153

ART. VI.-The Life of John Sterling. By THOMAS CARLYLE. London: Chapman & Hall. 1851.

THIS book is professedly the biography of a personal friend of Mr. Carlyle's. It is written, we are told, to give the true picture of one, of whom another biographer has given an inadequate and distorted sketch. Archdeacon Hare has published one Life of Mr. Sterling, prefixed to a collection of his Remains. This gave great dissatisfaction to many religious people, but it gave still greater to Mr. Carlyle. The one were scandalized at Archdeacon Hare's appearing to apologise for Sterling's unbelief; Mr. Carlyle is angry with him for thinking that it needed apology. He quarrels with the Archdeacon's extenuating tone, not for its boldness, but for its cowardice; not as excess of tenderness to the memory of a friend, but as treason to it. Such a life as Sterling's, he thinks, ought not to be left to the representations of one who, however candid and kindly, is still so hampered by professional prejudice as to think it necessary to meet seriously the charge of scepticism. Such a charge, in the popular sense of it, was one to avow and make light of in a more refined and recondite sense, to make a matter of the highest praise. With these feelings Mr. Carlyle feels himself bound to restore the reputation of his friend.

Such is the professed purpose of the book. But it must be a great subject indeed, which, in Mr. Carlyle's hands, eclipses himself. Hardly did the French Revolution do so. Oliver Cromwell was certainly not great enough. Still less, a clever, brilliant, amiable young littérateur of the nineteenth century; one, whose like and whose superior most persons may have seen, whose life has been passed in cultivated society. We do not, in the least, call in question the sincerity of the biographer's friendship and zeal. But it is he, and not Sterling, who fills the page. We do not say that he can help it. Each man has his own way of writing, and Mr. Carlyle has his. But so it is. Mr. Carlyle cannot forget himself, and cannot place himself anywhere but in the foreground. In this book, it is not a picture of Sterling that we have; it is Mr. Carlyle trying to draw his picture, and lecturing us the while.

Of the picture drawing we will speak presently. But the lecturing is, if not the most striking part of the book, the part which at first arrests attention. And to any one who had heard this lecturing for the first time, it would seem very striking and

impressive. His text is the vanity, the confusion, the falsehood, the selfishness which undeniably prevail in human affairs; his tone one of deep and scornful indignation-in its rugged honesty intolerant of all exceptions or disguises, and regardless of all conventional proprieties. This dark side of society is but too real a one; it is familiar to every one, and we are reminded of it by the constant recurrence, in the common language of the day, of a variety of emphatic words, which have sprung from the popular consciousness of it, and whose low-born origin and inelegance is pardoned for their expressiveness. What Englishman is not alive to the prevalence of humbug in every department of society? What Englishman but warms at its exposure? To be supposed to possess a strong sense of it, and a power to show it up, is the stock-in-trade of many who lead higher and more cultivated opinion than that of a vestry or town-council. But if you want to hear humbug of all sorts talked against in a new and forcible manner, Mr. Carlyle is the man for you. No Chartist demagogue, with St. Alban's for his theme, no Radical alderman, declaiming about Bishops, no inventive controversialist, adapting the cry of the day to his theological necessities, ever took such a wide range, dashed at his game with such frank vigour, or brought up from all sides such perfect and unexpected adaptations of language, to stamp it with appropriate and memorable symbols of infamy. No one could read Mr. Carlyle for the first time, without feeling that the hollowness of the nineteenth century had found in him the genius which understood and could celebrate it. Great powers of the writer's own were brought to bear-everything was sacrificed to the object of expressing it fully. The licences of familiar gossip, the antique roughness of the ballad, the grotesque vocabulary of the Puritans, and an equally quaint one of Mr. Carlyle's own, made their appearance, strangely enough, yet not out of place, in bursts of high eloquence, or earnest sympathy. Imagination contributed from its stores, in rich profusion and novelty, the monstrous, the loathsome, the ridiculous, and together with them, the grand; while history supplied heroic contrasts of the most varied forms to modern littleness. But unprecedented as the mixture was, it became in Mr. Carlyle's hands a homogeneous and living style, springing fresh from a vigorous mind, invented for the purpose of pouring contempt on shams,' and of great capabilities for its end.

This lecturing is, as we have said, at first hearing, very impres sive and startling; and it has impressed and startled people. Mr. Carlyle has been listened to with a mixture of feelings, but with profound attention; with plenty of remarks on his uncouth language, and strange ideas, and want of taste,-with protests that

'people could not understand him, could not make out what he was driving at,' but with abundant proofs of interest. Mr. Carlyle ranks among those who are looked upon as the teachers of their generation. Ile cannot complain of want of a hearing: it is rather for us to consider what he has told us, or taught us.

He has certainly impressed upon us, with his sledge-hammer strokes, that the world in our own day, and our own country, is very far from answering really, in any of its aspects, to those wholesale self-gratulatory and self-adulatory representations of it and its improvement, which used to be in fashion some years ago, but would now be considered rather shallow and behind the time. He has contributed powerfully, along with other influences, and the course of events, to disturb our ideas about the unrivalled solidity and excellence of our social and political state. He has sent a rude shock, not before it was time, against much smug, sleek, sleepy self-complacency; he has pitilessly given a bad name to the mere conventionalities of morals. He has made us feel, that in the midst of our knowledge, our success, and our pride, we are still walking in the twilight and among snares, with the gulfs of the pit under our feet; and he has made us feel also, that except in the noble and unselfish virtues of manhood, there is no charm against our perils that nothing that is unreal will stand the proof. To whatever extent these salutary, if not very comfortable truths, are more recognised than they were to whatever extent they have imposed a more subdued and measured tone on our ordinary way of speaking of our prosperity-abated arrogance, and added thoughtfulness to just enthusiasm-much of the effect is undoubtedly due, directly or indirectly, to Mr. Carlyle.

