THOMAS CARLYLE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 111, 19 February 1853, Page 4

THOMAS CARLYLE.

[Concluded from our last.]

Work!— All other syllables flow into this. This one mighty precept utters itself, has a fibre of itself, in every word he writes. One Himalaya phenomenon stretches back from the present, looms huge in the remotest past, the accomplished work. Art thou working? is thy production work ? he asks of every living man. Of every thought, deed, function, rank, and institution of the age, he questions—how is it related to woik ? does it help or hinder, does it produce or blight work? From the cobbling of shoes, to the making of poems, to the governing of men, true work is venerable, beneficent, for ever blessed in his sight: and damnable, devilish, accursed, is sham work, work misdone, work undone, no-work. That man can work, that man is by the law of being a worker, that idleness, simulation, uselessness, are not necessities of human life, should rejoice every child of Adam. Here is our likeness to God; he works, he has formed us to work. By work we grow into worth and nobleness. Work is winter frost and summer sun to us. Without it we stagnate and die. Laborare est orare. It is life, strength, health, as well as prayer. With it, by means of it, we may rise out of the corruptions, and entanglements, and meanness, of the basest ages in the world. Work is a putting off the defilements of an evil time ; it is a rising over them into the atmosphere of heaven. After these definitions, it will not surprise us if all that goes under the name of work amongst men should not be accounted work by Carlyle. Yet all actual doing, all performance, ■were it in the lowest spheres, does enter into his idea of work. The breaking of stones on the roadside, the spinning of cotton, all employments which produce, are work. But you have not the full produce of work, when you have cotton, stone heaps, and ploughed fields. Blessed is the produce outwards, when compared with sham cotton, sham stone-breaking, sham ploughing •, but not to be compared for blessedness with the progress inwards, the effects of -working on the soul. ' Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man ; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man.' Work itself, then, is a spiritual act, with spiritual results. In rudest quarrying, mining, shirt-making, shoe-patching, it is the spirit that plies the hands. How much more in poem-writing and statesmanship ! Properly speaking, work is the revelation of the spiritual in man. As creation is the revelation of God, work is the revelation of man. No man lives who is not worth revealing. His individuality gives him a value to all men, and is intrinsically his title to a place in the All. The All is not revealed, until its several portions rise out of the individual. But our individuality lies in the soul. Words and deeds that do not rise out of this depth are not work, but the semblances of work. Hence the necessity of faith. Work without faith is dead, is no work, is worse than do work. There is a depth in man, indeed, the depth of the stomach, but out of it proceeds no true work. A man whose faith reaches no deeper than this is morally paralytic. Hence also the necessity of silence. The dim vastness within, amid which consciousness first awakens, is in process of shaping outwards. Nature will not be hurried, ■will not be attended with trumpeters. In stillness, under the soil, the dissolving seed sends forth the shoot. Thou knowest not yet what will be; it will speak for itself in good time. Let man wait in silence and in faith. Let him also be true to his own century, and not live below it (c. g., in the seventeenth or the fourth) nut in it, listening to the word of God in the Present, The outshaping of the infinite in the soul will thus have freedom and scope. Each will develop into his appointed form, and'mimetic lives will cease. In the world, at present, all this is forgotten. Men live to their stomachs instead of to Gotl. Hunger of money or popularity is the universal "appetite, and poems are printed which are no poems, and shirts are sold which are no shirts, and high places of trust are filled with spectres, and clothespoles; and botching, and buffing, and disorder prevail. Let the world consider. There" are some nine hundred millions of human beings at work

