Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843

It is time, indeed, that we ourselves turned to this work, the perusal of which has led us to these remarks upon Mr Carlyle. We were desirous, however, of forming something like a general estimate of his merits and demerits before we entered upon any account of his last production. What space we have remaining shall be devoted to this work.

Past and Present, if it does not enhance, ought not, we think, to diminish from the reputation of its author; but as a mannerism becomes increasingly disagreeable by repetition, we suspect that, without having less merit, this work will have less popularity than its predecessors. The style is the same "motley wear," and has the same jerking movement—seems at times a thing of shreds and patches hung on wires—and is so full of brief allusions to his own previous writings, that to a reader unacquainted with these it would be scarce intelligible. With all this it has the same vigour, and produces the same vivid impression that always attends upon his writings. Here, as elsewhere, he pursues his author-craft with a right noble and independent spirit, striking manifestly for truth, and for no other cause; and here also, as elsewhere, he leaves his side unguarded, open to unavoidable attack, so that the most blundering critic cannot fail to hit right, and the most friendly cannot spare.

The past is represented by a certain Abbot Samson, and his abbey of St Edmunds, whose life and conversation are drawn from the chronicle already alluded to, and which has been lately published by the Camden Society.68 Our author will look, he tells us, face to face on this remote period, "in hope of perhaps illustrating our own poor century thereby." Very good. To get a station in the past, and therefrom view the present, is no ill-devised scheme. But Abbot Samson and his monks form a very limited, almost a domestic picture, which supplies but few points of contrast or similitude with our "own poor century," which, at all events, is very rich in point of view. When, therefore, he proceeds to discuss the world-wide topics of our own times, we soon lose all memory of the Abbot and his monastery, who seems indeed to have as little connexion with the difficulties of our position, as the statues of Gog and Magog in Guildhall with the decision of some election contest which is made to take place in their venerable presence. On one point only can any palpable contrast be exhibited, namely, between the religious spirit of his times and our own.

Now, here, as on every topic where a comparison is attempted, what must strike every one is, the manifest partiality Mr Carlyle shows to the past, and the unfair preference he gives it over the present. Nothing but respect and indulgence when he revisits the monastery of St Edmunds; nothing but censure and suspicion when he enters, say, for instance, the precincts of Exeter Hall. Well do we know, that if Mr Carlyle could meet such a monk alive, as he here treats with so much deference, encounter him face to face, talk to him, and hear him talk; he and the monk would be intolerable to each other. Fortunately for him, the monks are dead and buried whom he lauds so much when contrasted with our modern pietists. Could these tenants of the stately monastery preach to him about their purgatory and their prayers—lecture him, as assuredly they would, with that same earnest, uncomfortable, too anxious exhortation, which all saints must address to sinners—he would close his ears hermetically—he would fly for it—he would escape with as desperate haste as from the saddest whine that ever issued from some lath-and-plaster conventicle.

