LIFE AT CRAIGENPUTTOCH.

495

indication of the future direction of his thoughts, a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister,-were the literary labours of 1823, his first year of pen-work.

A Life of Schiller, published by scattered chapters in the "London Magazine,” and afterwards enlarged, was the second fruit of this Scottish sapling grafted upon German thought. It appeared in 1825 as a separate volume. During the same year the author became a married man with other resources than those of brain

and pen.

For several years Craigenputtoch, a small estate about fifteen miles north-west of Dumfries,-a patch of corn-land nestling among trees in the middle of the black Galloway moors,- -was the congenial home of this great man, whose mind, prone by nature and by habit to dwell apart, "wrapped in the solitude of its own originality," flamed out occasionally from its hermit-cell upon the shams and flunkeyism of that seething world, whose roar lay beyond the swelling granite hills. In this lonely nook he wrote several things for the Reviews, among which Characteristics and Burns in the "Edinburgh," and Goëthe in the "Foreign Quarterly," are notable. His estimate of Burns is remarkable for its sympathetic justice, and its straightforward recognition in the poet of a true manhood, swathed in wretched environments. And not less is it remarkable as our finest specimen of Carlyle's earlier manner, before he had laid aside the conventional forms of English speech for that language of splintered fire, rapid and sudden as the forked lightning, and often as jagged too, which we find in his later works.

But Sartor Resartus (The Patcher Repatched) was the principal result of the quiet thoughtfulness-by study-fire or on pony's back to which the Craigenputtoch life was chiefly given up. Professing to be a review of a German work on dress, it is in reality a philosophical essay, illustrating in a very original and powerful style the transcendentalism of Fichte. Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is the imaginary mouthpiece, through which Carlyle inveighs against the old clothes of falsehood and conventionalism that smother and conceal a Divine idea lying wrapped in

496

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION."

the centre of our human life. So odd the subject and apparently grotesque the style, that London publishers looked very shy at the offered manuscript, which could find its way to the public only in fragments through the pages of "Fraser's Magazine" (1833–34).

The year 1837 is the central point in Carlyle's literary life, for then appeared The French Revolution, a History, written as no history had ever been written before. All the scenes in that won derful tale of blood and tears flash out upon our gaze, as we read, with a startling vividness and distinctness of outline, entirely unlike the way in which the stately pictures of Gibbon and Macaulay grow upon the unfolding canvas, and thoroughly in keeping with the wild hurry and seeming disjointedness of the tumultuous time. Carlyle's pen has not yet outdone this brilliant historic piece. But it must not be forgotten, that those

A.D.

who wish to know all the minutia of the French Revolu1837 tion, must supplement their reading of Carlyle's "History" with the study of calmer works, which aim, not so much at fixing on the mind with bright sun-darts a succession of indelible photographs, as at heaping together with quiet and careful industry all the details of the tremendous drama. Defiant of critical canons, and regarding that stately pomp of diction which some think "the dignity of history" requires, as an intolerable sham, this hater of old clothes works out his own ideas in his own way-paints with a brush of daring lawlessness-is minute at one time, even to the wart on a hero's eyebrow, at another so broad in his treatment that a single dash of colour depicts a man-violates every propriety of conventional art, historical perspective excepted-fills his pages with abrupt and startling apostrophes—often flings together a bundle of words, which, upon cool analysis, we find to be a mass of disjointed notes-drives at full swing through all school-notions of logical order and grammatical arrangement, scattering right and left into ignominious exile nominatives and verbs, articles and pronouns,—and yet strikes so surely to the brain and heart, that his pictures, printed with an instantaneous flash, live on the mental retina for ever.

The delivery of certain courses of Lectures on German Litera

"CROMWELL'S LETTERS AND SPEECHES."

497

ture,―The Revolutions of Modern Europe, and Heroes, HeroWorship, and the Heroic in History (1840), combined with the production of a tract on Chartism (1839) and an historical contrast, entitled Past and Present (1843), filled up eight years between the publication of the "French Revolution" and the appearance of a second great work.

That work is entitled The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with Elucidations. A vast heap of materials, collected with painful patience from all sources, "fished up," as the collector tells us, "from foul Lethean quagmires, and washed clean from foreign stupidities—such a job of buck-washing as I do not long to repeat," was given to the world in fair order and modernized form, the great Puritan being made to speak from the dead past with his own voice and pen. This book, however, is no mere edition of Cromwell's works. What he modestly calls "Elucidations," the setting of these rough recovered gems, are brilliant specimens of Carlyle's historic style. His portraiture of the great Oliver, and his battle-piece of Dunbar, are well worthy 1845 of the pencil which drew Mirabeau and Marie Antoin- A.D. ette, the storming of the Bastille, and the shrill drumled march of the Paris women to Versailles. That substratum of the Puritan or old Covenanter in his character, to which Leigh Hunt and Hannay make allusion, kindled into volcanic flame when Cromwell formed his theme. He is, indeed, himself a literary Cromwell, waging sternest war with all the force of an earnest soul against modern humbug, untruth, and noisy pretension. No wonder that this soldier of the pen, among the stanchest of our century, looking back across two hundred years of history, should recognise natural royalty in the craggy brow, solid frame, and iron soul of a Huntingdon farmer who could lead armies to certain triumph and dissolve a senate with the stamping of his foot. An electric sympathy linked the two: true manhood sharpened Cromwell's sword and true manhood guides Carlyle's pen.

