On the Choice of Books Part 6

Later in the same year, weighed down as he was by his great sorrow, Carlyle nevertheless thought it a public duty to come forward in defence of Governor Eyre, when the quelling of the Jamaica insurrection excited so much controversy, and seemed to divide England into two parties. He acted as Vice-President of the Defence Fund. The following is a letter written to Mr. Hamilton Hume, giving his views on the subject in full:

"Ripple Court, Ringwould, Dover,

"_August 23_, 1866.

"SIR,

"The clamour raised against Governor Eyre appears to me to be disgraceful to the good sense of England; and if it rested on any depth of conviction, and were not rather (as I always flatter myself it is) a thing of rumour and hearsay, of repet.i.tion and reverberation, mostly from the teeth outward, I should consider it of evil omen to the country and to its highest interests in these times. For my own share, all the light that has yet reached me on Mr. Eyre and his history in the world goes steadily to establish the conclusion that he is a just, humane, and valiant man, faithful to his trusts everywhere, and with no ordinary faculty of executing them; that his late services in Jamaica were of great, perhaps of incalculable value, as certainly they were of perilous and appalling difficulty--something like the case of 'fire,' suddenly reported, 'in the s.h.i.+p's powder room,' in mid-ocean where the moments mean the ages, and life and death hang on your use or misuse of the moments; and, in short, that penalty and clamour are not the thing this Governor merits from any of us, but honour and thanks, and wise imitation (I will farther say), should similar emergencies arise, on the great scale or on the small, in whatever we are governing!

"The English nation never loved anarchy, nor was wont to spend its sympathy on miserable mad seditions, especially of this inhuman and half-brutish type; but always loved order, and the prompt suppression of seditions, and reserved its tears for something worthier than promoters of such delirious and fatal enterprises who had got their wages for their sad industry. Has the English nation changed, then, altogether? I flatter myself it is not, not yet quite; but only that certain loose, superficial portions of it have become a great deal louder, and not any wiser, than they formerly used to be.

"At any rate, though much averse, at any time, and at this time in particular, to figure on committees, or run into public noises without call, I do at once, and feel that as a British citizen I should, and must, make you welcome to my name for your committee, and to whatever good it can do you. With the hope only that many other British men, of far more significance in such a matter, will at once or gradually do the like; and that, in fine, by wise effort and persistence, a blind and disgraceful act of public injustice may be prevented; and an egregrious folly as well--not to say, for none can say or compute, what a vital detriment throughout the British Empire, in such an example set to all the colonies and governors the British Empire has!

"Farther service, I fear, I am not in a state to promise, but the whole weight of my conviction and good wishes is with you; and if other service possible to me do present itself, I shall not want for willingness in case of need. Enclosed is my mite of contribution to your fund."I have the honour to be yours truly,

"T. CARLYLE."

"To HAMILTON HUME, Esq., "Hon. Sec. 'Eyre Defence Fund.'"

In August, 1867, Carlyle broke silence again with an utterance in the style of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, ent.i.tled "Shooting Niagara: and After?" published anonymously (though everyone, of course, knew it to be his) in _Macmillan's Magazine_. Shortly afterwards it was reprinted as a separate pamphlet, with additions, and with the author's name on the t.i.tle-page.

In February, 1868, Carlyle wrote some Recollections of Sir William Hamilton, as a contribution to Professor Veitch's Memoir of that accomplished metaphysician.

In November, 1870, he addressed a long and very remarkable letter to the _Times_, on the French-German war, which is reprinted in the latest edition of his collected Miscellanies.

Two years later (November, 1872) he added a very beautiful Supplement to the People's Edition of his "Life of Schiller," founded on Saupe's "Schiller and his Father's Household," and other more recent books on Schiller that had appeared in Germany.

His last literary productions were a series of papers on "The Early Kings of Norway," and an Essay on "The Portraits of John Knox," which appeared, in instalments, in _Fraser's Magazine_, in the first four months of 1875. On the 4th December of that year, Carlyle attained his eightieth year, and this anniversary was signalised by some of the more distinguished of his friends and admirers by striking a medal, the head being executed by Mr. Boehm, whose n.o.ble statue of Carlyle, exhibited in the Royal Academy in the previous year, had won so much merited praise from Mr. Ruskin and others. The medal was accompanied by an address, signed by the subscribers. Carlyle seems to have been much gratified with this honour, which took him quite by surprise, and he expressed his acknowledgments as follows:--

"This of the medal and formal address of friends was an altogether unexpected event, to be received as a conspicuous and peculiar honour, without example hitherto anywhere in my life.... To you ... I address my thankful acknowledgments, which surely are deep and sincere, and will beg you to convey the same to all the kind friends so beautifully concerned in it. Let no one of you be other than a.s.sured that the beautiful transaction, in result, management, and intention, was altogether gratifying, welcome, and honourable to me, and that I cordially thank one and all of you for what you have been pleased to do. Your fine and n.o.ble gift shall remain among my precious possessions, and be the symbol to me of something still more _golden_ than itself, on the part of my many dear and too generous friends, so long as I continue in this world.

