OUR LITERARY CORNER.

Press, Volume L, Issue 15017, 11 July 1914, Page 9

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

TABLE-TALK OF CARLYLE.

(By James Collier.) (speciallt tvnitten fob "the press.' , ) No ouo since Johnson or since Solden has been so copiously and successfully Boswellised as Carlyle. I am not forgetting Professor Knight's reports of "Kabbi" Ihincan's abstruse metaphysical monologues in < *Colloquia .Peripatetica," which are done in a superior manner, bnt there- the things reported —snbflo reasonings and profound thoughts, spoken on the sands at Elie, in Fifeshire —were all of one kind, theological and philosophical, -and could be done with ease by anyone who could do them at all. How well Professor Knight could reproduce spoken thought is equally evident from his reports of

Carlyle's graver disquisitions. But the best stenographs of Carlyle's more discursive utterances are perhaps those of Sir Charles Gavan I>uffy. Ho alone gives, with acknowledged success, a ' j>pecimen or two of the lecturesque harangues that Carlyle was wont to address to his Sunday afternoon visitors aftor" the revolutionary risings of 1848. As we remember, Michelot, too, the great French historian, was caught up by the startling events of that stirring year, and continued his history of France in a revolutionary rein that belied the promise of earlier volumes. But Duffy had Carlyle all to . himself when the sage visited Ireland, and, getting him to paint the portraits of some of tho notabilities he knew— Mill. Jeffrey, Landor, and others—he „ .. took them down in a manner that has never been surpassed. Nothing more masterly has, in our time, been transferred from mouth to paper. WILLIAM AJLLINGHAM. Still another volume has come to revoal to us yet more completely the inner nature and outward demeanour of that strangely attractive personality. William Allingham was the son of a farmer, Shipmaster, and trader in ' - Kaliyshannon, on the extreme western verge of Europe, where he was.born in 1821. Most of his early working years were spent in the Custom-house m Ire-

•land and England; only in later ' years, when he .was close on 50, did he settle down to literary life in London, " . when he became editor of ■"Fraser's in succession to Fronde. • > But from an earlier date, when he was ..■-•< five or six and twenty, the Irish poet ' (and he was a pure and genuine poet) . hungered after the high men of his time; and, armed with his few poems, er self-introduced by a letter 6f admiration, and further recommended by an indefinable charm of manner, ho : it!ado the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt and; Thackeray, Dante Rosetti and Coventry Patmore, asr. a mere whetting of his appetite for notabilities. Through. , these he won his way to writers of no smaller dimensions than Garlyle, Tennyson, and Browning, to mention only these, and for a considerable part l of his lifetime this minor poet,con- ! sorted with these great ones on almost . equal terms.;* Seeing them at first only on his visits to London, he latterly &a\v them more frequently, and he was plainly a welcome visitor. Towards such men (he said in perfect "■• humility) he;felt a natural bond, and he would rather be -with them than with Nature or books. Not was the feeling tinj list. His own conversation was often as good as that which he reports. Wβ may add that he reported the tnlk of Carole, at Jlsst, with Car- ' lylo's sanction.

-' , . CAHLYLE, .One day in 1860 he fonnd Carlyle : sitting in his garden at' twenty /yards long by six broad. Carlyle was £ then (he himself reckoned) six foefc in but was already ' shrinking:" £Some years later he claimed only 5 feet " mcnes, and in the late seventies,- as can remember, lie had shrunk to nicSdnim height. In the early sevon- , ties his carriage, too, was still ' unaffected; ,£re or six years later he slightly staggered- as ,he x walked, sometimes at a speed beyond liis strength, the eyes '. blazing, the i • whole man absorbed in some burning '*v vision or carried away by a tempestuous mood. We see him, in* Allingham's "Diary," pass through all the stages of decline. In 1880 we behold htn slowly climbing m> into his hired carriage, or lying "crookedly back in his corner, noticing nothing of the'outer world." Yet there is "a dim fire still in his " eyes, a dusky red in his cheeks." Even then the ever-loyal Tyndall ''xiever saw him look grander." Or he lay. on the sofa, jiving his hand to a visitor, but saying nothing. : "So this is death," he .said one day in his last January; "well" —as if he would soon see what it was like. It was not death yet; that last enemy or friend lingered, as tf yinp; to slit the thin-grown thread of We, and it was, not till February sth the end came. Allingliam noticed ia death his "large beautiful eyelide." Though his forehead was not high, out broad, Car'lyle's head was 231 mches ronnd (he'told AHingham)—an Inch larger thaa that of Burns (he added), and he had-always to hare his hats specially made for him. Byron's and Browning's heads were known to be email, and Carlyle used to say, patronisingly, of Ruskin that he had "a good little head." The head -of Grote •was large but "his brain was found to bo light." The great brain of Whethe omniscient, had shrunk in his lifetime. HONOURS.

