Appreciation by Ralph Waldo Emerson
THOMAS CARLYLE, born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, the son of a
stonemason. Educated at Edinburgh University. Schoolmaster for
a short time, but decided on a literary career, visiting Paris
and London. Retired in 1828 to Dumfriesshire to write. In 1834
moved to Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and died there in 1881.
INTRODUCTION
Being an appreciation from "The Dial" (July 1843)
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here is Carlyle's new poem, his _Iliad_ of English woes, to
follow his poem on France, entitled the _History of the French
Revolution._ In its first aspect it is a political tract, and
since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with
it. It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men,
groups and disposes them with a master's mind, and, with a heart
full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his
brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the
dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has
conversed much on these topics with such wisemen of all ranks and
parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until, such daily and
nightly meditation has grown into a great connection, if not a
system of thoughts; and the topic of English politics becomes
the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking,
recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels,
and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a
brave and just book, and not a semblance. "No new truth," say
the critics on all sides. Is it so? Truth is very old, but the
merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their
right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount,
whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details
into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality
than any other. The book makes great approaches to true
contemporary history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to
daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and
European system. It is such an appeal to the conscience and
honour of England as cannot be forgotten, or be feigned to be
forgotten. It has the merit which belongs to every honest book,
that it was self-examining before it was eloquent, and so hits
all other men, and, as the country people say of good preaching,
"comes bounce down into every pew." Every reader shall carry
away something. The scholar shall read and write, the farmer and
mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget the book
when they resume their labour.
Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers, a believer
in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity
of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in
good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the
people, and the remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work
of genius, its great value is in telling such simple truths. As
we recall the topics, we are struck with force given to the plain
truths; the picture of the English nation all sitting enchanted,
the poor, enchanted so that they cannot work, the rich, enchanted
so that they cannot enjoy, and are rich in vain; the exposure of
the progress of fraud into all arts and social activities; the
proposition that the labourer must have a greater share in his
earnings; that the principle of permanence shall be admitted
into all contracts of mutual service; that the state shall
provide at least schoolmaster's education for all the citizens;
the exhortation to the workman that he shall respect the work and
not the wages; to the scholar that he shall be there for light;
to the idle, that no man shall sit idle; the picture of Abbot
Samson, the true governor, who "is not there to expect reason and
nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason
and nobleness;" the assumption throughout the book, that a new
chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labour, is replacing
the old nobilities. These things strike us with a force which
reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters,
and of no modern book. Truly in these things is great reward.
It is not by sitting so at a grand distance and calling the human
race _larvae,_ that men are to be helped, nor by helping the
depraved after their own foolish fashion; but by doing
unweariedly the particular work we were born to do. Let no man
think himself absolved because he does a generous action and
befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so holds his
property that a benefit goes from it to all. A man's diet should
be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is so
private a good. His house should be better, because that is for
the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of
the traveler. But his speech is a perpetual and public
instrument; let that always side with the race and yield neither
a lie nor a sneer. His manners,--let them be hospitable and
civilising, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught
anything better in canvas or stone; and his acts should be
representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in
his having, and poor in his want.
It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the
contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all
men for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of
the problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe
fruits. The task is superhuman; and the poet knows well that a
little time will do more than the most puissant genius. Time
stills the loud noise of opinions, sinks the small, raises the
great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect
harmony to all eyes; but the truth of the present hour, except
in particulars and single relations, is unattainable. Each man
can very well know his own part of duty, if he will; but to
bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature, surmounts the
powers of art. The most elaborate history of today will have the
oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The historian of
today is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend into the
turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence that
necessity of isolation which genius has always felt. He must
stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the
sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher
than Literary inspiration may succour him. It is a costly proof
of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should
take his reputation in his hand and should descend into the ring;
and he has added to his love whatever honour his opinions may
forfeit. To atone for this departure from the vows of the
scholar and his eternal duties to this secular charity, we have
at least this gain, that here is a message which those to whom it
was addressed cannot choose but hear. Though they die, they must
listen. It is plain that whether by hope or by fear, or were it
only by delight in this panorama of brilliant images; all the
great classes of English society must read, even those whose
existence it proscribes. Poor Queen Victoria--poor Sir Robert
Peel--poor Primate and Bishops--poor Dukes and Lords! There is
no help in place or pride or in looking another way; a grain of
wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm,
which no curtains or shutters will keep out. Here is a book
which will be read, no thanks to anybody but itself. What pains,
what hopes, what vows, shall come of the reading! Here is a book
as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lordship
and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism
tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air, with
merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is punishable by
statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal; and yet these
dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this darning sword of Cherubim
waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon, and shows to
the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all
for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all
sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane
conservatism, and impressing the reader with the conviction that
the satirist himself has the truest love for everything old and
excellent in English land and institutions, and a genuine respect
for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes.
We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of
this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the
talent displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special
criticism in the wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the
general objection which we feel. It appears to us as a certain
disproportion in the picture, caused by the obtrusion of the
whims of the painter. In this work, as in his former labours,
Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant. His humours are
expressed with so much force of constitution that his
fancies are more attractive and more credible than the sanity of
duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies
whilst it stimulated.
It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the
picture. It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in
lurid storm lights. Every object attitudinises, to the very
mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this
wonderful humorist; and instead of the common earth and sky, we
have a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always
arrived which requires a _deus ex machina._ One can hardly
credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world
always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us--as
of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to
begin again and try to do a little business. It was perhaps
inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and
imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis
and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should
appear, producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the
excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendour
of wit cannot out--dazzle the calm daylight, which always shows
every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work
out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such
glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has
its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young
people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself;
and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with
pride or with regret (according as he was practical or poetic),
that he had none. But after a short time, down go its follies
and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain,
and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful
superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in
the horizon with mist and colour. The revelation of Reason is
this of the un-changeableness of the fate of humanity under all
its subjective aspects; that to the cowering it always cowers,
to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only
venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial;
as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot
reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?
And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing
dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over-
colouring of the picture; and we at this distance are not so far
removed from any of the specific evils, and are deeply
participant in too many, not to share the gloom and thank the
love and the courage of the counselor. This book is full of
humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr.
Carlyle's works than the attitude of the writer. He has the
dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and
never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of
scholars, and sustains their office in the highest credit and
honour. If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this
unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for
its occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of
criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close.
Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye oft
from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.
As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main
one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how
adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his
expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he
entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of
straw from the cell,--and the respectable Sauerteig, or
Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveler, says what
is put into his mouth, and disappears. That morbid temperament
has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character; a luxury to
many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south-wind
with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over
the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of
reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were
possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be
forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes
with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,--in all this
glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet
ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the
crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level
tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game.
He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a
serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the
ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but
gives sincerity where it is due.
One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in
literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple
ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains.
Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though
deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has
entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and
wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of
these times--the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the
first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of
details, into style. We have been civilising very fast, building
London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New
Holland and Oregon--and it has not appeared in literature; there
has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books.
Carlyle's style is the first emergence of all this wealth and
labour with which the world has gone with child so long. London
and Europe, tunneled, graded corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and
East and West Indies for dependencies, and America, with the
Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in
literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How like
an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the
continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a
symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first
experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned
to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again,
sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did it first, though
never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character
pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything
in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He
"shakes with his mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the
Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house
and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo
the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in
his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his
frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full
of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but
in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music.
Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with
meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to
return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now
as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the
horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.