master of his powers, and by thirtynine (vol. ii. p. 469) his training was over, and thenceforward his life was in his works. Carlyle was confident all through his life, and this confidence explains his whole career, that he had a special message, or a "poor message," as he sometimes called it, to deliver; and his own appreciation of the truth and value of this message lay in the remarkable declaration that he had not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but only to fulfil them. tions, upon the answer to which depends whether the fame of his hero is to be lasting or ephemeral. Suppose, for instance, that ubiquitous individual, an intelligent foreigner, unacquainted with recent English history and literature, or an Anglicised Hindu, anxious to display his familiarity with the inner life of English history in a competitive examination, turned to Mr Froude's book, what answer would he find? Suppose further, if it be not profanation, that that fascinating figure of the nineteenth He was a profound century, a "thoughtful" Liberal, disbeliever in miracles, and therefully equipped in mind and man- fore none need be looked for as ners, and craving for more light, embellishing or authenticating his desired to measure the exact degree mission. Yet on p. 470 his editor in which Carlyle's influence had credits him with one of portentous favoured or thwarted the spread of comprehensiveness-viz., that he genuine Liberal principles, what had, during the whole thirty-nine answer would he find in this book years (!) comprised in this book, of Mr Froude's? He tells us (pre-been fighting with poverty, with face, p. xv.) that an "adequate estimate of Carlyle's work in this world is not at present possible;" but the context shows that what he means is, that the truth of the message and the value of the work must be tested by time. Granted, but the questions remain: True or false, what was the message? Valuable or worthless, what was the work? The real value of Mr Froude's work in these volumes-most of which, owing to the plan which he has adopted, is scissors and paste, directed by a presumably judicious selection-must be tested, as it seems to us, by the answers which it gives, or attempts to give, to these questions. As regards the message, the reader should turn to the first chapter of the second volume. There he will find that Goethe discerned that Carlyle had an originating principle of conviction that is, he could develop the force that lay in him unassisted by other men. At the age of thirty-three he became dyspepsia, with intellectual temptations, with obstruction, from his fellow - mortals." If so, he must have begun miraculously early, and an infancy of portentous significance fitly preceded his message. But, strange to say, Mr Froude's case is, that the message never got itself fairly delivered at all. It related to Carlyle's religion; and when the editor comes to explain it, he has to fall back (vol. ii. p. 2) on private conversations with himself and two unfinished and unpublished fragments which Carlyle threw away as inadequately expressing his thoughts, and apparently only saved from destruction because Mr Froude assured him that he (Froude) saw a meaning in them. No doubt, as Goethe says, and as Carlyle was given to repeating, the highest is inexpressible. But it does not follow that the inexpressible is necessarily the highest. Unless the hero or his biographer can present us with some clear and definite idea upon this subject, we must irreverently con a passage which we find in 'Reminiscences,' vol. ii. p. 204: "And what is it good for? Fools, get a true insight and belief of your own as to the matter; that is the way to get your belief into me: and it is the only way." Reading this first chapter of the second volume, which contains the result of the editor's conversation and the unpublished fragments, the gist of Carlyle's religious teaching is as follows. He was a Calvinist without the theology. He had been bred in a Calvinistic home, and was by nature firmly and ardently religious. His conviction was intense as to the broad fact of the divine government of the universe, and as to the divine origin of a moral law-the right reading of which was essential to human welfare, the revelation of which lay through experienced fact, -and generally as to the spiritual truth of religion. He flung away the whole of miracle and the supernatural; it is as certain as mathematics, he said, that no such thing ever has been or can be! The natural was far more truly wonderful than the supernatural, and all his torical religions were bona fide human efforts to explain human duty. On the other hand, he rejected scepticism as to right and wrong, and as to man's responsibility to his Maker. He rejected also the materialistic theory of things-that intellect is a phenomenon of matter, that conscience is the growth of social convenience: he would have nothing to say to utilitarian ethics. It is unnecessary to pursue this into further detail. It is the Christian religion minus its theology, miracles, and eschatology. Carlyle said that the fragments contained his real conviction, which lay at the bottom of all his thoughts about man and man's doings in the world-a truth which he was specially sent to insist upon. Yet, according to the biographer, he could never get his convictions completely expressed. Their governing idea appears to be that like as man's conceptions of the physical universe were shown by Galileo to be illusions, so his spiritual conceptions may be shown to be identical in kind-viz., errors of the inner instead of the outer eyesight. The divine remains unchanged, the human conceptions of it alter as circumstances and knowledge vary. There does not seem