Obiter Dicta

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OBITER DICTA

'An _obiter dictum_, in the language of the law, is
a gratuitous opinion, an individual impertinence, which,
whether it be wise or foolish, right or wrong, bindeth
none--not even the lips that utter it.'

OLD JUDGE.

_PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

This seems a very little book to introduce to so large a continent. No
such enterprise would ever have suggested itself to the home-keeping
mind of the Author, who, none the less, when this edition was proposed
to him by Messrs. Scribner on terms honorable to them and grateful to
him, found the notion of being read in America most fragrant and
delightful.

London, February 13, 1885._

CONTENTS.

* * * * *

CARLYLE
ON THE ALLEGED OBSCURITY OF MR. BROWNING'S POETRY
TRUTH-HUNTING
ACTORS
A ROGUE'S MEMOIRS
THE VIA MEDIA
FALSTAFF

CARLYLE

The accomplishments of our race have of late become so varied, that it
is often no easy task to assign him whom we would judge to his proper
station among men; and yet, until this has been done, the guns of our
criticism cannot be accurately levelled, and as a consequence the
greater part of our fire must remain futile. He, for example, who
would essay to take account of Mr. Gladstone, must read much else
besides Hansard; he must brush up his Homer, and set himself to
acquire some theology. The place of Greece in the providential order
of the world, and of laymen in the Church of England, must be
considered, together with a host of other subjects of much apparent
irrelevance to a statesman's life. So too in the case of his
distinguished rival, whose death eclipsed the gaiety of politics and
banished epigram from Parliament: keen must be the critical faculty
which can nicely discern where the novelist ended and the statesman
began in Benjamin Disraeli.

Happily, no such difficulty is now before us. Thomas Carlyle was a
writer of books, and he was nothing else. Beneath this judgment he
would have winced, but have remained silent, for the facts are so.

Little men sometimes, though not perhaps so often as is taken for
granted, complain of their destiny, and think they have been hardly
treated, in that they have been allowed to remain so undeniably small;
but great men, with hardly an exception, nauseate their greatness, for
not being of the particular sort they most fancy. The poet Gray was
passionately fond, so his biographers tell us, of military history;
but he took no Quebec. General Wolfe took Quebec, and whilst he was
taking it, recorded the fact that he would sooner have written Gray's
'Elegy'; and so Carlyle--who panted for action, who hated eloquence,
whose heroes were Cromwell and Wellington, Arkwright and the 'rugged
Brindley,' who beheld with pride and no ignoble envy the bridge at
Auldgarth his mason-father had helped to build half a century before,
and then exclaimed, 'A noble craft, that of a mason; a good building
will last longer than most books--than one book in a million'; who
despised men of letters, and abhorred the 'reading public'; whose
gospel was Silence and Action--spent his life in talking and writing;
and his legacy to the world is thirty-four volumes octavo.

There is a familiar melancholy in this; but the critic has no need to
grow sentimental. We must have men of thought as well as men of
action: poets as much as generals; authors no less than artizans;
libraries at least as much as militia; and therefore we may accept and
proceed critically to examine Carlyle's thirty-four volumes, remaining
somewhat indifferent to the fact that had he had the fashioning of his
own destiny, we should have had at his hands blows instead of books.

Taking him, then, as he was--a man of letters--perhaps the best type
of such since Dr. Johnson died in Fleet Street, what are we to say of
his thirty-four volumes?

