he himself, unclan-
nish chiefly in that, jokes without difficulty.
Strength of any kind bulks so large in Car-
lyle's esteem that the historian of Cromwell
and Friedrich has often been accused of mak-
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 13
ing might his right. After years of what he
felt to be misrepresentation, he endeavored to
set things straight by declaring that right, in
the long run, was pretty sure to be mighty.
However this may be, the strength of contem-
porary leaders was likely, by his thinking, to
be founded on unrighteousness; and it was
easier for him to worship his heroes through
the long nave of the past. There was an
altar for Cromwell, but -- alas that it should
have been so -- there was none for Lincoln.
Although these positives are lengthening
themselves out, there must be mention here
of the mother, wife, family, and friends, who
figure so engrossingly in Carlyle's correspond-
ence. I think we gather from the grand
total of documents in the case that he loved
his mother more deeply and singly than he
loved any other person. Yet for his wife
he had a strong, often disquieted affection.
The expression of this in his letters to her,
which are as remarkable for emotion as for
a very high order of writing, is of course
less checkered than it could have been in
the faring together of two such yoke-fel-
lows. In the action of temperament upon tem-
perament, like does not cure like. During
the long episode of Gloriana, it is often pos-
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? 14 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
sible to read between the lines of Carlyle's
letters to his wife. After the death of the
first Lady Ashburton, however, occurs the
most striking passage of self-accusation to be
found in any letter before the death of Mrs.
Carlyle. Carlyle writes to her on the 11th
of July, 1858 : --
"All yesterday I remarked, in speaking to
, if any tragic topic came in sight, I had
a difficulty to keep from breaking down in
my speech, and becoming inarticulate with
emotion over it. It is as if the scales were
falling from my eyes, and I were beginning
to see in this, my solitude, things that touch
me to the very quick. Oh, my little woman!
what a suffering thou hast had, and how no-
bly borne! with a simplicity, a silence, cour-
age, and patient heroism which are only now
too evident to me. Three waer days I can
hardly remember in my life; but they were
not without worth either; very blessed some
of the feelings, though many so sore and mis-
erable. It is very good to be left alone with
the truth sometimes, to hear with all its stern-
ness what it will say to one. "
It is often to be noted that no great mo-
ment finds Carlyle without a great word.
Moving as is the utterance just quoted, it is
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 15
dumb in comparison with this, written after
the death of Mrs. Carlyle: "Not for above
two days could I estimate the immeasurable
depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had
peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shat-
tered my poor world to universal ruin. "
Mother, wife, family, and one or two
friends, then, were very dear to Carlyle.
"Love me a little," he writes once to Emer-
son. Next to these few persons, nature had
perhaps the strongest sway over him; and
the strange, beautiful landscapes that shine
out from some of his darkest letters would
be enough to found a reputation on. The
phrases live in one's memory as if they had
line and color.
Two main facts detach themselves, I think,
from these imperfect suggestions of what
Carlyle's letters contain and what they are
vacant of. In the first place, no one can
doubt that although -- except in writing to
the Annandale kin -- Carlyle seldom attempts
to control himself, is seldom interesting or
entertaining of set purpose, he is yet, for
interest and entertainment, a letter - writer
among a thousand. Single-minded and single-
hearted, true as the very truth, in the words
of his mouth he utters the meditations of
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? 16 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
his heart. Gifted with eloquence, with hu-
mor, with pathos, with eyes that see every-
thing and a memory that loses nothing, with
an energy of speech which (compared with
that given to the majority of his fellow crea-
tures) is clearly superhuman, Carlyle uses his
amazing literary vehicle as an Arabian magic
carpet to transport him to his correspondent.
The letter is the writer; the word is the
man.
So much for one fact. The other, not
now stated for the first time, is that Carlyle,
in his familiar letters as in his published
works, presents the curious combination of
mystic and realist. The world that can be
tested by the senses is, in Carlyle's belief,
only the vesture, sometimes muddy, sometimes
clear, of the divine principle. For many
readers, the expression of this ruling idea
of Carlyle and his work is confused not only
by apparently contradictory phrasings, but by
the shifting of his conception of God between
theism and pantheism. When, however, Car-
lyle utters himself most earnestly and most
characteristically on this cardinal point of his
belief, no manner of man can misunderstand
him. "Matter," exclaims he, "exists only
spiritually, and to represent some idea and
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 17
body it forth. Heaven and Earth are but
the time-vesture of the Eternal. The Uni-
verse is but one vast symbol of God; nay, if
thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a
symbol of God? Is not all that he does sym-
bolical, a revelation to sense of the mystic
God-given force that is in him ? -- a gospel
of Freedom, which he, the 'Messias of Na-
ture,' preaches as he can by act and word. "
It was only to be expected that the favorite
quotation of a man whose high belief can be
stated thus, of a man who regarded time as
an illusion, should be the lines from Shake-
speare's Tempest: --
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. "
Now, although it is proverbially difficult to
prove a negative, the ease with which a nega-
tive can be stated should be equally matter
of proverb. Accordingly, we find that Car-
lyle, in his letters, a hundred times denounces
the world as he sees it for once that he de-
scribes, or even suggests, the world as he
would see it. Silent heroes should be the
rulers of England. Silent heroes are rare
birds, even among the dead. Instead of
them, talking parliamentarians are at the
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? 18 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
head of things; and Carlyle has to say what
he thinks of Gladstone and Disraeli, the alter-
nately ruling talkers. When, in 1874, Dis-
raeli proposed to grant him a pension and
bestow on him also the Grand Cross of the
Bath, he wrote to John Carlyle: "I do, how-
ever, truly admire the magnanimity of Dizzy
in regard to me. He is the only man I
almost never spoke of except with contempt. " Men of letters fare no better than men of
action. They should be priests, in white, un-
spotted robes. What does Carlyle find them?
