Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 9

so clear fifty
years since, when the crash and dust of demolition had not so subsided

as to let men see how much had risen up behind. The fire of the new
school had been taken from the very conflagration which they
execrated, but they were not held back from denouncing the eighteenth
century by the reflection that, at any rate, its thought and action had
made ready the way for much of what is best in the nineteenth.
[5] The dates of Mr. Carlyle's principal compositions are these:--Life of
Schiller, 1825; Sartor Resartus, 1831; French Revolution, 1837;
Chartism, 1839; Hero-Worship, 1840; Past and Present, 1843;
Cromwell, 1845; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850; Friedrich the Second,
1858-1865; Shooting Niagara, 1867.
Mr. Carlyle himself has told us about Coleridge, and the movement of
which Coleridge was the leader. That movement has led men in widely
different ways. In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps
of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous ephemera still suck a
little spiritual moisture. In another it led to the sacramental and
sacerdotal developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among men with
strong practical energy, to the benevolent bluster of a sort of
Christianity which is called muscular because it is not intellectual. It
would be an error to suppose that these and the other streams that have
sprung from the same source, did not in the days of their fulness
fertilise and gladden many lands. The wordy pietism of one school, the
mimetic rites of another, the romping heroics of the third, are
degenerate forms. How long they are likely to endure, it would be rash
to predict among a nation whose established teachers and official
preachers are prevented by an inveterate timidity from trusting
themselves to that disciplined intelligence, in which the superior minds
of the last century had such courageous faith.
Mr. Carlyle drank in some sort at the same fountain. Coleridgean ideas
were in the air. It was there probably that he acquired that sympathy
with the past, or with certain portions of the past, that feeling of the
unity of history, and that conviction of the necessity of binding our
theory of history fast with our theory of other things, in all of which he
so strikingly resembles the great Anglican leaders of a generation ago,
and in gaining some of which so strenuous an effort must have been

needed to modify the prepossessions of a Scotch Puritan education. No
one has contributed more powerfully to that movement which, drawing
force from many and various sides, has brought out the difference
between the historian and the gazetteer or antiquary. One half of Past
and Present might have been written by one of the Oxford chiefs in the
days of the Tracts. Vehement native force was too strong for such a
man to remain in the luminous haze which made the Coleridgean
atmosphere. A well-known chapter in the Life of Sterling, which some,
indeed, have found too ungracious, shows how little hold he felt
Coleridge's ideas to be capable of retaining, and how little permanent
satisfaction resided in them. Coleridge, in fact, was not only a poet but
a thinker as well; he had science of a sort as well as imagination, but it
was not science for headlong and impatient souls. Mr. Carlyle has
probably never been able to endure a subdivision all his life, and the
infinite ramifications of the central division between object and subject
might well be with him an unprofitable weariness to the flesh.
In England, the greatest literary organ of the Revolution was
unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic
lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination
over the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific
work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with
all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some
gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly
tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a
revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had
fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the
many-eyed minuteness and sustained pulsing force of Byron, has still
the full swell and tide and energy of genius: he is as lawless in his
disrespect for some things established. He had the unspeakable
advantage of being that which, though not in this sense, only his own
favourite word of contempt describes, respectable; and, for another
thing, of being ruggedly sincere. Carlylism is the male of Byronism. It
is Byronism with thew and sinew, bass pipe and shaggy bosom. There
is the same grievous complaint against the time and its men and its
spirit, something even of the same contemptuous despair, the same