In them are to be found criticism, biography, history, politics,
poetry, and religion. I mention this variety because of a foolish
notion, at one time often found suitably lodged in heads otherwise
empty, that Carlyle was a passionate old man, dominated by two or
three extravagant ideas, to which he was for ever giving utterance in
language of equal extravagance. The thirty-four volumes octavo render
this opinion untenable by those who can read. Carlyle cannot be killed
by an epigram, nor can the many influences that moulded him be
referred to any single source. The rich banquet his genius has spread
for us is of many courses. The fire and fury of the Latter-Day
Pamphlets may be disregarded by the peaceful soul, and the preference
given to the 'Past' of 'Past and Present,' which, with its intense and
sympathetic mediaevalism, might have been written by a Tractarian. The
'Life of Sterling' is the favourite book of many who would sooner pick
oakum than read 'Frederick the Great' all through; whilst the mere
student of _belles lettres_ may attach importance to the essays
on Johnson, Burns, and Scott, on Voltaire and Diderot, on Goethe and
Novalis, and yet remain blankly indifferent to 'Sartor Resartus' and
'The French Revolution.'

But true as this is, it is none the less true that, excepting possibly
the 'Life of Schiller,' Carlyle wrote nothing not clearly recognisable
as his. All his books are his very own--bone of his bone, and flesh of
his flesh. They are not stolen goods, nor elegant exhibitions of
recently and hastily acquired wares.

This being so, it may be as well if, before proceeding any further, I
attempt, with a scrupulous regard to brevity, to state what I take to
be the invariable indications of Mr. Carlyle's literary handiwork--the
tokens of his presence--'Thomas Carlyle, his mark.'

First of all, it may be stated, without a shadow of a doubt, that he
is one of those who would sooner be wrong with Plato than right with
Aristotle; in one word, he is a mystic. What he says of Novalis may
with equal truth be said of himself: 'He belongs to that class of
persons who do not recognise the syllogistic method as the chief organ
for investigating truth, or feel themselves bound at all times to stop
short where its light fails them. Many of his opinions he would
despair of proving in the most patient court of law, and would remain
well content that they should be disbelieved there.' In philosophy we
shall not be very far wrong if we rank Carlyle as a follower of Bishop
Berkeley; for an idealist he undoubtedly was. 'Matter,' says he,
'exists only spiritually, and to represent some idea, and body it
forth. Heaven and Earth are but the time-vesture of the Eternal. The
Universe is but one vast symbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it,
what is man himself but a symbol of God? Is not all that he does
symbolical, a revelation to sense of the mystic God-given force that
is in him?--a gospel of Freedom, which he, the "Messias of Nature,"
preaches as he can by act and word.' 'Yes, Friends,' he elsewhere
observes, 'not our logical mensurative faculty, but our imaginative
one, is King over us, I might say Priest and Prophet, to lead us
heavenward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward. The
understanding is indeed thy window--too clear thou canst not make it;
but phantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or
diseased.' It would be easy to multiply instances of this, the most
obvious and interesting trait of Mr. Carlyle's writing; but I must
bring my remarks upon it to a close by reminding you of his two
favourite quotations, which have both significance. One from
Shakespeare's _Tempest_:

'We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep;'

the other, the exclamation of the Earth-spirit, in Goethe's
_Faust_:

''Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.'

But this is but one side of Carlyle. There is another as strongly
marked, which is his second note; and that is what he somewhere calls
'his stubborn realism.' The combination of the two is as charming as
it is rare. No one at all acquainted with his writings can fail to
remember his almost excessive love of detail; his lively taste for
facts, simply as facts. Imaginary joys and sorrows may extort from him
nothing but grunts and snorts; but let him only worry out for himself,
from that great dust-heap called 'history,' some undoubted fact of
human and tender interest, and, however small it may be, relating
possibly to some one hardly known, and playing but a small part in the
events he is recording, and he will wax amazingly sentimental, and
perhaps shed as many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones over
their figments. This realism of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his
histories and biographies. The amount he tells you is something
astonishing--no platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles
which are the staple of most biography, but, instead of them, all the
facts and features of the case--pedigree, birth, father and mother,
brothers and sisters, education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress,
mode of speech; nothing escapes him. It was a characteristic criticism
of his, on one of Miss Martineau's American books, that the story of
the way Daniel Webster used to stand before the fire with his hands in
his pockets was worth all the politics, philosophy, political economy,
and sociology to be found in other portions of the good lady's
writings. Carlyle's eye was indeed a terrible organ: he saw
everything. Emerson, writing to him, says: 'I think you see as
pictures every street, church, Parliament-house, barracks, baker's
shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands,
creeps, rolls, or swims thereabout, and make all your own.' He crosses
over, one rough day, to Dublin; and he jots down in his diary the
personal appearance of some unhappy creatures he never saw before or
expected to see again; how men laughed, cried, swore, were all of huge
interest to Carlyle. Give him a fact, he loaded you with thanks;
propound a theory, you were rewarded with the most vivid abuse.