In 1824, after pinning Coleridge, De Quin-
cey, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt fiercely to the
page, he writes to Miss Welsh: "' Good
heavens!
' I often inwardly exclaim, 'and is
this the literary world? ' This rascal rout,
this dirty rabble, destitute not only of high
feeling and knowledge or intellect, but even
of common honesty! The very best of them
are ill-natured weaklings. They are not red-
blooded men at all. . . . Such is the literary
world of London; indisputably the poorest
part of its population at present. " So Car-
lyle wrote of writers when he was putting on
his literary armor, and not very differently
when he was putting it off. His Hero as
Man of Letters was almost invariably seen at
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 19
a distance, either of time or space. He
spitted Coleridge on his sharpest spear, and
two blasting, withering descriptions of Charles
Lamb -- with forty years between them for
reflection -- remain to the everlasting hurt
of Carlyle's own reputation.
Vitriol blesseth neither him that gives nor
him that takes, yet Carlyle stayed to the end
of his many days essentially high-minded.
Honorable, simple, helpful, charitable in deed
though not in word, he was seen at the limit
of his course to have a better heart, a charac-
ter less deteriorated, than many a man -- no
less good at the start -- who has indulged
himself with " omitting the negative proposi-
tion. " The habit of scorn would in the long
run have been more harmful to character than
the habit of tolerance and facile praise, ex-
cept that Carlyle had an extraordinarily high
standard of principle and performance, and
held to it not only in his judgment of others,
but also in what he exacted of himself. The
fact that Carlyle never tried to reconcile the
inconsistency (as it may have seemed to some
persons) between the Deity of his worship and
the symbolic manifestations of that Deity in a
world so little to Carlyle's liking no doubt
helped him to keep his spiritual integrity.
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? 20 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
In company and contrast with the mysticism
of Carlyle's thought -- "idealism" is the bet-
ter word, if it be strictly interpreted -- is the
eager realism of his literary methods. As a
result of this piquant union, Carlyle means
one thing to one man, and another, quite dif-
ferent thing to another man. The Carlyle
of X, the strait idealist, is a moonish philoso-
pher, to be shunned by A, the strait realist,
who rejoices in the closely packed narrative,
the wild action, and the portraits of men and
women, that make but a trivial appeal to X.
This union of natures is plain enough in
Shakespeare, in whom nothing surprises. The
hand which gave us the Tempest gave us also
Juliet's nurse and Hotspur's description of
"a certain Lord. " Too often, however, the
idealist's grasp of the concrete is wavering
and intermittent; too often the soul of the
realist needs little feeding.
Carlyle vibrated between these two ele-
ments of his nature, and fortified one with
the other. When, after burrowing in the
dust-heap of the past or fishing into "the
general Mother of Dead Dogs," he had
brought to light some pearl (or, it might be,
only some oyster-shell) of fact, he often im-
proved the opportunity to show the larger
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 21
significance of the little gleam or glint of
reality. It was the defect of a fine quality
that, in his later work, and especially in Fred-
erick, he spent himself on irrelevant facts
which helped to make Carlyle's longest book
a splendid failure, with episodes of indubita-
ble success.
The looser form of the letter more properly
admits the isolated concrete. Shrewd, wel-
come bits of fact are everywhere in Carlyle's
letters; everywhere, too, are those other ex-
pressions of a great realist, -- vividly "com-
posed" elements of landscape, and portraits
that give every token of life except breath.
As with every artist, whatever he depicts
takes color from him, and is seen through his
temperament. In the summer of 1837 Car-
lyle writes to Sterling from Scotsbrig: "One
night, late, I rode through the village where
I was born. The old kirkyard tree, a huge
old gnarled ash, was nestling itself softly
against the great twilight in the north. A
star or two looked out, and the old graves
were all there, and my father and my sister;
and God was above us all. " Here be worn,
familiar things. Gray has been to the village
churchyard at the hour of parting day, and a
procession has followed in his footsteps. But
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? 22 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
this kirkyard, where Carlyle has since laid
himself down with his kindred, is Carlyle's.
The reappearance (usually heightened or
elaborated) of bits of prospect or topography
first recorded in Carlyle's letters is an inter-
esting characteristic of his writing. His first
visit to Paris was of much service to him in
fixing the places and scenes of The French
Revolution; the trip into the country of
Cromwell's birth and the examination of
Naseby field come into sight again in the
book,-- witness especially the "Cease your
fooling," and the troopers' teeth that bit into
Carlyle's memory; and a number of rough
drafts for details of Frederick appear in let-
ters from the Continent. A brief note, dur-
ing a visit to Mr. Redwood in 1843, of the
Glamorganshire "green network of intricate
lanes, mouldering ruins, vigorous vegetation
good and bad," was afterward dilated (in
the Life of Sterling) into the spacious and
beautiful landscape beginning: "Llanblethian
hangs pleasantly, with its white cottages, and
orchard and other trees, on the western slope
of a green hill; looking far and wide over
green meadows and little or bigger hills, in
the pleasant plain of Glamorgan. "
Distinguished as are Carlyle's portraits of
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 23
places, it is probably his portraits of persons
that abide longest and most completely in
the memories of most readers. Robespierre,
Mirabeau and Mirabeau pere, Frederick and
Frederick William, -- it is one sign of Car-
lyle's power that he can make subordinate
characters salient and still bring out his hero,
-- Voltaire, Cromwell, and the Abbot Sam-
son, are a few of the pictures that line his
galleries. Wonderful as are these render-
ings of men he never saw, his sketches of men
he had known are almost literally "speaking
likenesses. " Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Dickens,
Thackeray, Tennyson, Mazzini, Louis Napo-
leon, are among the many who are painted to
a miracle in Carlyle's letters. Behold a great
American, in a letter to Emerson : --
"Not many days ago I saw at breakfast
the notablest of all your Notabilities, Daniel
Webster. He is a magnificent specimen;
you might say to all the world, This is your
Yankee Englishman, such Limbs we make in
Yankee-land! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate,
or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline
to back him at first sight against all the
extant world. The tanned complexion, that
amorphous craglike face; the dull black eyes
under their precipice of brows, like dull an-
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? 24 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WBITEE
thracite furnaces, needing only to be blown;
the mastiff - mouth, accurately closed : -- I
have not traced as much of silent Berserker-
rage, that I remember of, in any other man.
