Chapter IX: Usefulness of Art (5)

The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal vigor of the conqueror's mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon's moral nature, and the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the unmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe the moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In the paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the "rare good sense" of Napoleon, of "his instinct of justice." But was it not a compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of justice, backed by a Titan's will, wielding a mighty intellect, that enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot and the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon that he possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctive insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment was but fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical, or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must be felt. In whatever reaches general human interests, whether as practical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for their prosperity, a primary ingredient. "The Tempest" and "Don Quixote" shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots draw their first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum. And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is the foundation of his eminent critical ability. He has been led, we conceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by the blinding splendor of Napoleon's military genius, through which, with such swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on the purely material plane.

When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about the life and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined the proposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to write such a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, "their moral is not your moral." Such international misinterpretations and exaggerations are instinctive and involuntary. A nation from its being a nation, has a certain one-sidedness. To the Italian (even to one who carries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheer brutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the _cavaliere servente_ is looked upon with reprobation tempered by scorn. To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimation on the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being more abstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moral standard can with less difficulty be applied. Applying it to Gil Blas, is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of this and the other writings of Le Sage as being "the mirror of the world?" Moliere, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; and surely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world than that of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world? The world of Le Sage is a nether world. "Of Gil Blas it has been well said that the book is moral like experience." The experience one may get in brothels and "hells," in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons of virtue and morality,--for those who can extract them; but even for these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to have been written in a _cafe_, by a player of dominoes, on coming out of the comic theatre."

Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectly secure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we are therefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on English ground. In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters of Lord Chesterfield--whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England--he refers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfield gives his son advice as to his _liaisons_; and he adds: "All Chesterfield's morality, on this head, is resumed in a line of Voltaire,--

"Il n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie."

It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush: we only smile at them." For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the man of the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corrupt Continental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded as inevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father should not have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of the worldling some single sentence like this: "Writing to you, my son, as an experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend the good taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman; but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such _liaisons_; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a return throughout the whole of the future." But, a single sentence like this would _vitiate_ the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence.

How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learnt from many passages. Not the least animated and cordial of his papers is one on the Abbe Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper which shows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that "he studies with his heart, as women do;" and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whom he describes as being "separated, on the moral side, from the Mirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss," and whom he sums up as "great magistrate, minister too sensitive and too easily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim." Of this noble, deeply dutiful, self-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar of moral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the French Revolution: "I have seen for the first time in my life what I did not believe could exist, that is, a man _who is exempt from fear and from hope_, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth. Nothing can disturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a lively interest in all that is good."

In a paper on a volume of miscellaneous prose essays by M. Laprade, M. Sainte-Beuve has this sentence: "What strikes me above all and everywhere is, that the author, whether he reasons or whether he addresses himself to literary history, only understands his own mode of being and his own individuality. Hereby he reveals to us that he is not a critic." The first paragraph of a keen critique on M. de Pontmartin ends thus: "To say of even those writers who are opposed to us nothing which their judicious friends do not already think and are obliged to admit, this is my highest ambition." Discussing the proper method of dealing with the past, he writes: "For myself I respect tradition and I like novelty: I am never happier than when I can succeed in reconciling them together." Of Hoffman he says, in a paper on literary criticism: "He has many of the qualities of a true critic, conscientiousness, independence, ideas, an opinion of his own." These sentences, with others of like import, are keys to the character of the volumes from which they are taken. The office of the critic M. Sainte-Beuve administers, not for temporary or personal ends, but with a disinterested sense of its elevation and its responsibilities. Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample and ripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largeness of view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more than ordinarily empowered for its due discharge. He is at once what the French call _fin_ and what the English call "sound." In literary work, in biographical work, in work aesthetical and critical, he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation. The spirit of a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly. With a nice perception of shades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production; and by the same faculty he grasps the determining principles in a character. Delicately, strongly, variously endowed, there is a steady equilibrium among his fine powers. Considering the bulk and vast variety and general excellence of his critical work, is it too much to say of him, that he is not only, as he has been called, the foremost of living critics, but that he deserves to hold the first place among all critics? No other has done so much so well. Goethe and Coleridge are something more; they are critics incidentally; but M. Sainte-Beuve, with poetical and philosophical qualities that lift him to a high vantage-ground, has made criticism his life-work, and through conscientious and symmetrical use of these qualities has done his work well. Besides much else in his many and many-sided volumes, there is to be read in them a full, spirited history of French literature.

