THE ECLECTIC MAGAZINE OF FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. MAY, 1844. 2. Sartor Resartus: in Three Books. By Thomas Carlyle. London: Fraser, 1841. 3. Past and Present. By Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843. body that faith in action and keep us from idle contemplation. We ask this especially of those men, in whom the unuttered sentiments and aspirations of the multitudes are concentrated and harmonized with the high est intuition of individual conscience. Their mission changes with the times. There are periods of a calm and normal activity, when the thinker is like the pure and serene star which illumines and sanctifies with its halo of light that which is. There are other times, when genius must move devotedly onward before us, like the pillar of fire in the desert, and fathom for us the depths of that which shall WE gladly take the opportunity offered by the publication of a new work by Mr. Carlyle, to express our opinion of this remarkable writer. We say, our opinion of the writer,- be. Such are our times: we cannot at the of his genius and tendencies, rather than of present day merely amuse ourselves with his books, of the idea which inspires him, being artists, playing with sounds or forms, rather than of the form with which he chooses to invest it. The latter in truth is of far less importance than the former. In this period of transition from doubt to aspiration, this "sick and out-of-joint" time, old ideas die tickling only our senses, instead of pondering some germ of thought which may serve us. We are scarcely disposed, living in the nineteenth century, to act like that people mentioned by Herodotus, who beguiled eighteen years away, or weigh upon the heart like midnight of famine by playing with dice and tennis-balls. dreams: young ones spring up to view, The writer with whom we have now to deal, bright-colored and fresh with hope, but vague by the nature of his labors and the direction of and incomplete, like the dreams of the morn- his genius, authorizes the examination we proing. We stand wavering between a past pose to make. He is melancholy and grave: he whose life is extinct, and a future whose life has not yet begun; one while discouraged, at another animated by glorious presentiments, looking through the clouds for some star to guide us. One and all, like Herder, we de mand of the instinct of our conscience, a great religious thought, which may rescue us from doubt, a social faith which may save us from anarchy, a moral inspiration which may emMAY, 1844. 1 early felt the evil which is now preying upon the world, and from the outset of his career he proclaimed it loudly and courageously. "Call ye that a society," he exclaims, in one of his first publications, "where there is no longer any social idea extant, not so much as the idea of a common home, but only of a common overcrowded lodging-house? where each, isolated, regardless of his neighbor, turned against his neighbor, clutches what he can get, and cries | adequate to the task, acknowledge the neces'Mine!' and calls it Peace, because in the cut- sity of some solution of the sphinx-like enigma purse and cut-throat scramble, to steel knives, which the times present. It is good to see, by a new example, that neither ignorant levity nor materialist indifference can long suppress the divine rights of intellect. but only a far cunninger sort can be employed where friendship, communion, has become an incredible tradition, and your holiest sacramental supper is a smoking tavern dinner, with cook for evangelist? where your priest has no tongue but There are differences between Mr. Carfor plate-licking, and your high guides and gov- lyle's manner of viewing things and ours, ernors cannot guide; but on all hands hear it which we have to premise; but we will not passionately proclaimed, Laissez-faire! Leave do this without first avowing his incontestable us alone of your guidance-such light is darker than darkness-eat your wages, and sleep."* Mr. Carlyle, in writing these lines, was conscious that he engaged himself to seek a remedy for the evil, nor has he shrunk from the task. All that he has since written bears more and more evidently the stamp of a high purpose. In his 'Chartism' he attempted to grapple with the social question; in all his writings, whatever be their subject, he has touched upon it in some one of its aspects. Art is to him but as a means. In his vocation as a writer he fills the tribune of an apostle, and it is here that we must judge him. There is a multitude around him; and this is the first fact to establish, for it speaks both in favor of the writer and of the public whom he has won over. Since the day when, alone and uncomprehended, he penned the words which we have quoted, Teufelsdröck has made proselytes. The "mad hopes," expressed, with an allowable consciousness of the power which stirred within him, in the last chapter of 'Sartor Resartus,' have been largely realized. The philosophy of clothes -thanks to the good and bad conduct of the two Dandiacal and Drudge sects-has made some progress. Signs have appeared; they multiply daily on the horizon. The diameter of the two "bottomless, boiling whirlpools,'t has widened and widened, as they approach each other in a threatening manner; and many readers who commenced with a smile of pity, or scorn of the unintelligible and tiresome jargon, the insinuations, halfironical, half-wild, of the dark dreamer, now look into his pages, with the perseverance of the monks of Mount Athos, to see whether they cannot there discover the thought," of which they themselves begin to feel the want. They now admire as much as they once scorned, they admire even when they cannot understand. great Be it so, for this too is good: it is good to see that the great social question, which not long ago was ridiculed, begins to exercise a kind of fascination upon the public mind; to find that even those whose own powers are not * Sartor Resartus, Book iii. chap. 6 + Ibid., Book iii. chap. 10. merits, merits which at the present day