Thomas Carlyle Part 5

In this mood, the book was written off in the first seven weeks of 1843, a _tour de force_ comparable to Johnson's writing of _Ra.s.selas_.

Published in April, it at once made a mark by the opposition as well as by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work--of its excellences, which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold--belongs to a review of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it was remarkable in three ways. _First_, the object of its main attack, _laissez faire_, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts owed some of their suggestions to _Past and Present_. Carlyle always speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths that Lord Ashley was the greatest man alive: he was the only man that Carlyle praised in his book. I daresay he knew I was overhearing him."

But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of human misery became more p.r.o.nounced. About the date of the conception of this book we find in the Journal:--

Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms? ... Live to make others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can.

But at bottom that is not the aim of my life ... it is mere hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done nowadays.... Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and set up.

_Past and Present_, in the _second_ place, is notable as the only considerable consecutive book--unless we also except the _Life of Sterling_,--which the author wrote without the accompaniment of wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. _Thirdly_, though marking a stage in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of _Chartism_ and _Hero-Wors.h.i.+p_, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the _Westminster_, to which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on "Oliver Cromwell."

While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account of his health, and gave the review in charge to an Aberdonian called Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message that _he_ had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. aside, he set about constructing on its basis a History of the Civil War.

Numerous visits and tours during the following three years, though bringing him into contact with new and interesting personalities, were mainly determined by the resolve to make himself acquainted with the localities of the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to give colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern English prose.

In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and the same year, after a brief yachting trip to Belgium--in the notes on which the old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's verse--he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathedral, where Oliver two centuries before had called out to the recalcitrant Anglican in the pulpit, "Cease your fooling and come down." In July 1843 Carlyle made a trip to South Wales; to visit first a worthy devotee called Redwood, and then Bishop Thirlwall near Carmarthen. "A right solid simple-hearted robust man, very strangely swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of one of our most cla.s.sic historians.

On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of Worcester. Pa.s.sing his wife at Liverpool, where she was a guest of her uncle, and leaving her to return to London and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon from Llanheris to Beddgelert with his brother John. He next proceeded to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then to Dunbar, which he contrived to visit on the 3rd of September, an anniversary revived in his pictured page with a glow and force to match which we have to revert to Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the _Revenge_. From Dunbar he returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his always admired and admiring friend Erskine of Linlathen, a Scotch broad churchman of the type of F.D. Maurice and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided to abandon the design of a History, and to make his book a Biography of Cromwell, interlacing with it the main features and events of the Commonwealth. The difficulties even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his groans at every stage in its progress were "louder and more loud," _e.g._ "My progress in _Cromwell_ is frightful." "A thousand times I regretted that this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever before tried," and at the close, "_Cromwell_ I must have written in 1844, but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the most original historian of his time. Macaulay was his rival, but in different paths of the same field. About this time Mr. Froude became his pupil, and has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his master's influence over the Oxford of those days, which would be only spoilt by selections. Oxford, like Athens, ever longing after something new, patronised the Chelsea prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted cynicism. But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with the strong personality of each, always loyal; and the capacity inborn in both, the power to breathe life into dry records and dead stones, had at least an added impulse from their master.

The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of the essay on _Dr. Francia,_ and by the death of John Sterling,--loved with the love of David for Jonathan--outside his own family losses, the greatest wrench in Carlyle's life. Sterling's published writings are as inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains of Arthur Hallam; but in friends.h.i.+ps, especially unequal friends.h.i.+ps, personal fascination counts for more than half, and all are agreed as to the charm in both instances of the inspiring companions.h.i.+ps. Archdeacon Hare having given a somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that, written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_.

These years are marked by a series of acts of un.o.btrusive benevolence, the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned.

Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth, frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he was ungenerous in judging. His a.s.sistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the _Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's _Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm, that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade.

[Footnote: These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the working men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes: "We want more knowledge about the Lancas.h.i.+re operatives; their miseries and gains, virtues and vices. Winnow what you have to say, and give us wheat free from chaff. Then the rich captains of workers will he willing to listen to you. Brevity and sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject its proper proportionate s.p.a.ce; and be exact without caring to round off the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are prosaic, earnest, practical, not singing times."]

Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having one of the most powerful intellects and by far the greatest command of language among his contemporaries, was beginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown in being beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opinion made his acquaintance; he was a frequent guest of the genial Maecenas, an admirer of genius though no mere wors.h.i.+pper of success, R. Monckton Milnes; meeting Hallam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and afterwards visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorks.h.i.+re. The future Lord Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters and society, the one of whom he spoke with the most unvarying regard. Carlyle corresponded with Peel, whom he set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of perfect trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom he miraculously credits with holding at heart views much like his own. At a somewhat later date, in the circle of his friends, bound to him by various degrees of intimacy, History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote, and Froude; Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough; Social Romance by Kingsley; Biography by James Spedding and John Forster; and Criticism by John Ruskin. His link to the last named was, however, their common distrust of political economy, as shown in _Unto This Last_, rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a conversationalist more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a rival rather than a companion; but his prejudiced view of physical science was forgotten in his personal affection for Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was from the publication of _Cromwell_ till near his death increasingly sought after by the aristocracy, several members of which invited him to their country seats, and bestowed on him all acceptable favours. In this cla.s.s he came to find other qualities than those referred to in the _Sartor_ inscription, and other aims than that of "preserving their game,"--the ambition to hold the helm of the State in stormy weather, and to play their part among the captains of industry. In the _Reminiscences_ the aristocracy are deliberately voted to be "for continual grace of bearing and of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery stoicism, actually yet the best of English cla.s.ses." There can be no doubt that his intercourse with this cla.s.s, as with men of affairs and letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border moors.

