No More Learning



## p. 2 (#18) ###############################################

N
[CH.
Carlyle
Born in the little Dumfriesshire village of Ecclefechan on
4 December 1795, when the lurid light of the French revolution
still lit up the European sky, Thomas Carlyle came of a typical
lowland Scottish peasant stock, and, to the last, he remained
himself a peasant, bound by a thousand clannish bonds to his
provincial home. The narrow ties of blood and family always
meant more to him than that citizenship of the world which is
demanded of a man of genius; and, in spite of his forty years'
life in the metropolis, he never succeeded in shaking off the
unpliant instincts of the south of Scotland peasant. His prickly
originality and sturdy independence had something Celtic about
them, and these characteristics clung to him all his life, even
although he had early found an affinity in the Germanic mind.
In the Dichtung und Wahrheit of Sartor Resartus and the
preternaturally vivid pictures of Reminiscences, a kindly light
of retrospect is thrown over Carlyle's childhood and early life;
but, none the less, the reader is conscious of the atmosphere
of oppressive frugality, through which, as a child and youth,
he fought his way to the light. At the grammar school of
Annan, to which, after sparse educational beginnings in his native
village, he was sent in 1805, he was too sensitive a child to
distinguish himself other than as the tearful victim of his rougher
schoolmates; and, at the early age of fourteen, he passed to the
university of Edinburgh, where he attended lectures through five
sessions. The Scottish universities, still medieval in character and
curriculum, were then veritable bear-gardens, where the youth of
the land, drawn from every rank of the population, were let loose
to browse as they listed; the formalities and entrance-examina-
tions which now guard these institutions, and have destroyed
their old democratic character, were, as yet, undreamt of: but
the Scottish students of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a
Lernfreiheit as complete as, if, in its opportunities, more restricted
than, that of German students of our own time; and Carlyle, while
following, nominally, the usual courses, availed himself of this
freedom to the full. Ever intolerant of teachers and of the
systematic acquisition of knowledge, he benefited little from his
classes in Edinburgh. Like many of our men of genius, he-one
of the least academically minded of them all-always stood outside
the academic pale. He had no high opinion of centres of learning,
from this, his first experience—which, doubtless, provoked the
outburst in Sartor, 'that out of England and Spain, ours was the
worst of all hitherto discovered universities'-to the day when he


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1]
Early Years
3
a
recalled to students of Edinburgh university, more than fifty
years later, his dictum from Lectures on Heroes, that 'the true
university of our days is a collection of books. '
Edinburgh had thus little share in Carlyle's development;
at most, he succeeded, like his own Teufelsdröckh, 'in fishing
up from the chaos of the library more books perhaps than had
been known to the very keepers thereof. He had begun his
studies with certain vague and half-hearted aspirations towards
the ministry; but these were soon discarded. His only tie with
academic learning was mathematics, for which he had a peculiar
aptitude, and in which he even won the praise of his professor. He
left the university in 1814 without taking a degree. On his return
to Dumfriesshire, he was appointed a teacher of mathematics in
Annan, in which post he succeeded a friend who was also to make
some mark in the world, Edward Irving. From Annan, Carlyle,
now in his twenty-first year, passed, with the help of a recom-
mendation from his Edinburgh professor, to Kirkcaldy, whither
Irving had preceded him-still as mathematical master, still
without any kind of clearness as to what kind of work he was
ultimately to do in the world. In Fifeshire, however, he appears
to have had his first experience of romance, which presented itself
to him in the shape of a pupil of higher social station than his
own; Margaret Gordon, Carlyle's first love, may, possibly, have
hovered before him as a kind of model for the Blumine' of
Sartor; although it seems hardly necessary to seek any specific
model for so purely 'literary' a figure. No doubt, this love-
affair, which, through the timely interposition of a relative of
Miss Gordon, came to an abrupt end, upset many of the presup-
positions with which Carlyle set out in life. Another significant
event was the chance reading, in September 1817, of Madame de
Staël's De l'Allemagne, then quite new, which did more than all
the treasures of the university library in Edinburgh to bring
order and direction into Carlyle's intellectual world. Considerable
emphasis must be laid on this, the accident of his first introduction
to the literature that was to mean much to him. Madame de
Staël's work, which opened up the wonderland of German thought
and poetry, not only to Carlyle, but, also, to all Europe outside
Germany, was a product of German romanticism, having been
written, in great measure, under the guidance of August Wilhelm
Schlegel, the chief critic of that movement; it was responsible for
the fact that the impress which the new literature of Germany
made on the European mind was, in the main, romantic. Even
9
1-2


## p. 4 (#20) ###############################################

4
[ch.
Carlyle
Goethe and Schiller are here seen essentially as Schlegel saw
them; and Carlyle, all his life long, viewed the German writers
whom he loved and looked up to as his masters from the romantic
angle.
Heartily weary of school-teaching, Carlyle, once more, made an
effort towards a profession; he returned with his friend Irving to
Edinburgh, and, in September 1818, took up the study of law.
But he soon found that law had even less grip on him than had his
previous studies for the church; and, gradually, he drifted into
the undefined, and, for a man of Carlyle's temperament infinitely
disheartening and uphill, profession of the 'writer of books. ' His
task was the harder, as he had already begun to be tortured by
dyspepsia, and by the melancholy and depression which that
disease brought in its train. Nevertheless, he made a beginning
towards a literary activity with a number of articles contributed to
Sir David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia; this was the
merest hackwork, but, at least, it was hackwork honestly per-
formed. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1820, when at home in
Dumfriesshire, he entered on a systematic study of the German
language, and threw himself with passionate ardour into the works
of the new writers, from whom Madame de Staël's book had led
him to hope that he would find guidance. And, in his early efforts
to make money by his pen, it was only natural that he should have
turned his German studies to account; while translating—again for
Brewster-Legendre's Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry, he
found time to write an essay on Goethe's Faust, which appeared in
The New Edinburgh Review in April 1822. But his first serious
task as an interpreter of German literature was a Life of Schiller,
the German writer to whom, as was to be expected, he had been first
attracted. This is an excellent piece of work, if it be remembered
how meagre were the materials at his disposal; and it is hardly
surprising that Schiller's personality-in which Carlyle saw mirrored
his own early struggles—and Schiller's work as a historian, are
more adequately treated than are his dramatic poetry or aesthetic
studies. Carlyle's Life of Schiller came out serially in The London
Magazine in 1823 and 1824, and appeared in book form in 1825.
Meanwhile, he had turned to Goethe, and translated, not without
occasional secret misgivings, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,
which was published in 1824. This was followed by four volumes
entitled German Romance, which included stories by Musäus-
something of an intruder in this circle of romanticists—Fouqué,
Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, as well as the continuation of Goethe's


