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bility; but, to judge by what he has done, with no adequate sense of what it amounts to. "The reader has here before him,' he says, Mr. Carlyle's own handiwork, but without his last touches, not edited by himself, not corrected by himself, perhaps most of it not intended for publication. Just so; and the reader as he reads, if he feels as I do, will feel himself to be overhearing a soliloquy; and not the less a soliloquy because the diction is now and then strained and overwrought. It is for the most part less so than was usual with him; and men who have made the moulding of language the business of their lives may naturally fall into the practice in soliloquy from the force of habit.

If then many of the things in this book which we are grieved to find in it had merely passed through Carlyle's mind, unspoken and unwritten, should we have thought him so very much to blame? Do we not all of us, when not determined to shut our eyes, see failings and disfigurements in our friends and associates, and find no fault with ourselves for seeing them, provided we make no mention of them?

But it will be said that in some instances Carlyle has imagined faults and disfigurements which did not exist, and has failed to see merits and attractions which did. That also will happen to most of us; allowing ourselves in our silent meditations to come to conclusions, both positive and negative, from inadequate premisses and with imperfect discernment.

No doubt it would be much better if we did no such thing; better if our secret thoughts went quite another way; especially when measuring the merits of those who have been kind to us; and it is not surprising that when the misappreciation is made known it should be angrily denounced by the friends of those who have suffered wrong. They may be angry and sin not.' And there are instances in which even others who stand apart must feel strongly in sympathy with those who are aggrieved. On the other hand, not a few of these hasty or unfounded judgments, as they impute no moral infirmity and inflict nothing that can be called a personal injury, need not be matter of personal reproach to their author; and those to whom they come amiss, whether on private grounds or on the ground of public interests involved in literary reputations, will be better employed, if they happen to be competent witnesses, in the rectification of what they know to be wrong than in censure and complaint.

As an example which fails to my own lot, I will advert to what is said about Wordsworth. Carlyle's insensibility to his powers as a poet it is needless to deal with. His work is before the world, and the world knows what it is worth. But everything that can throw light upon him is interesting, and when I read what Carlyle says of his conversation, I feel it due to his memory to say something of its effect on myself. And the more as it was through me that Carlyle

became acquainted with Wordsworth, and most of the conversations in question took place in a house which he speaks of as mine.3 He accords great praise to Wordsworth's faculty of delineating the men of his time. Never, or never but once, had I seen a stronger intellect, a more luminous and veracious power of insight, directed upon such a survey of fellow-men and their contemporary journey through the world.' So far well; and it is evident that there was no desire to depreciate. But on another occasion when the talk was about literature, literary laws,' &c., Wordsworth is represented as 'joyfully reverent of the "wells of English undefiled," though stone dumb as to the deeper rules and wells of Eternal Truth and Harmony, which you were to try and set forth by said undefiled wells of English or what other speech you had! To me a little disappointing, but not much, though it would have given me pleasure had the robust veteran man emerged a little out of vocables into things, now and then, as he never once chanced to do.'5 There is a good deal more of the like tone and tenor in giving an account of divers other conversations.

Now, all this might be a fair inference enough from what Carlyle happened to hear from Wordsworth in conversation; and Carlyle, speaking to himself, may not have thought it necessary to say to himself that an inference from a few examples is no more than an inference huc usque. But the inference was certainly an erroneous one. Those who have had a large experience of Wordsworth in conversation know that it was mere matter of accident whether he trod upon the earth or mounted into the skies. He never dreamt of display, and whatever topic, celestial or terrene, happened to come across him, he was equally ready to deal with. Whilst, therefore, I maintain that there is no ground for imputing to Carlyle any deliberately unjust disparagement, I think that I may claim more credit, as founded upon more knowledge, for my own estimate of Wordsworth's powers in conversation; and what that estimate was at the time of those conversations in my friend's house in London, and what it is still, is expressed in a letter written there and then, though no doubt prompted by other examples than those at which Carlyle happened to be present:

This old philosopher is one of the most extraordinary human phenomena that one could have in the house. He has the simplicity and helplessness of a child in regard to the little transactions of life; and whilst he is being directed and dealt with in regard to them, he keeps tumbling out the highest and deepest thoughts that the mind of man can reach, in a stream of discourse which is so oddly broken by the little hitches and interruptions of common life, that we admire and laugh at him by turns. Everything that comes into his mind comes out; weakness and strength; affections or vanities; so that if ever an opportunity was offered of seeing

3 It was the house of an elderly lady, a friend and connection of mine, with whom I was in the habit of staying when she was in London.

