THE NEW

PRINCETON REVIEW.

61st Year.

JULY, 1886.

No. 4.

RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE, WITH NOTES CONCERNING HIS REMINISCENCES.'

AT the close of a note to me in 1873, Mr. Emerson wrote, “I please myself with believing that you will take care hereafter that his (Carlyle's) memory suffers no detriment on this side the sea." I had no thought at the time that such a duty could ever fall to me; and the words passed from my remembrance.

After Mr. Emerson's death, having occasion to refer to his note, this sentence, read afresh, and, as it were, for the first time, appealed to me as an injunction to do what might be in my power to remove the false impressions which, especially since the publication of Carlyle's own Reminiscences and of Froude's Life of him, have become current concerning him, and do wrong to his memory. A sufficient time has, perhaps, now elapsed since these books appeared to admit of a cool revision of the hasty and, in large measure, mistaken judgment to which they led.

My personal acquaintance with Carlyle began when he was an old man. I saw him first in 1869, and then but seldom. He spoke to me at that time of his intention to leave such of his books as related to Cromwell and Frederick the Great to some library in America; and his final determination to bequeath them to the library of Harvard College was the occasion of some correspondence between us in the course of the two following years. In 1872 I returned to London, for a stay of several months. During this time I saw much of Carlyle, and relations of affectionate friendliness grew up between

us.

In 1872 Carlyle was seventy-seven years old, a hale, vigorous old man, every organ and function of his body sound," as he himself declared, except for the trembling of his hand, which made writing difficult. His mind was no less healthy. Age had mellowed but had not impaired him.

The muscles of his strong and rugged face were still firm, and under steady control, and the lines drawn upon it by character and experience had suffered no deterioration. The light had not gone out of his eye; his sight was excellent; his glance keen, quick, and penetrating. His voice was full and unbroken, and his laugh was still deep and sonorous. His body was erect, his motions easy, his gait firm.

manner.

The variety and depth of expression in his countenance, and the accord of his looks with the emotion within, were such as are seldom seen in any face. There was no grimace or affectation in his look or His face when quiet was rugged as that of a shepherd of the hills; grave, stern, sad as that of a Covenanter; a face fit for one of the "Scottish Worthies." I never saw in it anything of that aspect of semi-professional melancholy which appears in some of his photographs. It had the look of one who had found life a tragedy, "alas! is not the Life of every such man a Tragedy, made up of Fate and one's own Deservings," but who had retained his selfpossession, and who, though worn, was not worsted by the years. Mingled with his stern aspect, nay, quite indissoluble from it, was a look of tenderness that easily kindled into a smile as sympathetic and as kindly as ever lit up a human face.

His laugh was not, as often with grave men, merely a smile become more or less vocal, but a deep-seated, cordial utterance, full of humorous intonation and suggestion, giving significant interpretation to the words that preceded or followed it, depriving satire of bitterness, and reënforcing the mirth of lively exaggerations. "How much," said Carlyle in 'Sartor Resartus,' "lies in laughter! the cipherkey wherewith we decipher the whole man." He might have drawn from himself his description of "a stern face, stern as any Hebrew, but capable withal of bursting into inextinguishable laughter on occasion; do you understand that new and better form of character? Laughter if it come from the heart is a heavenly thing."

His whole expression,-look, manner, word, tone,-gave evidence of that sincerity which was the controlling trait of his nature, an inherited trait, strengthened by personal conviction and rooted in princi

ple. What he said of his father, might be as truly applied to himself, "He was a man singularly free from affectation."

His talk had lost nothing of its raciness and vigor. In substance and in form it was the genuine expression of his exceptionally distinct individual temperament and genius, and of the wide range of his interest in human concerns. Much of it was of the nature of reminiscences, concerning his early life, the men whom he had known, the incidents he had witnessed or taken part in. In all this the extraordinary vigor and exactness of his memory were displayed; the impressions of the past seemed to stand complete pictures before him, sharp in outline, full in detail, and fresh as if of but yesterday. He talked but little of his immediately personal affairs; there was no touch of vanity or self-engrossment in his narratives. He had no conceit about his works, and never put on the air of a prophet, or of a man deserving of superior consideration.

One day the talk fell upon his books. "Poor old Sartor!" he said. "It's a book in which I take little satisfaction; really a book worth very little as a work of art, a fragmentary, disjointed, vehement production. It was written when I was livin' at Craigenputtock, one o' the solitariest places on the face o' the earth; a wild moor-land place where one might lead a wholesome, simple life, and might labor without interruption, and be not altogether without peace such as London cannot give. We were quite alone, and there is much that is beautiful and precious in them as I look back on those days." He went on to tell of the difficulties he had in getting the book published, of which an account has since been given in his Life, and of the lack of favor with which it was at first received, and then he said, "But it's been so with all my books. I've had little satisfaction or encouragement in the doin' of them, and the most satisfaction I can get out of them now is the sense of havin' shouldered a heavy burden o' work, an' not flinched under it. I've had but one thing to say from beginnin' to end o' them, and that was, that there's no other reliance for this world or any other but just the Truth, and that if men did not want to be damned to all eternity, they had best give up lyin', and all kinds o' falsehood; that the world was far gone already through lyin', and that there's no hope for it save just so far as men find out and believe the Truth, and match their lives to it. But on the whole the world has gone on lyin' worse than ever! (A laugh.) It's not a very pleasin' retrospect,-those books o' mine,—of a long life; a beggarly account of empty boxes.

"Doubtless it's better to see things breaking up and falling into confusion if so we can only get rid of the endless dubieties and bottomless insincerities of this hag-ridden old world. The very last entirely sincere voice heard in England was that of Oliver Cromwell; the spirit of the Truth was in him."

Carlyle's talk stamped itself on the memory, but it cannot be truly reported, for dialect, voice, tone, pause, emphasis and expression of face, were all essential elements of it. It was full of incommunicable flashes of humor, and gleams of imagination. His speech was an interpretation of his written words, and had his letters and his personal records addressed the ear as well as the eye, they would have lain far less open to misunderstanding. Carlyle, indeed, used capitals, italics and punctuation, as no other writer has used them, to give the full weight and just balance to written clause and sentence, but, even as he employed them, they cannot supply the place of intonation and look. He wrote as if speaking, but the vital significance of voice and manner are lacking in the printed words.

Though the dry bones of such talk as his can afford but faint suggestion of the flesh and blood of it, I will give a few passages from the imperfect record I made of it at the time, as illustrations of some of the currents of his thoughts. But the reader must bear in mind that this record was a pale abridgment, and that only a full report could do justice to the idiomatic vigor of his sentences, the richness of his vocabulary, the intermingling of gravity and lightness in his moods, and the play of his wholesome humor.

It was on the 9th of January, 1873, that Louis Napoleon died. "Poor wretch!" said Carlyle, "I never thought to feel so much pity for the man. Ah dear! and the poor creature has gone now from this wonderful welter and confusion in which he lived so long. The mystery and the awe of death round him now, and not one single good result plain from all his life, a very pitiable and movin' end! I never talked with the man but once; I sat next him at a dinner at the Stanleys' and he tried to convert me to his notions; but such ideas as he possessed had no real fire in them, not so much as a capacity for flame; his mind was a kind of extinct sulphur pit, and gave out nothing but a smell of rotten sulphur.—A tragi-comedian, or comic tragedian; and dying in this lamentable, ignominious sort of way. As he lay there in pain he must have wished that a cannonball had smashed the brains of him at Saarbrück or Sedan. I remember when he came over here, years ago, with that Spanish woman,