lutely destitute, for the most part, of the | Revolution," as far as the universality of its

application goes, would have been more incomplete,-would, indeed, have been hopelessly and dangerously incomplete,-without the succor of the book which had so strange a preliminary experience before it could get itself published to the world. After all, the too celebrated subscriber to "Fraser" had his excuses. If a trained critic like Jeffrey could go so far wrong, what might be expected of a layman? To the average English ear of 1830, "Sartor Resartus" had the double defect of talking in a language not understood of the people about things of which the people knew nothing. The "French Revolution" was, as a subject, at least free from the latter drawback. If the average Briton knew very little about its details, the fact of it and the importance of it were still fresh in his memory. He had not ceased " to plume

peculiar charm and the peculiar stimulating power for which its author will be remembered among English men of letters. The translations and the "Schiller" thus give us the two currents, the Saône and Rhone, of Mr. Carlyle's future literary river. In all the rest of his work we see how their united force waters the vineyards, supplies the great cities, and serves as central artery to the mighty province of his literary domain. In these comparatively early works, not merely the style, but also the matter, is noteworthy. From the nature of it, it could contain little or nothing of its author's own thought. It could only indicate that thought more or less indirectly and suggestively. The first two independent works of his genius completed the presentation. If we had nothing of Mr. Carlyle's but the "Sartor Resartus" and the "French Revolution," we should lack a great deal of literary de- | himself because we beat the Corsican," or

to believe-in which, indeed, he was not far wrong-that it was the turning-point of the history of Europe. There was, therefore, at least, common ground between him and his author. His interest and dim general acquaintance with the subject supplied the term wanting in the case of "Sartor Resartus," and while the United States, to their eternal honor, had welcomed the latter book long before it could venture to make its appearance in volume form in England, the "French Revolution" made its mark from the day of publication, forced itself onward against all opposition, and for nearly half a century has held, and is never likely to lose, the position of the locus classicus, in which all men of English birth and speech shall seek their knowledge of that tremendous fact. That it is worthy of the position which, in England at least, is generally assigned it, of the best of its author's works, judged from all points of view, I have no doubt. It is not so marvelous a monument of insight as the "Cromwell." Detached passages from the " Essays," from the "Latter-day Pamphlets," and from other pieces excel it in originality of humor, and quaint, fantastic perversion, and topsy-turvification. "The Life of Sterling" is even more admirable as a work of art. The "Frederick" is a more surprising evidence of untiring labor and of the comprehensiveness of grasp which is afraid of no mass of details, and which knows how to master them all.

light. We should not, perhaps, lack much literary instruction. The one still remains, on the whole, the most perfect presentment of his humoristic criticism; the other is, unquestionably, the best presentment of his remarkable combination of minute historical research with the widest and most comprehensible historical view. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that no book of the nineteenth century has equaled "Sartor Resartus" in the peculiar effect which it has had on the minds of young readers. The comparison of the chemical mixture which remains liquid as long as it be undisturbed, but shoots into crystallizations directly after the slightest shock is administered to it, is a hackneyed one; but nothing so aptly expresses this effect. Like all Mr. Carlyle's works, "Sartor Resartus" is remarkably barren in purely practical admonition. What he has to teach is, it has been well said, "an attitude, not a gospel"; and it is the attitude of "Sartor Resartus" which hundreds and thousands of English-speaking and English-reading youths during the last half-century have felt constrained, much to their souls' health, to adopt. To blench at no paradox, to accept no convention, to pierce below the surface at whatever cost apparently of safe and comfortable foot-hold, to get rid of belief in believing and assumption of knowing, these are the lessons taught in this earliest book, as it may perhaps be allowably taken to be, of the master's, and no others will be learnt from the most attentive student of his later lucubrations. Yet the But if these separate good gifts are more lesson, incomplete even with the "French | eminently present in other works, the "French Revolution" exhibits them in the | characteristic is clumsiness consequent upon

most harmonious combination. It is the most practically serviceable in the education of the citizen and the man of letters, and above all, it is the first sprightly running of its author's mind in the direction of practical and historical application of an original, if partial and one-sided, view of human life and human affairs. M. Taine's memorable complaint of the extravagant titles of the chapters, of the way in which the events are enveloped in a cloudy haze of declamation, will always remain a most interesting proof of the incompatibility of certain eyes to adjust themselves to certain telescopes. To the French critic, the events of which he had, as he thought, a nicely coördinated idea, were thrown into "pi" by Mr. Carlyle. To most Englishmen, even if they have taken the trouble to ascertain the facts by careful reference to authorities the most indisputable and the most diverse, the mysterious and almost incredible events of the French Revolution range themselves into a possible and intelligible whole in Mr. Carlyle's account, and in that account almost only. Such a view does not exclude difference of political opinion; it does not exclude the admission that in some cases the writer may have failed to take the true view. It simply amounts to an assertion that, in this famous book, for almost the first time since Tacitus, history had ceased to be a matter of words and names, of dates and figures. Between the "Annals" and the "French Revolution," the dramatic truth of history had for the most part been lost sight of; in the latter book it emerged into full recognition. That we have since suffered many