Our attempt to make M. Sainte-Beuve better known on this side the Atlantic we cannot more fitly conclude than with a sketch of him--a literary sketch--by himself. This we find in the fifth volume of the "Nouveaux Lundis," in a paper on Moliere, published in July, 1863. A man who, in the autumnal ripeness of his powers, thus frankly tells us his likes and dislikes, tells us what he is. While by reflected action the passage becomes a self-portraiture, it is a sample of finest criticism.

"To make Moliere loved by more people is in my judgment to do a public service.

"Indeed, to love Moliere--I mean to love him sincerely and with all one's heart--it is, do you know? to have within one's self a guarantee against many defects, much wrong-headedness. It is, in the first place, to dislike what is incompatible with Moliere, all that was counter to him in his day, and that would have been insupportable to him in ours.

"To love Moliere is to be forever cured--do not say of base and infamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of that kind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is to carry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who, after his example, exult, were it only in words, over their enemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, and involuntarily believe themselves to be, with the thunderbolt in their hand, in the region and place of the Most High. Men eloquent and sublime, you are far too much so for me!

"To love Moliere, is to be sheltered against, and a thousand leagues away from, that other fanaticism, the political, which is cold, dry, cruel, which never laughs, which smells of the sectary, which, under pretext of Puritanism, finds means to mix and knead all that is bitter, and to combine in one sour doctrine the hates, the spites, and the Jacobinism of all times. It is to be not less removed, on the other hand, from those tame, dull souls who, in the very presence of evil, cannot be roused to either indignation or hatred.

"To love Moliere, is to be secured against giving in to that pious and boundless admiration for a humanity which worships itself, and which forgets of what stuff it is made, and that, do what it will, it is always poor human nature. It is, not to despise it too much, however, this common humanity, at which one laughs, of which one is, and into which we throw ourselves through a healthful hilarity whenever we are with Moliere.

"To love and cherish Moliere, is to detest all mannerism in language and expression; it is, not to take pleasure in, or to be arrested by, petty graces, elaborate subtlety, superfine finish, excessive refinement of any kind, a tricky or artificial style.

"To love Moliere, it is to be disposed to like neither false wit nor pedantic science; it is to know how to recognize at first sight our _Trissotins_[6] and our _Vadius_ even under their rejuvenated jaunty airs; it is, not to let one's self be captivated at present any more than formerly by the everlasting _Philaminte_, that affected pretender of all times, whose form only changes and whose plumage is incessantly renewed; it is, to like soundness and directness of mind in others as well as in ourselves. I only give the first movement and the pitch; on this key one may continue, with variations.

[6] Trissotin, Vadius, and Philaminte, are personages in Moliere's
comedy of _Les Femmes Savantes_ (The Blue-Stockings).

"To love and openly to prefer Corneille, as certain minds do, is no doubt a fine thing, and, in one sense, a very legitimate thing; it is, to dwell in, and to mark one's rank in, the world of great souls: but is it not to run the risk of loving together with the grand and sublime, false glory a little, to go so far as not to detest inflation and magniloquence, an air of heroism on all occasions? He who passionately loves Corneille cannot be an enemy to a little boasting.

"On the other hand, to love and prefer Racine, ah! that is, no doubt, to love above all things, elegance, grace, what is natural and true (at least relatively), sensibility, touching and charming passion; but at the same time is it not also, to allow your taste and your mind to be too much taken with certain conventional and over-smooth beauties, a certain tameness and petted languidness, with certain excessive and exclusive refinements? In a word, to love Racine so much, it is to run the risk of having too much of what in France is called taste, and which brings so much distaste.

"To love Boileau--but no, one does not love Boileau, one esteems him, one respects him; we admire his uprightness, his understanding, at times his animation, and if we are tempted to love him, it is solely for that sovereign equity which made him do such unshaken justice to the great poets his contemporaries, and especially to him whom he proclaims the first of all, Moliere.

