Томас Карлейль
On the Choice of Books
"Yours and theirs, from the heart,
"T. CARLYLE."
Carlyle's last public utterances were a letter on the Eastern Question, addressed to Mr. George Howard, and printed in the Times of November 28, 1876, and a letter to the Editor of the Times, on "The Crisis," printed in that journal on May 5, 1877.
He was now beginning to feel the effects of his great age. Yearly and monthly he grew more feeble. His wonted walking exercise had to be curtailed, and at last abandoned. He was affectionately and piously tended during these last years by his niece, Mary Aitken, now Mrs. Alexander Carlyle. In the autumn of 1879 he lost his brother, Dr. John Aitken Carlyle, the translator of Dante's "Inferno."
The end came at last, after a long and gradual decay of strength. The great writer and noble-hearted man passed away peacefully at about half-past eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, February 5, 1881, in the eighty-sixth year of his age.
His remains were conveyed to Scotland, and were laid in the burial-ground at Ecclefechan, where the ashes of his father and mother, and of others of his kindred, repose. He had executed what is known in Scotch law as a "deed of mortification," by virtue of which he bequeathed to Edinburgh University the estate of Craigenputtoch—which had come to him through his wife—for the foundation of ten Bursaries in the Faculty of Arts, to be called the "John Welsh Bursaries." In his Will he bequeathed the books which he had used in writing on Cromwell and Friedrich to Harvard College, Massachusetts.
In less than a month after his death, with a haste on many accounts to be deplored, and which has excited much animadversion, his literary executor, Mr. James Anthony Froude, the historian, issued two volumes of posthumous "Reminiscences," written by Carlyle, partly in 1832, and partly in 1866-67. The first section consists of a memorial paper, written immediately after his father's death; the second contains Reminiscences of his early friend, Edward Irving, commenced at Cheyne Row in the autumn of 1866, and finished at Mentone on the 2nd January, 1867. The Reminiscences of Lord Jeffrey were begun on the following day, and finished on January 19. The paper on Southey and Wordsworth, relegated to the Appendix, was also written at Mentone between the 28th January and the 8th March, 1867. The Memorials of his wife, which fill the greater part of the second volume, were written at Cheyne Row, during the month after her death.
Of the earlier portraits of Carlyle three are specially interesting, 1. The full-length sketch by "Croquis" (Daniel Maclise) which formed one of the Fraser Gallery portraits, and was published in the magazine in June, 1833. (The original sketch of this is now deposited in the Forster Collection at South Kensington.) 2. Count D'Orsay's sketch, published by Mitchell in 1839, is highly characteristic of the artist. It was taken when no man of position was counted a dutiful subject who did not wear a black satin stock and a Petersham coat. The great author's own favourite among the early portraits was 3. the sketch by Samuel Laurence, engraved in Horne's "New Spirit of the Age," published in 1844. Since the art of photography came into vogue, a series of photographs of various degrees of merit and success have been executed by Messrs. Elliott and Fry, and by Watkins. The late Mrs. Cameron also produced a photograph of him in her peculiar style, but it was not so successful as her fine portrait of Tennyson. An oil-painting by Mr. Watts, exhibited some fifteen years ago, and now also forming part of the Forster Collection at South Kensington, is remarkable for its weird wildness; but it gave great displeasure to the old philosopher himself! More lately we have a remarkable portrait by Mr. Whistler, who seized the tout ensemble of his illustrious sitter's character and costume in a very effective manner. The terra cotta statue by Mr. Boehm, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875, has received such merited meed of enthusiastic praise from Mr. Ruskin that it needs no added praise of ours. It has been excellently photographed from two points of view by Mr. Hedderly, of Riley Street, Chelsea.
One of the best and happiest of the many likenesses of Mr. Carlyle that appeared during the last decade of his life was a sketch by Mrs. Allingham—a picture as well as a portrait—representing the venerable philosopher in a long and picturesque dressing-gown, seated on a chair and poring over a folio, in the garden at the back of the quaint old house at Chelsea, which will henceforth, as long as it stands, be associated with his memory. Beside him on the grass lies a long clay pipe (a churchwarden) which he has been smoking in the sweet morning air. So that altogether, as far as pictorial, graphic, and photographic art can go, the features, form, and bodily semblance of Carlyle will be as well known to future generations as they are to our own.