'I guess I should not like to be your nigger! '"
At the risk of numbering this paper with
the books of Chrysippus, we must look again
at the portrait of De Quincey, which is, per-
haps, the artist's chief triumph. Although
it is to be found in the Reminiscences, it yet
belongs here well enough, for that book is
not so much a book as a long, rambling let-
ter, partly of remorse, partly of pity, from
Carlyle to himself. "He was a pretty little
creature," says this terrible, sad old man, re-
membering after forty years, "full of wire-
drawn ingenuities; bankrupt enthusiasms,
bankrupt pride; with the finest silver-toned
low voice, and most elaborate gently-winding
courtesies and ingenuities of conversation:
'What would n't one give to have him in a
Box, and take him out to talk I' (That was
Her criticism of him; and it was right good. )
A bright, ready and melodious talker; but
in the end an inconclusive and long-winded.
One of the smallest man-figures I ever saw;
shaped like a pair of tongs; and hardly above
five feet in all: when he sat, you would have
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 25
taken him, by candle-light, for the beauti-
f ullest little Child; blue-eyed, blonde-haired,
sparkling face, -- had there not been a some-
thing too, which said, 'Eccovi, this Child has
been in Hell! '" One would be sure, without
other evidence than "Her criticism " in this
description, which is also a "character," -- to
use the old word, -- that She, too, had been
terrible. The broken order, the curious punc-
tuation, the capitals and italics, the leave of
absence granted to the verb, the quick inter-
jections, all taken together make the passage
a concentrated example of Carlyle's vox hu- mana style, -- of his writing when it is most
like speech, sublimated. In his use of persons, as of places, there
are pregnant comparisons to be made between
Carlyle's first study and the final portrait.
Sterling and old Sterling are cases in point;
Coleridge, maybe, the best instance of all.
The main lines and the personal atmosphere,
always visible, I think, in the sketch, are
reproduced by Carlyle in the finished work.
But in the heightening of lights, in the deep-
ening of shade, in composition, above all, he
makes many changes, which almost invariably
result in greater intensity of effect.
From such comparisons, if patiently con-
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? 26 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
ducted, might come luminous comment on
the question of Carlyle's style, -- a question
more vexed than the Bermoothes.
So far and so much for Carlyle's general
aspect as a letter-writer. I have tried to show
that, in addressing himself to a very few
friends, and especially to his own family, he
displays a different set of qualities. The dif-
ference between his vehemence toward the
world at large and his gentleness toward his
mother sometimes seems as marked as that
between the two visions of the prophet Jere-
miah: the one a seething caldron, the face
thereof from the north; the other, a rod of
an almond tree. The world, in truth, for this
peasant of genius, was, to the considerable
degree in which he remained a peasant, an
assemblage of persons and things to be ap-
proached with many reserves and a deal of
more or less violent disapproval. Annandale,
contrariwise, was an honest, strength-giving
corner of the world, which did for him
through life the office of the earth to An-
taeus. He went back to it so often that he
never lost his native accent, and, in certain
respects, the point of view to which he was
born. So long as Carlyle's mother lived,
there was rarely a year in which he did not
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 27
make a pilgrimage to Scotsbrig; and, after
she died, he went oftener to her grave than
most sons, dwelling at a distance from their
mothers, visit them in life. Scotsbrig also
came to him in the shape of letters, as well
as in the unsentimental (though, rightly be-
held, not unpathetic) guise of oatmeal, bacon,
clothes, and what not. The Carlyles held
that good meal could not be bought in Lon-
don; and when the barrel wasted, it was filled
again from home. One far-brought fowl we
all remember as the epic subject of a letter
from Mrs. Carlyle in Chelsea to her sister-
in-law in Scotland. Carlyle had his clothes
made in Annan, partly from thrift, partly
from distrust of London tailors.
However much he depended on the people
and the kindly fruits of his native soil, how-
ever much the exclusiveness of the Carlyles
may have been only that common to all
Scotch peasant families, it is still hard to
credit, though on the excellent authority of
Mrs. Oliphant, that their mutual love was
not "by ordinar," even among Scotch peas-
ants. Especially is it difficult of credence
that the attachment of Carlyle and his mother
was not as rare as it was beautiful. In 1832,
after the death of his father, he writes to his
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? 28 CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
brother Alick, at Scotsbrig: "0 let us all be
gentle, obedient, loving to our Mother, now
that she is left wholly to our charge ! ' Hon-
our thy Father and thy Mother': doubly
honour thy Mother when she alone remains. "
For twenty years this double honor was more
than trebly paid. The son writes once to his
mother: "Since I wrote last I have been in
Scotsbrig more than in London. " And so
it often is to the end, -- and after. Dream-
ing and waking, he looks far up across Eng-
land and the Solway. In the spring the plow
and the sower pass between his eyes and the
page of Cromwell or The French Revolution;
in the autumn he has a vision of the yel-
low fields, of "Jamie's" peat-stack, and the
"cauldron" singing under his mother's win-
dow. The mother's trembling thought of her
children answers their love for her. "She
told me the other day " (writes one of Car-
lyle's sisters), " the first gaet she gaed every
morning was to London, then to Italy, then
to Craigenputtock, and then to Mary's, and
finally began to think them at hame were,
maybe, no safer than the rest. When I asked
her what she wished me to say to you, she
said she had a thousand things to say if she
had you here; 'and thou may tell them, I'm
very little fra' them. '"
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? CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 29
As from his first clear earnings Carlyle sent
his father a pair of spectacles, and his mother
"a little sovereign to keep the fiend out of
her hussif," so throughout he never forgot
her in the least or the greatest particular.