are as important as they are rare, which in him are so elevated as to command the respect and admiration even of those who rank under another standard, and the sympathy and gratitude of those who, like ourselves, are in the main upon the same side, and who differ only respecting the choice of means and the road to pursue. Above all, we would note the sincerity of the writer. What he writes, he not only thinks, but feels. He may deceive himself,he cannot deceive us; for what he says, even when it is not the truth, is yet true, his individuality, his errors, his incomplete views of things, realities, and not nonentities, the truth limited, we might say, for error spring ing from sincerity in a high intellect is no other than such. He seeks good with conscientious zeal, not from a love of fame, not even from the gratification of the discovery; his motive is the love of his fellow-men, a deep and active feeling of duty, for he believes this to be the mission of man upon earth. He writes a book, as he would do a good action. Yet more, not only does he feel all that he writes, but he writes nearly all that he feels. Whatever is in his thoughts and has not yet been put on paper, we may be sure will sooner or later appear. He may preach the merit of "holding one's tongue;" to those, in truth, who do not agree with him, are such words addressed; but the "talent of silence" is not his: if sometimes he pre tend to reverence it, it is as we may say platonically, to prevent others speaking ill. But in minds constituted as his, compression of thought is impossible; it must expand, and every prolonged effort made to restrain it, will only render the explosion the more violent. Mr. Carlyle is no homœopathist; he never administers remedies for evil in infinitesimal doses; he never pollutes the sacredness of thought by outward concessions or compromise with error. Like Luther, he hurls his inkstand at the head of the devil, under whatever form he shows himself, without looking to the consequences; but he does it with such sincerity, such naïveté and good will, that the devil himself could not be displeased at it, were the moment not critical, : and every blow of the inkstand a serious thing even when found in the lowest grade of mere to him. We know no English writer who machine-tenders; that the producer, not the has during the last ten years so vigorously production, should form the chief object of attacked the half-gothic, half-pagan edifice social institutions; that the human soul, not which still imprisons the free flight of the the body, should be the starting-point of all spirit, no one who has thrown among a pub- our labors; since the body without the soul lic so much addicted to routine and formal- is but a carcase; whilst the soul, wherever it ism, so many bold negations, so many reli- is found free and holy, is sure to mould for gious and social views, novel and contrary to itself such a body as its wants and vocation all existing ones, yet no one who excites require. In all his writings, in 'Sartor Reless of hostility and animadversion. There sartus,' in his 'Lectures,' in his 'Essays' esis generally so much calmness and impartial- pecially, (some of which appear to us to be ity in his attacks, so much conviction in his among the best of Mr. Carlyle's writings,) thoughts, so entire an absence of egotism, the standard of the ideal and divine is that we are compelled to listen to what, if boldly unfurled. He seeks to abolish nothing, uttered by any other man with anger or con- but he desires this truth to be acknowledged tempt, would excite a storm of opposition. and proclaimed, that it is the invisible which. There is never anger in the language of Mr. Carlyle; disdain he has, but without bitterness, and when it gleams across his pages, it speedily disappears under a smile of sorrow and of pity, the rainbow after a storm. He condemns, because there are things which neither heaven nor earth can justify; but his reader always feels that it is a painful duty he fulfils. When he says to a creed or to an institution, "you are rotten, -begone!" he has always some good word upon what it has achieved in the past, upon its utility, sometimes even upon its inutility. He never buries without an epitaph, -" Valeat quantum valere potest." Take as an instance, above all, his "History of the French Revolution." We place in the second rank his tendencies toward the ideal, that which we shall call, governs the visible, the spiritual life which informs the exterior; he desires that the universe should appear, not as a vast workshop of material production (whether its tendency be to centre, as at the present day, in the hands of a few, or to spread, according to the utopian schemes of Owen or Fourier, among the whole community), but as a temple, in which man, sanctified by suffering and toil, studies the infinite in the finite, and walks on toward his object in faith and in hope, with eyes turned constantly toward heaven. Toward this heaven the thought of the writer soars continually with fervor, sometimes even with a kind of despair. It is a reflection of this heaven, the image of the sun in the dewdrop, which he seeks in terrestrial objects. Ile penetrates the symbol, to arrive at the for want of a better word, his spiritualism. idea: he seeks God through visible forms, He is the most ardent and powerful combat- the soul through the external manifestations ant of our day in that re-action, which is of its activity. We feel that wherever he slowly working against the strong material- found the first suppressed, the second extinism that for a century and a half has main-guished, nothing would be left for him but tained a progressive usurpation, one while in idolatry, falsehood, things to despise or to the writings of Locke, Bolingbroke, or Pope, destroy. For him, as for all who have loved, at another in those of Smith and Bentham, suffered, and have not lost, in the selfish purand has tended, by the doctrines of self-inter- suit of material gratifications, the divine sense est and material well-being, to the