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Leader (1850-1860), 27th October 1855, Edition 2 of 2, Page 15

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      Thomas Cakiiyle. Passag-Es Selected From...

      summit , and yetsubdued to calm and reverence as by the sublime things to be'ftBen-fir om < that ? summifc . m r # ¦ , ¦ , -. -Such ; a * riter is Thomas Carlyle . it is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence : if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral pile , it-would be only lite cutting down ap oak after its acorns have sown a forest . For there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle's writings ; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlylehad not lived . The character of his influence is best seen in the fact that many of the men who have the least agreement with his opinions are those to whom the reading of Sartor Resarius was an epoch in the history of their minds . The extent of his influence may be best seen in the fact that ideas which were startling novelties when he first wrote them are now become common-places . And

      we think few men will be found to say that this influence on the whole has not been for good . There are plenty who question the justice of Carlyle ' s estimates of past men and past times ., plenty who quarrel with the exaggerations of the Latter-Day Pamphlets , and who are as far as possible from looking for an amendment of things from a Carlylian theocracy with the " greatest man , " as a Joshua who is to smite the wicked ( and the stupid } tiff the going down of the sun . But for any large nature , those points of difference are quite incidental . It is not as a theorist , but as a great and beautiful human nature , that Carlyle influences us . You may meet a man whose wisdom seems unimpeachable , since you find him entirely in agreement with yourself ; but this oracular man of unexceptionable opinions has

      a green eye , a wiry hand , and altogether a Wesen , or demeanour , that makes the world look blank to you , and whose unexceptionable opinions become a bore ; while another man who deals in -what you cannot but think " dangerous paradoxes , '' warms your heart by the pressure of his hand , and looks out on the world with so clear and loving an eye , that nature seems to reflect the light of his glance upon your own feeling . So it is with Carlyle * . When he is saying the very opposite of what we think , he says it so finely , with such hearty conviction—he makes the object about which we differ stand out in such grand relief under the clear light of his strong and honest intellect—he appeals so constantly to our sense of the manly and the truthful —that we are obliged to say "Hear ! hear ! " to the writer before we can give the decorous " Oh ! oh ! " to his opinions .

      Much twaddling criticism has been spent on Carlyle ' s style . Unquestionably there are some genuine minds , not at all given to twaddle , to whom his style is antipathetic , who find it as unendurable as an English lady finds peppermint . Against antipathies there is no arguing ; they are misfortunes . But instinctive repulsion apart , surely there is no one who can read and relish Carlyle without feeling that they could no more wish him to have written in another style than they could wish Gothic architecture not to be jG-othic , or Raffaelle not to be Raffaellesque . It is the fashion to speak of '' Carlyle almost exclusively as a philosopher ; but , to our thinking ^ he is yet more of an artist than a philosopher . He glances deep down into human nature , and shows the causes of human actions ; he seizes grand generalisations , and traces them in tie particular -with wonderful acumen ; and in all this he is a philosopher . But , perhaps , his greatest power lies in

      concrete presentation . No novelist has made his creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men of the French Revolution , Cromwell and the Puritans . What humour in his pictures ! Yet what depth of appreciation , what reverence for the great and godlike « under every sort of earthly mummery 1 It is several years now since we read a work of Carlyle ' s seriatim , but this our long-standing impression of him as a writer we find confirmed by looking over Mr . Ballantyne ' s Selections . Such a volume as this is surely a benefit to the public , for alas ! Carlyle ' s works are still dear , and many who would like to have them are obliged to forego the possession of more than a volume or two . Through this good service of Mr . Ballantyne ' s , however , they may now obtain for a moderate sum a large collection of extracts—if not the best that could have been made , still very precious

      ones . To make extracts from a book of extracts may at first seem easy , and to make extracts from a writer so -well known may seem superfluous . The embarras de richesses and the length of the passages make the first not easy ; and as to the second , why , we have reread these passages so often in the volumes , and now again in JMr . Ballantyne ' s selection , that we cannot suppose any amount of repetition otherwise than agreeable . We will , howover , be sparing . Here is

