The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes
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Please do not assume that a book's appearance in 'The Builder' library means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe. The Webmaster Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924073797874 In compliance with current copyright law, Ridley's Book Bindery, Inc. produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39. 48-1984 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 1992 CENTENARY EDITION THE WORKS OF THOMAS CARLYLE IN THIRTY VOLUMES VOL. I SARTOR RESARTUS v^j; 1^ ^W-- ! THOMAS CARLYLE SAKTUii R:iiSAK 1 US THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF HERR TEUFELSDROCKH IN THREE BOOKS QJJttn SSctma($tmp, rtie ^eitttiiji Weit unt fcreit Die 3eit ijl mein a3ennac|itnip, mein Slitt ifi bit 3eit. :j 2 ^v 7 ,1 :v CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 1300 C^'4-^'.lr<^{ 1',^ . frs;-^ o~^'^ P.^ffi-7 Originally published 1831 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . VI SARTOR RESARTUS BOOK II CHAP. I. Incident in Modern History INTRODUCTION Time, the final judge of appeal from the verdicts of successive ages, is rather fond of 'reserving' his decisions. Often they are held over for a generation or more, under the formula of ' suspension known in the somewhat late ' Latinity of the lawyers, as Curia advisari vult. But sitting as Lord Justice on that supreme appellate tribunal which examines the claims of departed writers, ' Time has been swift of despatch ' in the case of Thomas Carlyle. His award has been delivered within fifteen years of Carlyle's death, and it confirms the judgment of his contemporaries as to his literary greatness. The appeal of his posthumous detractors is dismissed with costs. We cannot exactly condole with the defeated appellants : they hardly deserve that. But we can make some allowance for them, for, in truth, we can now more clearly see what grounds they had for taking the case to a higher court. Nay, we can even admit that their excuse has been in part provided for them by the victorious respondent himself. No great man of letters has ever so persistently be-littled the mere art of literature as Carlyle. It that he had his literary heroes to point his discourses on is true — hero-worship ^his Johnson, his Rousseau, his Burns : surely as strange a leash as were ever strung together, —and of course not even he could fail to disengage the matchless art of Shakespeare from his philosophy, his morality, his profound thoughts on life, and what not else among those high matters in which alone Carlyle was interested. But as a rule, it is the direct dogmatic teaching of a work of literature (which is its accident) and not the manner of it, the aesthetic charm, the emotional appeal, the intel- viii INTRODUCTION lectual delight, the spiritual refreshment of it (which are of its essence) that he values : so that when, as in Scott's romances, he came across work which consists wholly of the essentials of literature, detached from its accidents, the contact with it pro- duced a memorable and lamentable effect on his critical faculty. Allowing, in short, for a few inconsistencies, Carlyle's attitude towards literature pure and simple, —literature as literature— is uniform. On scores of pages, in hundreds of passages, he enounces or reveals the opinion that, dissociated from direct didactic purpose, it is but as sounding brass, and as a tinkling cymbal. The preacher with him is immeasurably ahead of the mere man of letters, as perhaps the man of action is of both. There is thus a certain poetical justice about the resistance offered in certain quarters to his decree of canonisation. By insisting, in fact, on the superior dignity of the prophet-preacher, and by idealising the silent man of action—exalting him who does nobly, to a level so vastly higher than his who merely writes nobly of noble deeds—Carlyle was in fact 'briefing' a 'devil's advocate' against himself. For he has now become a prophet whose prophecies are of little account ; while in the domain of action and conduct, his figure as viewed in the light thrown on it by his famous biogi-apher, shows distinctly less heroic than it was supposed to have been. The disclosure of his personal weaknesses —his egoism, his ill-tempers, his peasant-bred envy, his undue self-pity— passed harmlessly, as all such disclosures should, and will pass, by those whose admiration had always centred on the writer and not on the man ; but it fell at first with a most agitat- ing shock upon those to whom the man, the leader, the master and doctor, the teacher,—by example, as was assumed, as well as by precept,—counted for so much more than the writer. The echo of their outcries of disenchantment had to die away before a hear- ing could be obtained for the truth that Carlyle is neither political prophet nor ethical doctor, but simply a great master of literature who lives for posterity by the art which he despised. ' INTRODUCTION ix Neither prophet nor doctor : no, nor yet philosopher either. ' The word philosophy ' and its derivatives are among the hardest- worked vocables in the language. The substantive has been applied to everything, from a theory of the universe to the minutest researches in a single branch of physical science; its adjectival form is used indiscriminately to describe a variety of the human temperament, and the contents of an optician's shop. Men, who never so much as heard of the Stoics, have been called ' philosophers ' for meeting adversity with fortitude ; quadrants and sextants have been dignified with the name of ' philosophical instruments. And there was hardly less laxity in the employment ' of the word philosophy ' as applied to the teachings of Carlyle, a writer who was alike ignorant of philosophical systems, and contemptuous of philosophical method, dismissing the former as 'word-spinning,' and the latter as ' logic chopping,' and whose own metaphysic was a mere tissue of poetic rhapsodies, as his ethic was a mere series of intuitional and unreasoned dogmas. One hardly knows whether Carlyle himself was aware of the popular designa- tion of him in later years as the ' philosopher of Chelsea,' or, if he was, what he thought of the cognomen. But there can, at least, be no doubt that the appellation was one which he ought in common consistency to have emphatically, if not indignantly, repudiated. It is interesting, indeed, to inquire what system of philosophy the disciples of the master could have managed to extract from his writings. A philosopher, whether so self-styled or not, may be expected either to suggest some speculative solution of the problems of man's origin, man's destiny, man's duty, and above all, man's relation to the external world, or, if he is a pure sceptic, definitely to pronounce these problems unsoluble. But, while Carlyle would presumably have rejected pure dogmatic scepticism, such as Hume's, with impatience, there is, nevertheless, not one of the questions connected with these high matters, to which he has any definite answer to propound. To some of them he ofi^ers no reply at all ; to others he replies according to the personal b X INTRODUCTION moodj or the controversial exigencies, of the moment, and therefore in half-a-dozen different ways. He seems on the metaphysical side to have been more or less unconsciously a Fichtean Idealist : at any rate no transcendental German of them all, has insisted more strongly on the supremacy and even the solitude of the individual consciousness, and on the shadowy nature of the external woi'ld of sense Yet the ethical affinities of this theory of perception, and its easy avenues of exit into indifferentism, fatalism, hedonism, and many other 'isms,' which he would have heartily objurgated, never seems to have occurred to him.