—sham work or true—or preparing for work. Let each unit of these look a little deeper than the stomach, and begin to work from the soul; let each feel that there is in him there a sacred peculiarity, a something that distinguishes him from all others; and in the sphere where God has placed him, with his whole might, by genuine hand-work or head-work, begin to reveal that, and bring it up into the light—the dawn will be already come. Nay, let only one soul do this, and a gleam of morning will streak up through him on the world, and other souls will live in the light of it, and be led to do likewise. This is Carlyle's precept of life, his hope for nations and individuals. The aim of his life has been to enforce it. He returns to it again and again ; his books, at bottom, are an iteration of it, and passionate appeal to believe it. In the articles on Goethe, in his Critical Essays, we have his ideal of a nineteenth century worker. In his book on Cromwell, and his sketch of Abbot Samson in ' Past and Present,' resurrections, to shame and excite us, of heroic workmen out of ages which we of this count dark and fanatical. That this gospel of Carlyle's appears to us to have grave defieiences, it would now be wrong not to state. At the same time we call to mind his praise and practice of silence. We can understand, too, how an intellect of such sterling reverence as his is, will rather live by its faith than proclaim it, Still better, we know how aptly an intellect of narrower range will miss much which actually is revealed. In either case, whether the want be on our side or his, this has to be said, that we have searched in vain, microscopically studying the import of Christian-like utterances, and even capital letters (and in his books the initial letter speak), with a heart full of devout love—as a child even looking1 into his mother's face-^-and one clear enunciation of the hope of immortality, one little blink of the resurrection, one fair and avowed grapple with the abysmal fact of sin (and how much is implied in this!), we have failed to see. On the other hand, let this be said, that if the ground on which he has taken up his stand differ from ours, he still strives to build his house upon it; and he believes that it is good ground. Herein, indeed, is his vital claim to respect; be is from the inmost chamber of his being a believer. We can well understand what he has told us in the 'Sartor,' that scepticism in his heart could only mean a desire to believe. Moreover, he reverences faith in others. He is sometimes named in connection with one who has, indeed, learned much from him, the distinguished American, Emerson. But there is this difference between them, amongst a hundred others, that Carlyle does not, under his fine passages, carry on a petty Socinian controversy with you—does never insult you by classing 'Jesus and Judas/ or ' Jesus and Socrates' together, as it is the weakness of the American to do. On the contrary, if you do truly hold by your ' objective faith,'and strive to live by it, and if the life flowing from it approved itself to Carlyle as ■ higher and purer than his own, he, first of all ? so true is his integrity to the fact, would step forward and confess that • the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater* than he. Indeed, nothing is more inwardly characteristic of him than the integrity of his submission to fact. Take his treatment of Bentham, Burns, and Irving, as examples; all his abhorrence of the philosophy of the first will not hinder him from avowing that the man Bentham was honest and consistent; all his love for his dearest Irving will not keep back the statement that his London celebrity was a fall as compared with his previous life; and champion though he be for Burns, he comes to this sore utterance, ' his morality, in most of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man ; enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the only thing he longs aiid strives for.' We will only add, in connection with these remarks, that the accusations of pantheism, German nationalism, mysticism, and so forth, which are often hurled against him, like the largest portion of the criticism on the ' Model Prisons, more usually expresses the accusers' ideas of things than the things themselves. And further, that the minds amongst us who have rejected what Thomas Carlyle has contributed to thought, because it is wanting in certain elements, have yet to learn the meaning and immeasurable value of truth as truth. Dating from the translation of Wilhelm Meister, fully more than a quarter of a century has gone past since Carlyle chose literature— 'the haven of expatriated spiritualisms,' he

significantly calls it—for his workfield. Therein with the loftiest aims, with stvict, conscientious fidelity to these, he has unhaltingly toiled, until the best portions of English thought have, been move or less impressed by his peculiarities. To estimate Ihe work he has accomplished is not easy. The method of counting up the volumes is clearly not applicable in his case. 'A single number of ' Pickwick,'' he somewhere tells us, 'is as large as the Prophecies of Jeremiah.' The direction of his labours may, however, be indicated in this way:—l. He has greatly acr celerated the tendencies of our language towards its ancient simplicity and Saxon strength. 2. He has transplanted into English literature the highest growths of Germany, separating previously the clean from the unclean 3. He has leavened all literature with reverence, and elevated the life-purpose of the literary man. 4. He has delivered us from Benthamism and the sense-philosophies. 5. Hehas lifted historyout of the date-and-name abysses, and identified it with biography. 6. He has taught Christians the sacredness of life and work in the present world. 7. He, and he alone, has indicated our escape, by a manly path, from our social anomalies. We will exhibit, as spe-cimen-illustrations of these achievements, his influence on one function of literature, that of reviewing, and on a siugle mind, and take leave of our subject. We are, perhaps, not yet sufficiently removed from the early history of modern reviewing, to fix its place among the influences which have formed the present. The common tradition runs, however, that the Edinburgh reviewers put down many abuses, and gave a distinct impulse to literature. But it is very difficult, ia turning over the earlier numbers of their organ, to allow to their influence an intrinsically high' place. Smartness and Whig politics can only carry us a perfectly ascertainable length. And certainly, there is an air of complacency, a self-possessedness, a crowing, cowardly, sort of courage, a ' this-will-never-do'ism, in the wri-* ters, which we do not find in the earnest literature of our own day. We claim for Thomas Oarlyle the merit of the change. His arrival in the review-world was the signal for the flight of Stmtwells. A few months before his article on the * state of German Literature' (his first there) appeared in the ' Edinburgh,' there was published, in the same pages, a most prosaic piece of Strutwellianism on his translation of ' Wilhelm Meister.' Nothing good in this novel, I assure, said Mr. Strutwell; it is wholly a thing of vulgar playacting and questionable matrimonial engagements, most dull, most drivelling ! By the silent influence of one quotation, repeated in many forms, and without waste of vehemence, Carlyle made such ineptitudes for ever shameful. ' The eye sees what it brings the means of seeing,'he wrote. This one word laid the whole Strutwell world bare, and made their continuance impossible. If a man ivill criticise, let him first see that his own contracted individuality do not shut him out from facts on which a fair judgment must rest. To stand on an author's shoulders, and crow there, and valorously flourish a wooden skewer for sword, is not reviewing. No : it is to understand the" reviewed first; then, to elucidate his particular theorem, good or evil, and translate it for the general reader. Carlyle himself failed not to walk up to this precept. And the reverence with which, twenty years ago, he approached his favourite Novalis, Kichter, and Goethe, and our own Johnson and Burns, can easily be traced, as leaven, in the present tone and character of the best reviews of England and America. In other directions, his influence has been as great. It has been noticed by the writer of the ingenuous and appreciative review of the * Lat-ter-day Pamphlets' in the ' North British,' that there is not a man in England under forty, whom Carlyle has not, consciously or unconsciously, influenced. A friend of ours, who is ' under forty,' has allowed us to quote the following rather enthusiastic confirmation of the statement :—' For ourselves, with a profound feeling of gratitude, we recall the night, now some fourteen years ago, when we came first upon the -writings of this man. A medical friend, who was pleased to patronise our callow boyhood, had airted us to the paper on Burns ; ' the best by far,' he added, 'which has appeared on our poet, and by a schoolmaster.' Whether some echo of the Kirkaldy dominieship had come to our surgeon's ear, or Carlylo was actually on his six months' reign of that school, when it was written, we never found out. But