* * * * *
The impression of his brilliant and eloquent talk, though it will perhaps remain, for at least half a century to come, more or less vivid to some of those of the new generation who were privileged to hear it, will, of course, gradually fade away. But it seems hardly probable that the rich legacy of his long roll of writings—historical, biographical, critical—can be regarded as other than a permanent one, in which each succeeding generation will find fresh delight and instruction. The series of vivid pictures he has left behind in his "French Revolution," in his "Cromwell," in his "Frederick," can hardly become obsolete or cease to be attractive; nor is such power of word-painting likely soon to be equalled or ever to be surpassed. The salt of humour that savours nearly all he wrote (that lambent humour that lightens and plays over the grimmest and sternest of his pages) will also serve to keep his writings fresh and readable. Many of his dicta and opinions will doubtless be more and more called in question, especially in those of his works which are more directly of a didactic than a narrative character, and in regard to subjects which he was by habit, by mental constitution, and by that prejudice from which the greatest can never wholly free themselves, incapable of judging broadly or soundly,—such, for instance, as the scope and functions of painting and the fine arts generally, the value of modern poetry, or the working of Constitutional and Parliamentary institutions.
RICHARD HERNE SHEPHERD.
Chelsea, June, 1881.
ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE STUDENTS OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, APRIL 2, 1866
GENTLEMEN,
I have accepted the office you have elected me to, and have now the duty to return thanks for the great honour done me. Your enthusiasm towards me, I admit, is very beautiful in itself, however undesirable it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when I was in a position analogous to your own. I can only hope that it may endure to the end—that noble desire to honour those whom you think worthy of honour, and come to be more and more select and discriminate in the choice of the object of it; for I can well understand that you will modify your opinions of me and many things else as you go on. (Laughter and cheers.) There are now fifty-six years gone last November since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen—fifty-six years ago—to attend classes here and gain knowledge of all kinds, I know not what, with feelings of wonder and awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to. (Cheers.) There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up and saying, "Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard: you have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges." As the old proverb says, "He that builds by the wayside has many masters." We must expect a variety of judges; but the voice of young Scotland, through you, is really of some value to me, and I return you many thanks for it, though I cannot describe my emotions to you, and perhaps they will be much more conceivable if expressed in silence. (Cheers.)
When this office was proposed to me, some of you know that I was not very ambitious to accept it, at first. I was taught to believe that there were more or less certain important duties which would lie in my power. This, I confess, was my chief motive in going into it—at least, in reconciling the objections felt to such things; for if I can do anything to honour you and my dear old Alma Mater, why should I not do so? (Loud cheers.) Well, but on practically looking into the matter when the office actually came into my hands, I find it grows more and more uncertain and abstruse to me whether there is much real duty that I can do at all. I live four hundred miles away from you, in an entirely different state of things; and my weak health—now for many years accumulating upon me—and a total unacquaintance with such subjects as concern your affairs here,—all this fills me with apprehension that there is really nothing worth the least consideration that I can do on that score. You may, however, depend upon it that if any such duty does arise in any form, I will use my most faithful endeavour to do whatever is right and proper, according to the best of my judgment. (Cheers.)
In the meanwhile, the duty I have at present—which might be very pleasant, but which is quite the reverse, as you may fancy—is to address some words to you on some subjects more or less cognate to the pursuits you are engaged in. In fact, I had meant to throw out some loose observations—loose in point of order, I mean—in such a way as they may occur to me—the truths I have in me about the business you are engaged in, the race you have started on, what kind of race it is you young gentlemen have begun, and what sort of arena you are likely to find in this world. I ought, I believe, according to custom, to have written all that down on paper, and had it read out. That would have been much handier for me at the present moment (a laugh), but when I attempted to write, I found that I was not accustomed to write speeches, and that I did not get on very well. So I flung that away, and resolved to trust to the inspiration of the moment—just to what came uppermost. You will therefore have to accept what is readiest, what comes direct from the heart, and you must just take that in compensation for any good order of arrangement there might have been in it.