We learn for the first, time from Allingham. or rather from Qarlyle 1-im-idf. that it was intended, in 1867, to , .ppoint Carlyle Historiographer-Royal ', for Scotland. What hindered it? Be- . fore the proposal could take effect, CarIjle's explosive pamphlet, "Shooting *_. Niagara." appeared, with its attack on 'Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Excheq- , ' ner. and Carlyle's chance of gaining an *' official status was gone. It would havo f v - been a very bad appointment. Cari, lyle knew next to nothing of the his-*-, '- j" 7 °* { -> cot '^ an d- The right thing was -? done when Dr. Skene, the profoundest t Scottish spholar of his time, was fit- £ ting-y appointed. \, "We have a glimpse of another matter -_ on which we should gladly be more fully 1* • h-form-d. On his 80th birthday Carlyle > was the honoured recipient of a letter [ "'from th_ German Chancellor, Prince

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED MATTE3L

' NOTES ON BOOKS AND AUTHBR_k=

Bismarck, particularly praising his work on Frederick the Great. Froude had been shown the letter, but kept no j copy of it, and in iiis biography of Car- { lyle he "dared not reproduce it from memory," nor could lie serusal of it" from Mr or Airs Alexander Carlyle, with whom he was on unfriendly terms. We are all the losers. A fragment of one sentence we get from Carlyle himself. Bismarck told him that no "had raised a living etatue of their great king." Carlylo was very proud of the eulogium, and said that it was a most nattering thing to receive such a letter; "there could not be a finer compliment." It appears, however, that he lost his good opinion of Bismarck in later years. Ho had heard that the Chancellor was "a terrible fellow at eating and drinking"—sometimes getting tipsy, even. HIS RELIGION. Carlyle's heresies in the matter of religion must have broken out much earlier than is usually stated. When he was only 15 years old, he asked his mother. "Did God Almighty com*» down and make wheelbarrows in a shop?" His mother lay awake at night for hours, praying and bitterly weeping at her favourite son's dawning unbelief. By nineteen years he had given up orthodox belief of every kind, but said nothing about it. One day he again asked his mother how it was known that the "Sone of Solomon" had a figurative meaning, standing for Christ and the Church, "and she showed such boundless horror at" his question that he resolved to be 6ilent henceforth on all such matters. He did not quite keep his inward resolution. In later days, when he had grown famous, ho always felt great difficulty "on tho Semitic side of things," when he talked with his mother. He tried always to make her understand, on such matters — with indifferent success, I fear —that, at bottom his beliefs were still the same as her own. It was an expedient of questionable honesty. He had read Gibbon at Kirkcaldy, and then he first clearly saw that Christianity was not true. The struggle wont on for about ton years. Then Goethe drove him out of it, tivught him that "the truo things in Christianity survived and were eternally true," and showed him "tho real nature of life and things." COSMIC SPECULATIONS. One day in 1878 he spoke of'the folly of TyndaU and others who speculated on the origin of things. He "long ago perceived that no one could know anything about that." A month later he return-

Ed to the topic, which was a recurrent one. Browning had repeated to him a saying of Huxley's: beginning was hydrogen." This etirred him deep-' ly "Any man who spoko thus in my presence I would request to be silent. 'No more of that stuff, Sir, to mo!' (angrily). If you persevere, I will take means, such as are in my power, to get quit of you without,delay.' " He could not comprehend ttaJ all such speculations are legitimate. . The research into the nature of matter and the origin. of. life has .advanced a long way since Tyndall's Belfast address was delivered, and has added new worlds to man's perception. Huxley's characteristic utterance was no more than the conclusion of the leadirig chemists of his day, and it meant only v that all the chemical elements could be reserved into hydrogen,' as ancient Thales held that water was the beginning of all things. -■■■""■•■• DARWINISM.