So much is to be acknowledged, and with it, it seems, we must be content. Perhaps it is asking more than is fair under the circumstances, to ask Mr. Carlyle to lay his hand on any one practical recommendation, in the course of all his volumes, as to how the evils which he so definitely specifies, are definitely to be dealt with. He would tell us, probably, that he did not profess to construct or mend, only to expose those who pretend to do so. But so the fact is. There are a number of people in the world who are very active, in their several ways-with definite practical methods for what they think the improvement and good of their fellow-men-in many cases for their own good also, but along with that of others. They work early and late, with resolution, with thoughtfulness, with selfdevotion, with toil and pain, often, as they think, with success. Not so Mr. Carlyle. He, sitting in his study at Chelsea, and looking out on them all, pronounces them in the gress, a set of sharpers or blockheads, losing their time. They really do work

hard-head and hand are busy all day, heavy and worn with work at night. Mr. Carlyle, with his paper before him, sneeringly damns them all, and writes them down impostors, blindly scrambling and struggling in inextricable mazes of selfishness and corruption; manufacturers and country gentlemen, trades and professions, lawyers, physicians, clergymen, prime ministers, all but, perhaps, the labourer and handicraftsman, and the literary man.

Surely as mad a world as you could wish! . . . .

If you want to make sudden fortunes in it, and achieve the temporary hallelujah of flunkeys for yourself, renounce the perennial esteem of wise men; if you can believe that the chief end of man is to collect about him a bigger heap of gold than ever before, in a shorter time than ever before, you will find it a most handy and everyway furthersome, blessed and felicitous world. But for any other human aim, I think you will find it not furthersome. If you in any way ask practically, How a noble life is to be led in it? you will be luckier than Sterling or I if you get any credible answer, or find any made road whatever. Alas, it is even so.

"

'Heaven mend it! In a better time there will be other " professions' than those three extremely cramp, confused and indeed almost obsolete ones professions, if possible that are true, and do not require you at the threshold to constitute yourself an impostor. Human association,-which will mean discipline, vigorous wise subordination and co-ordination,—is so unspeakably important. Professions, "regimented human pursuits," how many of honourable and manful might be possible for men; and which should not, in their results to society, need to stumble along, in such an unwieldy futile manner, with legs swollen into such enormous elephantiasis and no go at all in them! Men will one day think of the force they squander in every generation, and the fatal damage they encounter, by this neglect.'— Pp. 51-53.

He calls for work, but the work which has hitherto maintained the state of the world' he will not have, nor will he tell us what he wants instead. He calls for intelligible speech,' but not the speech which is accounted intelligible by the mass of men, and of his own he will give us none. He thunders against flunkeyism; he flames into enthusiasm for the heroic, and the man-like. What shall we do to be heroic and man-like in our day and generation? Mr. Carlyle, in answer, tells us in racy and often eloquent paragraphs, to be so. He has told us much that is false-we cannot remember that he has given us the hope of finding, in one single case, what is true.

Mr. Carlyle, it appears, steadily declines committing himself to anything that may be tried. The utmost he will do, is to point to, and comment on, certain select heroes of the past, of great variety, and many degrees of excellence. From these, or his sketches of them,-Mahomet, Dante, Luther, Cromwell, Mirabeau, Dr. Johnson, and the famous Abbot Sampson, of Bury St. Edmund's, we are to learn what Mr. Carlyle thinks we ought to be. But anything more definite he refuses. We

are to work; but if we go on working in our old lines, as lawyers or clergymen, we are carrying on an imposture. We are to believe; but if we believe what men and Christians have believed before us, we believe shams.' Mr. Carlyle is an impressive teacher, but he is a very puzzling one.

But much more damaging than even this to Mr. Carlyle's usefulness and character, is-it is a strange charge to make against one whose watchwords are fact and veracity-his want of truthfulness,-truthfulness of feeling, truthfulness of statement. A man may tell us a great many truths, such as no one else tells us, without being himself truthful; and a writer whose chosen instrument is exaggeration, plain, palpable, undeniable exaggeration, exaggeration repeated continually, written down in cold blood, is not a truthful writer. We pardon the exaggeration of passion; but when it has become a habit and a trick, it is no more pardonable in a moralist, using it to give effect to his philosophy, than it is in the fanatic or demagogue. The man who uses it consciously, the man who does not check himself in it when he may, does what lies in him to dull and destroy the sense of truth, in himself, and those whom he speaks to. Most readers will be struck, some impressed, others perhaps delighted, and many amused, with the following picture of our own day, but who seriously believes it?

'So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the course of pious genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown. No fixed highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognised paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, submerged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability, of brutal living Atheism and damnable dead putrescent Cant: surely a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; Darkness, and the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all things from pole to pole; and in the raging gulf-currents, offering us will-o'-wisps for loadstars,-intimating that there are no stars, nor ever were, except certain Old-Jew ones which have now gone out. Once more, a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; and for the young pious soul, winged with genius, and passionately seeking land, and passionately abhorrent of floating carrion withal, more tragical than for any!'-Pp. 126, 127.

To have written this once, is to have written it once too often, for the simple reason, that even the writer does not believe it. With a world so mad, so lost, really believed and felt to be so mad and lost, no sane man could be living in easy converse, quietly enjoying its conveniences, receiving its money, sympathy, patronage, and applause, in exchange for his eloquent books. He would be more embruted than the mad world itself, if he had the heart for such employments and such a commerce. But Mr. Carlyle is not to be taken strictly at his word here; he has a strong impression, and by some powerful means he wishes to communicate it. What such a picture answers to, is the feeling of an irritated and indignant mind-not the real intellectual conviction