I will endeavour to say nothing that is not true, as far as I can manage, and that is pretty much all that I can engage for. (A laugh.) Advices, I believe, to young men—and to all men—are very seldom much valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action, is better suppressed altogether. I would not, therefore, go much into advising; but there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the summary of all advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I dare say; but I must, nevertheless, let you hear it the thousand and first time, for it is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or not—namely, that above all things the interest of your own life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day, in this place where you have come to get education. Diligent! That includes all virtues in it that a student can have; I mean to include in it all qualities that lead into the acquirement of real instruction and improvement in such a place. If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life, in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at indeed little; while in the course of years, when you come to look back, and if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers—and among many counsellers there is wisdom—you will bitterly repent when it is too late. The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last. By diligence, I mean among other things—and very chiefly—honesty in all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavour to do that. Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with intelligence.
There is such a thing as a man endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does not know more than the outside skin of them; and he goes flourishing about with them. ("Hear, hear," and a laugh.) There is also a process called cramming in some Universities (a laugh)—that is, getting up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put questions about. Avoid all that as entirely unworthy of an honourable habit. Be modest, and humble, and diligent in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the right way, so far as they have been able to understand it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. In fact, morality as regards study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything real; and it would be greatly better if he were tied up from doing any such thing. He does nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters. That is a very old doctrine, but a very true one; and you will find it confirmed by all the thinking men that have ever lived in this long series of generations of which we are the latest.
I daresay you know, very many of you, that it is now seven hundred years since Universities were first set up in this world of ours. Abelard and other people had risen up with doctrines in them the people wished to hear of, and students flocked towards them from all parts of the world. There was no getting the thing recorded in books as you may now. You had to hear him speaking to you vocally, or else you could not learn at all what it was that he wanted to say. And so they gathered together the various people who had anything to teach, and formed themselves gradually, under the patronage of kings and other potentates who were anxious about the culture of their populations, nobly anxious for their benefit, and became a University.
I daresay, perhaps, you have heard it said that all that is greatly altered by the invention of printing, which took place about midway between us and the origin of Universities. A man has not now to go away to where a professor is actually speaking, because in most cases he can get his doctrine out of him through a book, and can read it, and read it again and again, and study it. I don't know that I know of any way in which the whole facts of a subject may be more completely taken in, if our studies are moulded in conformity with it. Nevertheless, Universities have, and will continue to have, an indispensable value in society—a very high value. I consider the very highest interests of man vitally intrusted to them.
In regard to theology, as you are aware, it has been the study of the deepest heads that have come into the world—what is the nature of this stupendous universe, and what its relations to all things, as known to man, and as only known to the awful Author of it. In fact, the members of the Church keep theology in a lively condition (laughter), for the benefit of the whole population, which is the great object of our Universities. I consider it is the same now intrinsically, though very much forgotten, from many causes, and not so successful as might be wished at all. (A laugh.) It remains, however, a very curious truth, what has been said by observant people, that the main use of the Universities in the present age is that, after you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a collection of books, a great library of good books, which you proceed to study and to read. What the Universities have mainly done—what I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading; and learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading—to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the present time, in a great deal of the reading incumbent on you you must be guided by the books recommended to you by your professors for assistance towards the prelections. And then, when you get out of the University, and go into studies of your own, you will find it very important that you have selected a field, a province in which you can study and work.