From year to year he sent her money and to-
bacco, -- which they often smoked together
in the farmhouse, -- books and comforts and
letters. The letters, of course, were far the
best of all to her. Often as they came, they
could not come often enough. In 1824 Mar-
garet Carlyle wrote to her son: "Pray do
not let me want food; as your father says, I
look as if I would eat your letters. Write
everything and soon. " Everything and soon
it always was; and in these many letters Car-
lyle strove to bring near to the untraveled
ones at home all that he was seeing and
doing. One means of doing this was to de-
scribe interesting places in terms of Annan-
dale. Thus, in telling his sister Jean about
Naseby, he wrote : --
"Next day they drove me over some fif-
teen miles off to see the field of Naseby fight
-- Oliver Cromwell's chief battle, or one of
his chief. It was a grand scene for me --
Naseby, a venerable hamlet, larger than Mid-
dlebie, all built of mud, but trim with high
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? 80 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
peaked roofs, and two feet thick of smooth
thatch on them, and plenty of trees scattered
round and among. It is built as on the brow
of the Hagheads at Ecclefechan; Cromwell
lay with his back to that, and King Charles
was drawn up as at Wull Welsh's -- only the
Sinclair burn must be mostly dried, and the
hollow much wider and deeper. "
Carlyle knew that his mother would be
eager to hear of Luther and Lutherland. In
September of the last year but one of her
life, he writes to her from Weimar that
"Eisenach is about as big as Dumfries;"
that a hill near by is "somewhat as Lock-
erbie hill is in height and position. " The
donjon tower of the Wartburg (which he
translates for her, Watch Castle) stands like
the old Tower of Repentance on Hoddam
Hill, where his mother had visited him during
his "russet-coated idyll" there, many years
before. "They open a door, you enter a
little apartment, less than your best room at
Scotsbrig, I almost think less than your
smallest, a very poor low room with an old
leaded lattice window > to me the most ven-
erable of all rooms I ever entered. " That
afternoon they drive to Gotha in a " kind of
clatch. " Carlyle helps out his English for
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? CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 7
is none the less (perhaps, rather, the more)
sad, for all the wide and shining landscape.
A few lines later Carlyle says: "You perceive
me sufficiently at this point of my Pilgrimage,
as withdrawn to Hades for the time being;
intending a month's walk there, till the
muddy semi - solutions settle into sediment
according to what laws they have, and there
be perhaps a partial restoration of clearness. "
The voice of 1865, though early in the in-
terim it gained its individual accent, is still
the voice of 1822.
Malice was operant in this choice of a pas-
sage from one of Carlyle's letters to Emerson,
to show the frequent hue of his spirit. For
not only is the mere thought of Emerson a
cause of cheer to most men,--to Carlyle him-
self it usually brought comfort, -- but Carlyle
had adopted Emerson, or more nearly adopted
him than any one else except Sterling, into
the close communion of his own family, to-
ward whom he generally showed compunction
in the matter of invective and lament. Yet
in writing to Emerson and to them he would
sometimes forget his restraint, and, while eat-
ing his heart, would invite them to the same
repast. It has been said that Froude made
an exceptionally gloomy selection from Car-
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? 8 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
lyle's correspondence, and that Mr. Norton's
volumes give a fairer view of the habitual
tone of his spirits. So far as they are con-
cerned with Emerson and with Carlyle's kin-
dred, an explanation of the higher average of
cheerfulness has already been offered. But
even in these letters, and still more in the
rest of Mr. Norton's selections, one is tempted
to inquire whether he did not intend (and
very properly) to redress the balance which
Froude had unduly weighted on the other
side. For the essence and gist of Carlyle's
published writings -- books, letters, and jour-
nals -- is that " it is not a merry place, this
world; it is a stern and awful place. " Much
that is meat to other men was poison, or tinc-
tured with poison, to him. "My letter, you
will see" (he wrote to his brother John in
1828), "ends in sable, like the life of man.
My own thoughts grow graver every day I
live. " He could, and did, suck melancholy
from his own successful lectures, from his
own books and the books of others, from the
state of the nation and the state of his own
health, from society, from solitude. Craig-
enputtock, high on the moors between Dum-
friesshire and Galloway, and sixteen miles
from the town of Dumfries, has always seemed
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WHITER 9
to me the right scenic background for Car-
lyle. The stone farmhouse, surrounded by a
few acres of land reclaimed from peat bog,
stands in the midst of bleak hills, seven hun-
dred feet above the level of the sea. This is
the right scenery for Carlyle, and many of
his most characteristic letters, from whatever
places written, carry with them a feeling of
the north, November, and the moors. Had
Froude left any gaps in his biography, they
might be bridged with sighs.
Persons who talked with Carlyle, or who
heard him talk, often received a different im-
pression. This was, no doubt, partly because
his pentecostal gift excited him to a variety
and fire of speech for which he afterward
paid the penalty of a natural enough reac-
tion ; partly, also, because the sense of humor
never deserted him at those moments, and
rich gusts of laughter swept away boding
prophecy, fierce invective, and the whole sym-
bolic apparatus of Carlylean denunciation.
Humor, indeed, is always to be reckoned with
in Carlyle; and his letters, like his books,
abound in a range of it -- seldom genial --
that extends from the grim to the farcical.