## p. 5 (#21) ###############################################

1]
Under German Influence
5
>
novel, Wilhelm Meister's Travels, the translation of which was,
naturally, more to his mind than that of the Apprenticeship had
been. German Romance appeared in 1827, and found little favour
with the reading public; but in that same year Carlyle had begun
to write the remarkable series of essays on German literature,
contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review and
Foreign Quarterly Review, which now form a considerable part
of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.
The beginnings of Carlyle's career as man of letters, all things
considered, had been auspicious: perhaps, indeed, more auspicious
than was justified by subsequent developments. But, at least, all
thought of the bar as a profession was given up. Through Edward
Irving, who, in the meantime, had settled in London, Carlyle
became tutor to Charles Buller in 1822, and had the opportunity
of getting to know something of a social world much above his
own and of seeing London and even Paris. Before this, however,
a new chapter in his life had begun with his introduction, in the
early summer of 1821, to Jane Welsh of Haddington. Again,
it was Irving whom he had to thank for this introduction, which
formed a momentous turning-point in his life. Irving had himself
been attracted by Miss Welsh, and she by him; but he was under
other obligations; and the friendship between her and Carlyle
was free to drift, in spite of many points of friction, into love.
In 1826, the many difficulties and scruples which had arisen were
successfully overcome, and she became Carlyle's wife. After
a short spell in Edinburgh, the young couple took up their
abode amid the solitudes of the Dumfriesshire moors, at Craigen-
puttock, 'the dreariest spot in all the British dominions,' where
Mrs Carlyle, born, if ever woman was, to grace a salon, spent six
of her best years in oppressive solitude added to household work.
With these years, which produced the essays on German literature,
as well as Sartor Resartus, Carlyle's apprenticeship to literature
may be said to have come to a close.
It will be convenient, at this stage, to consider what these
literary beginnings under German influence meant for Carlyle.
He was by no means, as has been often asserted, a pioneer of
German studies in this country; he rather took advantage of
an already existing interest in, and curiosity about, things
German, to which many translations and magazine articles-Black-
wood's Magazine, for instance, had, since its inception in 1817,
manifested a strong interest in German poetry-bear witness.
Carlyle, however, had an advantage over other writers and


## p. 6 (#22) ###############################################

6
[CH.
Carlyle
1
a
a
translators of his day, in so far as his work is free from the taint
of dilettantism, the besetting sin of all who, in those days, wrote
on German literature in English magazines; he spoke with the
authority of one who knew, whose study had been deep and
fundamental, even although his practical knowledge of German at
no time reached a very high degree of proficiency.
Carlyle was never weary, all his life long, of proclaiming his
personal debt to his German masters, above all, to Goethe; and,
no doubt, the debt, especially to the latter, was a very real one.
It was Goethe who helped him out of the Slough of Despond in
the early twenties, when he was searching for a solution to the
problem: “What canst thou work at? '-Goethe who showed
him how to work his way through blank despair to the ‘Ever-
lasting Yea.
'If I have been delivered from darkness into any measure of light,' he him-
self wrote to the German poet, “if I know aught of myself and my duties and
destination, it is to the study of your writings more than to any other circum-
stance that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always
thank and reverence with the feeling of a Disciple to his Master, nay of a Son
to his spiritual Father. '
Carlyle has himself said that the famous incident in Sartor
Resartus, where the light breaks on Teufelsdröckh in the rue
Saint Thomas de l'Enfer, really took place in his own life one June
afternoon in 1821, as he went down Leith walk to bathe in the
firth of Forth. He, too, like his hero, had dwelt with the ‘Ever-
lasting No’; difficulties of all kinds had beset him, religious
difficulties, moral difficulties, above all, the racking problem of the
end of life—happiness versus renunciation. He had, perhaps, also
to face problems of a more practical kind than those which assailed
his Teufelsdröckh; for it was only a few weeks before the crisis
that he had met Miss Welsh; and, doubtless, in a dim way, he felt
that the problem of life was now, or would become for him, not
merely what canst thou work at, but what canst thou work at
with sufficient worldly success to allow of sharing thy life with
another. Moreover, the spiritual crisis, when it did break over
Carlyle, assuredly did not come and go with the dramatic vivid-
ness of the chapters in Sartor; Carlyle's struggles with the powers
of darkness extended over years, and it may be questioned if he
ever found complete deliverance, ever succeeded in setting the
‘Everlasting No' completely and finally at defiance.
When, however, we scrutinise Carlyle's relation to Goethe
more closely, we see how strangely few points actually existed
between the two men. Carlyle's Goethe was by no means the


## p. 7 (#23) ###############################################

1]
Relation to Goethe
7
whole Goethe, not even the real Goethe. Carlyle's hero and
saviour was a fantastic, romantic Goethe, on whom was grafted
a modern individualism that was assuredly not Goethe's. Carlyle
attributed to Goethe a disharmony between the emotional and the
intellectual life, which the German poet had never really known;
for Goethe's 'storm and stress' crisis, which had been lived
through, once and for all, years before Carlyle was born, was
of quite another kind. The ‘Everlasting Yea' of Sartor, tinged,
as it was, by puritanic abnegations, had not been Goethe's solu-
tion to the inner dissonance of his early years; and Entsagen,
to “the Great Heathen,' was a very different thing from the drab
and austere interpretation which Carlyle put on the English word
‘renunciation. ' In truth, Carlyle was no true Goethean, but a
romanticist to the core; not in the vague English sense of that
word, but as it is used in Germany, where it connotes a particular
school of thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
He drew his spiritual transcendentalism from Novalis, who is the
theme of one of the most beautiful of his German essays; he
sought his philosophic and political inspiration in Fichte; he
regarded Richter’s Sterne-like genius, his fantastic and often in-
congruous mingling of crude melodrama, eccentric humour and
soaring imaginative flight, as something divinely inspired; and
Goethe, to him, was no calm Olympian, but a hero of self-abne-
gation, who had emerged, scarified and broken, from a 'sanctuary
of sorrows. And yet, in a kind of dim way, even if much of
Goethe's life and thinking was a closed book to him, Carlyle
realised that the German poet had solved the riddle of the spiritual
life which tortured himself, and had arrived at a peace and
serenity to which it was never his own lot to attain. Carlyle's
interest in German literature virtually came to a close with
Goethe's death and the end of romantic ascendancy in Germany.
For the later men and movements of that literature he had no
sympathy or understanding; and the chief German friend of his later
life, Varnhagen von Ense, was, pre-eminently, an upholder of the
traditions of the past. Thus, it is to Carlyle, rather than to Byron,
or to Coleridge and Wordsworth, that we must look to find the
analogue in English literature of continental romanticism, that
movement which, built up on a faith in the spiritual and the
unseen, had risen superior to the ‘enlightenment,' as well as to the
Weltschmerz, of the previous century. This was what Carlyle's
English contemporaries endeavoured to express when they said
that he belonged to the 'mystic' school. At the same time, he by
a
>


## p. 8 (#24) ###############################################

OC
[CH.
8
Carlyle
no means represents romanticism in all its variety and extent;
he stands rather for its ethical and religious side only; while, to
find an English equivalent for the no less fruitful aesthetic side of
the romantic movement with which Carlyle had no sympathy-
we have to turn to the later pre-Raphaelites and to Carlyle’s
disciple Ruskin.
The romantic stamp on Carlyle's work is nowhere more clearly
apparent than in his critical writings. His method as a literary
critic is summed up in the title of one of his essays, Characteristics,
a title which had been used for a volume of criticism by the two
leaders of German romanticism, the brothers Schlegel. The older
ideals of criticism, which had held uninterrupted sway in Europe
from the renascence to the end of the eighteenth century, had
been established on the assumption that the critic was a man of
superior knowledge and juster instincts; the critic, according to
this view, sat in judgment, and looked down on the criticised from
his higher standpoint; or, as Carlyle himself put it: 'perched him-
self resolutely, as it were, on the shoulders of his author, and
therefrom showed as if he commanded and looked down upon
him by a natural superiority of stature. ' This type of critic
persisted in England in the school of Jeffrey and The Edinburgh
Review; its most brilliant representative among Carlyle's con-
temporaries was Macaulay. It was Carlyle's mission, as a literary
critic, to complete the revolution already tentatively foreshadowed
by Coleridge, and to establish the new standpoint which had been
ably maintained by the Schlegels. According to these writers,
the first function of the critic is not to pass superior judgments, but
to ‘characterise'; to interpret, in humble respect for the higher
rights and claims of creative genius; to approach poetry through
the personality of the poet. This is the attitude which Carlyle
consistently maintains in all his essays. He insists that it is the
critic's chief task to get into sympathy with his author, to under-
stand and appreciate his aims and intentions, not to impose on
him purposes which may have lain entirely outside his plan. It was
this ideal, Carlyle's adaptation of the interpretative method of the
Schlegels to English needs, that makes his critical essays a land-
mark of the first importance in the history of English criticism.
In practice, criticism of this kind is, obviously, at the mercy of the
personal attitude of the critic to literature; it allows freer play to
subjective likes and dislikes than is permitted to the critic who pro-
ceeds by rule of thumb. One might say that it postulates an original
sympathy between critic and criticised; at least, it is to be seen