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.

The life of a great capital may be the crown of education, but there is a danger in homage that comes late and then without reserve. Give me neither poverty nor riches, applies to praise as well as to wealth; and the sudden transition from comparative neglect to

honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

is a moral trial pa.s.sing the strength of all but a few of the "irritable race" of writers. The deference paid to Carlyle made him yet more intolerant of contradiction, and fostered his selfishness, in one instance with the disastrous result of clouding a whole decade of his domestic life. In February 1839 he speaks of dining--"an eight-o'clock dinner which ruined me for a week"--with "a certain Baring," at whose table in Bath House he again met Bunsen, and was introduced to Lord Mahon. This was the beginning of what, after the death of Sterling, grew into the most intimate friends.h.i.+p of his life. Baring, son of Lord Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and successor to the t.i.tle on his father's death in 1848, was a man of sterling worth and sound sense, who entered into many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose grace, wit, refinement, and decision of character had made her the acknowledged leader of society. Lady Harriet, by the exercise of some overpowering though purely intellectual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern Diogenes, our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years, whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her beck from town to country, from castle to cot; from Addis...o...b.., her husband's villa in Surrey, to the Grange, her father-in-law's seat in Hamps.h.i.+re; from Loch Luichart and Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the Palais Eoyal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction to the Journal is substantially as follows: Lady Harriet Baring or Ashburton was the centre of a planetary system in which every distinguished public man of genuine worth then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among them, and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself taking some part in public affairs, and saw the advantage of this stepping-stone to enable him to do something more for the world, as Byron said, than write books for it. But the idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient to have ever influenced his conduct. It is more correct to say that he was flattered by a sympathy not too thorough to be tame, pleased by adulation never gross, charmed by the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally fascinated by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne Row is no matter of surprise. Pride and affection together had made her bear with all her husband's humours, and share with him all the toils of the struggle from obscurity. He had emerged, and she was still half content to be systematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on which he was building a fame she had some claim to share. But her fiery spirit was not yet tamed into submitting to be sacrificed to an animate rival, or pa.s.sively permitting the usurpation of companions.h.i.+p grudged to herself by another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of despising. Lady Harriet's superiority in _finesse_ and geniality, as well as advantages of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently un.o.bservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's "Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen G.o.ddess," while Mrs.

Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in her turn nicknamed "Agrippina."

In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at Addis...o...b.. in worse than her usual health, she returned to Chelsea with "her mind all churned to froth," and opened it to her husband with such plainness that "there was a violent scene": she left the house in a mood like that of the first Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the Paulets at Seaforth near Liverpool, uncertain whether or not she would return. There were only two persons from whom it seemed natural for her at such a crisis to ask advice; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester lady, auth.o.r.ess of a well-known novel, _The Half-Sisters_, from the beginning of their acquaintance in 1841 till the close in 1866 her most intimate a.s.sociate and chosen confidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets.

[Footnote: Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated her genuine worth.]

The other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic moralist Joseph Mazzini. To him she wrote twice--once apparently before leaving London, and again from Seaforth. His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and yet rigidly insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed to avert the threatened catastrophe; but there are sentences which show how bitter the complaints must have been.

It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you, and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme.

Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the suns.h.i.+ne that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do not think a single moment that the one or the other have anything to do with the _end_ of the journey.

Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness prevail not, may for ever be your authentic t.i.tle." Another, enclosing the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death, softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time.

But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May 1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so much debate. It is like a page from _Oth.e.l.lo_ reversed. A few sentences condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the d.u.c.h.ess de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!"

I gin to think I've sold myself For very little cas."

"To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder."

"Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone--

O waly, waly, love is bonnie, A little while when it is new;"

quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic.

The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas, unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wis.h.i.+ng yourself at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and tranquil(!!!)."

In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real ground for offence in allowing both the Carlyles, on their way north with her, to take a seat in an ordinary railway carriage, beside her maid, while she herself travelled in a special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs.

Carlyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifes.h.i.+re, and afterwards refused to accompany her ladys.h.i.+p on the way back. This resulted in another quarrel with her husband, who had issued the command from Luichart--but it was their last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the 4th of the following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like woman I had ever known or seen, by nature and by culture _facile princeps_ she, I think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." This brought to a close an episode in which there were faults on both sides, gravely punished: the incidents of its course and the manner in which they were received show, among other things, that railing at the name of "Happiness" does little or nothing to reconcile people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord Ashburton married again--a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who became the attached friend of the Carlyles, and remained on terms of unruffled intimacy with both till the end: she survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a legacy of 2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. _Sic transiit._

From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty years to retrace the main steps of the great author's career. Much of the interval was devoted to innumerable visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in paying his annual devotions to Annandale,--calls on his time which kept him rus.h.i.+ng from place to place like a comet. Two facts are notable about those expeditions: they rarely seemed to give him much pleasure, even at Scotsbrig he complained of sleepless nights and farm noises; and he was hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She too was constantly running north to her own kindred in Liverpool or Scotland, but their paths did not run parallel, they almost always intersected, so that when the one was on the way north the other was homeward bound, to look out alone on "a horizon of zero." Only a few of these visits are worth recording as of general interest. Most of them were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846, Margaret Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, and recorded her impression of the master as "in a very sweet humour, full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing," adding that she was "carried away by the rich flow of his discourse"; and that "the hearty n.o.ble earnestness of his personal bearing brought back the charm of his writing before she wearied of it." A later visitor, Miss Martineau, his old helper in days of struggle, was now thus esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness, a mind reduced to these three elements--imbecility, dogmatism, and unlimited hope. I never in my life was more heartily bored with any creature!" In 1847 there followed the last English glimpse of Jeffrey and the last of Dr. Chalmers, who was full of enthusiasm about _Cromwell_; then a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with the former he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics described as "shallow, totally worthless to me," the latter he liked, recognising in him a culture and delicacy rare with so much strength of will and independence of thought.

Later came a second visit from Emerson, then on a lecturing tour to England, gathering impressions revived in his _English Traits_. "His doctrines are too airy and thin," wrote Carlyle, "for the solid practical heads of the Lancas.h.i.+re region. We had immense talkings with him here, but found that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon. He is a pure-minded man, but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had antic.i.p.ated." They had an interesting walk to Stonehenge together, and Carlyle attended one of his friend's lectures, but with modified approval, finding this serene "spiritual son" of his own rather "gone into philanthropy and moons.h.i.+ne." Emerson's notes of this date, on the other hand, mark his emanc.i.p.ation from mere disciples.h.i.+p. "Carlyle had all the kleinstdtlicher traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent.... In him, as in Byron, one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter.... There is more character than intellect in every sentence, therein strangely resembling Samuel Johnson." The same year Carlyle perpetrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats:--

The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of h.e.l.l";

and in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference to Macaulay's _History_:--

The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already, within perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred editions could not add any value, there being no depth of sense in it at all, and a very great quant.i.ty of rhetorical wind.

Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at Bath, he appreciated, being "much taken with the gigantesque, explosive but essentially chivalrous and almost heroic old man." He was now at ease about the sale of his books, having, _inter alia_, received 600 for a new edition of the _French Revolution_ and the _Miscellanies_. His journal is full of plans for a new work on Democracy, Organisation of Labour, and Education, and his letters of the period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely devoted to politics.

[Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson, 1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor, and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.]

In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does not mince his words.

Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney ... the big beggar-man who had 15,000 a year, and, _proh pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the pillory.

At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitch.e.l.l and Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have liked, but he told Mitch.e.l.l that he would probably be hanged, and said during a drive about some flouris.h.i.+ng and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah!

Duffy, there you see the hoof of the b.l.o.o.d.y Saxon."

[Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence,"

now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as n.i.g.g.e.rs!'--perhaps Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be n.i.g.g.e.rs!"]

He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th, 1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or "common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days there pa.s.sing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar, where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after- breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that the remedy for Ireland was not "emanc.i.p.ation" or "liberty," but to "cease following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M.

on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces.

But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only for self-government but for what is commonly called const.i.tutional government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme,"

he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for their good.

Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes, indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty horse-whip over that back of yours."

And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here would have to eat itself and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by the rest of our Empire standing afoot." These pa.s.sages are written in the spirit which inspired his paper on "The n.i.g.g.e.r Question" and the aggressive series of a.s.saults to which it belongs, on what he regarded as the most prominent quackeries, shams, and pretence philanthropies of the day. His own account of the reception of this work is characteristic:--

In 1849, after an interval of deep gloom and bottomless dubitation, came _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, which unpleasantly astonished everybody, set the world upon the strangest suppositions--"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said some,--ruined my reputation according to the friendliest voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have been ever since.

These pamphlets alienated Mazzini and Mill, and provoked the a.s.sault of the newspapers; which, by the author's confession, did something to arrest and restrict the sale.

Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the majority; but coaxing as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was to fly in its face and tear it to pieces. His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught his readers _ridendo dicere verum_, it was rather that of the elder Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote--

That patience is a virtue high is plain, Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, Things that rude valour never could attain,