CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE DATE DUt 2 7 1948 ft 1 AUG A^^ FEB 2 2 ^ I •71 OECirHdtWt Cornell University Library PR 4422.E92 Carlyle; 3 1924 013 460 336 The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013460336 MASTERS OF LITERATURE CARLYLE LONDON : GEORGE BELL AND SONS PORTUGAL STREET, KINGSWAY, W.C. CAMBRIDGE : DEIGHTON, BELL & CO. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. BOMBAY : A. H. WHEELER & CO. 5^^ F ' y' i^.. ="' • sfcr c' ^izv jZu/i "'- J a/-/M- ^tidiau 'Z/Jio7rhcLA Gxz/rlulo. MASTERS OF LITERATURE CARLYLE EMTED BY A. W. EVAN3 cvaic^S LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1909 I- V I; Nil K U'WiV/uia-riY ,~v -J Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, ekead street hill, e.g., and bungav, suffolk. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction . xi Life of Friedrich Schiller I. Proem I 11. Schiller and Goethe 4 German Criticism . 8 Burns 14 Voltaire 26 On History 37 Goethe . 46 Biography 52 Boswell . 58 The Diamond Necklace I. Age of Romance 67 II. The Park of Versailles 73 The Opera . 76 The Man of Letters I. From the Life of Schiller 81 IL From Heroes and Hero-Worship 84 vii CONTENTS Sartor Resartus I. Teufelsdrockh is Alone with the Stars 86 II. The Everlasting No . 89 III. The Everlasting Yea .... 95 IV. Helotage 102 V. Natural Supernaturalism . i°5 The French Revolution I. Realised Ideals 112 II. Death of Louis XV . 117 III. The Procession of the States-General 124 IV. The Fall of the Bastille . 135 V. The General Overturn 144 VI. The Death of Mirabeau . 149 The Flight to Varennes i. Count Fersen . 156 ii. Attitude .... 160 iii. The New Berline 164 iv. Old-Dragoon Drouet 168 V. The Night of Spurs . 172 VIII. Place de la Revolution 179 IX. Charlotte Corday 185 X. Danton 190 XI. End of the Reign of Terror 194 XII. The Whiff of Grapeshot . 197 Chartism I. Rights and Mights . 205 II. New Eras. 208 III. Education 219 CONTENTS ix PAGE Heroes and Hero-Worship I. The Hero as Poet : Dante; Shakspeare . 225 II. The Hero as Man of Letters : Johnson . 248 Past and Present I. The Sphinx-Question 254 II. The Election of a Medieval Abbot 258 III. Labour and Reward . 265 IV. The One Institution . 272 V. Chivalry of Labour . 276 Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell I. The Battle of Dunbar . , .279 II. Death of the Protector .... 289 Life of John Sterling Coleridge 295 History of Frederick the Great I. Friedrich Then, and Friedrich Now . 306 II. Historical Meaning of the Reformation 3" III. Friedrich Wilhelm as a Man of Genius 31S IV. The Tobacco Parliament . 318 V. Death of Friedrich Wilhelm 324 VI. Glogau 333 VII. The Battle of Leuthen 335 VIII. Friedrich's Last Illness and Death 348 Pen Portraits 354 Shorter Extracts 368 INTRODUCTION For more than twenty-five years of his lifetime Carlyle occupied a place among his contemporaries which is very nearly unique in the history of English men of letters. Men of all schools and of all parties listened for the oracles delivered at Chelsea with veneration, enthusiasm, doubt, dissent, or amusement, but always with close attention. His denunciations of what displeased him in life or in letters were passed about from mouth to mouth and laughed at or applauded, while his approval of a scheme or of a move- ment was looked upon by those (and they were not many) who received it as a testimonial of the highest worth. He was, in short, almost an English insti- tution. And this ascendancy was quite as much a tribute to his character as an acknowledgment of his genius. Men felt that he had reached his convictions by the road of personal experience as well as of ardent intellectual toil, that he had taught himself before he took it upon himself to teach others, and that what- ever value might be attributed to the message he delivered, there could be no shadow of doubt regard- ing its sincerity. Like Dr. Johnson, with whom, in spite of many points of dissimilarity, Carlyle had a great deal in common, his position was due to what he was as much as to what he had written. Johnson, an Englishman of Englishmen, a Tory and a Royalist, content to accept the teaching of the Church of England with scarcely a movement of doubt, was, as Carlyle himself discerned, gifted by nature for "the noblest of earthly tasks, that of Priesthood and guidance of man- kind." Carlyle, a thorough Scotsman, who thought xi xii INTRODUCTION that the best use for the "sorry stuff" that had been written