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1]
Sartor Resartus
9
at its best where such sympathy is strong, as, for instance, in
Carlyle's essays on his German masters, Goethe, Jean Paul Friedrich
Richter, Novalis, and in his masterly essay on Burns. But, where
such sympathy does not exist, the method may be responsible for an
even greater unfairness than is to be laid at the door of the older,
objective criticism. This disadvantage, to some extent, is apparent
in Carlyle's essay on Scott; it comes out with disagreeable
emphasis in his personal utterances on men like Heine, on the
leaders of the French romantic school and on many of his English
contemporaries, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb. On the
other hand, one must not overlook the eminent fairness with which
Carlyle has written of the eighteenth century—a century which
appeared to him only as an age of paralysing scepticism and un-
belief-and on writers so far away from his own way of thinking
as Diderot and Voltaire.
Apart from his essays, the work by which Carlyle takes his
place as the English representative of German romanticism is
Sartor Resartus, an immediate product of his affectionate study
of Jean Paul. The ideas, form, the very style, of this work,
which repelled many when it first appeared and had made the
search for a publisher dishearteningly difficult, have all the
stamp of Jean Paul on them. But, into the German fabric,
which has more consistency of plan, and a more original imagi-
native basis than it is usually credited with, Carlyle wove his own
spiritual adventures, which had already found expression in a
cruder and more verbose form in an unfinished autobiographical
novel, Wotton Reinfred. Sartor Resartus falls into two parts,
a disquisition on 'the philosophy of clothes '—which, doubtless,
formed the original nucleus of the book—and an autobiographic
romance, modelled, to a large extent, on the writings of Jean Paul.
The philosophy of clothes left most of Carlyle's contemporaries
cold; and, indeed, to his early critics, it seemed lacking in origi-
nality, as a mere adaptation of an idea from Swift's Tale of a Tub;
in their eyes, it was overshadowed by the subjective romance, as it
seems to have been in the case of Carlyle himself as he proceeded
with it. The German village of Entepfuhl took on the colouring
of Ecclefechan; the German university, the name of which Teufels-
dröckh forbears to disclose, was suggested by what Carlyle had
experienced in Edinburgh; the clothes-philosophy made way,
more and more, for a vivid depiction of the spiritual and moral
crisis in the author's own life. The three chapters, “The Ever-
lasting No,' 'Centre of Indifference' and 'The Everlasting Yea,


## p. 10 (#26) ##############################################

IO
[CH.
Carlyle
were, as we have seen, an epitome of what Carlyle had himself
come through acutely in 1821. Here, moreover, and not in
its metaphysics, lay the significance of Sartor Resartus for more
than one generation of young Englishmen; in Carlyle's cry of
defiance—for defiance it was, rather than meek resignation-in his
'Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe! ' 'Love not Pleasure; love
God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is
solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him,' they
found a veritable finger-post pointing to the higher moral and
spiritual life. Here was a basis for that new spiritual idealism,
based on suffering and resignation, but 'strong in will to strive, to
seek, to find, and not to yield,' which, later, was to pass into the
poetry of In Memoriam, and into the more assured optimism of
Browning.
In 1833, the Carlyles' six years' exile in their Dumfriesshire
Patmos came to an end; after a few months' trial of Edinburgh,
which proved unsatisfactory, they migrated-with no more than
two hundred pounds to their credit-to London, 'the best
place,' as he realised, ‘for writing books, after all the one use of
living. In May 1834, they took up their abode at 5 Cheyne
row, Chelsea, which remained their home for the rest of their
lives. Although London meant an accession of new friends,
and the stimulus of congenial intercourse, Carlyle's life had by no
means yet passed into smoother waters. For the first time, in
fact, financial difficulties began seriously to press on him. Sartor
had begun to appear in Fraser's Magazine before the move was
made; but, owing to what the editor regarded as its dubious
quality, it was not paid for at the full rate, and the result went
far towards justifying the editorial attitude. The publication
met, indeed, with a storm of disapprobation, one critic even dis-
missing it as 'a heap of clotted nonsense. ' There seemed little hope
that it would ever attain to book-form at all; and it might have
taken much longer to do so had not Emerson taken the initiative
in America; Sartor Resartus appeared as a book in New York
in 1836, in London in 1838. Meanwhile, however, Carlyle, having
more or less turned his back on German literature and German
thought, was deep in a historical work, the subject of which was
the French revolution.
The labour on this new book meant even more self-abnegation
than that on Sartor had implied. On the lonely Scottish moors at
Craigenputtock there had been little or nothing to tempt Carlyle
to deviate from his singleness of purpose; but London opened up


## p. 11 (#27) ##############################################

1]
The French Revolution
II
alluring avenues to a literary life which might have led to
freedom from material cares, to comfort, perhaps even to affluence.
Had Carlyle stooped to journalism and adapted himself to the
everyday routine of the professional man of letters—The Times,
for instance, was thrown open to him-he might rapidly have won
an assured position for himself. Instead, he buried himself in
French history, laboured unremittingly at his French Revolution,
while months passed when not a penny came into the domestic
exchequer. And, as if the struggles to produce the book were
not enough, the work of many weeks, the manuscript of the
first volume, was accidentally destroyed in the early part of 1835,
when in the hands of John Stuart Mill. Rarely has the virtue of
'the hero as man of letters' shone in fairer light than in the
manner in which Carlyle received the terrible news, and grimly
determined to sit down and rewrite the volume. At last, in
January 1837, the History of the French Revolution was finished.
The English reading world did not, at first, know what to make of
this strange history, any more than it had known what to make
of Sartor; but it was, at least, quicker to feel the power of the
book; and enthusiastic recognition soon began to pour in from the
most unexpected quarters. Fame came at last, the right kind of
fame, a fame, too, that, in course of time, brought reasonable
remuneration in its train.
Carlyle's French Revolution is, again in the continental sense
of the word, a “romantic' work; once more, as in his literary
criticism, he stands out in sharp antagonism to Macaulay, the
heir of rationalism, whose History of England began to appear
some ten years later. The French Revolution is individualistic
history, interpretative history on a subjective basis; it is as far
removed from the sober ideals of a scientific age of faithful
chronicling of 'things as they were,' as it is from the ‘enlightened'
history-writing of the eighteenth century. Carlyle's work is,
essentially, a personal 'confession. ' “You have not,' he declared
to the world, ‘had for two hundred years any book that came
more truly from a man's very heart. ' The French revolution, as
Carlyle sees it, becomes a vindication of the ways of God to man;
a
a sermon on the text: ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he
also reap' on the nemesis that follows the abuse of power or
the neglect of the duties and responsibilities of those in whom
power has been placed by Providence. And Carlyle ranges him-
self unmistakably on the side of that nemesis; he makes no
attempt, so to speak, to write ‘fair' history, to hold the balance