The most unhappy of all men is the man that cannot tell what he is going to do, that has got no work cut out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind—honest work, which you intend getting done. If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice—perhaps the best you could get—is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book. It is analogous to what doctors tell us about the physical health and appetites of the patient. You must learn to distinguish between false appetite and real. There is such a thing as a false appetite, which will lead a man into vagaries with regard to diet, will tempt him to eat spicy things which he should not eat at all, and would not but that it is toothsome, and for the moment in baseness of mind. A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for—what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to go into history—to inquire into what has passed before you in the families of men. The history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all concern you; and you will find that all the knowledge you have got will be extremely applicable to elucidate that. There you have the most remarkable race of men in the world set before you, to say nothing of the languages, which your professors can better explain, and which, I believe, are admitted to be the most perfect orders of speech we have yet found to exist among men. And you will find, if you read well, a pair of extremely remarkable nations shining in the records left by themselves as a kind of pillar to light up life in the darkness of the past ages; and it will be well worth your while if you can get into the understanding of what these people were and what they did. You will find a great deal of hearsay, as I have found, that does not touch on the matter; but perhaps some of you will get to see a Roman face to face; you will know in some measure how they contrived to exist, and to perform these feats in the world; I believe, also, you will find a thing not much noted, that there was a very great deal of deep religion in its form in both nations. That is noted by the wisest of historians, and particularly by Ferguson, who is particularly well worth reading on Roman history; and I believe he was an alumnus in our own University. His book is a very creditable book. He points out the profoundly religious nature of the Roman people, notwithstanding the wildness and ferociousness of their nature. They believed that Jupiter Optimus—Jupiter Maximus—was lord of the universe, and that he had appointed the Romans to become the chief of men, provided they followed his commands—to brave all difficulty, and to stand up with an invincible front—to be ready to do and die; and also to have the same sacred regard to veracity, to promise, to integrity, and all the virtues that surround that noblest quality of men—courage—to which the Romans gave the name of virtue, manhood, as the one thing ennobling for a man.
In the literary ages of Rome, that had very much decayed away; but still it had retained its place among the lower classes of the Roman people. Of the deeply religious nature of the Greeks, along with their beautiful and sunny effulgences of art, you have a striking proof, if you look for it.
In the tragedies of Sophocles, there is a most distinct recognition of the eternal justice of Heaven, and the unfailing punishment of crime against the laws of God.
I believe you will find in all histories that that has been at the head and foundation of them all, and that no nation that did not contemplate this wonderful universe with an awe-stricken and reverential feeling that there was a great unknown, omnipotent, and all-wise, and all-virtuous Being, superintending all men in it, and all interests in it—no nation ever came to very much, nor did any man either, who forgot that. If a man did forget that, he forgot the most important part of his mission in this world.
In our own history of England, which you will take a great deal of natural pains to make yourselves acquainted with, you will find it beyond all others worthy of your study; because I believe that the British nation—and I include in them the Scottish nation—produced a finer set of men than any you will find it possible to get anywhere else in the world. (Applause.) I don't know in any history of Greece or Rome where you will get so fine a man as Oliver Cromwell. (Applause.) And we have had men worthy of memory in our little corner of the island here as well as others, and our history has been strong at least in being connected with the world itself—for if you examine well you will find that John Knox was the author, as it were, of Oliver Cromwell; that the Puritan revolution would never have taken place in England at all if it had not been for that Scotchman. (Applause.) This is an arithmetical fact, and is not prompted by national vanity on my part at all. (Laughter and applause.) And it is very possible, if you look at the struggle that was going on in England, as I have had to do in my time, you will see that people were overawed with the immense impediments lying in the way.
A small minority of God-fearing men in the country were flying away with any ship they could get to New England, rather than take the lion by the beard. They durstn't confront the powers with their most just complaint to be delivered from idolatry. They wanted to make the nation altogether conformable to the Hebrew Bible, which they understood to be according to the will of God; and there could be no aim more legitimate. However, they could not have got their desire fulfilled at all if Knox had not succeeded by the firmness and nobleness of his mind. For he is also of the select of the earth to me—John Knox. (Applause.) What he has suffered from the ungrateful generations that have followed him should really make us humble ourselves to the dust, to think that the most excellent man our country has produced, to whom we owe everything that distinguishes us among modern nations, should have been sneered at and abused by people. Knox was heard by Scotland—the people heard him with the marrow of their bones—they took up his doctrine, and they defied principalities and powers to move them from it. "We must have it," they said.