length. The style of Carlyle is never clumsy, and it is rarely long. The truth is that, in the formative period of his studies, Mr. Carlyle had evidently three different models before his eyes. There was the English style of the seventeenth century, before Dryden had coördinated it into harmony,-а style loose, unequal, not to be depended upon, but unmatched in striking appropriateness when it happened to be appropriate. There was, secondly, the French style of the memoirs and casual writings of the eighteenth century, -a style unequaled in detached felicities, but cast generally in a mold which requires to be strangely altered before it can give any good result in this speech of ours. There was, thirdly, the German determination to say what had to be said quite irrespective of any preëstablished harmony between the conventional forms of speech and the meaning which had to be conveyed by that speech. Pepys, Voltaire, Richter, suggest themselves, turn by turn, as the antitypes of the singular hybrid language in which our author got his thoughts dressed and ready for the inspection of mankind. But the general result was wholly felicitous. Let us go for a negative definition of style to the writer who of all writers in our own day is most antipodean to Mr. Carlyle, save that both were humorists. The writer, says Théophile Gautier, to whom an idea presents itself which he cannot clothe in words, is not écrivain has no style. To escape a negative condemnation may be thought to be a justification of the imperfect kind, yet there are few authors who are justified in this way so completely as the author of the "French Revolu

things from the dramatic historian matters ❘tion" and "Sartor Resartus." He can say

little; the fact remains that the "French Revolution," after nearly a century of very praiseworthy philosophy of history, made the dry bones of the science live and move, and once more have an active being.

Any elaborate inquiry into that most interesting of subjects to the purely literary critic, the style of Carlyle, would be here out of place; yet, perhaps, a few words as from ❘ one who has considered that matter with such light as he has had may be given. The vague popular notion that this style consists in a mere Germanizing, and especially Richterizing, of English may be dismissed at once. For, in the first place, the first evil characteristic of a purely German style, as it appears to the impartial considerer of German literature in the original, from Wolfram von Eschenbach to Heine, is absent. That

what he pleases, even though the saying require an altogether Herculean task of rearranging the arrangements of his mothertongue. He is never obscure by reason of his style merely; he never needs to have recourse to the clumsy elongations of the sentence in which inorganic talent takes refuge in all languages, and especially in German. Soon, too, after the time which we are now considering, a fresh and remarkable testimony to his varied capacities and excellencies was published. This was the collection of essays or miscellanies which he had contributed to various reviews or magazines during his period of probation. This collection (unlike the "Sartor," first reprinted in America) has since been augmented by some remarkable works, some of which I may have occasion to comment upon later. It did not, per

a

who is not frightened by the poet's moral obliquities, and who, at the same time, has no national, or pseudo-national, temptation to speak unadvisedly with his lips. In the same context comes the equally remarkable essay on Voltaire. It has made French critics very angry; it has made English critics, who are by no means Voltaireans, confess that there is a good deal more to be said. But is there anywhere a more vivid account of the whole of that remarkable phenomenon called François Marie Arouet? Is there to be found in literature a better introduction to Voltaire, which the intelligent reader may, in the course of his reading, correct, but which will put him in case to undertake that reading with a chance of comprehension, and not a certainty of miscomprehension? The third volume brings us to that admirable paper on the "Nibelungen Lied," which it is not wonderful that the editor of the "Edinburgh Review" gently chid the author for not offering to him. I speak of this with all modesty, but with some tolerable knowledge of early German literature, and with knowledge which perhaps also will pass muster of the earlier and more voluminous French or Franco-German literature of the chansons de gestes. But I do not know that to this day, after forty years' ceaseless disinterment and careful examination of early mediæval literature, any paper has appeared equal to this of the "Nibelungen Lied," in the power of putting merely English readers in a position to appreciate the fertile fancies-now graceful now fierce, now southern now northern-of their ancestors a thousand years ago. The following essay on "German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” deals with far baser matter, but it has the same power of initiating the reader into the spirit of the time; while, in so far as it deals with Reynard the Fox, it is one of the best comments ever made on one of the most delightful things in literature. It is a pity indeed that the critic's knowledge of the real original, as far as we have it in the French of the thirteenth century, was imperfect, but that is only an unimportant detail. The essay of the fourth volume-I name only those which give salient illustrations of the author's idiosyncrasy, where all are admirable-is the famous one on Boswell's "Johnson," where perhaps the force of fellow-feeling is better illustrated than anywhere else, and which, in contrast with