enthronement of selfishness in men's hearts. All the movement of industrial civilization, which has overflooded intellectual and moral civilization, has not deafened him. Amidst the noise of machinery, wheels, and steam-engines, he has been able to distinguish the stifled plaint of the prisoned spirit, the sigh of millions, in whose hearts the voice of God whispers at times, "Be men!" and the voice of society too often cries, "In the name of Production, be brutes!" and he is come, with a small number which makes us men-it is a profound truth that " we live, we walk, and we are in God." Hence his reverence for nature,-hence the universality of his sympathies, prompt to seize the poetical side in all things, hence, above all, his notion of human life devoted to the pursuit of duty, and not to that of happiness, - "the worship of sorrow and renunciation," such as he has given it in his chapter, "The Everlasting Yea" of Sartor Resartus, and such as comes out in all his works. There are, no doubt, many who will term this a of chosen spirits, to be their interpreter. He truism; there are others who will call it utodeclares that all the bustle of matter and of in- pian. We would however remind the first that dustry in movement does not weigh against it is not enough to stammer out the sacred the calm, gentle, and divine whisper, that words "sacrifice and duty," and to inscribe speaks from the depths of a virtuous soul, the name of God upon the porch of the tem ple, in order to render the worship real ander: for there are, thank God, enow good infruitful: the theory of individual well-being stincts at the bottom of our hearts to make us rules incontestably at the present day, we will render homage to the truth, although failing not say all our political parties (this it does in its practice, when it finds among us a puremore than enough of course), but all our so- minded and sincere interpreter. , cial doctrines, and attaches us all unconscious- We place in the third rank our author's ly to materialism. We would likewise re-cosmopolitan tendencies, humanitarian we mind the second, that although we have pre- would say, if the word were in use; for costended for the last fifty years to organize mopolitism has at the present day come to every thing with a view to the interests, that indicate rather the indifference than the uniis to say, the happiness, of society, we yet see versality of sympathies. He well knows that before us a society harassed by ills, by misery there is a holy land, in which, under whatand complaints in eighteen-twentieths of its ever latitude they may be born, men are members. Is it then just to treat the contra- brethren. He seeks among his equals in inry practice as utopian? In looking around telligence, not the Englishman, the Italian, us, we affirm that the spiritual view which the German, but man: he adores, not the Mr. Carlyle takes of human life is the only god of one sect, of one period, or of one peogood, the only essentially religious one, and ple, but God; and, as the reflex of God upon one of extreme importance, here especially, earth, the beautiful, the noble, the great, where the very men who battle the most bold- wherever he finds it: knowing well, that ly for social progress are led away by degrees whencesoever it beams, it is, or will be, to neglect the development of what is highest, sooner or later for all. His points of view holiest, and most imperishable in man, and to are always elevated; his horizon always ex devote themselves to the pursuit of what they call the useful. There is nothing useful but the good, and that which it produces; it is a consequence to be foreseen, not a principle to be invoked. The theory which gives to tends beyond the limits of country; his criticism is never stamped with that spirit of nationalism (we will not say of nationality, a thing sacred with us all), which is only too much at work amongst us, and which retards life, as its basis, a right to well-being, which the progress of our intellectual life by isolatplaces the object of life in the search after ing it from the universal life, derived from happiness, can only lead vulgar minds to ego- the millions of our brethren abroad. He has ism, noble and powerful minds to deception, attached himself earnestly to the widest liteto doubt, and to despair. It may indeed de-rature endued with this assimilating power, stroy a given evil, but can never establish the and has revealed it to us. His Essays on good; it may dissolve, but cannot reunite. Schiller, on Goethe, on Jean Paul, on WerWhatever names it assume, in whatever Uto-ner, his excellent translations from the Gerpia it may cradle itself, it will invariably ter- man, will remain a testimony of the naturaliminate in organizing war, war between the zation which he has given to German literagovernors and governed in politics, disguised ture amongst us; as the beautiful pages in under the name of a system of guarantees, of his Lectures on Dante, and some of those balance, or of parliamentary majorities, -war which he has devoted to French writers, tes between individuals in economy under the name of free competition (free competition between those who have nothing and who work for their livelihood, and those who have much and seek a superfluity), -war, or moral anarchy, by effacing all social faith before the absolute independence of individual opinion. This is nearly the present state of things in the world,-a state from which we must at any cost escape. We must come to the conviction, in this as in all other cases, that there exist no rights but those which result from the fufilment of duty; that our concernment here below is not to be happy, but to become better; that there is no other object in human life than to discover, by collective effort, and to execute, every one for himself, the law of God, without regarding individual results. Mr. Carlyle is an eloquent advocate of this doctrine, and it is this which creates his pow tify the universality of that tendency which we distinguish here as forming the third characteristic