Past and Present | Page 4

of castanets, or playing of tunes with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,--in all this glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game. He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due.
One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though?deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of these times--the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of details, into style. We have been civilising very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New Holland and Oregon--and it has not appeared in literature; there has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books. Carlyle's style is the first emergence of all this wealth and labour with which the world has gone with child so long. London and Europe, tunneled, graded corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and East and West Indies for dependencies, and America, with the Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How like an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first?experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again, sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did it first, though never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He "shakes with his mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Life of Schiller (Lond. Mag., 1823-4), 1825, 1845. (Supplement published in the People's Edition, 1873) Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1824. Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry (from the French of Legendre), 1824. German Romance, 1827. Sartor Resartus (Fraser's Mag., 1833-4), 1835 (Boston) 1838. French Revolution, 1837,1839. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 1839, 1840, 1847, 1857. (In these were reprinted Articles from Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review, Foreign Quarterly Review, Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, New Monthly Magazine, London and Westminster Review, Keepsake, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Times.) Chartism, 1840. Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841. Past and Present, 1843. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; with Elucidations, 1845. Thirty-five Unpublished Letters of Oliver Cromwell, 1847 (Fraser). Original Discourses on the Negro?Question (Fraser, 1849), 1853. Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850. Life of John Sterling, 1851. History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, 1858-65. Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, 1866. Shooting?Niagara; and After? 1867 (from Macmillan). The Early Kings of Norway; also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox, 1875.
There were also contributions to Brewster's Edinburgh?Encyclopaedia, vols. xiv. xv., and xvi.; to New Edinburgh?Review, 1821, 1822; Fraser's Magazine, 1830, 1831; The Times, 19 June, 1844 (Mazzini); 28 November, 1876; 5 May, 1877;?Examiner, 1848; Spectator 1848.
First Collected Edition of Works, 1857-58 (16 vols.)
Reminiscences (ed. J.A. Froude), 1881; (ed. C.E. Norton, 1887, and preprinted in Everyman's Library; 1932, with an added?article on Professor John Wilson--"Christopher North")?Reminiscences of my Irish journey in 1849, 1882. Last Words of Thomas Carlyle, 1882 (ed. by J.C.A.) Last Words of Thomas?Carlyle, 1892. Rescued Essays (ed. P. Newberry) 1892.?Historical Sketches