## p. 12 (#28) ##############################################

I 2
[ch.
Carlyle
between the two great antagonistic forces that clashed in the
revolution. The French Revolution, rightly read, is a declaration
of its author's convictions on problems of his own time; a solemn
warning to the England of his own day to avoid a catastrophe
which Carlyle believed, and never ceased to believe all his life long,
was imminent. But this work is, also, something more precious
than a subjective history combined with a tract for the times; it is
a prose epic, a work of creative genius, in which the facts of
history are illumined by the imagination of a poet. Light and
shadow, colour and darkness, are distributed over the picture
with the eye and the instinctive judgment of an artist. Carlyle
does not dilate on motives or on theories of government; he does
not even, in a straightforward way, narrate facts; he paints
pictures; he brings before us only what, as it were, he has first
seen with his own eyes. Setting out from the conviction that
biographies are the most precious of all records of the past—or,
as he put it in lectures On Heroes, “the History of the World is
the Biography of Great Men'-he writes a history which is a
collection of marvellously clear-cut portraits; more than this, he
deals with the history of a nation itself as if it were a human
biography; distils, so to speak, the life of the whole from innu-
merable lives of individuals. Thus, the events he has to narrate
are overshadowed and dominated by the men that were respon-
sible for them; Danton, Mirabeau, the 'sea-green incorruptible'
Robespierre, are masterpieces of historical portraiture; and the
imaginative literature of Carlyle's age knew nothing more graphic
and unforgettable than the description of the royal flight to
Varennes.
Meanwhile, until the material harvest of the labour on The
French Revolution came in, Carlyle was induced, in order to keep
the wolf from the door, to give several series of popular lectures
in London. For the first of these, delivered in May 1837, he
utilised the materials he had gathered for a history of German
literature; the second course, in the following year, was also on
literature, but took a wider sweep of literary history, beginning
with classical times and coming down to the eighteenth century.
A third series dealt with the revolutions of modern Europe, while
the fourth and last, delivered in the early summer of 1840, and
published in the following year under the title On Heroes, Hero-
Worship, and the Heroic in History, was most successful of all. This
has always been one of Carlyle's most attractive and popular works.
It elucidates, with the help of picturesque and contrasting portraits,


## p. 13 (#29) ##############################################

1]
Heroes
13
the cardinal doctrines of his own romantic creed of individualism,
a creed which went back in its essentials to the philosophy of
Fichte, namely, that personality alone matters in the world; that
history is the record of the thoughts and actions of great men;
and that greatness lies in the exercise of the 'heroic' virtues, that
is to say, in the power to renounce, coupled with the will to
achieve. On the basic assumption that the quality of heroism,
which makes a man a leader of men, is capable of realisation in
any sphere of human activity in which the hero happens to be
placed, Carlyle applied his doctrine to the most varied forms
of leadership. Odin, chosen to illustrate the hero as god, gave
Carlyle his first opportunity to proclaim his sympathy with the
virile religion of our Germanic ancestors, a sympathy that grew
with the years and found expression again in his very last work.
Mahomet, the hero as prophet, led him to seek a solid foundation
of sincerity for the faith of Islam. Dante and Shakespeare, again
in contrasting spheres, served to illustrate the hero as vates or
poet; while, for examples of the less soaring activity of the ‘man
of letters,' Carlyle turned to the century he found it hardest to
understand, and singled out as sympathetic figures against an
unsympathetic background, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau and Burns.
For the hero as priest, he chose Luther and John Knox; for the
hero as king, Cromwell and Napoleon; but the last two lectures
show some falling off in comparison with the earlier ones.
The interest in Heroes was, in the main, literary rather
than historical, although, with The French Revolution, Carlyle
had appeared to turn his back definitely on literary criticism;
but readers, not merely of the latter work, but, also, of Heroes,
began to discern a trend in his mind which was neither literary
nor historical, a trend towards actuality and the present. Litera-
ture was never, indeed, for Carlyle, merely literature; its value
as an aesthetic expression had always been subordinate to its
potentiality as an intellectual and moral factor. Great poetry,
for him, was not the embodiment of the highest beauty, but
the poetry that contained the deepest lessons for mankind.
So, too, had it been with history; history was not merely a
record of how things had been, but, also, a writing on the
wall for the benefit of the historian's contemporaries. Carlyle's
mission in life, as he interpreted it, was, in fact, neither to be
a critic of literature nor a chronicler of history; but to be a
teacher and a prophet to his own time. With every new book his
writing was becoming more 'actual' in its aims; the past was


## p. 14 (#30) ##############################################

14
Carlyle
[CH.
1
1
1
1
>
becoming more and more a medium through which he spoke to
the present.
Before the lectures On Heroes were published, Carlyle threw
off all historical disguise and entered the arena of practical, con-
temporary politics. This was with the little book, originally planned
as a review article, entitled Chartism (end of 1839). Carlyle
had begun life as a radical of the radicals; the disturbances of the
Peterloo time had made a deep impression on him in his student
years, and the Corn law agitation had stirred up his sympathies
with the oppressed classes. In his early London days, he was
,
heart and soul with the reform agitation. But, by the time he
came to write on chartism, his radicalism had undergone a
change. He was still convinced that a root-and-branch reform
was urgent; but his faith in the nostrums of political radicalism
was rapidly waning. In his antagonism to what he stigmatised
as the 'quackery' of the radicalism of his day, he appeared almost
conservative; it only meant that his radicalism had become more
radical than before. 'I am not a Tory,' he said in Chartism, 'no,
but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of radicals. '
The only radicalism, as it now seemed to him, which would avail
against the ills and cankers of the day was the hand of the just,
strong man. The salvation of the working-classes was not to be
attained by political enfranchisement and the dicta of political
economists, but by reverting to the conditions of the middle ages,
when the labourer was still a serf. The freedom of the working-
man was a delusion; it meant only freedom to be sucked out in
the labour market, freedom to be a greater slave than he had
ever been before. Carlyle's warfare against political economy was
part and parcel of his crusade against the scientific materialism
of his time. The 'dismal science' eliminated the factors of religion
and morality from the relation of man to man, and established
that relation on a scientific ‘profit and loss' basis; it preached
that the business of each man was to get as large a share of
the world's goods as he could, at the expense-strictly regulated
by laws of contract-of his fellow-man. Carlyle believed that the
path marked out by such a science was the way to perdition and
national ruin.
These doctrines were repeated in a more picturesque form in
Carlyle's next contribution to political literature, Past and Present.
In the beginning and end of this little work, which, perhaps, is
his most inspired, as it was his most spontaneous, production-it
was written within the space of two months early in 1843-he
1


## p. 15 (#31) ##############################################

1]
Political Writings
15
unrolls once again "The condition of England question,' in its
familiar form; he reiterates the old demands for duty and respon-
sibility, for earnestness and just dealing on the part of England's
rulers; and he sets up the strong man as the only remedy for
political rottenness. The arguments are the same as before; but
they are put even more trenchantly and vividly; the scornful
contempt which he heaps on the democratic remedies of his
radical friends is more scathing. Encased within these two sec-
tions of the book lies the contrasting picture of the past; he
takes the chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond, which, not long before,
had been unearthed by the Camden society, and, with a clearness
of delineation and dramatic actuality hardly surpassed by Scott
himself, he puts life into the records of the abbot Samson and
his monks of St Edmund's and transmutes these dry records into
a veritable prose idyll. Here, Carlyle stands out emphatically as
the poet and the artist, rather than as the politician or economist.
Seven years later, in 1850, Carlyle again essayed the role of
political critic and prophet, namely in his Latter-Day Pamphlets.
In these papers, he brought his doctrines to a still sharper focus
on the actual problems of the day, and expressed them with a viru-
lence and passionate exaggeration which left his earliest utterances
far behind. The consequence was that many of his old friends-
friends of many years' standing like Mazzini and Mill—were
estranged. Carlyle's wholehearted denunciation of philanthropy,
in particular, appeared to that eminently philanthropic age as the
utterances of a misanthrope and a barbarian. Possibly, he overshot
the mark, although the Pamphlets contain little that he had not
already said–in point of fact, Carlyle's political creed turns round
a very few cardinal ideas which are repeated again and again in
different keys throughout his writings. So long as he had been
content to enunciate these political theories as abstractions, they
were accepted no doubt with some demur, but still accepted-as
the curious views of an interesting personality; it was when he
'
brought them to bear on the concrete questions of the day that he
caused real offence. Looking back on the storm that Latter-Day
Pamphlets called forth, one cannot help thinking that this book
was, in some way, a reflex of the great political upheaval of 1848,
from which England had emerged much less scathed than the
nations of the continent. Doubtless, Carlyle saw in the March
revolution and its dire consequences in other lands a realisation
of his forebodings. 'It is long years,' he wrote to Emerson of that
revolution, 'since I felt any such deep-seated satisfaction at a
>