This intense love for, and faculty of perceiving, what one may call
the 'concrete picturesque,' accounts for his many hard sayings about
fiction and poetry. He could not understand people being at the
trouble of inventing characters and situations when history was full
of men and women; when streets were crowded and continents were being
peopled under their very noses. Emerson's sphynx-like utterances
irritated him at times, as they well might; his orations and the like.
'I long,' he says, 'to see some _concrete thing_, some Event--
Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation which this Emerson
loves and wonders at, well _Emersonised_, depicted by Emerson--
filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him then to live
by itself.' [*] But Carlyle forgot the sluggishness of the ordinary
imagination, and, for the moment, the stupendous dulness of the
ordinary historian. It cannot be matter for surprise that people
prefer Smollett's 'Humphrey Clinker' to his 'History of England.'

[* Footnote: One need scarcely add, nothing of the sort
ever proceeded from Emerson. How should it? Where was it
to come from? When, to employ language of Mr. Arnold's
own, 'any poor child of nature' overhears the author of
'Essays in Criticism' telling two worlds that Emerson's
'Essays' are the most valuable prose contributions to the
literature of the century, his soul is indeed filled 'with
an unutterable sense of lamentation and mourning and woe.'
Mr. Arnold's silence was once felt to be provoking.
Wordsworth's lines kept occurring to one's mind--

'Poor Matthew, all his frolics o'er,
Is silent as a standing pool.'

But it was better so.]

The third and last mark to which I call attention is his humour.
Nowhere, surely, in the whole field of English literature, Shakespeare
excepted, do you come upon a more abundant vein of humour than
Carlyle's, though I admit that the quality of the ore is not of the
finest. His every production is bathed in humour. This must never be,
though it often has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken literally.
He is always a humourist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and
occasionally a buffoon.

Although the spectacle of Mr. Swinburne taking Mr. Carlyle to task, as
he recently did, for indelicacy, has an oddity all its own, so far as
I am concerned I cannot but concur with this critic in thinking that
Carlyle has laid himself open, particularly in his 'Frederick the
Great,' to the charge one usually associates with the great and
terrible name of Dean Swift; but it is the Dean with a difference, and
the difference is all in Carlyle's favour. The former deliberately
pelts you with dirt, as did in old days gentlemen electors their
parliamentary candidates; the latter only occasionally splashes you,
as does a public vehicle pursuing on a wet day its uproarious course.

These, then, I take to be Carlyle's three principal marks or notes:
mysticism in thought, realism in description, and humour in both.

To proceed now to his actual literary work.

First, then, I would record the fact that he was a great critic, and
this at a time when our literary criticism was a scandal. He more than
any other has purged our vision and widened our horizons in this great
matter. He taught us there was no sort of finality, but only nonsense,
in that kind of criticism which was content with laying down some
foreign masterpiece with the observation that it was not suited for
the English taste. He was, if not the first, almost the first critic,
who pursued in his criticism the historical method, and sought to make
us understand what we were required to judge. It has been said that
Carlyle's criticisms are not final, and that he has not said the last
word about Voltaire, Diderot, Richter, and Goethe. I can well believe
it. But reserving 'last words' for the use of the last man (to whom
they would appear to belong), it is surely something to have said the
_first_ sensible words uttered in English on these important
subjects. We ought not to forget the early days of the _Foreign and
Quarterly Review_. We have critics now, quieter, more reposeful
souls, taking their ease on Zion, who have entered upon a world ready
to welcome them, whose keen rapiers may cut velvet better than did the
two-handed broadsword of Carlyle, and whose later date may enable them
to discern what their forerunner failed to perceive; but when the
critics of this century come to be criticized by the critics of the
next, an honourable, if not the highest place will be awarded to
Carlyle.