      DAVID , TOE HEBREW KINO . On the whole , wo make too much of faults : the details of the business hide the real centre of it . Faults ? The greatest of faults , I should say , is to be conscious of none . Readers of the Bible above all , one would think , might know better . Who is called there " the man according to God ' s own heart ? " David , the Hebrew King , had fallen into sins enough ; blackest crimes ; there was no want of sins . And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask , Is this your man according to God ' s heart ? The sneer , I must say , seems to mo but a shallow one . What are faults , what are the outward details of a life , if the inner secret of it , the remorse , temptations , true , often-baffled , nover-onded struggle of it , bo forgotten ? " It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps . " Of all acts is not , for a man , repentance the most divine ? The deadliest sin , I say , were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;—that is death ; the heart

      bo conscious is divorced from sincerity , humility , and fact ; is dead : it is " pure" as dead dry sand is pure . David ' s life and history , as written for us in those Psalms of his , I consider to bo the truest emblem over given of a man ' s moral progress and warfaro here below . All earnest eouls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best . Struggle often baffled , sore baffled , down as into entire wreck ; yet a struggle never ended ; over , with tears , repentance , true unconquerable purpose , begun anew . Poor human nature ! Is not a man ' s walking , in truth , always Unit : " a succession of falls ? " Man can do no other . In this wild clement of a Life , lie has to struggle onwards ; now fallen , deepabased ; and ever , with tears , repentance , with bleeding heart , ho has to rise again , struggle again still onwards . That hia struggle be a faithful unconquerable one : that is too question of questions . In . another way how excellent is tliis on

      THO WOUTII OIT KORMUI . AB . What we call » Formulas" are not in their origin bad ; they are indispensably good . Formula is method , habitude , found wherever man i « found . Formulae

      fashion themselves as Paths do , as beaten Highways , leading toward * some sacred or high object , whither many men are bent . Consider it . One man , full of . heartfelt earnest impulse , finds out a way of domg somewhat—were it of uttering his soul's ( reverence for the Highest , were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man . An inventor was needed to do that , a poet ; he has articulated the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts . This is his way of doing that ; these are hia footsteps , the beginning of a " Path . " And now see : the second man travels naturally in the footsteps of his foregoer : it is the easiest method . In the footsteps of his foregoer ; yet with improvements , changes where such seem good ; at all events with enlargements , the Path ever widening itself as more travel it ;—till at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may travel and drive . While there remains a City or Shrine , or any Reality to dxive to , at the farther end , the Highway shall be right welcome ! When the City is gone , we will forsake the Highway . In this manner all Institutions , Practices , Regulated . Things in the world have come into existence , and gone out of existence . Formulas all begin by being fuJl of substance ; you may call them the skin , the articulation into shape , into limbs and skin , of a substance . that is already there : they had not been there otherwise . Idols , as we said , are not idolatrous till they become doubtful , empty for the worshipper ' s heart . Much as we talk against Formulas , I hope no one of us is ignorant withal of the high significance of trtte Formulas ; that they were , and will ever be , the indispensablest furniture of our habitation in this world . Finally , this characteristic passage tempts us : — THE APES OF THE DEAD SEA . Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant than that Moslem one , of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea . A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake ; and having forgqtten , as we are all prone to do , the inner facts of Nature , and taken up -with the falsities and outer semblances of it , were fallen into sad conditions— verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Hake . Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses , with an instructive word of warning , out of which might have sprung " remedial measures " not a few . But no : the men of the Dead Sea discovered , as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets , no comeliness in Moses ; listened with real tedium to Moses , with light grinning , or with splenetic sniffs and sneers , affecting even to yawn ; and signified , in short , that they found him a humbug , and even a bore . Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses , That probably he was a humbug , that certainly he was a bore . Moses withdrew ; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw . The Men of the Dead Sea , when we next went to visit them , were all " changed into Apes ; " sitting on the trees there , grinning now in the most wwafFected manner ; gibbering and chattering complete nonsense ; finding the whole Universe now a most undisputable Humbug ! The Universe has become a Humbug to the Apes who thought it one ! There they sit and chatter , to this hour ; only I think , every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness , half-reminiscence ; and they sit , with their vdzzened smoke-dried visages , and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may ; looking op £ , through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs , into the wonderfulest pttiversal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things ; ¦ wholly an Uncertainty , Unintelligibility , they and it ; and for commentary thereon , here and there an unmusical chatter or mew : —truest , tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape ! The } ' made no use of their souls ; and so have lost them . Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there , with unmusical screeches , and half remember that they had souls . Didst thou never , O Traveller , fall in with parties of this tribe ? Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day .

