Thomas Carlyle, A Biography | Page 3

pride, in the "caste of
Vere de Vere," in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting
purposes, the garrulous incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the
other unwavering belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse.
Byron leapt into the citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest
inheritor of an ancient name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to
his eminence, and, only after outliving twice the years of the other,
attained it. His career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson
or Wordsworth, from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely
challenged renown. Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence":
at his death, in a sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and
deafening was the Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every
original thinker is accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells

as it runs till it ends in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first
recognition was from America, his last from his own countrymen. His
teaching came home to their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland,
where, for good or ill, passions are in extremes, he was long howled
down, lampooned, preached at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh
Inaugural Address, he of a sudden became the object of an equally
blind devotion; and was, often by the very men who had tried and
condemned him for blasphemy, as senselessly credited with essential
orthodoxy. "The stone which the builders rejected became the
headstone of the corner," the terror of the pulpit its text. Carlyle's
decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists whose measureless
acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism. In the realm of
contemporary English prose he has left no adequate successor;
[Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers of our
time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass by
primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder and
grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village
churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose
streets his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so
honoured.
Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates
in his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the
feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace,"
where Louis XV. and the _ancien régime_ lay dying; later to the
ticking of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of
the steeples that roused the singers of the Marseillaise to march from
"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last
bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian
characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a
commander." Already, over little more than the space of the author's
life--for he was a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the
death of Burns, Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four,
Byron's by seven years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse
of the "cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea.
Two whole generations have passed with the memory of half their
storms. "Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old

policies, governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have
been sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig,
Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when
he was seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the
French Directory and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived
two French empires, two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere
partitions, abolitions, revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During
his life our sway in the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German
with, the Italian without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the
Continent, while another across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude
that amazes and sometimes alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and
repelled, patriots perorated and fought, diplomatists finessed with a
zeal worthy of the world's most restless, if not its wisest, age. In the
internal affairs of the leading nations the transformation scenes were
often as rapid as those of a pantomime. The Art and Literature of those
eighty-six years--stirred to new thought and form at their
commencement by the so-called Romantic movement, more recently
influenced by the Classic reaction, the Pre-Raphaelite protest, the
Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even contradictory, standards.
But, in one line of progress, there was no shadow of turning. Over the
road which Bacon laid roughly down and Newton made safe for transit,
Physical Science, during the whole period, advanced without let and
beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams of the New Atlantis have
not even in our days been wholly realised, Science has been brought