## p. 16 (#32) ##############################################

16
[CH.
Carlyle
a
public event, showing once again that the righteous Gods do yet
live and reign. He felt the surer that England would not escape
the nemesis, that nemesis, indeed, might be all the more terrible
in consequence of the delay of its coming.
As a political preacher and prophet, Carlyle was as one crying
in the wilderness; his hand was against every man's; he was dis-
owned by all parties, and, apart from a certain confidence which,
in earlier days, he had felt in Peel, he was notoriously out of
sympathy with the leaders of the two great political parties. He
trampled ruthlessly on the toes of Victorian liberals, and flouted
their most cherished ideas. Deep down in his heart, he remained
the democratic Scottish peasant, who demanded, with Burns-like
radicalism, that the innate nobility of manhood, whether in king
or peasant, must be recognised; he claimed the right of nobly
born souls to rise to be rulers of men. His own cure for all
political ills was government by the ablest and the best: but
he denied vehemently the possibility of the ablest and best
being discoverable by the vote of a majority; for such a purpose,
reform bills and secret ballots were wholly unsuitable. No nation
could be guided aright-any more than a ship could double cape
Horn-by the votes of a majority. Exactly in what manner the
best man, the hero, is to be discovered and endowed with power,
is a problem Carlyle never reduces to practical terms or intel-
ligible language; and methods similar to those whereby abbot
Samson became the head of his monastery, if applied to the con-
ditions of modern life, would-he must himself have admitted
it-lead to anarchy, not stable government. Carlyle had rather
a kind of mystic belief in the able man entering into his inherit-
ance by virtue of a supernatural right; that the choice of the
man who should rule over men lay not so much with the ruled
themselves as with a higher Power; and that the right to
govern was enforced by a divinely endowed might to compel
the obedience of one's fellow-men.
But the world, as Carlyle clearly saw, was not planned on so
orderly a scheme as his faith implied. 'Might' showed itself by no
means always to be the same thing as 'right'; and, in spite of his
belief in the virtue of strength, none could be more denunciatory
than Carlyle of the victorious usurper, if the usurper's ends were not
in accordance with Carlyle's own interpretation of God's purpose.
Behind all his political writings, and his asseveration of the right
of might, there thus lay a serious and irreconcilable schism.
*The strong thing is the just thing,' he proclaimed with increasing


## p. 17 (#33) ##############################################

1]
As a Historian
17
201
vehemence; but he was forced to add that it might need centuries
to show the identity of strength and justice.
In truth, with all his
belief in the strong man, Carlyle never came entirely out into the
open; never expressed himself with the ruthless logical consistency
of the individualistic thinkers of our own time; the doctrine of the
Übermensch was not yet ripe. On the other hand, in the modern
democratic ideal of a state built up on mutually helpful citizen-
ship, Carlyle had little faith.
Amid all these incursions into the politics of the moment, how-
ever, he still felt on surer ground as a historian; the lesson he
had to teach, he felt, could be more effectually set forth from the
platform of history, than by descending into the dusty and noisy
arena of political controversy. His wish to serve the present
by reviving the past is indicated by the masterly portrait he
put together from the letters and utterances of Oliver Cromwel).
The work had been long in preparation; indeed, none of Carlyle's
writings, not even his Frederick the Great, was heralded by so
many groans and despairs as this; in the case of none did he find
it so difficult to discover the form best suited to the matter.
At first, he had some idea of writing a history of the civil wars,
or a history of the commonwealth ; but the ultimate result was
very different from that originally contemplated; in fact, he
arrived at that result unawares. The publication of the letters
and speeches was to have been a mere by-product, but, this
done, he saw that there was nothing more left for him to do.
The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) has been
described by Froude as the most important contribution to
English history which has been made in the nineteenth century. '
This opinion may be debatable; but it might, at least, be said
that the task of rehabilitating the protector, of destroying false
legends which had gathered round him, was peculiarly made for
Carlyle's hand. Cromwell lives again here in all his rugged
strength; and lives precisely because his was one of those natures
into which Carlyle could, so to speak, project something of his
own. Again, Carlyle is the artist here: not the artist in form;
nor the Protean artist of many parts, as in The French Revo-
lution or Frederick the Great, where the stage is crowded with
varied figures; but the artist who has concentrated all his creative
power on one great figure.
Standing apart from the turmoil of political controversy as well
as the more serious historical studies in these years, is a work
which cannot be overlooked in an estimate of Carlyle's activity as
2
E. L. XIII.
CH. I.


## p. 18 (#34) ##############################################

18
[ch.
Carlyle
.
>
a man of letters, the biography of his friend John Sterling,
which appeared in 1851. Sterling himself, whose life of brilliant
promise had been darkened and prematurely eclipsed by con-
sumption, was hardly a significant enough figure to warrant the
monument which Carlyle has erected to him; but Carlyle felt
that a duty was imposed upon him to remove the stigma which
Sterling's first biographer, Christopher Hare, had placed on his
memory, in presenting him too exclusively as a renegade from
church of England orthodoxy. Carlyle's book has been declared
by more than one critic to be his best from the point of view
of pure literature; but it is unduly long, and suffers by excessive
and unnecessary detail. It contains, however, some of Carlyle's
most trenchant writing, notably the often quoted pen-portrait
of Coleridge. Its chief value, perhaps, is the light it throws
on Carlyle himself. We obtain from it an instructive glimpse
of the writer's own religion, that religion which was an almost
ludicrous combination of the 'dourest' Scottish Calvinism and
the Spinozistic pantheism of Goethe; we get a pleasanter, less
atrabilious picture in it, too, of the Carlyle of the early London
days, than is to be obtained from Froude’s biography; and, most
valuable of all, we are able to gather from it, not merely what
he felt towards one disciple, but towards all the young aspiring
souls of the time who, setting out in life, looked to him for
spiritual guidance,
The most ambitious of Carlyle's work had still to come, The
History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great.
The first volume appeared in 1858, the sixth and last in March
1865. There has been much difference of opinion concerning
Carlyle's Frederick, much questioning of the wisdom which led
him to spend many years of racking labour, torments and misery
over the production of this work. It was asserted quite openly in
the sixties and seventies, and it is a very generally held opinion
today, that the result of those labours was in no fair proportion to
what they meant to the author. It cannot be said that Carlyle has
uttered any very final word about his hero; it is doubtful if any of
the acknowledged standard writings on Frederick in our day
would have been essentially different had Carlyle never laboured.
At most, he has been commended by German historians for his
vivid and accurate accounts of Frederick's decisive battles. In
point of fact, Carlyle had once more set out, in his imperturbable
romantic way, to do something more than make known to the world
'what had happened. Not but what he was, in respect of the
.
1