It was at that time the Puritan struggle arose in England, and you know well that the Scottish Earls and nobility, with their tenantry, marched away to Dunse-hill, and sat down there; and just in the course of that struggle, when it was either to be suppressed or brought into greater vitality, they encamped on the top of Dunse-hill thirty thousand armed men, drilled for that occasion, each regiment around its landlord, its earl, or whatever he might be called, and eager for Christ's Crown and Covenant. That was the signal for all England rising up into unappeasable determination to have the Gospel there also, and you know it went on and came to be a contest whether the Parliament or the King should rule—whether it should be old formalities and use and wont, or something that had been of new conceived in the souls of men—namely, a divine determination to walk according to the laws of God here as the sum of all prosperity—which of these should have the mastery; and after a long, long agony of struggle, it was decided—the way we know. I should say also of that Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell's—notwithstanding the abuse it has encountered, and the denial of everybody that it was able to get on in the world, and so on—it appears to me to have been the most salutary thing in the modern history of England on the whole. If Oliver Cromwell had continued it out, I don't know what it would have come to. It would have got corrupted perhaps in other hands, and could not have gone on, but it was pure and true to the last fibre in his mind—there was truth in it when he ruled over it.
Machiavelli has remarked, in speaking about the Romans, that democracy cannot exist anywhere in the world; as a Government it is an impossibility that it should be continued, and he goes on proving that in his own way. I do not ask you all to follow him in his conviction (hear); but it is to him a clear truth that it is a solecism and impossibility that the universal mass of men should govern themselves. He says of the Romans that they continued a long time, but it was purely in virtue of this item in their constitution—namely, that they had all the conviction in their minds that it was solemnly necessary at times to appoint a Dictator—a man who had the power of life and death over everything—who degraded men out of their places, ordered them to execution, and did whatever seemed to him good in the name of God above him. He was commanded to take care that the Republic suffered no detriment, and Machiavelli calculates that that was the thing that purified the social system from time to time, and enabled it to hang on as it did—an extremely likely thing if it was composed of nothing but bad and tumultuous men triumphing in general over the better, and all going the bad road, in fact. Well, Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, or Dictatorate if you will, lasted for about ten years, and you will find that nothing that was contrary to the laws of Heaven was allowed to live by Oliver. (A laugh, and applause.) For example, it was found by his Parliament, called "Barebones"—the most zealous of all Parliaments probably—the Court of Chancery in England was in a state that was really capable of no apology—no man could get up and say that that was a right court. There were, I think, fifteen thousand or fifteen hundred—(laughter)—I don't really remember which, but we shall call it by the last (renewed laughter)—there were fifteen hundred cases lying in it undecided; and one of them, I remember, for a large amount of money, was eighty-three years old, and it was going on still. Wigs were waving over it, and lawyers were taking their fees, and there was no end of it, upon which the Barebones people, after deliberation about it, thought it was expedient, and commanded by the Author of Man and the Fountain of Justice, and for the true and right, to abolish the court. Really, I don't know who could have dissented from that opinion. At the same time, it was thought by those who were wiser, and had more experience of the world, that it was a very dangerous thing, and would never suit at all. The lawyers began to make an immense noise about it. (Laughter.) All the public, the great mass of solid and well-disposed people who had got no deep insight into such matters, were very adverse to it, and the president of it, old Sir Francis Rous, who translated the Psalms—those that we sing every Sunday in the church yet—a very good man and a wise man—the Provost of Eton—he got the minority, or I don't know whether or no he did not persuade the majority—he, at any rate, got a great number of the Parliament to go to Oliver the Dictator, and lay down their functions altogether, and declare officially with their signature on Monday morning that the Parliament was dissolved.
The thing was passed on Saturday night, and on Monday morning Rous came and said, "We cannot carry on the affair any longer, and we remit it into the hands of your Highness." Oliver in that way became Protector a second time.
I give you this as an instance that Oliver felt that the Parliament that had been dismissed had been perfectly right with regard to Chancery, and that there was no doubt of the propriety of abolishing Chancery, or reforming it in some kind of way. He considered it, and this is what he did. He assembled sixty of the wisest lawyers to be found in England. Happily, there were men great in the law—men who valued the laws as much as anybody does now, I suppose. (A laugh.) Oliver said to them, "Go and examine this thing, and in the name of God inform me what is necessary to be done with regard to it. You will see how we may clean out the foul things in it that render it poison to everybody." Well, they sat down then, and in the course of six weeks—there was no public speaking then, no reporting of speeches, and no trouble of any kind; there was just the business in hand—they got sixty propositions fixed in their minds of the things that required to be done. And upon these sixty propositions Chancery was reconstituted and remodelled, and so it has lasted to our time. It had become a nuisance, and could not have continued much longer.