we set out on our travels for the New Star. The public library of the suburban village we lived in had once, in its palmier days, taken in the ' Edinburgh.' Perhaps the number containing'Burns'might be there ? And it was. And not it alone. 'Jean Paul Eichter,' ' State of German Literature,' ' Taylor's Survey,' and the * Characteristics,' were also there. Then was the sunny hour of our boyhood. Glasgow smoke and student-poverty swept into the gulph behind us. A Pospher had brought light to us, and us to the gates of the city of light. Much of our new teacher's work had ere this been published. Another library—a penny a week one—brought us into contact with ' Bos well's Johnson,' ' The Diamond Necklace,' and the immortal 'Sartor' in ' Fraser's Magazine.' Passages of the ' Necklace' are pealing up through us to the present day. Wonder grew up within us again. A 'golden prime' shot in red lines into our inner life. The age of romance embosomed us, and filled; us with the sense of present beauty. Glimpses into the miracle of life were opened up in 'Sartor.' The flowing river, the town crowd, the town itself, came to us with new meanings and words from the far past. Then, on our path, came ' Novalis'—then the lament for 'Edward Irving'—then ' Heroes and Heroworship,' itself a shoot of the Igdrasil-life tree it described—and last of all, at that period, 'Chartism.' Hitherto we had been warming our spiritual toes at the hearth of a fierce democracy—Equality, Liberty, Radicalism, Chartism (but never 0 Connorism—never so low as that), and Cliauningism, hardly suffice to compound a name for our superlative Liberalism. Dismissal of bishops from the Upper House, destruction of the Upper House itself, universal suffrage, abolition of taxes, were only prefatory leaves from the volume of our politics. In this hot-bath of furious democracy, the following sentence —a proverb, we believe—of ' Chartism,' found us :—' Rights of man ! If every one had his rights, who would escape a whipping V Somehow or other, our democracy got cold and colder. 'A. bade me lay more clothes on his feet; I put my hand into the bed, and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and so upward, and upwardj and all was as cold as any stone.' If every one had his rights, who would escape a whipping- ? That was the word. It haunted us wherever we turned our steps. Political meetings lost their interest, popular,applause its meaning, platfitfin oratory its fire. The edges of old things crumbled away from us. We laughed at the tricks which brought cheers from the crowd. A power thrust us out from its midst, shut us up in a'corner, looked down into the hidden places of our heart, turned us inside-out and over and over, and weighed us as in a balance, and humbled us, and made us -wiser, and all by the pressure of this one question :—lf thou hadst thy rights—what then ? — the inexorable whip!' But we cut short our whipped friend, and shall now leave our artist's portrait in our gallery, and take our departure hence. As we step down into the paved streets, and mix once more among the hurrying crowds, a still quiet music seems to follow us, or rather, indeed, to murmur up.within us. A living voice it is, that separates us from the crowd, and then knits us closer to it. The passing footsteps become beats of passing opportunities. The swimming light falls upon the clock of life. One! two ! The hours go past into eternity. We push open the door of our home. The voices of loved ones welcome us. And the loud welcome of childhood, and the striking of clocks, and the fall of hurrying steps, and the thoughts of our own hearts, and the rush of infinite life, twine together into the inner echoes of a song of Carlvle's, which has redeemed us to work .from many an idle impulse, and taught us more of the sacredness of life and time than we can describe in words. Singing it, we lay down our pen : . ' So here hath been dawning ' Another blue day ; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away ? Out of eternity ; This new day is born ; Into eternity At night doth, return. Behold it aforetime No eye ever did ; So soon it for ever From all eyes is hid. Here hath been dawning Another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away ?'