But you cannot hear a man laugh in print;
and where in a Carlyle conversation the stage
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? 10 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
direction would be, "Exit laughing," in a
Carlyle letter it appears, "Exit groaning" or
"Exit swearing. " The writer "laughs off,"
as Macbeth and Macduff "fight off;" and
the reader hears but the ghost of a laugh, --
a faint, imagined reverberation.
Hence, loathed Melancholy, and a truce to
sable. I have, perhaps, made too much of a
striking characteristic, however indubitable,
of a great writer. The famous rat was not
always gnawing at the pit of his stomach;
and when neither the mood of vituperation
nor the mood of lament was upon him, he
was of too vigorous and too honest a mind
not to discuss with comparative calmness
many subjects that interested him. What
did interest him and what didn't, what ap-
pears in his letters and what is never seen
there, would make a catalogue fairly descrip-
tive of Carlyle's intellectual and moral consti-
tution. Food and raiment he seldom writes
of, save as necessities of life. No Christmas
gastronomy in his letters, no rule for "cook-
ing a chub," no incipient essay on roast pig.
As Carlyle's pen is never occupied with cards,
one concludes that "old women to play whist
with of an evening," so much desired by a
certain delightful letter-writer, were not a de-
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? CAELYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 11
sideratum with him. Women, in fact, play
no dominantly feminine part in his life.
Love, as a passion, he apparently does not
understand. He gave no more sensitive re-
sponse to the fine arts than Emerson, in whose
books there are many "blind places," -- so
says Mr. Chapman in his original and im-
portant essay on Emerson, -- " like the notes
which will not strike on a sick piano. " To
name the theatre is, with Carlyle, to scorn
it. Goethe himself could not make him care
for plays or play-acting. Goethe's Wilhelm
Meister he learned to admire, although, had
any other written it, the book would have
had from him the treatment it got from
Wordsworth. If we may believe Froude,
Carlyle called some of the most noteworthy
French novels " a new Phallus worship, with
Sue, Balzac, and Co. for prophets, and Ma-
dame Sand for a virgin. " Poetry, art allied
to his own, interests Carlyle only through its
thought or its lesson. In the actual affairs
of life, he desires neither money, rank, nor
political power. He gives no adherence to
any religious creed, political faith, or party
leader. He often feels himself in a " minor-
ity of one," but on a certain occasion doubles
the number, to include Emerson.
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? 12 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
Here may end, without special reason for
ending, the catalogue of negatives by which
people learn to know Carlyle in his letters.
Shorter, not less impressive or informing, is
the list of positives. Words Carlyle must have
had at least a sneaking fondness for. He
does not admit it, but he uses words and
phrases in a way that tells its own story to
those upon whose ears his noblest strains fall
like music. Very often, as he intended, the
words stand for facts, which he loved, and
for which he was proud to tell his love. Pu-
rity, honor, and truth are dear to Carlyle, and
he celebrates them in his letters. "Poor and
sad humanity," although it often moves him
to scorn, never quite loses its hold upon him:
his letters are a crowded thoroughfare of
human beings, who live again at his touch.
Good sayings -- pious, shrewd, sage, or hu-
morous, as the case may be -- this eloquent
talker rolls under his tongue, especially when
they are in the speech of the Scottish peo-
ple. His taste for humor is catholic enough
to relish jokes; and he himself, unclan-
nish chiefly in that, jokes without difficulty.
Strength of any kind bulks so large in Car-
lyle's esteem that the historian of Cromwell
and Friedrich has often been accused of mak-
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 13
ing might his right. After years of what he
felt to be misrepresentation, he endeavored to
set things straight by declaring that right, in
the long run, was pretty sure to be mighty.
However this may be, the strength of contem-
porary leaders was likely, by his thinking, to
be founded on unrighteousness; and it was
easier for him to worship his heroes through
the long nave of the past. There was an
altar for Cromwell, but -- alas that it should
have been so -- there was none for Lincoln.
Although these positives are lengthening
themselves out, there must be mention here
of the mother, wife, family, and friends, who
figure so engrossingly in Carlyle's correspond-
ence. I think we gather from the grand
total of documents in the case that he loved
his mother more deeply and singly than he
loved any other person. Yet for his wife
he had a strong, often disquieted affection.
The expression of this in his letters to her,
which are as remarkable for emotion as for
a very high order of writing, is of course
less checkered than it could have been in
the faring together of two such yoke-fel-
lows. In the action of temperament upon tem-
perament, like does not cure like. During
the long episode of Gloriana, it is often pos-
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? 14 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
sible to read between the lines of Carlyle's
letters to his wife. After the death of the
first Lady Ashburton, however, occurs the
most striking passage of self-accusation to be
found in any letter before the death of Mrs.
Carlyle. Carlyle writes to her on the 11th
of July, 1858 : --
"All yesterday I remarked, in speaking to
, if any tragic topic came in sight, I had
a difficulty to keep from breaking down in
my speech, and becoming inarticulate with
emotion over it. It is as if the scales were
falling from my eyes, and I were beginning
to see in this, my solitude, things that touch
me to the very quick. Oh, my little woman!
what a suffering thou hast had, and how no-
bly borne! with a simplicity, a silence, cour-
age, and patient heroism which are only now
too evident to me. Three waer days I can
hardly remember in my life; but they were
not without worth either; very blessed some
of the feelings, though many so sore and mis-
erable. It is very good to be left alone with
the truth sometimes, to hear with all its stern-
ness what it will say to one. "
It is often to be noted that no great mo-
ment finds Carlyle without a great word.
Moving as is the utterance just quoted, it is
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 15
dumb in comparison with this, written after
the death of Mrs. Carlyle: "Not for above
two days could I estimate the immeasurable
depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had
peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shat-
tered my poor world to universal ruin. "
Mother, wife, family, and one or two
friends, then, were very dear to Carlyle.