For like reasons Carlylo 'Imd a deep abhorrence of Darwinism" in,his "heart of heart*;'.'; it was science falsely,, socalled, though "for Darwin personally" ho, hid "great respect. , ' Hβ '-'didn't care three-ha'pence for the - Darwinian theory.!' "What, we desire to know is, who is the.Maker? , . . Whoever looks ir.to himself must be aware.that at the contro of things is a mysterious Demhirgus—who is God, and who canhofc in the least be sooken of in any human words." "The Power that formed n Y he;-resumed olf another occasion— ,He (or It—if that appears to anyone more suitable) has known how .to put into the human soul an ineradicable love of justice and truth." That is the veritable Carlyle, who never varied. , One who would wish to see Carlyle'e religious views lucidly: drawn out could not do better than, peruse Mr Ailingham's statement of his own views, on pages 317-18 of his "Diary." It is worthy of a "disciple of Carlyle; written with more intensity, it. Would be worthy of Carlyle himself. • ■ ■ "

ON HIS CONTEMPORARIES. Carlyle's opinions of both Gladstone and Disraeli aro well known. Hβ never tired, as we see from this volume, in denouncing; the success of V O iir miraculous Premier," as tho scandal bf the age, or m showing Tip the other as "ar poor phantasm of a man." With Gladstone he had onco. a hand-to-hand encounter over the appointment of a librarian at the newly-founded I*>ndon Library, which' Gladstone also publicly recalled m after years. They were like Valentine and Orson. Orson-Carlvle laid about him with a rough club: Val-entine-Gladstono "got up in shiniii"- ar* mour and drew his sword." But CarTylo won the day. He had a single encounter before, not with Disraeli. As a member of the committee of the National Portrait Gallery Carlyle opposed, while Jiarl .Stanhope, the chairman, approved of, the acceptance of a portrait of Lord Brousham then still living. He detha f ? r ? Ugham had done nothin X worthy of being remembered, and it was.agamst the rule to accept the portrays of .living persons. Disraeli sat 'beaming upon him, But was. silent: and again Carlyle won. At no time, says Mr Allingham, did Carlyle ■ "show himself so happy' and hannoniousas Tvhen talfiing on sorae frreat literary subject, with notbin- in it to raise his pugnacity." , He .adiftitted that : wntinc was an art. He cared lS fo, ; + , Thn <l ke ray/ "nd despised Dickey (the writer, not tli* man/who wae "just and kind"). He wae very guarded in his enlogy of Browning It took him two "Balauslion" to find out the meaning of it. Browning had far more ideas than Tennyson/ but. was "hot so truthful." Brownin" does nofc really go into anything, or believe much about it." He accepte conventional values." He might have been the better for a course of Nietzsche (wo may add), who had close affinities with wariyle. He was, indeed; Carlyle's natural son. He was half condemnatory of 'The King and the Book": "what a thing it is!" It was, "a good story well told," but poetry/it was not Like most other readers, he was puzzled by "Fifiue at the Fair," and repeatedly, while he read it, he said to Browning, though he-was not present: "What the povil do you mean?" Of Browning's translation of "Akestis" h© said, with his habitual exaggeration, that it was ' th f -,?***■ bes . fc translation he ever read:" Browning .had been "growing worse and worse," and his "Inn Album" was the worst of all. He had "no eobNJ basis of 'knowledge in anything." Of the "Agamemnon" (dedicated to himself) he said to Allingham: "Oh, bless mc! Can yoa understand it at all? I went carefully into .some parts of it, and for my soul's salvation I couldn't make out the meaning/V He ' counselled Browning to abandon verse-making. Of Swinburne- he sweepingly remarked ihat "there was not the least intellectual value in anything he wrote." What else he said of him (not to Allingham) must , -not be repeated here. JJut Carlyle had a reckless tousue. Jtle

nearly forfeited Browning's friendship by what he said of Mrs rirowning, and a hasty remark, al-out Mill and MrsTaylor cost him their friendship. Beautifully he -aid of Ruskin: "'There is a celestial brightness in him." His morality, too, was the highest and purest. And, withal, a wonderful folly at times. But Ruskin wouid come in and kneel down on the floor to his master lying on the couch, Ruskin leaning over him as he talked. When he took leave, ho affectionately kissed Carlylo's withered hands.