"Yours and theirs, from the heart,

"T. CARLYLE."

Carlyle's last public utterances were a letter on the Eastern Question, addressed to Mr. George Howard, and printed in the _Times_ of November 28, 1876, and a letter to the Editor of the _Times_, on "The Crisis," printed in that journal on May 5, 1877.

He was now beginning to feel the effects of his great age. Yearly and monthly he grew more feeble. His wonted walking exercise had to be curtailed, and at last abandoned. He was affectionately and piously tended during these last years by his niece, Mary Aitken, now Mrs.

Alexander Carlyle. In the autumn of 1879 he lost his brother, Dr. John Aitken Carlyle, the translator of Dante's "Inferno."

The end came at last, after a long and gradual decay of strength. The great writer and n.o.ble-hearted man pa.s.sed away peacefully at about half-past eight o'clock on the morning of Sat.u.r.day, February 5, 1881, in the eighty-sixth year of his age.

His remains were conveyed to Scotland, and were laid in the burial-ground at Ecclefechan, where the ashes of his father and mother, and of others of his kindred, repose. He had executed what is known in Scotch law as a "deed of mortification," by virtue of which he bequeathed to Edinburgh University the estate of Craigenputtoch--which had come to him through his wife--for the foundation of ten Bursaries in the Faculty of Arts, to be called the "John Welsh Bursaries." In his Will he bequeathed the books which he had used in writing on Cromwell and Friedrich to Harvard College, Ma.s.sachusetts.

In less than a month after his death, with a haste on many accounts to be deplored, and which has excited much animadversion, his literary executor, Mr. James Anthony Froude, the historian, issued two volumes of posthumous "Reminiscences," written by Carlyle, partly in 1832, and partly in 1866-67. The first section consists of a memorial paper, written immediately after his father's death; the second contains Reminiscences of his early friend, Edward Irving, commenced at Cheyne Row in the autumn of 1866, and finished at Mentone on the 2nd January, 1867. The Reminiscences of Lord Jeffrey were begun on the following day, and finished on January 19. The paper on Southey and Wordsworth, relegated to the Appendix, was also written at Mentone between the 28th January and the 8th March, 1867. The Memorials of his wife, which fill the greater part of the second volume, were written at Cheyne Row, during the month after her death.

Of the earlier portraits of Carlyle three are specially interesting, 1. The full-length sketch by "Croquis" (Daniel Maclise) which formed one of the _Fraser_ Gallery portraits, and was published in the magazine in June, 1833. (The original sketch of this is now deposited in the Forster Collection at South Kensington.) 2. Count D'Orsay's sketch, published by Mitch.e.l.l in 1839, is highly characteristic of the artist. It was taken when no man of position was counted a dutiful subject who did not wear a black satin stock and a Petersham coat.

The great author's own favourite among the early portraits was 3.

the sketch by Samuel Laurence, engraved in Horne's "New Spirit of the Age," published in 1844. Since the art of photography came into vogue, a series of photographs of various degrees of merit and success have been executed by Messrs. Elliott and Fry, and by Watkins. The late Mrs. Cameron also produced a photograph of him in her peculiar style, but it was not so successful as her fine portrait of Tennyson. An oil-painting by Mr. Watts, exhibited some fifteen years ago, and now also forming part of the Forster Collection at South Kensington, is remarkable for its weird wildness; but it gave great displeasure to the old philosopher himself! More lately we have a remarkable portrait by Mr. Whistler, who seized the _tout ensemble_ of his ill.u.s.trious sitter's character and costume in a very effective manner. The _terra cotta_ statue by Mr. Boehm, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875, has received such merited meed of enthusiastic praise from Mr.

Ruskin that it needs no added praise of ours. It has been excellently photographed from two points of view by Mr. Hedderly, of Riley Street, Chelsea.

One of the best and happiest of the many likenesses of Mr. Carlyle that appeared during the last decade of his life was a sketch by Mrs.

Allingham--a picture as well as a portrait--representing the venerable philosopher in a long and picturesque dressing-gown, seated on a chair and poring over a folio, in the garden at the back of the quaint old house at Chelsea, which will henceforth, as long as it stands, be a.s.sociated with his memory. Beside him on the gra.s.s lies a long clay pipe (a churchwarden) which he has been smoking in the sweet morning air. So that altogether, as far as pictorial, graphic, and photographic art can go, the features, form, and bodily semblance of Carlyle will be as well known to future generations as they are to our own.