of his mind. To descend to qualities purely literary, Mr. Carlyle is moreover a powerful artist. Since the appearance of his work on the French Revolution, no one can any longer dispute his claim to this title. The brilliant faculties which were revealed in flashes in his previous writings burst out in this work, and one must have a very limited view of the actual duties of the historian to be able to judge it coldly and to remark its defects. He carries his reader along, he fascinates him. Powerful in imagination, which is apt to discover the sympathetic side of things and to seize its salient point, -expressing himself in an original style, which, though it often appear whimsical, is yet the true expression of the man, and perfectly conveys his thought, -Mr. Carlyle rarely fails of his effect. the few pages we can here devote to it) that Gifted with that objectivity, of which Goethe we must now glance at: upon it depends the has in recent times given us the highest mod- question of the duty imposed at the present el, he so identifies himself with the things, time on the whole world. It appears to us events, or men, which he exhibits, that in his portraits and his descriptions he attains a rare lucidness of outline, force of coloring, and graphic precision: they are not imitations, but reproductions. And yet he never loses, in the detail, the characteristic, the unity of the object, being, or idea, which he wishes to exhibit. He works in the manner of a master, indicating by certain features, firm, deep, and decisive, the general physiognomy of the object, concentrating the effort of his labor and the richness of his light upon the central point, or that which he deems such, and placing this so well in relief that we cannot forget it. Humor, or the faculty of setting off small things, after the manner of Jean Paul, abounds in his writings. Beside the principal idea, secondary ideas meet us at every step, often new and important in themselves, particles of gold scattered upon the shore by the broad wave of the writer's thought. His epithets, although numerous, are seldom without force: they mark a progression in the development of the idea or the qualities of the object. His diction may have faults; of these we shall not treat here, that Mr. Carlyle's tendency, hitherto appreciated from only one point of view, -tory, whig, or sectarian,-well deserves that we should seek to appreciate it from the point of view of the future, from which all the present transitionary parties are excluded. There is but one defect in Mr. Carlyle, in our opinion, but that one is vital: it influences all he does, it determines all his views; for logic and system rule the intellect even when the latter pretends to rise the most against them. We refer to his view of the collective intelligence of our times. That which rules the period, which is now commencing, in all its manifestations, that which makes every one in the present day complain, and seek good as well as bad remedies, that which every where tends to substitute, in politics, democracy for governments founded upon privilege, -in social economy, association for unlimited competition,-in religion, the spirit of universal tradition for the solitary inspiration of the conscience, is the work of an idea, which not only distances the object, but misplaces the starting-point of human activity; it is the collective thought but we may remark that the charge of obscu- seeking to supplant, as the point of view in rity so commonly brought against all thinkers the social organism, the individual thought; endowed with originality, is, generally speak- the spirit of humanity visibly surpassing (for ing, only a declaration of incompetence to it has been always silently and unperceived comprehend or to judge of their ideas. at work) the spirit of man. In the past, we Moreover, his style is, as we have said, the studied one by one the small leaves of the spontaneous expression of the genius of Mr. calix, the petals of the corolla; at the present Carlyle, the aptest form to symbolize his thought, the body shaped by the soul. We would not that it were otherwise; what we require in all thingsis, man as he was meant to be. Thus frank, honest, and powerful, "ohne day our attention is turned to the full expansion of the flower. Two thousand years, from the earliest times of Greece down to the latest times of Pagan Rome, worked out Individuality under one of its phases; Hast, aber ohne Rast," Mr. Carlyle pursues eighteen centuries have enlightened and dehis career: may he long continue it, and veloped it under the other. At the present reap the honors that he merits,-not for him-day other horizons reveal themselves,-we self so much, as for the gratification of those leave the individual for the species. The inwho esteem him, of all those who would see strument is organized; we seek for it a law the relation between intelligence and the public drawn more and more close; and may he thus, in his pilgrimage here, attain the consciousness that the seed which he has scattered has not been given to the wind. We have stated sufficiently at large what is absolutely good in the writer we have undertaken to estimate, that we might the more freely fulfil a second duty, that of declaring what appears to us to render this noble talent of activity and an outward object. From the point of view of the individual we have gained the idea of right; we have worked out (were it only in thought) liberty and equality-the two great guarantees of all personality: we proceed further we stammer out the word Duty, that is to say, something which can only be derived from the general law, association that is to say, something which requires a common object, incomplete, and to vitiate his work by keep- a common belief. The prolonged plaint of ing it behind what the times require else- millions crushed beneath the wheels of comwhere, and will soon require here. It is a petition has warned us that freedom of labor very important question (too important for does not suffice to render industry what it |