"Love me a little," he writes once to Emer-
son. Next to these few persons, nature had
perhaps the strongest sway over him; and
the strange, beautiful landscapes that shine
out from some of his darkest letters would
be enough to found a reputation on. The
phrases live in one's memory as if they had
line and color.
Two main facts detach themselves, I think,
from these imperfect suggestions of what
Carlyle's letters contain and what they are
vacant of. In the first place, no one can
doubt that although -- except in writing to
the Annandale kin -- Carlyle seldom attempts
to control himself, is seldom interesting or
entertaining of set purpose, he is yet, for
interest and entertainment, a letter - writer
among a thousand. Single-minded and single-
hearted, true as the very truth, in the words
of his mouth he utters the meditations of
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? 16 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
his heart. Gifted with eloquence, with hu-
mor, with pathos, with eyes that see every-
thing and a memory that loses nothing, with
an energy of speech which (compared with
that given to the majority of his fellow crea-
tures) is clearly superhuman, Carlyle uses his
amazing literary vehicle as an Arabian magic
carpet to transport him to his correspondent.
The letter is the writer; the word is the
man.
So much for one fact. The other, not
now stated for the first time, is that Carlyle,
in his familiar letters as in his published
works, presents the curious combination of
mystic and realist. The world that can be
tested by the senses is, in Carlyle's belief,
only the vesture, sometimes muddy, sometimes
clear, of the divine principle. For many
readers, the expression of this ruling idea
of Carlyle and his work is confused not only
by apparently contradictory phrasings, but by
the shifting of his conception of God between
theism and pantheism. When, however, Car-
lyle utters himself most earnestly and most
characteristically on this cardinal point of his
belief, no manner of man can misunderstand
him. "Matter," exclaims he, "exists only
spiritually, and to represent some idea and
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 17
body it forth. Heaven and Earth are but
the time-vesture of the Eternal. The Uni-
verse is but one vast symbol of God; nay, if
thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a
symbol of God? Is not all that he does sym-
bolical, a revelation to sense of the mystic
God-given force that is in him ? -- a gospel
of Freedom, which he, the 'Messias of Na-
ture,' preaches as he can by act and word. "
It was only to be expected that the favorite
quotation of a man whose high belief can be
stated thus, of a man who regarded time as
an illusion, should be the lines from Shake-
speare's Tempest: --
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. "
Now, although it is proverbially difficult to
prove a negative, the ease with which a nega-
tive can be stated should be equally matter
of proverb. Accordingly, we find that Car-
lyle, in his letters, a hundred times denounces
the world as he sees it for once that he de-
scribes, or even suggests, the world as he
would see it. Silent heroes should be the
rulers of England. Silent heroes are rare
birds, even among the dead. Instead of
them, talking parliamentarians are at the
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? 18 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
head of things; and Carlyle has to say what
he thinks of Gladstone and Disraeli, the alter-
nately ruling talkers. When, in 1874, Dis-
raeli proposed to grant him a pension and
bestow on him also the Grand Cross of the
Bath, he wrote to John Carlyle: "I do, how-
ever, truly admire the magnanimity of Dizzy
in regard to me. He is the only man I
almost never spoke of except with contempt. " Men of letters fare no better than men of
action. They should be priests, in white, un-
spotted robes. What does Carlyle find them?
In 1824, after pinning Coleridge, De Quin-
cey, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt fiercely to the
page, he writes to Miss Welsh: "' Good
heavens!
' I often inwardly exclaim, 'and is
this the literary world? ' This rascal rout,
this dirty rabble, destitute not only of high
feeling and knowledge or intellect, but even
of common honesty! The very best of them
are ill-natured weaklings. They are not red-
blooded men at all. . . . Such is the literary
world of London; indisputably the poorest
part of its population at present. " So Car-
lyle wrote of writers when he was putting on
his literary armor, and not very differently
when he was putting it off. His Hero as
Man of Letters was almost invariably seen at
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 19
a distance, either of time or space. He
spitted Coleridge on his sharpest spear, and
two blasting, withering descriptions of Charles
Lamb -- with forty years between them for
reflection -- remain to the everlasting hurt
of Carlyle's own reputation.
Vitriol blesseth neither him that gives nor
him that takes, yet Carlyle stayed to the end
of his many days essentially high-minded.
Honorable, simple, helpful, charitable in deed
though not in word, he was seen at the limit
of his course to have a better heart, a charac-
ter less deteriorated, than many a man -- no
less good at the start -- who has indulged
himself with " omitting the negative proposi-
tion. " The habit of scorn would in the long
run have been more harmful to character than
the habit of tolerance and facile praise, ex-
cept that Carlyle had an extraordinarily high
standard of principle and performance, and
held to it not only in his judgment of others,
but also in what he exacted of himself. The
fact that Carlyle never tried to reconcile the
inconsistency (as it may have seemed to some
persons) between the Deity of his worship and
the symbolic manifestations of that Deity in a
world so little to Carlyle's liking no doubt
helped him to keep his spiritual integrity.
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? 20 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
In company and contrast with the mysticism
of Carlyle's thought -- "idealism" is the bet-
ter word, if it be strictly interpreted -- is the
eager realism of his literary methods. As a
result of this piquant union, Carlyle means
one thing to one man, and another, quite dif-
ferent thing to another man. The Carlyle
of X, the strait idealist, is a moonish philoso-
pher, to be shunned by A, the strait realist,
who rejoices in the closely packed narrative,
the wild action, and the portraits of men and
women, that make but a trivial appeal to X.
This union of natures is plain enough in
Shakespeare, in whom nothing surprises. The
hand which gave us the Tempest gave us also
Juliet's nurse and Hotspur's description of
"a certain Lord. " Too often, however, the
idealist's grasp of the concrete is wavering
and intermittent; too often the soul of the
realist needs little feeding.