Mr Carlyle censures our poor century for its lack of faith; yet the kind of faith it possesses, which has grown up in it, which is here at this present, he has no respect for, treats with no manner of tenderness. What other would he have? He deals out to it no measure of philosophical justice. He accepts the faith of every age but his own. He will accept, as the best thing possible, the trustful and hopeful spirit of dark and superstitious periods; but if the more enlightened piety of his own age be at variance even with the most subtle and difficult tenets of his own philosophy, he will make no compromise with it, he casts it away for contemptuous infidelity to trample on as it pleases. When visiting the past, how indulgent, kind, and considerate he is! When Abbot Samson (as the greatest event of his life) resolves to see and to touch the remains of St Edmund, and "taking the head between his hands, speaks groaning," and prays to the "Glorious Martyr that it may not be turned to his perdition that he, miserable and sinful, has dared to touch his sacred person," and thereupon proceeds to touch the eyes and the nose, and the breast and the toes, which last he religiously counts; our complacent author sees here, "a noble awe surrounding the memory of the dead saint, symbol, and promoter of many other right noble things." And when he has occasion to call to mind the preaching of Peter the Hermit, who threw the fanaticism of the west on the fanaticism of the east, and in order that there should be no disparity between them in the sanguinary conflict, assimilated the faith of Christ to that of Mahommed, and taught that the baptized believer who fell by the Saracen would die in the arms of angels, and at the very gates of heaven; here, too, he bestows a hearty respect on the enthusiastic missionary, and all his fellow crusaders: it seems that he also would willingly have gone with such an army of the faithful. But when he turns from the past to the present, all this charity and indulgence are at an end. He finds in his own mechanico-philosophical age a faith in accordance with its prevailing modes of thought—faith lying at the foundation of whatever else of doctrinal theology it possesses—a faith diffused over all society, and taught not only in churches and chapels to pious auditories, but in every lecture-room, and by scientific as well as theological instructors—a faith in God, as creator of the universe, as the demonstrated author, architect, originator, of this wondrous world; and lo! this same philosopher who looked with encouraging complacency on Abbot Samson bending in adoration over the exhumed remains of a fellow mortal, and who listens without a protest to the cries of sanguinary enthusiasm, rising from a throng of embattled Christians, steps disdainfully aside from this faith of a peaceful and scientific age; he has some subtle, metaphysical speculations that will not countenance it; he demands that a faith in God should he put on some other foundation, which foundation, unhappily, his countrymen, as yet unskilled in transcendental metaphysics; cannot apprehend; he withdraws his sympathy from the so trite and sober-minded belief of an industrious, experimental, ratiocinating generation, and cares not if they have a God at all, if they can only make his existence evident to themselves from some commonplace notion of design and prearrangement visible in the world. Accordingly, we have passages like the following, which it is not our fault if the reader finds to be not very intelligible, or written in, what our author occasionally perpetrates, a sad jargon.

"For out of this that we call Atheism, come so many other isms and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels!—A SOUL is not, like wind, (spiritus or breath,) contained within a capsule; the ALMIGHTY MAKER is not like a clockmaker that once, in old immemorial ages, having made his horologe of a universe, sits ever since and sees it go! Not at all. Hence comes Atheism; come, as we say, many other isms; and as the sum of all comes vatetism, the reverse of heroism—sad root of all woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man ever saw the above said wind element inclosed within its capsule, and finds it at bottom more deniable than conceivable; so too, he finds, in spite of Bridgewater bequests, your clockmaker Almighty an entirely questionable affair, a deniable affair; and accordingly denies it, and along with it so much else."—(P. 199.)

Do we ask Mr Carlyle to falsify his own transendental philosophy for the sake of his weaker brethren? By no means. Let him proceed on the "high à priori road," if he finds it—as not many do—practicable. Let men, at all times, when they write as philosophers, speak out simply what they hold to be truth. It is his partiality only that we here take notice of, and the different measure that he deals out to the past and the present. Out of compliment to a bygone century he can sink philosophy, and common sense too; when it might be something more than a compliment to the existing age to appear in harmony with its creed, he will not bate a jot from the subtlest of his metaphysical convictions.

Mr Carlyle not being en rapport with the religious spirit of his age, finds therein no religious spirit whatever; on the other hand, he has a great deal of religion of his own, not very clear to any but himself; and thus, between these two, we have pages, very many, of such raving as the following:—

"It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have forgotten God;'—in the most modern dialect, and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the fact of the universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal substance of things, and opened them only to the shows and shams of things. We quietly believe this universe to be intrinsically a great unintelligible PERHAPS; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive cattle-fold and workhouse, with most extensive kitchen-ranges, dining-tables—whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the truth of this universe is uncertain; only the profit and the loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical man.

"There is no longer any God for us! God's laws are become a greatest-happiness principle, a parliamentary expediency; the heavens overarch us only as an astronomical timekeeper: a butt for Herschel telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities at:—in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the soul out of him; and now, after the due period, begins to find the want of it! This is verily the plague-spot—centre of the universal social gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and top-root, with its world-wide upas boughs and accursed poison exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, re-appears in new force and desperateness next hour.

"For actually this is not the real fact of the world; the world is not made so, but otherwise! Truly, any society setting out from this no-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two. The unveracities, escorted each unveracity of them by its corresponding misery and penalty; the phantasms and fatuities, and ten-years' corn-law debatings, that shall walk the earth at noonday, must needs be numerous! The universe being intrinsically a perhaps, being too probably an 'infinite humbug,' why should any minor humbug astonish us? It is all according to the order of nature; and phantasms riding with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish nobody. Enchanted St Ives' workhouses and Joe Manton aristocracies; giant-working mammonism near strangled in the partridge nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism—this, in all its branches, in its thousand thousand modes and figures, is a sight familiar to us."—P. 185.