to be at the present day any character of deep originality about this. Goethe's religion was very much the same. That Carlyle held his opinions with a fervour which may be described as intense, that he enforced them with the hard striking which was characteristic of his family, that relatively to his surroundings and education and the spirit of his time they were a novelty, may be quite true. He first taught his countrymen to appreciate Goethe, and spread the influence of German literature. Perhaps we are indebted to his influence that the wide chasm which separates freethinkers from orthodox believers on the Continent is not nearly so conspicuous at home. Revelation through experienced fact, and not through miracle; the moral teaching rather than the dogmas of Christianity; the uniform recognition of the Divine in nature, rather than belief founded on the supernatural,— are far healthier characteristics of free thought than the scornful rejection, root and branch, of an ancient religion and its influence, which is so widely recommended abroad, but only occasionally advocated at home. If Carlyle gave the decisive impulse to this development of English thought, the manner in which he did so, and the proof of it, should be rescued from oblivion by his biographer. Secularism may have temporarily flourished under some of our leading thinkers; it had no quarter from Carlyle, and both his posthumous works and Miss Caroline Fox's Reminiscences show that Mill rejected the dogmatic unbelief of his father, and would gladly have imbibed from Carlyle some definite conviction, but could never get further than acquiescence in the probability of divine law and government. Even in Mr Froude's "Lights and Shadows," with which he closes his account of Carlyle's training, there is the same indefiniteness as to Carlyle's work and purpose and mission. The statement that "he was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning" conveys no more meaning than the editor's assurance that in Carlyle "the sense of having a mission was the growth of the actual presence in him of the necessary powers. Certain associations, certain aspects of human life and duty, had forced themselves upon him as truths of immeasurable consequence which the world was forgetting. He was a vates, a seer. He perceived things which others did not see, and which it was his business to force them to see. He regarded himself as being charged actually and really with a message which he was to deliver to mankind, and like other prophets, he was straitened till his work was accomplished," &c., &c., ad infini tum. But why in the name of all that is wonderful does not the editor "condescend to particulars," and tell us in few words what it was that Carlyle was seeing all this time, and what are these truths of immeasurable consequence? In the preface (p. xv.) there is a passage as follows: that Carlyle "has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution." If this was the real purport of the message, the subject ought to receive further and better elucidation at the hands of the biographer than he has yet given to it. If Carlyle's reputation depends upon the truth of this prophecy being tested by time, it must rise on the ruins of his country, and a future generation will be too much absorbed in their own affairs to care much for the fame of the prophet. But if Mr Froude has not himself given us the means of judging of Carlyle's "work in the world," as he frequently calls it, and has left the reader to judge of it for himself mainly from tradition and the knowledge of his books, he has nevertheless given us the materials for judging Carlyle's character in the process of development, and the effect produced upon his earlier contemporaries by his genius before it was recognised by the public at large. The world in the later years of his life saw and felt his genius, but they were imperfectly acquainted with his character. In the earlier years his friends were witnesses of both, as are the readers of his works and reminiscences. The effect of this biography is very much to restore and justify the earlier opinion of his friends and acquaintances, which, so far as we can collect it, appears to have been more balanced than the extravagant eulogy of his later admirers, or the angry detraction provoked by his 'Reminiscences.' Mr Froude fairly claims for him a character (preface, p. viii.) of " unblemished integrity, purity, loftiness of purpose, and inflexible resolution to do right, as of a man living consciously under his Maker's eye." But he draws at the same time a picture of failings and infirmities, both of temper and disposition, which though somewhat toned down from the high colouring imparted by remorse and irritability to his 'Reminiscences,' has nevertheless some striking tints. The eye is not fatigued by the contemplation of a dead level of virtue, corresponding to some inspired message. There are some redeeming vices which stand out in bold relief, attract one by their piquancy, and to any reader with a didactic turn of mind, and an eye to a literary career, may give occasion for many salutary warnings. As regards the early development of Carlyle's talents and character, and their effect upon his early contemporaries, the light which this book throws upon these points would appear to be as follows. There do not seem to have been any precocious displays of genius, nor was any experiment" made in his education, of the kind from which John Stuart Mill suffered all his life. Notwithstanding the res angusta domi, it was decided that Tom should go to Edinburgh University, where, however, he learned little. In Latin and the classical field generally he was, as he says himself, "truly as