## p. 19 (#35) ##############################################

1]
Frederick the Great
19
truth of history, just as conscientious in his way as historians of the
scientific school are. This is to be seen in the unwearying labour
with which he collected his materials, poring over libraries of dull
books'; and in his efforts, notwithstanding that travel was to him
a torture, to see with his own eyes the backgrounds against which
Frederick’s life was played, the battlefields on which he fought.
But there was another purpose which, in the first instance, moved
him to undertake the work; he set out with the object of
demonstrating the heroic in Frederick, of illustrating his thesis of
'the hero as king. He had written his previous histories—The
French Revolution and Cromwell—with similar preconceived ends;
but there was an essential difference in these cases, in so far as
hypotheses and fact are dovetailed into one another. The French
revolution, in reality, was an illustration of the nemesis of misrule;
and Cromwell was well adapted to the role of Carlylean strong
man; whereas, it is very much open to question if the friend
and patron of the French encyclopedists, the extremely practical
and hardheaded ruler who built up the modern Prussian state,
could be adjudged a hero in Carlyle's sense at all. Thus, the
history suffers from a too apparent dissonance; it suffers, also,
from a certain futility in its author's efforts to make it throw
a shadow across the world of his own day. For, just as The
French Revolution was intended to be an overwhelming object-
lesson to an England which Carlyle believed to be rushing
blindly into the whirlpool of chartism, so, his Frederick the Great
was intended to clinch his gospel of might as right, to be an embodi-
ment, in its highest form, of the ideal of romantic individualism.
Of all men of the past, none, it seems to us, was less suited to
such an interpretation than Frederick the great. There are,
however, many pages in this history which bear witness to the
cunning of the artist; the gallery of living portraits is even wider
than that in the first history, the battle scenes are on a grander
scale.
In 1865, an event happened which brought peculiar gratifi-
cation to Carlyle: he was invited by the students of his own
university of Edinburgh to become their lord rector. At last, the
prophet was to find honour in his own country. In many ways
-bound as he was by every fibre of his nature to his native land
-he regarded 2 April 1866, when he delivered his inaugural
address on the Choice of Books, in Edinburgh, as a kind of coping-
stone to his career. The address, although it makes but ineffective
reading, was a triumph in delivery. Very shortly afterwards,
22


## p. 20 (#36) ##############################################

20
[ch.
Carlyle
.
however, a blow fell on him of the direst kind. Before he got
back to London, the news reached him that his wife had been
found dead in her carriage when driving in Hyde park. “She died
at London 21 April 1866, suddenly snatched from him, and the
light of his life as if gone out. ' The light of his life was very
literally gone out; the remaining fifteen years he had still to
live were years of gradual decadence. Still one other book
it was given to him to publish, entitled The Early Kings of
Norway (1875), but it has little of the old fire and strength;
and his name appeared frequently attached to letters in the
press. Notable among such letters was his vigorous appeal in
The Times in behalf of Germany in her war with France, an
appeal which, no doubt, had weight with Bismarck when, later,
he conferred on him the much prized Prussian order of merit.
Disraeli made an effort to get Carlyle to accept an honour from
the British government, but he declined. Years before the end,
his right hand failed him and made literary work impossible, even
although his intellectual power and energy remained unimpaired.
His death took place on 4 February 1881. He lies buried, not as
his friends would have wished, in Westminster abbey, but with
his own kinsfolk in Ecclefechan.
Carlyle is not to be regarded as a mere apostle or transmitter
of German ideas and German ideals; he built up, under the
stimulus, and with the help, of these ideas, a spiritual and
moral world of his own. He saw human life and earthly hap-
penings against a vast background of mystic spiritualism, of
eternities and immensities; he was an individualist, to whom the
development of the race depends on great personal virtues, on
heroic abnegation and self-sacrificing activity. His rugged inde-
pendence made it difficult for his contemporaries to 'place' him;
he resolutely refused to be labelled, or to be identified with any
specific intellectual, literary or political creed. He would admit
allegiance to no one; he treated his peers and contemporaries with
crying injustice, often with quite indefensible contumely; he scorned
every link with the world around him. He went through life
fighting for high causes, scattering the forces of cant and unbelief,
grappling, like a modern Luther, with the very devil himself. No
man was ever more terribly in earnest about his 'God-given hest,'
than Carlyle; and yet, perhaps, none was less conscious of his
own precise place and rôle in the world-history. Carlyle's own
personal convictions were full of irreconcilable contradictions.
At one time, for instance, the making of books, his own craft, is


## p. 21 (#37) ##############################################

1]
Carlyle as a Moral Force
21
endowed, in his eyes, with priesthood; at another, it is the paltriest
and meanest of trades; at one time, his utterances are radical of
the radical; at another, his radical friends are appalled and struck
dumb by his apparent apostasy. A preacher of the virtue of silence,
he himself has left us well-nigh forty volumes of printed speech;
a scorner of philanthropy, he was the most generous and open-
handed disburser of charity. Possibly, his own love of startling
paradox and contrast led him to accentuate such antitheses in his
own nature; but, perhaps, they only meant that he saw deeper into
the essence of things and relationships than other men; that the
irreconcilability was a mere mirage of the surface. One might
fittingly apply to Carlyle the phrase with which George Brandes
characterised Nietzsche ; he is 'an aristocratic radical'; or, as
MacCunn bas called him, 'an anti-democratic radical. ' Equally
distraught was his own personal life; it was built up on dis-
sonances. The agonies and despairs which made the life at
Cheyne row often a veritable purgatory for his faithful helpmate
were not all the emanation of dyspepsia and insomnia; he was
the irritable man of genius, who, as his mother had discovered
long before, was 'gey ill to live wi'. ' Below all his reflections
on human things and fates, there lay a deep and ineradicable
discord. Outwardly, he would fain have appeared as a convinced
optimist, to whom God was ‘in his heaven,' and all was 'right with
the world’; inwardly, he was often haunted with pessimistic
doubts as to the right governance of the world. He proclaimed,
incessantly and fervently, that the world is God's, but the
converse thought of the 'absentee-God sitting outside the Uni-
verse and seeing it go' often tempted and assailed him. Thus,
Carlyle's 'Everlasting Yea' is an 'Everlasting Yea' against a
background of 'the Everlasting No. ' He may well have cried
‘Love not Pleasure; love God! ' but these words were originally
wrung from him by bitter, enforced resignation. He had spurned
mere 'happiness' all his life; but it is not given to everyone
who thus places himself above the common lot of men to find
what he himself calls 'blessedness. ' And we sometimes doubt
whether Carlyle ever found it. Such a struggle as is reflected in
his life is, too often, the consequence when a man sees his own
life-happiness slip through his fingers in the pursuit of other
ideals, and when all that is left to him is to make of the stern
Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren! such virtue as he can.
Certainly, the higher, harmonious life, to which Goethe attained,
Carlyle only saw afar off as an ideal beyond his reach. Rather,
>


## p. 22 (#38) ##############################################

22
[CH. I
Carlyle
we have to think of him, even in his maturity, as he appears in
early days, when he chose as a symbol of his life the burning candle
with the motto: terar dum prosim.
But it is just this discord, this Misston auf der grossen Laute
of which Schiller sang, that gave the enormous impetus to Carlyle's
influence; it was this optimism, tossed fitfully on a vast ocean
of pessimism, that acted as a tonic on the national life of the
Victorian age. Carlyle's idealism, whether in literature or in
morals, was an impracticable creed, but idealisms, after all, are
not there to be practicable, but, rather, to leaven the practice of
life. It was this leaven that Carlyle brought to many who, in
youth, fell under the spell of his teaching. We have already
claimed Carlyle as the greatest moral force in the England of his
day, and it is difficult to say more. His influence penetrated
deep into English intellectual life, at no time overprone to im-
practicable idealisms; and it acted as a deterrent and antidote
to the allurements held out by Benthamism, Saint-Simonism,
Comtism; it helped to counteract the secondary effects of the re-
birth and advance of science-a re-birth which made appalling
havoc on intellectual idealism in Germany itself. To Carlyle, the
first of all practical problems was for a man to discover his
appointed activity, the activity which alone is capable of destroying
the canker of doubt. The life of the individual man passes, but
his work remains.
The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much
about was happiness enough to get his work done. Not I can't eat! ' but
"I can't work! ' that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It
is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, that he cannot work; that he
cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold the day is passing swiftly
over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh when no man can
work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness-it is all
abolished; vanished; clean gone; a thing that has been. . . . But our work-
behold, that is not abolished, that has not vanished; our work, behold it
remains, or the want of it remains; for endless Times and Eternities remains;
and that is now the sole question for us for evermore!
This was Carlyle's firm positive faith, his panacea for the tempta-
tions and despairs that assail human life; it stands out now as
his greatest message to his generation.