The impression of his brilliant and eloquent talk, though it will perhaps remain, for at least half a century to come, more or less vivid to some of those of the new generation who were privileged to hear it, will, of course, gradually fade away. But it seems hardly probable that the rich legacy of his long roll of writings--historical, biographical, critical--can be regarded as other than a permanent one, in which each succeeding generation will find fresh delight and instruction. The series of vivid pictures he has left behind in his "French Revolution," in his "Cromwell," in his "Frederick," can hardly become obsolete or cease to be attractive; nor is such power of word-painting likely soon to be equalled or ever to be surpa.s.sed. The salt of humour that savours nearly all he wrote (that lambent humour that lightens and plays over the grimmest and sternest of his pages) will also serve to keep his writings fresh and readable. Many of his _dicta_ and opinions will doubtless be more and more called in question, especially in those of his works which are more directly of a didactic than a narrative character, and in regard to subjects which he was by habit, by mental const.i.tution, and by that prejudice from which the greatest can never wholly free themselves, incapable of judging broadly or soundly,--such, for instance, as the scope and functions of painting and the fine arts generally, the value of modern poetry, or the working of Const.i.tutional and Parliamentary inst.i.tutions.

RICHARD HERNE SHEPHERD.

_Chelsea, June, 1881_.

ON THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE STUDENTS OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, APRIL 2, 1866.

GENTLEMEN,

I have accepted the office you have elected me to, and have now the duty to return thanks for the great honour done me. Your enthusiasm towards me, I admit, is very beautiful in itself, however undesirable it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when I was in a position a.n.a.logous to your own. I can only hope that it may endure to the end--that n.o.ble desire to honour those whom you think worthy of honour, and come to be more and more select and discriminate in the choice of the object of it; for I can well understand that you will modify your opinions of me and many things else as you go on. (Laughter and cheers.) There are now fifty-six years gone last November since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen--fifty-six years ago--to attend cla.s.ses here and gain knowledge of all kinds, I know not what, with feelings of wonder and awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to. (Cheers.) There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up and saying, "Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard: you have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges." As the old proverb says, "He that builds by the wayside has many masters." We must expect a variety of judges; but the voice of young Scotland, through you, is really of some value to me, and I return you many thanks for it, though I cannot describe my emotions to you, and perhaps they will be much more conceivable if expressed in silence. (Cheers.)

When this office was proposed to me, some of you know that I was not very ambitious to accept it, at first. I was taught to believe that there were more or less certain important duties which would lie in my power. This, I confess, was my chief motive in going into it--at least, in reconciling the objections felt to such things; for if I can do anything to honour you and my dear old _Alma Mater_, why should I not do so? (Loud cheers.) Well, but on practically looking into the matter when the office actually came into my hands, I find it grows more and more uncertain and abstruse to me whether there is much real duty that I can do at all. I live four hundred miles away from you, in an entirely different state of things; and my weak health--now for many years acc.u.mulating upon me--and a total unacquaintance with such subjects as concern your affairs here,--all this fills me with apprehension that there is really nothing worth the least consideration that I can do on that score. You may, however, depend upon it that if any such duty does arise in any form, I will use my most faithful endeavour to do whatever is right and proper, according to the best of my judgment. (Cheers.)

In the meanwhile, the duty I have at present--which might be very pleasant, but which is quite the reverse, as you may fancy--is to address some words to you on some subjects more or less cognate to the pursuits you are engaged in. In fact, I had meant to throw out some loose observations--loose in point of order, I mean--in such a way as they may occur to me--the truths I have in me about the business you are engaged in, the race you have started on, what kind of race it is you young gentlemen have begun, and what sort of arena you are likely to find in this world. I ought, I believe, according to custom, to have written all that down on paper, and had it read out. That would have been much handier for me at the present moment (a laugh), but when I attempted to write, I found that I was not accustomed to write speeches, and that I did not get on very well. So I flung that away, and resolved to trust to the inspiration of the moment--just to what came uppermost. You will therefore have to accept what is readiest, what comes direct from the heart, and you must just take that in compensation for any good order of arrangement there might have been in it.

I will endeavour to say nothing that is not true, as far as I can manage, and that is pretty much all that I can engage for. (A laugh.) Advices, I believe, to young men--and to all men--are very seldom much valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action, is better suppressed altogether. I would not, therefore, go much into advising; but there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the summary of all advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I dare say; but I must, nevertheless, let you hear it the thousand and first time, for it is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or not--namely, that above all things the interest of your own life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day, in this place where you have come to get education. Diligent! That includes all virtues in it that a student can have; I mean to include in it all qualities that lead into the acquirement of real instruction and improvement in such a place. If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life, in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at indeed little; while in the course of years, when you come to look back, and if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers--and among many counsellers there is wisdom--you will bitterly repent when it is too late. The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.

By diligence, I mean among other things--and very chiefly--honesty in all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavour to do that.

Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with intelligence.

There is such a thing as a man endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does not know more than the outside skin of them; and he goes flouris.h.i.+ng about with them. ("Hear, hear," and a laugh.) There is also a process called cramming in some Universities (a laugh)--that is, getting up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put questions about. Avoid all that as entirely unworthy of an honourable habit. Be modest, and humble, and diligent in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the right way, so far as they have been able to understand it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. In fact, morality as regards study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything real; and it would be greatly better if he were tied up from doing any such thing. He does nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters. That is a very old doctrine, but a very true one; and you will find it confirmed by all the thinking men that have ever lived in this long series of generations of which we are the latest.

I daresay you know, very many of you, that it is now seven hundred years since Universities were first set up in this world of ours.

Abelard and other people had risen up with doctrines in them the people wished to hear of, and students flocked towards them from all parts of the world. There was no getting the thing recorded in books as you may now. You had to hear him speaking to you vocally, or else you could not learn at all what it was that he wanted to say. And so they gathered together the various people who had anything to teach, and formed themselves gradually, under the patronage of kings and other potentates who were anxious about the culture of their populations, n.o.bly anxious for their benefit, and became a University.

I daresay, perhaps, you have heard it said that all that is greatly altered by the invention of printing, which took place about midway between us and the origin of Universities. A man has not now to go away to where a professor is actually speaking, because in most cases he can get his doctrine out of him through a book, and can read it, and read it again and again, and study it. I don't know that I know of any way in which the whole facts of a subject may be more completely taken in, if our studies are moulded in conformity with it.

Nevertheless, Universities have, and will continue to have, an indispensable value in society--a very high value. I consider the very highest interests of man vitally intrusted to them.

In regard to theology, as you are aware, it has been the study of the deepest heads that have come into the world--what is the nature of this stupendous universe, and what its relations to all things, as known to man, and as only known to the awful Author of it. In fact, the members of the Church keep theology in a lively condition (laughter), for the benefit of the whole population, which is the great object of our Universities. I consider it is the same now intrinsically, though very much forgotten, from many causes, and not so successful as might be wished at all. (A laugh.) It remains, however, a very curious truth, what has been said by observant people, that the main use of the Universities in the present age is that, after you have done with all your cla.s.ses, the next thing is a collection of books, a great library of good books, which you proceed to study and to read. What the Universities have mainly done--what I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be a.s.siduous in your reading; and learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine.

Learn to be discriminative in your reading--to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the present time, in a great deal of the reading inc.u.mbent on you you must be guided by the books recommended to you by your professors for a.s.sistance towards the prelections. And then, when you get out of the University, and go into studies of your own, you will find it very important that you have selected a field, a province in which you can study and work.

The most unhappy of all men is the man that cannot tell what he is going to do, that has got no work cut out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind--honest work, which you intend getting done. If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice--perhaps the best you could get--is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book. It is a.n.a.logous to what doctors tell us about the physical health and appet.i.tes of the patient. You must learn to distinguish between false appet.i.te and real. There is such a thing as a false appet.i.te, which will lead a man into vagaries with regard to diet, will tempt him to eat spicy things which he should not eat at all, and would not but that it is toothsome, and for the moment in baseness of mind. A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appet.i.te for--what suits his const.i.tution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to go into history--to inquire into what has pa.s.sed before you in the families of men. The history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all concern you; and you will find that all the knowledge you have got will be extremely applicable to elucidate that. There you have the most remarkable race of men in the world set before you, to say nothing of the languages, which your professors can better explain, and which, I believe, are admitted to be the most perfect orders of speech we have yet found to exist among men. And you will find, if you read well, a pair of extremely remarkable nations s.h.i.+ning in the records left by themselves as a kind of pillar to light up life in the darkness of the past ages; and it will be well worth your while if you can get into the understanding of what these people were and what they did. You will find a great deal of hearsay, as I have found, that does not touch on the matter; but perhaps some of you will get to see a Roman face to face; you will know in some measure how they contrived to exist, and to perform these feats in the world; I believe, also, you will find a thing not much noted, that there was a very great deal of deep religion in its form in both nations. That is noted by the wisest of historians, and particularly by Ferguson, who is particularly well worth reading on Roman history; and I believe he was an alumnus in our own University. His book is a very creditable book. He points out the profoundly religious nature of the Roman people, notwithstanding the wildness and ferociousness of their nature. They believed that Jupiter Optimus--Jupiter Maximus--was lord of the universe, and that he had appointed the Romans to become the chief of men, provided they followed his commands--to brave all difficulty, and to stand up with an invincible front--to be ready to do and die; and also to have the same sacred regard to veracity, to promise, to integrity, and all the virtues that surround that n.o.blest quality of men--courage--to which the Romans gave the name of virtue, manhood, as the one thing enn.o.bling for a man.