4 Vol. ii. p. 336.

5 Vol. ii. pp. 332-3.

a human being through and through, we have it in the person of this 'old man eloquent.'"

Of Coleridge's gifts of speech Carlyle is still less appreciative than of Wordsworth's :

I had him to myself once or twice in various parts of the garden walk and tried hard to get something about Kant from him-about reason versus understanding and the like but in vain. Nothing came that was of use to me that day or, in fact, any day. The sight and sound of a sage who was so venerated by those about me, and whom I too would willingly have venerated but could not-this was all.'

8

So in the Reminiscences. But not altogether so in the Life of Sterling. There we find Coleridge to be 'A sublime man; who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with "God, Freedom, Immortality" still his: A king of men.' And though this is followed by a long train of offsets, with denials of any meaning being to be gathered from the mysteries of his doctrinal declamations, yet, all this notwithstanding, there were 'glorious Islets' to be seen rising out of the haze - balmy, sunny Islets, Islets of the blest and the intelligible '—and 'eloquent artistically expressive words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came at intervals; tones of noble, pious sympathy, recognisable as pious though strangely coloured, were never wanting long.' My experiences of Coleridge's conversation were in accord with what is thus expressed in the Life of Sterling, and by no means with the passage from the Reminiscences. What opportunities Carlyle had of listening to Coleridge, I know only from the Reminiscences. They may not have been very ample. And there is this to be borne in mind that Carlyle himself had a great gift of speech, and when these gifts confront each other, however amicably, the gifts of auscultation, whether on one side or the other, are not generally found to be great in proportion. My own opportunities were not so abundant in the case of Coleridge as in that of Wordsworth, but they

Mr. Carlyle's description, or rather his wife's, adopted by him, of Mrs. Wordsworth, whom they once saw, or thought they saw, at a dinner party, is so wholly opposite, not only to what she was, but to what she was manifestly seen to be by those who did not know her as well as by those who did, that I cannot but think there was simply a mistake of one person for another. She was not 'little' but rather tall; and as to the other misrepresentations, what I have to say is, that her manner and deportment were in entire harmony with her character-unexceptionable in their quiet grace and easy simplicity; and that, like another dweller in the woods and mountains known to her husband, Nature had said of her when she was born,

This child I to myself will take,
She shall be mine and I will make
A Lady of mine own.'

This was absolutely true of Mrs. Wordsworth.

7 Vol. i. pp. 230–1.

8 Life of Sterling, chapter viii.

were probably equal to those of Carlyle. It is only in his latter years and in his decline that he could be seen by either of us, and what I recollect is, that I could not sleep at nights after hearing him talk. Between April 1823 and February 1824, I kept an occasional diary, in which the last entries are these :

February 24, 1824.-Coleridge said he did not perceive his daughter's beauty. The perception of female beauty was the only thing in which his mind was conscious of age. It had decayed with him. I expressed my admiration of a distinct contour of features. Coleridge concurred, but said, 'the contour of the face should be an act of the face, and not something suffered by the face.'

February 26, 1824.-Certainly the most extraordinary evening I ever passed; Coleridge with his luminous face and white head, Irving's wild dark locks and wilder eyes, and the keen analytical visage of Basil Montagu. The poring and mining of Wordsworth out of the depths of his intellect is not half so wonderful as Coleridge was to-night, and the buoyancy of Southey is only more delightful.