The

The toppling thrones and surging peoples of the disastrous year 1848 stirred the impulsive oracle to a vehement utterance. Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) assailed with most galling invec

498

HISTORY OF FREDERICK THE GREAT."

tive and contemptuous ridicule the leading politicians and institutions of the country. The hollowness of great men and the servility of small are lashed with a furious, stinging whip, whose thongs, steeped in the salt of grim fantastic wit, cut and smart to the very bone. Yet many blows are too fierce, too sweeping, and many fall harmless upon sound and honest things.

His Life of John Sterling (1851), a brilliant Essayist who had conducted the " Athenæum " for a while, and who died prematurely in 1844, grew out of his dissatisfaction with the picture which Archdeacon Hare had given of the free-thinking curate. It is a fine specimen of literary skill; but the sympathy which the writer shows for the loose religious views of his friend has been heavily blamed.

1858

A.D.

During the last ten years Mr. Carlyle, residing chiefly at Chelsea, has been employed upon The History of Friedrich II., called Frederick the Great. This stern soldier has been chosen as the hero of a new work, not because the historian believes him to have been a truly great man, but "because he managed not to be a liar and a charlatan, as his century was." Frederick and Voltaire are the types of action and of thought in the eighteenth century. In 1858 the first and second volumes of "Frederick" appeared; but they are only preliminary to the greater story of his reign, bringing his life, through a tangled thicket of Brandenburg and Hohenzollern genealogy, up to the death, in 1740, of his bearish old father, Friedrich Wilhelm. Since the issue of these volumes Mr. Carlyle has, we believe, visited the leading battle-fields of the Seven Years' War; and in the volumes which, as we write, are said to be on the eve of publication, we may look for a succession of pictures coloured with that lawless but potent brilliance, that wild, abrupt, impulsive touch, which distinguish this master's style from that of all other writers of English. Clarendon nor Gibbon nor Macaulay, all great masters of the historic pencil and well skilled in the portraiture of men, can scarcely match, can certainly not overmatch, that image of the great Frederick—the very Fritz himself—that starts to life in the opening pages of Carlyle's latest work.

SPECIMEN OF CARLYLE'S PROSE.

499

PORTRAIT OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.

He is a king every inch of him, though without the trappings of a king. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity of vesture: no crown, but an old military cocked hat generally old, or trampled and kneaded into absolute softness if new; no sceptre but one like Agamemnon's, a walking-stick cut from the woods, which serves also as a riding-stick (with which he hits the horse "between the ears," say authors); and for royal robes, a mere soldier's blue coat with red facings,coat likely to be old, and sure to have a good deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it; rest of the apparel dim, unobtrusive in colour or cut, ending in high overknee military boots, which may be brushed (and, I hope, kept soft with an underhand suspicion of oil), but are not permitted to be blackened or varnished, -Day and Martin with their soot-pots forbidden to approach. The man is not of god-like physiognomy, any more than of imposing stature or costume: closeshut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose, receding brow, by no means of Olympian height; head, however, is of long form, and has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beautiful man; nor yet, by all appearance, what is called a happy. On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, as they are termed, of much hard labour done in this world; and seems to anticipate nothing but more still coming. Quiet stoicism, capable enough of what joys there were, but not expecting any worth mention; great unconscious and some conscious pride, well tempered with a cheery mockery of humour, are written on that old face, which carries its chin well forward, in spite of the slight stoop about the neck; snuffy nose, rather flung into the air, under its old cocked hat, like an old snuffy lion on the watch; and such a pair of eyes as no man, or lion, or lynx of that century bore elsewhere, according to all the testimony we have. "Those eyes," says Mirabeau, "which, at the bidding of his great soul, fascinated you with seduction or with terror." Most excellent, potent, brilliant eyes, swift-darting as the stars, steadfast as the sun; gray, we said, of the azuregray colour; large enough, not of glaring size; the habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense, rapidity resting on depth. Which is an excellent combination, and gives us the notion of a lambent outer radiance, springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the man. The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy: clear, melodious, and sonorous; all tones are in it, from that of ingenuous inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter (rather prickly for most part), up to definite word of command, up to desolating word of rebuke and reprobation.