about the Divine Right of Kings, was to let it "moulder unread in the Public Libraries of the country," whose creed might be summed up as Calvinistic Puritan- ism from which Christianity had evaporated, in politics a reformer if not a revolutionist, felt called upon to take up the task for which he said that Johnson was fitted. Both men were combative, uncompromising in utterance, fierce and domineering in discussion, externally stern and rugged, yet at bottom full of tenderness and affec- tion. Each was a brilliant talker and owed much of his reputation to the force and charm of his conversation. Each developed a peculiar literary style which, though admirable when employed by its inventor, has never been imitated without disaster. Finally, there is a great similarity in the essential message of each, and Carlyle's insistence upon veracity is but another way of putting Johnson's advice to "clear our minds of cant." It is customary to describe Carlyle as a great Prophet or a great Teacher. In a sense it cannot be denied that he was both. But many of those who have most benefited from his teaching have abandoned the greater number of its distinctive tenets. They have a great admiration for the author, while mistrusting nearly everything that he has said. Huxley has placed on record the different ways in which he and Tyndall were affected by reading Carlyle. "Tyndall and I," he writes, "had long been zealous students of Carlyle's works .... and my sense of obligation to the author was then, as it remains, extremely strong. Tyndall's appreciation of the Seer of Chelsea was even more enthusiastic ; and in after years assumed a character of almost filial devotion. The grounds of our appreciation, however, were not exactly the same. My friend, I think, was disposed to regard Carlyle as a great teacher ; I was rather inclined to take him as a great tonic, —as a source of intellectual and moral stimulus and refreshment, rather than of theoretical and practical guidance." The attitude of Huxley rather than that of — INTRODUCTION xiii Tyndall, is the one which has gained ground. For most of his readers to-day, Carlyle is a great Awakener. But he is also a great literary artist. As time goes on it is under these two aspects, as a great Awakener and as a great Artist, that he must come more and more to be judged. Carlyle's Life Carlyle's life, like that of most men of letters, was unbroken by any great external incident. He made no attempt to enter public life or to influence the world except through his writings. The interest of his biography lies in the development of his mind and the formation of his opinions ; its chief events are the successive appearances of his books. Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, a small village in Annandale, on December 4, 1795. His father, James Carlyle, was a stone-mason coming from a stock noted for resolution and independence, "pithy, bitter-speaking bodies," said a neighbour, "and awfu' fighters." According to his son's account, James Carlyle was a man of great force of character, deep religious feeling, and unusual ability. "In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting men I have known. He was a man of perhaps the largest natural endowment of any it has been my lot to converse with. None of us will ever forget that bold, glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was) with all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with a sur- prising accuracy you often could not guess whence brief, energetic, and which I should say conveyed the most perfect picture, definite, clear, not in ambitious colours but in a full white sunlight, of all dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear him attempt xiv INTRODUCTION to render visible which did not become almost ocularly so."i He had, however, his forbidding side. All the household feared his anger and looked towards him with respect rather than affection. " We had all to complain that we durst not freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in ; he had not the free means to unbosom himself. ... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear repelled us from him." Margaret Aitken, his second wife and Carlyle's mother, fully made up for this want of sympathy. Of gentle disposition and tremulously eager for her son's welfare, both temporal and eternal, it was her dearest wish as well as that of his father that he should become a Minister of the Presbyterian Church.