## p. 23 (#39) ##############################################

CHAPTER II
THE TENNYSONS
ALFRED TENNYSON, the most representative, and by far the
most popular, poet of Victorian England, born in 1809, was the
fourth son of the rector of Somersby in Lincolnshire. His two elder
brothers, Frederick and Charles, were also poets and must receive
some mention later. They were all, not least the greatest of them,
,
men of singular physical beauty and strength, dark and stalwart,
and through most of them ran a vein of almost morbid hyper-
sensitiveness and melancholy, to which, in Alfred, we may trace
the rare delicacy and intensity of his sensuous and emotional
renderings of nature and mood and dream, as well as the
hysterical extravagances of some of the poems in which he touched
on subjects, political and religious, that moved him deeply.
Educated at Louth grammar school (of which his only pleasant
memory was the music of the Latin words sonus desilientis aquae)
and by his father at home, Tennyson's genius struck its roots deep
into that soil of family affection and love of country the alienation
from which, in varying degree, of most of the earlier romantic
poets-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley-contributed to the
independent, revolutionary tone of their poetry, and the slowness
with which some of them gained the ear of English readers.
When Tennyson went up to Cambridge, Shelley's was still a name
of doubtful omen. Tennyson was always to be--not entirely for
the benefit of his poetry-in closer sympathy with the sentiments
of the English middle-classes, domestic, distrustful of passion or,
at least, of the frank expression and portrayal of passion, patriotic,
utilitarian.
And the influence of these classes, politically and morally, was
becoming dominant. Tennyson went to Cambridge a few months
before Gladstone, the representative statesman of the coming era,
went to Oxford. The group of friends who gathered round
Tennyson included Arthur Henry Hallam, Gladstone's most intimate


## p. 24 (#40) ##############################################

24
[CH.
The Tennysons
1
friend at Eton. They were all of them young men of the high and
strenuous seriousness which breathes from the letters of Sterling
and Hallam-James Spedding, Richard Trench, Henry Alford,
Edward Lushington. The life they led was a very different one
from that which Byron describes in his letters of twenty years
earlier. These have the hard, reckless ring of the age of Fox
and his dissipated, aristocratic friends. The young band of
* Apostles' who debated
on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land
were imbued with the serious, practical temper of the great
merchant class which was to reshape England during the next
fifty years. They were strangers alike to the revolutionary hopes
that intoxicated the youthful Wordsworth, and the reactionary
spirit of 'blood and iron' against which Byron fought and over
which Shelley lamented in strains of ineffable music :
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die ?
The era of conservative reform, of Canning and Peel, of attach-
ment to English institutions combined with a philanthropic ardour
for social betterment, had begun. The repeal of the Test act,
Catholic emancipation, the first great Reform bill were all carried
between the date at which Gladstone and Tennyson went up to
college and a year after they had gone down. Of this movement,
Tennyson was to make conscientious efforts to approve himself
the poet; but, as experience was to show, the conservative instincts
of the would-be liberal poet were deeper and more indestructible
than those of the young statesman who, in these years, was still
'the rising hope of stern and unbending Tories? . '
The same via media was the path followed by Tennyson and
his friends in the region of theology and philosophy. Disciples,
some of them, of Coleridge, they were all more or less broad
churchmen, Christian in sentiment but with little of Gladstone's
reverence for dogma, and sensitive, as Gladstone never was, to
movements of contemporary thought and science. “Christianity
is always rugging at my heart, Tennyson said, and his heart and
mind were too often divided against one another to allow of his
attaining to the heights of inspired and inspiring religious
song. But in no mind of his day did the conflict of feeling and
1 Macaulay, Essays : Gladstone on Church and State, 1839.
1
6