Carlyle vibrated between these two ele-
ments of his nature, and fortified one with
the other. When, after burrowing in the
dust-heap of the past or fishing into "the
general Mother of Dead Dogs," he had
brought to light some pearl (or, it might be,
only some oyster-shell) of fact, he often im-
proved the opportunity to show the larger
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 21
significance of the little gleam or glint of
reality. It was the defect of a fine quality
that, in his later work, and especially in Fred-
erick, he spent himself on irrelevant facts
which helped to make Carlyle's longest book
a splendid failure, with episodes of indubita-
ble success.
The looser form of the letter more properly
admits the isolated concrete. Shrewd, wel-
come bits of fact are everywhere in Carlyle's
letters; everywhere, too, are those other ex-
pressions of a great realist, -- vividly "com-
posed" elements of landscape, and portraits
that give every token of life except breath.
As with every artist, whatever he depicts
takes color from him, and is seen through his
temperament. In the summer of 1837 Car-
lyle writes to Sterling from Scotsbrig: "One
night, late, I rode through the village where
I was born. The old kirkyard tree, a huge
old gnarled ash, was nestling itself softly
against the great twilight in the north. A
star or two looked out, and the old graves
were all there, and my father and my sister;
and God was above us all. " Here be worn,
familiar things. Gray has been to the village
churchyard at the hour of parting day, and a
procession has followed in his footsteps. But
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? 22 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
this kirkyard, where Carlyle has since laid
himself down with his kindred, is Carlyle's.
The reappearance (usually heightened or
elaborated) of bits of prospect or topography
first recorded in Carlyle's letters is an inter-
esting characteristic of his writing. His first
visit to Paris was of much service to him in
fixing the places and scenes of The French
Revolution; the trip into the country of
Cromwell's birth and the examination of
Naseby field come into sight again in the
book,-- witness especially the "Cease your
fooling," and the troopers' teeth that bit into
Carlyle's memory; and a number of rough
drafts for details of Frederick appear in let-
ters from the Continent. A brief note, dur-
ing a visit to Mr. Redwood in 1843, of the
Glamorganshire "green network of intricate
lanes, mouldering ruins, vigorous vegetation
good and bad," was afterward dilated (in
the Life of Sterling) into the spacious and
beautiful landscape beginning: "Llanblethian
hangs pleasantly, with its white cottages, and
orchard and other trees, on the western slope
of a green hill; looking far and wide over
green meadows and little or bigger hills, in
the pleasant plain of Glamorgan. "
Distinguished as are Carlyle's portraits of
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 23
places, it is probably his portraits of persons
that abide longest and most completely in
the memories of most readers. Robespierre,
Mirabeau and Mirabeau pere, Frederick and
Frederick William, -- it is one sign of Car-
lyle's power that he can make subordinate
characters salient and still bring out his hero,
-- Voltaire, Cromwell, and the Abbot Sam-
son, are a few of the pictures that line his
galleries. Wonderful as are these render-
ings of men he never saw, his sketches of men
he had known are almost literally "speaking
likenesses. " Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Dickens,
Thackeray, Tennyson, Mazzini, Louis Napo-
leon, are among the many who are painted to
a miracle in Carlyle's letters. Behold a great
American, in a letter to Emerson : --
"Not many days ago I saw at breakfast
the notablest of all your Notabilities, Daniel
Webster. He is a magnificent specimen;
you might say to all the world, This is your
Yankee Englishman, such Limbs we make in
Yankee-land! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate,
or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline
to back him at first sight against all the
extant world. The tanned complexion, that
amorphous craglike face; the dull black eyes
under their precipice of brows, like dull an-
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? 24 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WBITEE
thracite furnaces, needing only to be blown;
the mastiff - mouth, accurately closed : -- I
have not traced as much of silent Berserker-
rage, that I remember of, in any other man.
'I guess I should not like to be your nigger! '"
At the risk of numbering this paper with
the books of Chrysippus, we must look again
at the portrait of De Quincey, which is, per-
haps, the artist's chief triumph. Although
it is to be found in the Reminiscences, it yet
belongs here well enough, for that book is
not so much a book as a long, rambling let-
ter, partly of remorse, partly of pity, from
Carlyle to himself. "He was a pretty little
creature," says this terrible, sad old man, re-
membering after forty years, "full of wire-
drawn ingenuities; bankrupt enthusiasms,
bankrupt pride; with the finest silver-toned
low voice, and most elaborate gently-winding
courtesies and ingenuities of conversation:
'What would n't one give to have him in a
Box, and take him out to talk I' (That was
Her criticism of him; and it was right good. )
A bright, ready and melodious talker; but
in the end an inconclusive and long-winded.
One of the smallest man-figures I ever saw;
shaped like a pair of tongs; and hardly above
five feet in all: when he sat, you would have
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 25
taken him, by candle-light, for the beauti-
f ullest little Child; blue-eyed, blonde-haired,
sparkling face, -- had there not been a some-
thing too, which said, 'Eccovi, this Child has
been in Hell! '" One would be sure, without
other evidence than "Her criticism " in this
description, which is also a "character," -- to
use the old word, -- that She, too, had been
terrible. The broken order, the curious punc-
tuation, the capitals and italics, the leave of
absence granted to the verb, the quick inter-
jections, all taken together make the passage
a concentrated example of Carlyle's vox hu- mana style, -- of his writing when it is most
like speech, sublimated. In his use of persons, as of places, there
are pregnant comparisons to be made between
Carlyle's first study and the final portrait.
Sterling and old Sterling are cases in point;
Coleridge, maybe, the best instance of all.
The main lines and the personal atmosphere,
always visible, I think, in the sketch, are
reproduced by Carlyle in the finished work.