"To love La Fontaine, is almost the same thing as to love Moliere; it is, to love nature, the whole of nature, humanity ingenuously depicted, a representation of the grand comedy "of a hundred different acts," unrolling itself, cutting itself up before our eyes into a thousand little scenes with the graces and freedoms that are so becoming, with weaknesses also, and liberties which are never found in the simple, manly genius of the master of masters. But why separate them? La Fontaine and Moliere--we must not part them, we love them united."

* * * * *

The number of "Putnam's Magazine," containing this paper, was sent to M. Sainte-Beuve accompanied by a note. In due time I received an answer to the note, saying that the Magazine had not reached him. Hereupon I sent the article by itself. On receiving it he wrote the following acknowledgment.

In my note I referred to a rumor of his illness. His disease was, by _post-mortem_ examination, discovered to be as the newspapers had reported, the stone. But a consultation of physicians declared that it was what he states it to be in his letter. Had they not made so gross a mistake, his life might have been prolonged.

"PARIS, 6 _Decembre_, 1868, No. 11 Rue Mont Parnasse.

"CHER MONSIEUR:--

"Oh! Cette fois je recois bien decidement le tres aimable et si bien etudie portrait du _critique_. Comment exprimer comme je le sens ma gratitude pour tant de soin, d'attention penetrante, de desir d'etre agreable tout en restant juste? Il y avait certes moyen d'insister bien plus sur les variations, les disparates et les defaillances momentanees de la pensee et du jugement a travers cette suite de volumes. C'est toujours un sujet d'etonnement pour moi, et cette fois autant que jamais, de voir comment un lecteur ami et un juge de gout parvient a tirer une figure une et consistante de ce qui ne me parait a moi meme dans mon souvenir que le cours d'un long fleuve qui va s'epandant un pen au hazard des pentes et desertant continuellement ses rives. De tels portraits comme celui que vous voulez bien m'offrir me rendent un point d'appui et me feraient veritablement croire a moi-meme. Et quand je songe a l'immense quantite d'esprits auxquels vous me presentez sous un aspect si favorable et si magistral dans ce nouveau monde de tant de jeunesse et d'avenir, je me prends d'une sorte de fierte et de courageuse confiance comme en presence deja de la posterite.

"Le mal auquel vous voulez bien vous interesser est tout simplement une hypertrophie de la prostate. Les souffrances ne sont pas vives, mais l'incommodite est grande, ne pouvant supporter a aucun degre le mouvement de la voiture, ce qui restreint ma vie sociale a un bien court rayon.

"Veuillez agreeer, cher Monsieur, l'assurance de ma cordiale gratitude, et de mes sentiments les plus distingues.

SAINTE-BEUVE."

VI.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

A brain ever aglow with self-kindled fire--a cerebral battery bristling with magnetic life--such is Thomas Carlyle. Exceptional fervor of temperament, rare intellectual vivacity, manful earnestness--these are the primary qualifications of the man. He has an uncommon soul-power. Hence his attractiveness, hence his influence. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, throbs with his own being. Themselves all authors put, of course, more or less, into what they write: few, very few, can make their sentences quiver with themselves. This Mr. Carlyle does by the intenseness of a warm individuality, by the nimble vigor of his mental life, and, be it added, by the rapture of his spirituality. The self, in his case, is a large, deep self, and it sends an audible pulse through his pen into his page.

To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties, of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to which these are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes the difference between a genius and a blockhead. There being high vital pressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mental currents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends on individual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, a Dante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, with all her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchange of gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. In his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind is biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not constructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at a picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealth of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire, irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his "Cromwell" and his "Frederick." Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr. Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, has embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader. To him they are more than leaders. Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand at opposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history, them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them,--a prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are the complements the one of the other.