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      Theological And Social Essays. Essays Ec...

      THEOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL ESSAYS . Essays Ecclesiastical and Social . Keprinted , with Additions , from the Edinburg h Review . By W . J . Conybeare , M . A ., late Fellow of Trinity College , Cambridge . Longman The Man Christ Jesus . By the Rev . Robert Craig , A . M ., Rothesay . Edinburgh : Thomas Constable and Co . Essays Ecclesiastical and Social . —Mr . Conybeare is a thoroughly clever -writer , and the popularity of his Essays is not to be wondered at . But we cannot give him the praise due to great depth of thought . His celebrated , the most remarkable

      -we may almost say famous , Essay on Church Parties is instance we ever saw of a man unconsciously sawing off the bough on which lie sits . He seems himself scarcely to have made up his mind whether the divisions which he reveals and satirises are creditable or discreditable , useful or dangerous , to his Church . At one time he tells us that the three parties —High Church , Low Church , and Broad Church—are a triple cord which cannot easily be untwisted , and neither of the strands of which ought to be cut ; that the object of every wise Churchman should be to keep each of the main schools of opinion from extravagance on the one hand , and stagnation on the other : and that the existence of counteracting parties is a check

      providentially operating for this end . But afterwards he winds up thus : — While civil discord thus convulses the Church , many of her children are falling away from her , and abandoning the distinctive doctrinea of Christianity . Wo have already noticed the diffusion of infidel opinions among the lower claases ; but tho mischief is not confined to them . The highest ranks and most intelligent professions are influenced by sceptical opinions to an extent which , twenty years back , would have / seemed incredible . It is true that ' as far as tho upper classes are concerned , the last lialf century ( taken as a whole ) has been characterised by a reaction against the fashionable scepticism of the preceding ago . But in England tho tide turned ten or Afteen years ngo , and the current is now running in tho opposite direction . This state of things , as far aa the upper classes are concerned , has been directly caused by the dissensions of the Church . " When doctors differ , who shall decide ? " is tho oxpreBsion of an almost inevitable scepticism . These unnatural hostilities must cease if we forum

      are ever to reconvert the Pagans of the factory and the Pantheists of the . How , indeed , can we hope to move them if wo are unable to answer that moBt obvious retort of the unbeliever , " I will hearken when you Christians can agree upon tho lessons which you want to teach me . " And how can we answer this , but by acknowledging a substantial unity of faith , and an absolute identity of holiness , in the [/» " »« of endless diversity of opinion ? "Oh , what are the things wo ugU * tor , « £ « Leigh ton , " compared with tho great things of God ! " Surely it is * ' " « "'** Yf should agree to differ about Prevenient Grace and Surplice Preaching *™ turn - * true battle which is raging round us ; a battle not between Anglicans an « v ^ nor even between Popery and Protestantiam , but between * nlth an «* A ™ ^™ " ^ believe that the end is sure , and that Truth will conquer . Hut who can eay now many ages of defeat may precede that nnal riotoryP mn ,. h loss In the flr . 1 place the divisions in thej . Ohurol ^ . not , tl ; e » j « £ ™* J £ the only cau « e , of the spread of ^ ig ^ fj ^ dy of criticSL directed ^ nTthcTviScnct c J Sy e ^ c' -ntary cvi Jencea , of Chrl « ,

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), Oct. 27, 1855, page 15, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_27101855/page/15/