August 5, 1824.-At Coleridge's again, and with the same company. He was this evening less vehement than I have heard him, but no less extraordinary and admirable. His language was less interrupted by logical catches, and more fanciful and romantic. For instance, in speaking of men led by age to fix their thoughts on that which was permanent within them, 'when their eyes grew dimmer and their ears less apprehensive, and the objects which surrounded them more shadowy and cold, &c., &c. . . . He did not say that this would be the case with the man who had spent all his life in trading, with only the principle of money-getting, or in the pursuit of a not less foolish ambition,-the man who chained himself to the wheel of events and was rolled rapidly on without being able to stop himself for an instant to think of anything further than the objects which surrounded him; who was in fact only a reflection of the surrounding objects-it was not to be said, when the objects grew dim and disappeared, but that he would go out--it was not to be said but that the mirror would be a blank, when the objects which were its population were removed,' &c.

My diary goes no further, but I can add a supplement from a letter (February 18, 1829):—

I have been two or three times to see the old gentleman this winter, and his talk has been sometimes exceedingly curious and sometimes very magnificent. I never knew such a scope of mind exhibited in any man,—such largeness of views, together with such subtlety of insight, and a vivid imagination flashing through all.

This

If Carlyle is less than just to Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the other hand his description of Southey is genial as well as faithful and true. It was through me that they became known to each other— the time soon after the publication of Carlyle's work on the French Revolution. Southey, in speaking of it to me, called it a Pindaric History,' adding that he should probably read it six times over. augured well for a meeting between them, and, judging from the Reminiscences, the meeting was an unalloyed pleasure to Carlyle, nor is there, in the case of Southey, any backing out from his first impressions. Southey was of all the men of letters of his generation that I knew the most personally attractive, and he found favour with Carlyle.

Admiration is designated by Wordsworth as one of the three vital elements in the mind of man." For the historic heroes of whom he read and wrote Carlyle could feel an abounding admiration; for his fellow-creatures whom he saw in the flesh he could find his way to it often enough, but not so surely or in so large a measure except through love. When that way was opened the approach was by no means uphill work, and least of all when it lay through the gates of death. Mrs. Carlyle made him an admirable wife, and it is with an impassioned admiration that he writes of her. Nor is there anything in his Reminiscences which will be read with more interest and sympathy than his account of his father, to whom also he had been ardently attached. In his portraitures generally he aims at force and intensity of first effects, accompanied, in some measure qualified, and even more or less counteracted, by subtle and discriminating reservations, or by casting of shadows across the lights. But love and death could clear away all subtleties and distinctions in perception, and even much of what was far-fetched or peculiar to himself in diction; and in the descriptions of his wife and his father we have for the most part a simplicity of language, passionate in the one case, affectionate in the other, which, whether or not it be chargeable with exaggeration, will have more of a charm for most people than the best of his elaborate utterances.

And when the failure to see what was admirable in some of his contemporaries is complained of, the darkness which fell upon him at his wife's death is not the only thing to be borne in mind. From his twenty-second year till he was in middle age his life had been that of a forlorn man of genius, gloomy and irritable by temperament, disordered in health, conscious in a measure, but not confidently or hopefully conscious, of the powers he possessed, and above all despairing of their recognition by others. Nor was the despair so altogether unreasonable as results may lead us now to suppose. At a time when he was slowly emerging from obscurity, and sadly struggling for the means of subsistence, I was in communication on the subject of literary pensions with the one of our statesmen now gone to their rest who was the most distinguished for his love of literature, whilst his feelings of benevolence certainly exceeded what most of our public men have time for. I ventured to propose that a pension should be offered to Carlyle, and the answer was that a man who wrote such a style as that ought to starve. Carlyle did not know of the proposal at the time, nor did it ever come to his knowledge, nor would it perhaps have met with his approval. But the reception given to it is significant of what was thought of him by most men of high cultivation in the orthodox and classical school of literature. No vagrant or gipsy could have had to break his way through more boundaries: The world was not his friend nor the world's law;

We live by admiration, hope, and love.'

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