haps, show the differentia of a new writer so fully as the two more independent works which have just been commented upon. But as "Sartor Resartus" and the "French Revolution" remain the best examples of Mr. Carlyle's original faculty, so the "Essays," which were republished in 1839, remain the best example of his faculty of adaptation, the critical faculty, more especially, and are, perhaps, the best existing proof of his purely literary power. They contain also, beyond all doubt, the best examples of his limitations. The last test of the critic is, doubtless, the question, How does he bear himself toward those things or persons with whom he happens to disagree? Carlyle cannot wholly stand this test, and, in so far, he is an imperfect critic. Yet how many imperfect critics are there who achieve such a result as he has achieved? The list of his critical essays is, perhaps, the most varied that any author of his standing has to show; and the letters so often referred to which passed between him and Macvey Napier, show that even the completed and published results do not exhibit fully the range of his talent. He began by devoting himself to that German literature which was his first love and his last, and of which, like most men with their first loves, he was not, perhaps, an altogether wise judge. But the second volume, as ordinarily printed, of his "Essays," shows at once the enlargement of circle which he was seldom afterward to lose. The essay on Burns is, in many ways, a test essay. Burns is, as a rule, to the Englishman a stumbling-block, and to the Scotchman foolishness,-not in the sense of the original quotation, but because he deems himself bound to indulge in inconsiderate and indefensible laudation. The essay of which we are speaking did not say the last word about Burns, because Mr. Carlyle always had, and could not but have, a certain incapacity to take poetry merely on poetical grounds, and to decide whether it was or was not bad or good on those grounds. One of his proposed essays on "French Poetry in 1841" would probably have been -had it seen the light-a memorable study of the sorrowful chances which wait on those who undertake uncongenial tasks; yet by sheer force of solid sense and human sympathy he has said better things about Burns than have ever been said before or since, and better than are ever likely to be said, until some one takes up the task to whom the dialect is no stumbling-block, | Macaulay's delightful but flashy paper, re

do away with the ignorant and foolish prej | at any rate, for a time-to be propitiated by

the furious denunciations of game-preserving, of the "business of owning land," of this and that and the other, which occurred here and there in the midst of demonstrations of the Tory theory of government. But all this time his reputation, and, so to speak, his popularity, public and private, grew steadily, and a rich harvest of stories from all sources will reward the biographer who sets himself patiently and humbly to Boswellize. His miscellaneous employments gave way early in the fifties to the project of writing a life of Frederick the Great, which was undertaken on the same plan of careful documentary investigation and actual inspection of places as the "Cromwell." There is no doubt that the labor involved was immense, and, as the author was now advancing in years, it may well be that at times it was felt to be a burden.

udice against his style and his ideas which still existed to no small extent. By 1840, however, he had thoroughly made his mark in England, and was fast becoming the center of pilgrimages, in the body or in the spirit, such as those he had himself made to Goethe and to Coleridge ten years before. Of his attitude in relation to the former there is no need to speak, but it has often been suspected that the "Life of Sterling" does not tell the whole story of the relation to Coleridge, or, rather, that it tells it in an indirect way, and that some such process of enchantment and of disenchantment befell the biographer as that which, by hypothesis chiefly, he asserts of his subject. But it is not difficult to see that the Coleridgean indifference to conduct must have been wholly horrible to Mr. Carlyle, and that the Coleridgean moonshine-not being his own variety of that fascinating kind of light-was scarcely less horrible. By the time, however, at which we have now arrived, he was master, not pupil, and was rapidly becoming recognized as such by others than his own familiars. The years from 1839 to 1845 were chiefly occupied with the composition of the "Cromwell," a task upon which he bestowed, perhaps, more elaborate pains, as well as more genius, than any previous historian. Circumstances were more favorable than they had been in the case of the "French Revolution," and he was able to add to the most careful collation of documentary evidence, actual visits to the places mentioned-visits resulting in a hardly matched vividness of description. He had also for some time begun to interest himself not a little in actual politics, though in a most curiously original way. "Past and Present" is at once a monument of the keen practical spirit of the man and of what may be called his literary flair, or scent. Ecclesiological mediævalism | was at its very height, and in itself Mr. Carlyle hated it, or regarded it with a partly unutterable sense of sarcastic astonishment. Yet he managed, out of a book published to interest readers who read in this spirit, to make something quite different, to expound his own views, preach his own gospel, and illustrate his own fancies. These views and fancies, as well as those before expounded in the tract on "Chartism," and those subsequently developed in "Latterday Pamphlets," and elsewhere, were anything but palatable to his Radical friends, while the opposite party was hardly likely- | one, remarkable. One-" Heroes and Hero

Fortunately or unfortunately, this is not the place for a critical examination in detail of Mr. Carlyle's work, and only a very general summary can be attempted of what he did in this, the second and longest period of his career. The success of the "French Revolution" had placed him, not indeed, beyond the reach of carping criticism, but in the rank of an admitted master of English prose. In the same year as the collected essays, was published-as has been just remarked-the tractate on "Chartism," which has sometimes been combined with them, and has sometimes made its appearance independently. It was its author's first direct and independent attempt to meddle with English politics of the actual kind, and its merits and defects were very much what might have been anticipated by a clear-sighted critic. The "Condition-ofEngland" question was treated in altogether too a priori a fashion for the treatment to commend itself to merely practical politicians, who set before themselves the simple question, How is the Queen's government to be carried on? as the deciding test of all suggestions. Judged even from a less limited stand-point, it was, perhaps, wanting in practicality, inasmuch as the writer, after the wont of study-politicians, does not by any means grasp the whole of his subject; yet it was in principle sound and healthy, as Mr. Carlyle's work almost always has been, and it may be doubted whether, in forty years, it has grown wholly obsolete The two works which were produced in the next year-1840-were, in more senses than