What is to be said of writing such as this! For ourselves, we hurry on with a sort of incredulity, scarce believing that it is set down there for our steady perusal; we tread lightly over these "Phantasms" and "Unveracities," and "Double-barrelled Dilettantism," (another favourite phrase of his—pity it is not more euphonious—but none of his coinage rings well,) we step on, we say, briskly, in the confident hope of soon meeting something—if only a stroke of humour—which shall be worth pausing for. Accordingly in the very page where our extract stopped, in the very next paragraph, comes a description of a certain pope most delectable to read. As it is but fair that our readers should enjoy the same compensation as ourselves, we insert it in a note.69

The whole parallel which he runs between past and present is false—whimsically false. At one time we hear it uttered as an impeachment against our age, that every thing is done by committees and companies, shares and joint effort, and that no one man, or hero, can any longer move the world as in the blessed days of Peter the Hermit. Were we disposed to treat Mr Carlye as members of Parliament, by the help of their Hansard, controvert each other, we should have no difficulty in finding amongst his works some passage—whether eloquent or not, or how far intelligible, would be just a mere chance—in which he would tell us that this capacity for joint effort, this habit of co-operation, was the greatest boast our times could make, and gave the fairest promise for the future. In Ireland, by the way, one man can still effect something, and work after the fashion, if not with so pure a fanaticism, as Peter the Hermit. The spectacle does not appear very edifying. Pray—the question just occurs to us—pray has Mr O'Connell got an eye? Would Mr Carlyle acknowledge that this man has swallowed all formulas? Having been bred a lawyer, we are afraid, or, in common Christian speech, we hope, that he has not.

But we are not about to proceed through a volume such as this in a carping spirit, though food enough for such a spirit may be found; there is too much genuine merit, too much genuine humour, in the work. What, indeed, is the use of selecting from an author who will indulge in all manner of vagaries, whether of thought or expression, passages to prove that he can be whimsical and absurd, can deal abundantly in obscurities and contradictions, and can withal write the most motley, confused English of any man living? Better take, with thanks, from so irregular a genius, what seems to us good, or affords us gratification, and leave the rest alone.

We will not enter into the account of Abbot Samson; it is a little historical sketch, perfect in its kind, in which no part is redundant, and which, being gathered itself from very scanty sources, will not bear further mutilation. We turn, therefore, from the Past, although, in a literary point of view, a very attractive portion of the work, and will draw our extracts (they cannot now be numerous) from his lucubrations upon the Present.

Perhaps the most characteristic passage in the volume is that where, in the manner of a philosopher who suddenly finds himself awake in this "half-realized" world, he scans the institution of an army—looks out upon the soldier.

"Who can despair of Government that passes a soldier's guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets! That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them; this, à priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things? Yet look—behold it; in the stolidest of do-nothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done. See it there, with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an indisputable, palpable fact. Out of grey antiquity, amid all finance-difficulties, scaccarium-tallies, ship-monies, coat-and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of chance and time, there, down to the present blessed hour, it is.

"Often, in these painfully decadent, and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black, sleek, fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards—it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest fighting institution is still so young! Fresh complexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the standard, this fighting man has verily been got up, and can fight. While so much has not yet got into being, while so much has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty semblance, a clothes'-suit, and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's blanket—here still is a reality!

"The man in horse-hair wig advances, promising that he will get me 'justice;' he takes me into Chancery law-courts, into decades, half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon; and does get me—disappointment, almost desperation; and one refuge—that of dismissing him and his 'justice' altogether out of my head. For I have work to do; I cannot spend my decades in mere arguing with other men about the exact wages of my work: I will work cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten years' gangrene or Chancery lawsuit in my heart. He of the horse-hair wig is a sort of failure; no substance, but a fond imagination of the mind. He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes forward professing that he will save my soul. O ye eternities, of him in this place be absolute silence! But he of the red coat, I say, is a success and no failure! He will veritably, if he gets orders, draw out a long sword and kill me. No mistake there. He is a fact, and not a shadow. Alive in this year Forty-three, able and willing to do his work. In dim old centuries, with William Rufus, William of Ipres, or far earlier, he began; and has come down safe so far. Catapult has given place to cannon, pike has given place to musket, iron mail-shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre ropematch to percussion-cap; equipments, circumstances, have all changed and again changed; but the human battle-engine, in the inside of any or of each of these, ready still to do battle, stands there, six feet in standard size.

"Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection—this of successfully killing one another? Truly you have learned it well, and carried the business to a high perfection. It is incalculable what, by arranging, commanding, and regimenting, you can make of men. These thousand straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat, and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity; few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish valets—an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came; by tap of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling them; and he and you have made them this! Most potent, effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining, and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who look on these two sentries at the Horse Guards!"—P. 349.

Passages there are in the work which a political agitator might be glad enough to seize on; but, upon the whole, it is very little that Radicalism or Chartism obtain from Mr Carlyle. No political party would choose him for its champion, or find in him a serviceable ally. Observe how he demolishes the hope of those who expect, by new systems of election, to secure some incomparably pure and wise body of legislators—some aristocracy of talent!

"We must have more wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the wisest, we must have an aristocracy of talent! cry many. True, most true; but how to get it? The following extract from our young friend of the Houndsditch Indicator is worth perusing—'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry every where, articulate or inarticulate, for an aristocracy of talent, a governing class, namely, what did govern, not merely which took the wages of governing, and could not with all our industry be kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and playing the very deuce, with us—it may not be altogether useless to remind some of the greener-headed sort what a dreadfully difficult affair the getting of such an aristocracy is! Do you expect, my friends, that your indispensable aristocracy of talent is to be enlisted straightway, by some sort of recruitment aforethought, out of the general population; arranged in supreme regimental order; and set to rule over us? That it will be got sifted, like wheat out of chaff, from the twenty-seven million British subjects; that any ballot-box, reform-bill, or other political machine, with force of public opinion ever so active on it, is likely to perform said process of sifting? Would to heaven that we had a sieve; that we could so much as fancy any kind of sieve, wind-fanners, or ne plus ultra of machinery, devisable by man that would do it!

"'Done, nevertheless, sure enough, it must be; it shall, and will be. We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction; every hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure, done. The doing of it is not doubtful; only the method or the costs! Nay, I will even mention to you an infallible sifting-process, whereby he that has ability will be sifted out to rule amongst us, and that same blessed aristocracy of talent be verily, in an approximate degree, vouchsafed us by-and-by; an infallible sifting-process; to which, however, no soul can help his neighbour, but each must, with devout prayer to heaven, help himself. It is, O friends! that all of us, that many of us, should acquire the true eye for talent, which is dreadfully wanting at present.

"'For example, you, Bobus Higgins, sausage-maker on the great scale, who are raising such a clamour for this aristocracy of talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours, chiefly in very fact pay reverence to? Is it to talent, intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus? The manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever reverence him; did you so much as know that he was a manly man at all, till his coat grew better? Talent! I understand you to be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity, or other success of talent; but the talent itself is a thing you never saw with eyes. Nay, what is it in yourself that you are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in surveying, meditatively, in thoughtful moments? Speak now, is it the bare Bobus, stript of his very name and shirt, and turned loose upon society, that you admire and thank heaven for; or Bobus, with his cash-accounts, and larders dropping fatness, with his respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony chaise, admirable in some measure to certain of the flunkey species? Your own degree of worth and talent, is it of infinite value to you; or only of finite—measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of praise or pudding, it has brought you to? Bobus, you are in a vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages; and will never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-talent has already got itself voted for!'—We here cut short the Indicator; all readers perceiving whither he now tends."—P. 39.

In the chapter, also, on Democracy, we have notions expressed upon liberty which would make little impression—would be very distasteful to any audience assembled for the usual excitement of political oratory.

"Liberty! the true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, and to walk thereon—to learn or to be taught what work he actually was able for, and then, by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing the same! That is his true blessedness, honour, 'liberty,' and maximum of well-being,—if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise, and keep him, were it in strait waist-coat, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man, is but a less palpable madman; his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he is going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O! if thou really art my senior—seigneur, my elder—Presbyter or priest,—if thou art in very deed my wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee, in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips, and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called by all the newspapers a 'free man,' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not death but life! Liberty requires new definitions."—P. 285.