## p. 25 (#41) ##############################################

11] Alfred's Early Poems
25
thought produce more sensitive reactions. In the widened and
altered vision of the universe which natural science was slowly
unfolding, Tennyson was to find, at moments, a fresh justification
of the deepest hopes and instincts of his heart, at moments, their
utter negation. To the conflict between his sensitive and conser-
vative temperament and that Lucretian vision of the universe
which physical science seemed more and more to unroll, we owe
some of the most haunting notes of Tennyson's poetry.
But these notes were not sounded at once. Tennyson's first
concern was with poetry alone, the object of his assiduous and
patient quest being to discover and to master the style and measures
in which he could best express the poetry with which his mind
was charged to overflowing. Poems, by Two Brothers (1827) is
negligible. In these early verses, he threw off, as in a kind of
mental measles, the infection of the more popular poets of the
day-Byron and Moore and Scott. At Cambridge, Wordsworth
and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats displaced their more popular
rivals, and Tennyson's genius entered upon a period of experiment,
of growing clearness and sureness of judgment, of increasing
richness and felicity of diction and rhythm, the record of which
has been preserved with unusual fulness in the successive Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Poems (1833) and Poems. By Alfred
Tennyson, 2 vols. (1842).
The relation in which these stand to one another is not unlike
that of the different states' of an etching, the successive 'pulls'
in which the artist studies the progress he has made towards the
complex perfection of the final plate. Some poems were rejected
altogether; others dropped only to reappear; a few suffered little
or no alteration between the first edition and the last; yet others
(and these are the most interesting and the most important)
underwent an elaborate process of rearrangement of the com-
ponent features, of rehandling that included every kind of erasing,
deepening and enriching-processes of which the final outcome
was the pomp and magnificence of the 1842 volumes, the beauty
and glow presented in their final form by such studies as The
Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, Enone, The Palace
of Art (considering the poem only on the side of its music and
pictures), A Dream of Fair Women and The Lotos Eaters.
Tennyson's aim in all this elaboration is clear enough now,
though it was not to such early critics as Christopher North and
Lockhart—who were justifiably witty at the expense of the poet's
lapses, if Lockhart was less justifiably blind to the final result to
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26
[Ch.
The Tennysons
which the experiments tended. It was no deepening insight into
his subjects which guided Tennyson's efforts, for they were to
him subjects and no more. They were the common topics of his
romantic predecessors, nature, English pastorals, ballad themes,
medieval romance, classical legend, love and death. But Tennyson
was burdened with no message, no new interpretation of nature
or the peasant, no fresh insight into the significance of things
medieval or things Hellenic. Each and all were subjects that
quickened his poetic imagination, and his concern was to attain
to the perfect rendering in melody and picturesque suggestion
of the mood which each begat in his brooding temperament.
Much has been said of Tennyson's relation to Keats and
Wordsworth ; but a closer tie unites him to Coleridge, the poet.
Like Coleridge, Tennyson is a poet not so much of passion and
passionate thinking as of moods-moods subtle and luxurious and
sombre, moods in which it is not always easy to discern the
line that separates waking from dreaming.
And, like Coleridge, Tennyson, from the outset, was a metrist,
bold in experiment and felicitous in achievement. Almost every
poem in these volumes was a distinct, conscious experiment in the
metrical expression of a single, definite mood. There were some
failures, not from inadequate control of the poet's medium of
verse (as Coleridge was inclined to think) but because, as
Christopher North pointed out, Tennyson occasionally mistook
for a poetic mood what was merely a fleeting fancy and recorded
it in lines that were, at times, even silly. Of the poems which
survived the purgation to which Tennyson subjected his work,
some are less happy than others, again not because the poet has
failed to make the verse the echo of the mood, but because the
mood itself was not one that was altogether congenial to his
mind. In lighter and simpler strains, Tennyson is never quite
spontaneous. But, when the mood was one of the poet's very
soul, luxurious or sombre or a complex blend of both, the metrical
expression was, from the first, a triumphant success. Claribel,
Mariana, 'A spirit haunts the year's last hours,' Recollections of
the Arabian Nights, The Dying Swan, The Lady of Shalott, the
blank verse of Enone, A Dream of Fair Women, The Palace of
Art, The Vision of Sin, The Lotos Eaters—all reveal (think what
one may of the philosophy of some or of the faults of phrase and
figure which marred the first transcripts) a poet with a command
of new and surprising and delightful metrical effects as unmis-
takably as did the early poems of Milton, the masterpieces of
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11] Changes in Tennyson's Poems
27
Coleridge, Shelley's songs or Swinburne's Poems and Ballads.
The true character of the English verse foot which the romantic
poets had rediscovered without all of them quite knowing what
they had done, the possibilities of what Saintsbury calls 'substi-
tution,' the fact that, in verse whose indicator is a recurring stress,
the foot may be iambic, trochaic, spondaic or monosyllabic without
altering the time-lengths of the rhythmical interval, Tennyson
understood perfectly and he experimented on it with a conscious
and felicitous art, combining with this subtle management of
the foot a careful attention to the musical value of vowel
and consonant combinations in which his precursors are Gray and
Pope and Milton. And, for Tennyson, the guiding principle in
every experiment, from Claribel to The Vision of Sin, is the
dramatic appropriateness of verse to mood.
Many of the poems, as has been said, underwent drastic
revision ; but this revision seldom affected the metre, though the
concluding stanza of The Lotos Eaters is a striking exception.
It was the phrasing and imagery, the richly decorative and
picturesque diction, that was revised before the eyes of the reader
with wonderful results. The motive which dictated this labour
was the same as that which controlled the varied cadences of the
poet's verse, the desire to secure the full and exact expression
for the single mood which dominates the poem throughout. For
each of Tennyson's shorter poems, at any rate-hence, perhaps,
his preference of the idyll to the epic—is the expression of a
single mood of feeling. It is seldom that one of his songs or odes
or idylls carries the imagination of the reader from one mood of
feeling to another, as does an ode by Keats or Wordsworth,
while the stream of impassioned thought flows through the mind.
In his longer poems, In Memoriam and Idylls of the King, as
will be seen later, the plan of construction finally adopted is a
concession to this quality of the poet's genius. A brooding
imagination, a fine ear and a vivid and curious eye, the eye of
an artist who, also, was something of a naturalist-these are the
distinctive qualities of Tennyson's poetic temperament.
He
divined, as Keats had before him (but Keats's eye was not, to
a like extent, the dominant factor in his sensibility), that a picture
presented with extraordinary precision of detail may, if every
detail be relevant, contribute potently to the communication of
a mood of feeling-the whole secret of pre-Raphaelitism. But
he was also aware that mere description is no business of the
poet who describes only to communicate feeling. Accordingly,
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28
[CH.
The Tennysons
i
1
1
1
1
1
the alterations which Tennyson introduced into his work, in so
far as they were not dictated by the ear, by the desire to secure
a purer more flute-like melody of vowel and consonant, had one of
two purposes in view, either to present a picture with greater
clearness of arrangement and vividness or wealth of detail, or, even
more often, to diminish merely descriptive effects, to substitute one
or two significant, suggestive details for a fully drawn picture, in
every way to intensify the emotional, dramatic effect as by passing
the stanza once more through the dyeing vat of the poet's own
passionate mood. Of passages in which the first aim predominates,
a classical example is the opening landscape in Enone, but a
shorter may be cited from The Palace of Art :
One seemed a foreground black with stones and slags,
Below sunsmitten icy spires
Rose striped with long white cloud the scornful crags
Deeptrenched with thunderfires,
compared with
And one a foreground black with stones and slags,
Beyond, a line of heights, and higher
All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags,
And highest, snow and fire.
Of the other process, the subtle heightening of the emotional
thrill, examples will be found in all the poems mentioned; but two
short passages may be cited by way of illustration :
No time hath she to sport and play,
A charmed web she weaves alway,
A curse is on her if she stay
Her weaving either night or day,
To look down to Camelot,
compared with
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot,
or,
She moved her lips, she prayed alone,
She praying disarrayed and warm
From slumber, deep her wavy form
In the darklustrous mirror shone.
“Madonna,” in a low, clear tone
Said Mariana, night and morn,
Low she mourned, “I am all alone,
Love-forgotten, and love-forlorn,"
compared with
Complaining, 'Mother, give me grace
To help me of my weary load. '
And on the liquid mirror glow'd
The clear perfection of her face.
.
1
1
i
6
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11]
His Style and Topics
29
6
• Is this the form,' she made her moan,
'That won his praises night and morn? '
And 'Ah,' she said, 'but I wake alone,
I sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn. '
The heightened glow of the picture in the lines italicised is not
more striking than the dramatic significance of 'Is this the form,'
etc. But, perhaps, the supreme examples of the poet's power to
enrich his verses by passing them once again through the mood in
which the whole poem was conceived are the closing stanzas of
The Lady of Shalott and of The Lotos Eaters.
The outcome of the severe course of training to which Tenuyson
submitted his art-a process that never quite came to an end, for
later poems were, also, carefully revised after publication—was a
style, the ground and texture of which is a pure, idiomatic English,
mannered as, in a different way, the style of Milton is mannered,
decorative as, in a different way, the style of Milton is decorative',
and a verse of wonderful variety, a felicitous adaptability to the
mood of the poem, and a curiously elaborated melody of vowel
and consonant. With the exception of Gray-for Pope's 'correct-
ness' is not entirely a poetical excellence-English poetry had
produced nothing since Milton that is so obviously the result of a
strenuous and unwearied pursuit of perfection of form.
Tennyson's range of topics is, also, fully represented in the
1842 volumes-studies of mood and character ranging from the
first slight sketches of Adelines and Marianas to the complexities
of Simeon Stylites, St Agnes and Sir Galahad, and the nobility of
Ulysses ; studies of English rural life like Dora, among the least
successful of Tennyson's poems, not because (as a critic has com-
plained) they have too much of Wordsworth’s ‘silly sooth,' but
because they lack the intense conviction which keeps Wordsworth
from ever being 'silly,' though he may at times be absurd, and
exalts his 'sooth' into imaginative truth; medieval studies in
which was now included Morte d'Arthur, starting point of the
later Idylls of the King; classical legend represented by the
early Enone recast and Ulysses, for Tithonus though written was
not yet published; and, lastly, poems in which Tennyson touches
on the mysteries of life and death and immortality, themes round
1 The ground-work of Milton's style is English Latinised in syntax, idiom and
vocabulary. Of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a contemporary critic says: 'In the
history of the English language these poems will occupy a remarkable place as
examples of vigorous, unaffected, and almost unmixed Saxon written at a time in
which all the ordinary walks of literature are becoming rapidly vulgarised with bastard
Latinity,' The Edinburgh Review, 1859. Dyboski's Tennyson's Sprache und Stil
collects Tennyson's usages and throws an instructive light on his mannerisms.
6
6
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30
[CH.
The Tennysons
which his brooding imagination was to circle all his life with a
sincerer passionate and pathetic interest than he felt for any
other
subject that engaged his art-seeking, finding, but never long sure
that he really had found, like some lone, ghostly sea-bird wheeling
round the luring, dazzling, baffling beams of a lighthouse on some
stormy headland. For all his questing, Tennyson was never to get
much further than the vague hope of the closing section of The
Vision of Sin :
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, “Is there any hope ? '
To which an answer peal'd from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
The sombre note of the scene and the song which precede this
close was to be heard more than once again in the verse of the
poet who had already written The Two Voices and was yet to
write Vastness.