Turn we now to the historian and biographer. History and biography
much resemble one another in the pages of Carlyle, and occupy more
than half his thirty-four volumes; nor is this to be wondered at,
since they afford him fullest scope for his three strong points--his
love of the wonderful; his love of telling a story, as the children
say, 'from the very beginning;' and his humour. His view of history is
sufficiently lofty. History, says he, is the true epic poem, a
universal divine scripture whose plenary inspiration no one out of
Bedlam shall bring into question. Nor is he quite at one with the
ordinary historian as to the true historical method. 'The time seems
coming when he who sees no world but that of courts and camps, and
writes only how soldiers were drilled and shot, and how this
ministerial conjurer out-conjured that other, and then guided, or at
least held, something which he called the rudder of Government, but
which was rather the spigot of Taxation, wherewith in place of
steering he could tax, will pass for a more or less instructive
Gazetteer, but will no longer be called an Historian.'

Nor does the philosophical method of writing history please him any
better:

'Truly if History is Philosophy teaching by examples, the writer
fitted to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. Better were it
that mere earthly historians should lower such pretensions, more
suitable for omniscience than for human science, and aiming only at
some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will be a poor
approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged
secret--or at most, in reverent faith, pause over the mysterious
vestiges of Him whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History
indeed reveals, but only all History and in Eternity will clearly
reveal.'