History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient, calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful, nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly throw into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfth century as a model. A judicial expounder would not cite one single example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this. A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride "ballot-boxes, reform bills, winnowing machines:" he would make the best of these and other tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act, would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who, by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice, by aiming to lift up the down-trodden, prepare, through such means as are at hand, a better ground for the next generation. If to such workers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence gives jeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about "semblance and quackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism," and deems himself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims: "Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of human worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery in Birmingham discover the true and worthy:" in that case, does he not expose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack, and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partake of the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence, namely, of cant? The sick lion crouches growling in his lair; he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat.

Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven's name, what are all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,--worldly bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow sway-wielding dukes,--what are all these, and much else, but so many exemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease to bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may be at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely as our hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite, the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfth century was rife all around "Abbot Sampson."

Like unto this moral fallacy is an aesthetic fallacy which, through bright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment. "I confess," says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men." Could Newton have written the "Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation? Could Columbus have given birth to "Don Quixote?" One of Mr. Carlyle's military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick's verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. "I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward." Thus Mr. Carlyle writes in "Heroes and Hero-Worship." If Mirabeau, why not Savonarola, or Marcus Aurelius. In that case a "Twelfth Night," or an "Othello," might have come from Luther. Nature does not work so loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency. Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. "Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages," says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did, or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. We Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be done.

On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages, pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and executed with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His early papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made something like an epoch in English criticism. Seizing the value and significance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in "Past and Present,"--"Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean? An inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great fire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it." On the same page he thus taunts his countrymen: "We English find a poet, as brave a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the sun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our 'patronage of genius.'" "George the Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' in those years. George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies of England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions, American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in Dumfries." Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist to know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and things before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, had Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the many sinecures of two or three hundred pounds a year that were wasted on idle scions of titled families, an aureole of glory would now shine through the darkness that environs the memory of George III. So much for George Guelf. Now for Thomas Carlyle.

If, for not recognizing Burns, _poor_ George is to be blamed, what terms of stricture will be too harsh for _rich_ Thomas, that by him were not recognized poets greater than Burns, at a time when for England's good, full, sympathetic recognition of them was just what was literarily most wanted? Here was a man, for the fine function of poetic criticism how rarely gifted is visible in those thorough papers on Burns and Goethe, written so early as 1828, wherein, besides a masterly setting forth of their great subjects, are notable passages on other poets. On Byron is passed the following sentence, which will, we think, be ever confirmed by sound criticism. "Generally speaking, we should say that Byron's poetry is not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do not these characters, does not the character of their author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended to look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces."

In the same paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears of that generation,--partially opened, for the general aesthetic ear is not fully opened yet,--to a hollowness which was musical to the many: "Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_; the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men." And in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray's poetry, "a laborious mosaic, through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace could be expected to look." Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to be, what is the critic's noblest office, an interpreter between new poets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed, to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. The interpreter was there, but he spoke not. Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would, have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear he had already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanity there was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlative singers. Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, to disabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken for harmony; to refresh, with clear streams from "the divine fountain," hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic "strong waters;" to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way to that higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparable function it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargement and the purification of consciousness in which themselves exult through the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolific sentiment. The gifted interpreter was dumb. Nay, he made diversions into Scotland and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctly before Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter better known to them. And it pleased him to write about "Corn-law rhymes." That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done, by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr. Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of "Goethe's Helena," which is a kind of episode in the second part of "Faust," and was first published as a fragment. This takes up more than sixty pages in the first volume of the "Miscellanies," about the half being translations from "Helena," which by no means stands in the front rank of Goethe's poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high artistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almost uncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for five years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of Shakespeare,--a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender, deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with excess of light,--or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed of Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and a richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley. For this glittering masterpiece,--a congenial commentary on which would have illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,--Mr. Carlyle had no word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for Wordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it is: "Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague, random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty." A parenthesis, short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power, variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first class of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justly chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay, considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his offense may be termed a literary crime. He knew better.

Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, after this fashion; "For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell and Sheridan Knowles." Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poor Knowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for. Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literary spite. For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it, no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or of Elizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not yet faded for England when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of public action can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, for the admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, two agents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelson and Wellington. Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rare personal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vast breadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness, were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpably saving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot. Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the ten thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not only are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce acknowledged.

Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy is not a noble form of

"The last infirmity of noble mind."

Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things, should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case it is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an imaginative man will not rise.

Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censorious comments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is too large a benefactor. Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like, and what may be termed a pathological drift towards political despotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the "gospel of freedom"? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses, with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon; what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer," to drink of the spiritual waters of "Sartor Resartus." Here was a new spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, purifying draughts, did it bubble and sparkle! That picture, in the beginning, of the "doing and driving (_Thun und Treiben_)" of a city as beheld by Professor Teufelsdroeckh from his attic--would one have been surprised to read that on a page of Shakespeare?

A marvelous faculty of speech has Mr. Carlyle; a gift of saying what he has to say with a ring in the words that makes the thought tingle through your ears. His diction surrounds itself with a magnetic _aura_, which seems to float it, to part it from the paper, it stands out in such transparent chiar-oscuro. Common phrases he refreshes by making them the vehicle for new meanings, and in the ordering of words he has command of a magical logic. The marrowy vigor in his mind it is that lends such expressiveness, such nimbleness, such accent to his sentences, to his style.

Mr. Carlyle's power comes mainly from his sensibilities. Through them he is poetical; through them there is so much light in his pages. More often from his than from any others, except those of the major poets, breaks the sudden, joyful beam that flames around a thought when it knows itself embraced by a feeling. Of humor and of wit, what an added fund does our language now possess through his pen. The body of criticism, inclosed in the five volumes of Miscellanies, were enough to give their author a lasting name. When one of these papers appeared in the Edinburgh, or other review, it shone, amid the contributions of the Jeffreys and Broughams, like a guinea in a handful of shillings.

The masterpiece of Mr. Carlyle, and the masterpiece of English prose literature, is his "French Revolution," a rhythmic Epic without verse. To write those three volumes a man needs have in him a big, glowing heart, thus to flood with passionate life all the men and scenes of a momentous volcanic epoch; a lively, strong, intellectual vision he must have, to grasp in their full reality the multitudinous and diverse facts and incidents so swiftly begotten under the pulsation of millions of contentious brains; he needs a literary faculty finely artistic, creatively imaginative, to enrank the figures of such vast tumultuous scenes, to depict the actors in each, to present vividly in clear relief the rapid succession of eventful convulsions. Outside of the choice achievements of verse, is there a literary task of breadth and difficulty that has been done so well? A theme of unusual grandeur and significance is here greatly treated.

The foremost literary gift,--nay, the test whereby to try whether there be any genuine literary gift,--is the power in a writer to impart so much of himself, that his subject shall stand invested, or rather, imbued, with a life which renews it; it becomes warmed with a fire from the writer's soul. Of this, the most perfect exhibition is in poetry, wherein, by the intensity and fullness of inflammation, of passion, is born a something new, which, through the strong creativeness of the poet, has henceforth a rounded being of its own. With this power Mr. Carlyle is highly endowed. Not only, as already said, does his page quiver with himself; through the warmth and healthiness of his sympathies, and his intellectual mastery, he makes each scene and person in his gorgeous representation of the French Revolution to shine with its own life, the more brilliantly and truly that this life has been lighted up by his. Where in history is there a picture greater than that of the execution of Louis XVI.? With a few strokes how many a vivid portrait does he paint, and each one vivid chiefly from its faithfulness to personality and to history. And then his full-length, more elaborated likenesses, of the king, of the queen, of the Duke of Orleans, of Lafayette, of Camille Desmoulins, of Danton, of Robespierre: it seems now that only on his throbbing page do these personages live and move and have their true being. The giant Mirabeau, 'twas thought at first he had drawn too gigantic. But intimate documents, historical and biographical, that have come to light since, confirm the insight of Mr. Carlyle, and swell his hero out to the large proportions he has given him.

For a conclusion we will let Mr. Carlyle depict himself. Making allowance for some humorous play in describing a fellow-man so eccentric as his friend, Professor Teufelsdroeckh, this we think he does consciously and designedly in the fourth chapter of "Sartor Resartus," wherein, under the head of "Characteristics," he comments on the professor's Work on Clothes, and its effect on himself. From this chapter we extract some of the most pertinent sentences. It opens thus:--

"It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like the very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid its effulgence,--a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness' double-vision, and even utter blindness.

