Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/962

CAR music; Wilhelmina and her book; the black artists, Seckendorf and Grumkow; George I. and his Bluebeard chamber; the Old Dessauer; August the Strong; Voltaire; Algerotti. All these, and more are summoned as by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows to march or flutter past the central figure of his volumes. Carlyle as a historian is notably exact. What he himself calls "a transcendant capacity of taking trouble," and a genius for accuracy, preserves him from being carried away from the strict confines of fact. He has a keen eye for nature, and the reliance we come to have on their fidelity adds a new charm to his pictures. His descriptions of places and events, even the most trivial, have a freshness which one hardly finds anywhere else out of Homer. See especially in "Cromwell" the account of the battle and battle-field of Dunbar, where the narrative is sustained throughout with more than Homeric grandeur. His last work brings before us a host of places and scenes—all vividly realized, and enriched by the memories that are made to cluster round them.

Much of the power of this writing is connected with the peculiar fascination of the author's later style. Questionable as a model for others, his own manner suits him, for it is emphatically part of his matter. Its abruptness corresponds with the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often by a series of electric shocks, as if—to borrow a simile from a criticism on St. Paul—it were breaking its bounds and breaking the sentence. It has a rugged energy which suggests a want of fluency in the writer, and gives the impression of his being compelled to write. He is at all hazards determined to convey his meaning; willing to borrow expressions from all lines of life and all languages, and even to invent new sounds and coin new words, for the expression of a new thought. He cares as little for rounded phrases as for logical arguments, and rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of feelings than a train of reasoning. Hence his love of repetitions, and his profuse use of. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his humour. Now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy; now shining over his serious thought like sunshine on the sea, it is as subtle as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's, and only less exuberant than Richter's. There is in it, as in all humour, a sense of ever-present contrasts and apparent contradictions, a sort of double sight, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in joy. It has besides a gloomy fervour of its own, and an irony which is more Socratic than Sophoclean, for it is as often at the expense of the writer as of others. He seems perpetually checking himself, as if afraid of betraying too much emotion, and throwing in absurd illustrations of serious propositions, partly to show their universal applicability, partly to escape the suspicion of sermonizing. Carlyle's humour is a mode in which he practises his doctrine of golden silence. It is, in one of its aspects, the offspring of intense reserve. Sometimes it takes a lighter form, and appears as side-splitting satire; sometimes it consists in drollery of description; sometimes in oddity of conception; sometimes it is a character sketch; sometimes it is prominent in the account of an event; now it is an antithesis—now a simile; sometimes it lurks in a word, sometimes in a sentence. Its most unfortunate use is where Carlyle forgets his own warning, and makes laughter a test of truth; its noblest accompanies the purity which enables him to handle fearlessly themes that in more awkward hands might have easily become disgusting. . Unlike others, he can touch pitch and not be defiled. His humour is equal to that of Sterne; his pathos is profounder, in proportion as the man himself is more true. Pathos is the other side of humour. It is the same deep sympathy that laughs with those who laugh, and mourns with those who mourn. Its two phases are often simultaneously prominent in our author's works; but his reverence for the past makes him more touched by its sorrows than moved by its folly. With a sense of brotherhood he stretches out a hand of compassion to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death-chamber of Louis Quinze, of Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with him in the presence of a mystery which solemnizes the errors as well as the greatness of men. Ever and anon amid the din of battle and the cares of state, some gentler feeling wells up in his pages like the chime of Sabbath bells. It is Teufelsdrockh left "alone with the night"—Oliver remembering the old days at St. Ives—or the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her Elector. "At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures—Farewell, thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easy to forget in this world." There is nothing more pathetic than the whole account of the relations of father and son in the domestic history of the Prussian court, from the first estrangement between them—the young Frederick in his prison at Custrin, the old Frederick gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for Absalom—to the reconciliation, the end, and the after-thoughts about the loved one—a scene never to be mentioned without thoughts that lie too deep for tears.

What Carlyle says of Dante's Francesca, that it is "a thing woven as of rainbows on a ground of eternal black," might be applied to his own tenderness. Every reader of his works has felt in them the presence—sometimes the excess—of an element of sternness. He is a good hater. What he loves most is truth; what he hates most is falsehood, and his denunciations of all its forms—as shams, hypocrisies, phantasms—often remind one of the Hebrew prophets, or Dante himself in their condensed ferocity. He is constantly drawing lessons from history to show their necessary overthrow, and in somewhat exaggerated terms proclaiming their essential weakness. A strong sympathy with strength is one of his characteristic qualities. A Titan himself, he is ever ready to shake hands with Titans, Gothic gods, burly Dantons, Mahomet, Knox, Columbus. Hence his connection of truth and strength; his view that virtue, valour, and victory, are inseparable; his assertion that Might is Right; that all power is moral—convictions which express a truth as yet but partially realized, and which in their premature anticipation of it lead this writer to partial verdicts even on questions of history and biography. He is apt to find excuse for all the tyranny of conquest, and withdraw his sympathy even from the greatness of conquered nations. His burden is too prevailingly a "Væ victis." We may admit that right is might, and remember that wrong is might also. We can only hope for the ultimate triumph of the better power. There is nothing more difficult to guard against in speculation than schemes of crude optimism; it seems almost irreligious to draw no morals from history. Yet surely we do not honour God by being too eager to justify his ways to men. In the fraction of the universe we see, our notions of justice are but imperfectly borne out; we may try to enlarge them, but we only jump the difficulty by proclaiming loudly that they are borne out. When we make success or failure the test of national or individual merit, we revive in a new form the old error that made sorrow the sign of sin. Power may accompany the right to conquer, but they are not indissoluble, for the right is not derived from the power. Even the power to rule is an insufficient test; it is only the power to rule well that is a warrant of just victory. We may avoid the logical consequences of a partial view by a vague use of words. If power means moral force it is of course moral; but the assertion, explained, is tautological; unexplained, it is misleading. Carlyle's desire to reconcile the moral and intellectual powers, leads him to fill up the side of a character which is wanting from his imagination. He attacks other schemes of historical optimism, and yet frames one for himself which embraces only half the truth. We need only read it between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation to see its limitations. But his view of the past is comparatively a just one; in long periods the laws of the universe do at least dimly appear, and in the main assert their supremacy. It is when he turns to politics with the eye of a historian, and regards present relations as history accomplished instead of history in progress, that he falls into serious errors. While apprehending more, perhaps, than any previous writer the foundations of existing greatness, it is strange how seldom he tries to realize what may properly be called the new ideas of the age. He wars against the anarchy of passion, and yet respects that other anarchy which takes the name of order. Rebellion is generally but an indication of impatience; nations which cannot obey need not hope to command. He ridicules the American abolitionists in the assertion of a principle which is not based on his view of national deserts. Strength of mind and industry, the prime marks of merit, do not appear prominently in the negro race. It is a proof that it had better remain as it is, in slavery. He derides, in the same way, all female emancipation and other movements which rest