This same transcendental way of looking at things is very noticeable
in the following view of Biography: 'For, as the highest gospel was a
Biography, so is the life of every good man still an indubitable
gospel, and preaches to the eye and heart and whole man, so that
devils even must believe and tremble, these gladdest tidings. Man is
heaven-born--not the thrall of circumstances, of necessity, but the
victorious subduer thereof.' These, then, being his views, what are we
to say of his works? His three principal historical works are, as
everyone knows, 'Cromwell,' 'The French Revolution,' and 'Frederick
the Great,' though there is a very considerable amount of other
historical writing scattered up and down his works. But what are we to
say of these three? Is he, by virtue of them, entitled to the rank and
influence of a great historian? What have we a right to demand of an
historian? First, surely, stern veracity, which implies not merely
knowledge but honesty. An historian stands in a fiduciary position
towards his readers, and if he withholds from them important facts
likely to influence their judgment, he is guilty of fraud, and, when
justice is done in this world, will be condemned to refund all moneys
he has made by his false professions, with compound interest. This
sort of fraud is unknown to the law, but to nobody else. 'Let me know
the facts!' may well be the agonized cry of the student who finds
himself floating down what Arnold has called 'the vast Mississippi of
falsehood, History.' Secondly comes a catholic temper and way of
looking at things. The historian should be a gentleman and possess a
moral breadth of temperament. There should be no bitter protesting
spirit about him. He should remember the world he has taken upon
himself to write about is a large place, and that nobody set him up
over us. Thirdly, he must be a born story-teller. If he is not this,
he has mistaken his vocation. He may be a great philosopher, a useful
editor, a profound scholar, and anything else his friends like to call
him, except a great historian. How does Carlyle meet these
requirements? His veracity, that is, his laborious accuracy, is
admitted by the only persons competent to form an opinion, namely,
independent investigators who have followed in his track; but what may
be called the internal evidence of the case also supplies a strong
proof of it. Carlyle was, as everyone knows, a hero-worshipper. It is
part of his mysticism. With him man, as well as God, is a spirit,
either of good or evil, and as such should be either worshipped or
reviled. He is never himself till he has discovered or invented a
hero; and, when he has got him, he tosses and dandles him as a mother
her babe. This is a terrible temptation to put in the way of an
historian, and few there be who are found able to resist it. How easy
to keep back an ugly fact, sure to be a stumbling-block in the way of
weak brethren! Carlyle is above suspicion in this respect. He knows no
reticence. Nothing restrains him; not even the so-called proprieties
of history. He may, after his boisterous fashion, pour scorn upon you
for looking grave, as you read in his vivid pages of the reckless
manner in which too many of his heroes drove coaches-and-six through
the Ten Commandments. As likely as not he will call you a blockhead,
and tell you to close your wide mouth and cease shrieking. But, dear
me! hard words break no bones, and it is an amazing comfort to know
the facts. Is he writing of Cromwell?--down goes everything--letters,
speeches, as they were written, as they were delivered. Few great men
are edited after this fashion. Were they to be so--Luther, for
example--many eyes would be opened very wide. Nor does Carlyle fail in
comment. If the Protector makes a somewhat distant allusion to the
Barbadoes, Carlyle is at your elbow to tell you it means his selling
people to work as slaves in the West Indies. As for Mirabeau, 'our
wild Gabriel Honoré,' well! we are told all about him; nor is
Frederick let off a single absurdity or atrocity. But when we have
admitted the veracity, what are we to say of the catholic temper, the
breadth of temperament, the wide Shakespearian tolerance? Carlyle
ought to have them all. By nature he was tolerant enough; so true a
humourist could never be a bigot. When his war-paint is not on, a
child might lead him. His judgments are gracious, chivalrous, tinged
with a kindly melancholy and divine pity. But this mood is never for
long. Some gadfly stings him: he seizes his tomahawk and is off on the
trail. It must sorrowfully be admitted that a long life of opposition
and indigestion, of fierce warfare with cooks and Philistines, spoilt
his temper, never of the best, and made him too often contemptuous,
savage, unjust. His language then becomes unreasonable, unbearable,
bad. Literature takes care of herself. You disobey her rules: well and
good, she shuts her door in your face; you plead your genius: she
replies, 'Your temper,' and bolts it. Carlyle has deliberately
destroyed, by his own wilfulness, the value of a great deal he has
written. It can never become classical. Alas! that this should be true
of too many eminent Englishmen of our time. Language such as was, at
one time, almost habitual with Mr. Ruskin, is a national humiliation,
giving point to the Frenchman's sneer as to our distinguishing
literary characteristic being '_la brutalité_.' In Carlyle's case
much must be allowed for his rhetoric and humour. In slang phrase, he
always 'piles it on.' Does a bookseller misdirect a parcel, he
exclaims, 'My malison on all Blockheadisms and Torpid Infidelities of
which this world is full.' Still, all allowances made, it is a
thousand pities; and one's thoughts turn away from this stormy old man
and take refuge in the quiet haven of the Oratory at Birmingham, with
his great Protagonist, who, throughout an equally long life spent in
painful controversy, and wielding weapons as terrible as Carlyle's
own, has rarely forgotten to be urbane, and whose every sentence is a
'thing of beauty.' It must, then, be owned that too many of Carlyle's
literary achievements 'lack a gracious somewhat.' By force of his
genius he 'smites the rock and spreads the water;' but then, like
Moses, 'he desecrates, belike, the deed in doing.'

Our third requirement was, it may be remembered, the gift of the
storyteller. Here one is on firm ground. Where is the equal of the man
who has told us the story of 'The Diamond Necklace'?

It is the vogue, nowadays, to sneer at picturesque writing. Professor
Seeley, for reasons of his own, appears to think that whilst politics,
and, I presume religion, may be made as interesting as you please,
history should be as dull as possible. This, surely, is a jaundiced
view. If there is one thing it is legitimate to make more interesting
than another, it is the varied record of man's life upon earth. So
long as we have human hearts and await human destinies, so long as we
are alive to the pathos, the dignity, the comedy of human life, so
long shall we continue to rank above the philosopher, higher than the
politician, the great artist, be he called dramatist or historian, who
makes us conscious of the divine movement of events, and of our
fathers who were before us. Of course we assume accuracy and labor in
our animated historian; though, for that matter, other things being
equal, I prefer a lively liar to a dull one.