nothing." Quite late in life he alludes to "omnibi,' with nothing in the context to show (as must, however, have been the case) that it was a joke. It was not much better with philosophy; in mathematics he made real progress, but carried off no prizes. He displayed amongst his friends superior judgment, an abhorrence of all affectation, at least in others, a power of effective speech, far too sarcastic for so young a man; and all foretold future greatness to him of one kind or another. The young lady (Margaret Gordon, the original of Blumine in 'Sartor Resartus'), who rejected his hand, wrote to him at the age of twenty-three, "Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved! Remove the awful distance between you and ordinary men by kind and gentle manners." At twenty-six he transacted his conversion (p. 101), as our author puts it; "authentically took the Devil by the nose," as he put it himself; in other words, "began to achieve the conviction, positive and negative, by which the whole of his later life was governed." Speculation was the business in hand, contemplating man's place in the infinities. Schoolmastering, lecturing, the law, classical literature, were all thrown aside "light, if light there was, could be looked for only in the writers of his own era" (p. 130). There was, perhaps, no one of his age (twenty-nine) in Scotland who knew so much or had seen so little. He had read enormously-history, poetry, philosophy; the whole range of modern literature French, German, and English-was more familiar to him, perhaps, than to any man living of his own age (p. 216). His memory was so vigorous and retentive that in his reminiscences forty years. after the fact it plays no involunary freaks. Scenes and persons remain as if photographed, precisely as they are to be found in his contemporaries' letters. "Nothing is changed. The images stand as they were first printed; the judgments are unmodified, and are often repeated in the same words." Goethe early noticed, and applauded his powers. On receipt of his translation of Wilhelm Meister,' Goethe expressed his interest in the work and its author, which deepened into regard and admiration when the 'Life of Schiller' reached his hands. His letter in answer to a gift of the latter work delighted Carlyle, as well as an inquiry ad dressed to him by Goethe as to the authorship, which Carlyle could claim for himself, of a certain article upon German literature. Further, Goethe used the expression, so much relied on by Mr Froude (p. 431) in vindicating his hero's title to originality, that Carlyle was resting on an original foundation, and was so happily constituted that he could develop out of himself the requirements of what was good and beautiful-out of himself, not out of contact with others. Carlyle was long before he established any position with his publishers. The German Literature,' which attracted the admiration of Goethe, could not find a publisher who would so much as look at it. The 'Teufelsdröckh' was sent back from London, having created nothing but astonished dislike. Great as were his gifts and powers, they were unmarketable. But nevertheless literary men, prophets with messages, must live. He taught with authority, but every element was absent from his works which would command popularity. Desperate as were the straits to which Carlyle's finances were reduced, he found the means of contributing largely to his brother John's education. His devotion to his blood relations was evidently deep and lasting. Jeffrey regarded him as under the influence (p. 126) of a curious but most reprehensible vanity, which would not and could not land him anywhere but in poverty and disappointment, while all the time the world was ready and eager to open its arms and lavish its liberality upon him if he would but consent to walk in its ways and be like other men. He "had a book in him which would cause ears to tingle "-in fact, 'Sartor Resartus' was growing in his mind, based upon the ideas of Goethe and Kant. The clothes philosophy gave him the form of his new book. His own history, inward and outward, furnished substance. The idea was that certain institutions, religious creeds, were only the clothes in which human creatures covered their nakedness, and enabled men to live in harmony and decency; but they changed with the times, grew old, varied with the habits of life, and were the outward indications for the time being of the inward and spiritual nature. The impulse which eventually sent him out into the world, away from Craigenputtock, is expressed in these scornful sentences (p. 144) :— "What are your Whigs and Lord Advocates and Lord Chancellors, and the whole host of unspeakably gabbling parliamenteers and pulpiteers and pamphleteers, if a man suspect that there is fire enough in his belly to burn up the entire creation of such? These all build on mechanism; one spark of dynamism, of inspiration, were it the poorest soul, is stronger than them all." Yet the unfortunate Sartor Resartus,' with all its dynamism and inspiration, could not find a publisher (p. 347), and was eventually cut to pieces, and produced limb by limb in Fraser's Magazine.' No one (p. 363) could tell what to make of it. The writer was considered a literary maniac, and the unlucky editor was dreading the ruin of his magazine-one of his oldest subscribers threatening (p. 430) that if there was any more of that d-d stuff he would, &c. &c. From that time forward (p. 370) all editors gave him the cold shoulder till the appearance of his French Revolution.' Mill always boasted that one of the three chief successes of his life had been that he secured a hearing for this work. The world, till that book appeared, settled down into the view taken |