But in the heightening of lights, in the deep-
ening of shade, in composition, above all, he
makes many changes, which almost invariably
result in greater intensity of effect.
From such comparisons, if patiently con-
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? 26 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
ducted, might come luminous comment on
the question of Carlyle's style, -- a question
more vexed than the Bermoothes.
So far and so much for Carlyle's general
aspect as a letter-writer. I have tried to show
that, in addressing himself to a very few
friends, and especially to his own family, he
displays a different set of qualities. The dif-
ference between his vehemence toward the
world at large and his gentleness toward his
mother sometimes seems as marked as that
between the two visions of the prophet Jere-
miah: the one a seething caldron, the face
thereof from the north; the other, a rod of
an almond tree. The world, in truth, for this
peasant of genius, was, to the considerable
degree in which he remained a peasant, an
assemblage of persons and things to be ap-
proached with many reserves and a deal of
more or less violent disapproval. Annandale,
contrariwise, was an honest, strength-giving
corner of the world, which did for him
through life the office of the earth to An-
taeus. He went back to it so often that he
never lost his native accent, and, in certain
respects, the point of view to which he was
born. So long as Carlyle's mother lived,
there was rarely a year in which he did not
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 27
make a pilgrimage to Scotsbrig; and, after
she died, he went oftener to her grave than
most sons, dwelling at a distance from their
mothers, visit them in life. Scotsbrig also
came to him in the shape of letters, as well
as in the unsentimental (though, rightly be-
held, not unpathetic) guise of oatmeal, bacon,
clothes, and what not. The Carlyles held
that good meal could not be bought in Lon-
don; and when the barrel wasted, it was filled
again from home. One far-brought fowl we
all remember as the epic subject of a letter
from Mrs. Carlyle in Chelsea to her sister-
in-law in Scotland. Carlyle had his clothes
made in Annan, partly from thrift, partly
from distrust of London tailors.
However much he depended on the people
and the kindly fruits of his native soil, how-
ever much the exclusiveness of the Carlyles
may have been only that common to all
Scotch peasant families, it is still hard to
credit, though on the excellent authority of
Mrs. Oliphant, that their mutual love was
not "by ordinar," even among Scotch peas-
ants. Especially is it difficult of credence
that the attachment of Carlyle and his mother
was not as rare as it was beautiful. In 1832,
after the death of his father, he writes to his
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? 28 CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
brother Alick, at Scotsbrig: "0 let us all be
gentle, obedient, loving to our Mother, now
that she is left wholly to our charge ! ' Hon-
our thy Father and thy Mother': doubly
honour thy Mother when she alone remains. "
For twenty years this double honor was more
than trebly paid. The son writes once to his
mother: "Since I wrote last I have been in
Scotsbrig more than in London. " And so
it often is to the end, -- and after. Dream-
ing and waking, he looks far up across Eng-
land and the Solway. In the spring the plow
and the sower pass between his eyes and the
page of Cromwell or The French Revolution;
in the autumn he has a vision of the yel-
low fields, of "Jamie's" peat-stack, and the
"cauldron" singing under his mother's win-
dow. The mother's trembling thought of her
children answers their love for her. "She
told me the other day " (writes one of Car-
lyle's sisters), " the first gaet she gaed every
morning was to London, then to Italy, then
to Craigenputtock, and then to Mary's, and
finally began to think them at hame were,
maybe, no safer than the rest. When I asked
her what she wished me to say to you, she
said she had a thousand things to say if she
had you here; 'and thou may tell them, I'm
very little fra' them. '"
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? CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 29
As from his first clear earnings Carlyle sent
his father a pair of spectacles, and his mother
"a little sovereign to keep the fiend out of
her hussif," so throughout he never forgot
her in the least or the greatest particular.
From year to year he sent her money and to-
bacco, -- which they often smoked together
in the farmhouse, -- books and comforts and
letters. The letters, of course, were far the
best of all to her. Often as they came, they
could not come often enough. In 1824 Mar-
garet Carlyle wrote to her son: "Pray do
not let me want food; as your father says, I
look as if I would eat your letters. Write
everything and soon. " Everything and soon
it always was; and in these many letters Car-
lyle strove to bring near to the untraveled
ones at home all that he was seeing and
doing. One means of doing this was to de-
scribe interesting places in terms of Annan-
dale. Thus, in telling his sister Jean about
Naseby, he wrote : --
"Next day they drove me over some fif-
teen miles off to see the field of Naseby fight
-- Oliver Cromwell's chief battle, or one of
his chief. It was a grand scene for me --
Naseby, a venerable hamlet, larger than Mid-
dlebie, all built of mud, but trim with high
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? 80 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
peaked roofs, and two feet thick of smooth
thatch on them, and plenty of trees scattered
round and among. It is built as on the brow
of the Hagheads at Ecclefechan; Cromwell
lay with his back to that, and King Charles
was drawn up as at Wull Welsh's -- only the
Sinclair burn must be mostly dried, and the
hollow much wider and deeper. "
Carlyle knew that his mother would be
eager to hear of Luther and Lutherland. In
September of the last year but one of her
life, he writes to her from Weimar that
"Eisenach is about as big as Dumfries;"
that a hill near by is "somewhat as Lock-
erbie hill is in height and position. " The
donjon tower of the Wartburg (which he
translates for her, Watch Castle) stands like
the old Tower of Repentance on Hoddam
Hill, where his mother had visited him during
his "russet-coated idyll" there, many years
before. "They open a door, you enter a
little apartment, less than your best room at
Scotsbrig, I almost think less than your
smallest, a very poor low room with an old
leaded lattice window > to me the most ven-
erable of all rooms I ever entered. " That
afternoon they drive to Gotha in a " kind of
clatch. " Carlyle helps out his English for
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