"Without committing ourselves to those enthusiastic praises and prophesyings of the "Weissnichtwo'sche Anzeiger," we admitted that the book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book; that it had even operated changes in our way of thought; nay, that it promised to prove, as it were, the opening of a new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of _Speculation_ might henceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now be declared that Professor Teufelsdroeckh's acquirements, patience of research, philosophic, and even poetic vigor, are here made indisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and tortuosity and manifold inaptitude....

"Many a deep glance, and often with unspeakable precision, has he cast into mysterious Nature, and the still more mysterious Life of man. Wonderful it is with what cutting words, now and then, he severs asunder the confusion; sheers down, were it furlongs deep, into the true center of the matter; and there not only hits the nail on the head, but with crushing force smites it home and buries it....

"Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigor, a true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendor from Jove's head; a rich idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy twins; all the graces and terrors of a wild imagination, wedded to the clearest intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages, circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon so often intervene.... A wild tone pervades the whole utterance of the man, like its key-note and regulator; now screwing itself aloft as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill mockery of fiends; now sinking in cadences, not without melodious heartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch, when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremely difficult to fix....

"Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse, do we still lie with regard to the professor's moral feeling. Gleams of an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite pity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, and keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter, sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,--that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest."

VII.

ERRATA.[7]

[7] From Lippincott's Magazine, 1870.

Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his pupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Style may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind; and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the transparency and directness of its threads, which are words.

A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use his privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and phrases,--abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral and intellectual energies of a people, soon spots its speech.

Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms--transgressions more or less superficial--such errors take from the correctness, from the efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written or spoken speech.

The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by our English tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, by strenuous, varied, and continuous mental action. Offenses against the laws and proprieties of language--like so many other of our lapses--are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature to relax its tone. None save the most resolute and rigorous but have their moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence. Moreover, men are prone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions. Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; and without habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precision or excellence. In this, as in other provinces, people like to take things easily. Now, every capable man of business knows that to take things easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain sense every one's business; but it is especially the business, as their appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are ever a-building. Culture, demanding and creating diversity and subtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect of infinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable of establishing between itself and the objects of its action, and between its own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture, has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr. Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on which thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of our speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds."

Our enumeration of _errata_ being made alphabetically, the first to be cited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle.

As. The misuse of _as_ for _so_ is, in certain cases, almost universal. If authority could justify error and convert the faulty into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English literature.

"_As_ far as doth concern my single self,"

is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude," p. 70) which, by a change of the first _as_ into _so_, would gain not only in sound (which is not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh line of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most beautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais," begins, "_As_ long as skies are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "_So_ long as skies are blue." On page 242 of the first volume of De Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by _as_ philosophic a politician _as_ Edmund Burke," in which the critical blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules, from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I conceive, that the double _as_ should only be employed when there is direct comparison. In the first part of the following sentence there is no direct comparative relation--in the second, the negative destroys it; "_So_ far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphia is not _so_ far from New York as from Baltimore." Five writers out of six would commit the error of using _as_ in both members of the sentence. The most prevalent misuse of _as_ is in connection with _soon_; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance of good writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard to unravel it. But principle is higher than the authority derived from custom. Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute; and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial, violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and will be, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping into shallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeit much of its manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness. Language is a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage, for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practices that result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose it to become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism. Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, "They go astray _as_ soon as they be born." We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible as liable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley? A writer in the English "National Review" for January, 1862, in an admirable paper on the "Italian Clergy and the Pope," begins a sentence with the same phrase: "_As_ soon as the law was passed." And we ourselves, sure though we be that the use of _as_ in this and every similar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongue against running into it, so strong to overcome principle and conviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and to hear the wrong.

AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods, when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.

ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. _another_, often incorrectly used for _other_; as in "on one ground or another," "from one cause or another." Now, _another_, the prefix _an_ making it singular,--embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are but two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other," and the words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word _other_ implying several or many grounds.