Carlyle is sometimes as irresistible as 'The Campbells are Coming,' or
'Auld Lang Syne.' He has described some men and some events once and
for all, and so takes his place with Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon.
Pedants may try hard to forget this, and may in their laboured
nothings seek to ignore the author of 'Cromwell' and 'The French
Revolution'; but as well might the pedestrian in Cumberland or
Inverness seek to ignore Helvellyn or Ben Nevis. Carlyle is
_there_, and will remain there, when the pedant of today has been
superseded by the pedant of to-morrow.

Remembering all this, we are apt to forget his faults, his
eccentricities, and vagaries, his buffooneries, his too-outrageous
cynicisms and his too-intrusive egotisms, and to ask ourselves--if it
be not this man, who is it then to be? Macaulay, answer some; and
Macaulay's claims are not of the sort to go unrecognised in a world
which loves clearness of expression and of view only too well.
Macaulay's position never admitted of doubt. We know what to expect,
and we always get it. It is like the old days of W. G. Grace's
cricket. We went to see the leviathan slog for six, and we saw it. We
expected him to do it, and he did it. So with Macaulay--the good Whig,
as he takes up the History, settles himself down in his chair, and
knows it is going to be a bad time for the Tories. Macaulay's style--
his much-praised style--is ineffectual for the purpose of telling the
truth about anything. It is splendid, but _splendide mendax_, and
in Macaulay's case the style was the man. He had enormous knowledge,
and a noble spirit; his knowledge enriched his style and his spirit
consecrated it to the service of Liberty. We do well to be proud of
Macaulay; but we must add that, great as was his knowledge, great also
was his ignorance, which was none the less ignorance because it was
wilful; noble as was his spirit, the range of subject over which it
energized was painfully restricted. He looked out upon the world, but,
behold, only the Whigs were good. Luther and Loyola, Cromwell and
Claverhouse, Carlyle and Newman--they moved him not; their enthusiasms
were delusions, and their politics demonstrable errors. Whereas, of
Lord Somers and Charles first Earl Grey it is impossible to speak
without emotion. But the world does not belong to the Whigs; and a
great historian must be capable of sympathizing both with delusions
and demonstrable errors. Mr. Gladstone has commented with force upon
what he calls Macaulay's invincible ignorance, and further says that
to certain aspects of a case (particularly those aspects most pleasing
to Mr. Gladstone) Macaulay's mind was hermetically sealed. It is
difficult to resist these conclusions; and it would appear no rash
inference from them, that a man in a state of invincible ignorance and
with a mind hermetically sealed, whatever else he may be--orator,
advocate, statesman, journalist, man of letters--can never be a great
historian. But, indeed, when one remembers Macaulay's limited range of
ideas: the commonplaceness of his morality, and of his descriptions;
his absence of humour, and of pathos--for though Miss Martineau says
she found one pathetic passage in the History, I have often searched
for it in vain; and then turns to Carlyle--to his almost bewildering
affluence of thought, fancy, feeling, humour, pathos--his biting pen,
his scorching criticism, his world-wide sympathy (save in certain
moods) with everything but the smug commonplace--to prefer Macaulay to
him, is like giving the preference to Birket Foster over Salvator
Rosa. But if it is not Macaulay, who is it to be? Mr. Hepworth Dixon
or Mr. Froude? Of Bishop Stubbs and Professor Freeman it behoves every
ignoramus to speak with respect. Horny-handed sons of toil, they are
worthy of their wage. Carlyle has somewhere struck a distinction
between the historical artist and the historical artizan. The bishop
and the professor are historical artizans; artists they are not--and
the great historian is a great artist.

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