The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 6/Editor’s Introduction
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
The present, like an earlier, volume of the series has a history of some, though of a slighter, interest connected with the name of Mr. John Stuart Mill. In the year 1840, Carlyle had, at the suggestion of Mill, then editor of the Westminster Review, undertaken to contribute to that periodical an article on Oliver Cromwell. While this article was being written, ill-health compelled the editor to go abroad, and his temporary successor, who, probably through some misunderstanding or oversight on Mill’s part, had been left uninformed of the engagement, decided to deal with the subject himself, and wrote in that sense to Carlyle. It was undoubtedly a somewhat provoking incident, and Carlyle was not unnaturally annoyed by it; but he was, fortunately, too much attracted by his subject to abandon it, and, instead of throwing aside his uncompleted essay, resolved to expand it into a history of the Civil War.
As, however, was not unusual with him, and, as became still more his habit in later life, the hot fit of enthusiasm for a newly conceived project was succeeded by the cold fit of regret for his decision, and of disenchantment with his task. Even after he had determined, warned by the discovery of its true dimensions, to reduce the scope of the work, and to make it mainly a biography of Cromwell, embodying a narrative of the principal events of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, we still find him lamenting, always with his customary touch of exaggeration, the difficulties and labours of the undertaking. ‘My progress with Cromwell, he writes, ‘is frightful.‘ A thousand times I regretted that this task was ever taken up.‘ Again, he describes it as ‘the most impossible book of all I ever before tried,‘—an unconscious ‘Grecism’ which numbers the book among its own predecessors, but which has the august countenance of Milton, in the well-known passage wherein he includes Adam among ‘his sons since born,‘ and calls Eve the ‘fairest of her daughters.‘ Even in looking back upon the completed work, Carlyle could find no less despairing terms in which to speak of it than these: ‘Cromwell I must have written in 1844, but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling and misery, I used to count it had cost me.‘
Happily for himself and for the world, we can trace much other and far more fruitful employment of the period of preparation than he here acknowledges. In 1842, he visited the field of Naseby, in company with Dr. Arnold, and in the following year, he inspected the scene of the ‘crowning mercy’ at Worcester, and also that of the decisive victory of Dunbar, on the very anniversary of the fight: journeys which, in their inspiring effect upon his wonderfully vivid descriptions of those memorable battles, count for a good deal more in the success of the Cromwell than all the ‘abstruse toil, obscure speculation and futile wrestlings’ of which he speaks.
In the course, however, of his four years of preparatory labour, his plan, as we all know, underwent a still further modification. Commenced as a History, and transformed into a Biography, it was now to become virtually an Autobiography with copious editorial annotations. Having originally proposed to compose a narrative of the Civil War, and next to write in place thereof a Life of Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle’s final idea was to let his hero relate the story of his own career, in the words of his own written and spoken deliverances, as explained, illustrated and amplified by their Editor. And so at last the book took the definitive form of its description on the title-page as Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations.
Assuredly that description is not, on the first blush of the matter, a very promising one. To this day, indeed, it must remain more or less of a marvel, and much more than less of a testimony to Carlyle’s remarkable gifts, that he succeeded in producing a masterpiece from such forbidding materials. A priori, one would have said that whatever merits such a book might possess, they could not possibly be those of a continuous and coherent narrative; whereas nothing is more noticeable about the Cromwell than the unity of the impression which it produces on the reader, and the completeness with which the fire of its author’s genius has fused it into an artistic whole. Of his battle-pieces, with their intense reality and dramatic vigour of narrative, mention has already been made; but these might well have been and probably would have been in most other hands mere ‘purple patches’ on a fabric of the dullest and plainest hodden-grey. But the inexhaustible animation which he has contrived to infuse into a story, the main thread of which is carried on through a series of what, with all respect to Carlyle’s hero, are some of the most undistinguished and ineffective letters ever written, it is this that makes the work a living thing. The mere editing of the letters, the emendations, ‘elucidations’ and explanatory scholia are full of critical ingenuity and insight; and it will be superfluous information to any one who has studied the text without their assistance, to remark that few letter-writers have ever demanded more of these qualities from an Editor than Oliver Cromwell.
From the historical point of view, the work displays much the same merits and the same defects as the French Revolution. Carlyle approaches both the English and the French revolutionary movement from the same standpoint of preconception; as indeed he frankly confesses in his Introduction. ‘To see God’s own law then universally acknowledged for complete as it stood in the holy Written Book, made good in this world.‘ This, according to Carlyle, is the whole, sole, and sufficient cause, beginning, and end of the Puritan-Democratic uprising; and he dismisses all political and constitutional questions, all disputes between Royal prerogative and popular liberties, as mere irrelevances. To uphold the law of God was ‘the general spirit of England in the seventeenth century,‘ as ‘in other somewhat disfigured form’ (somewhat disfigured indeed!) ‘we have seen the same immortal hope take practical shape in the French Revolution, and once more astonish the world.‘ A man who will set about to explain the whole of the events between 1635 and 1659, on this theory and this alone, will, in Carlyle’s own language, ‘go far.‘ Much, too, is demanded from one who essays to pose Cromwell as a single-minded soldier in the warfare of truth against quackery and sham. ‘Fundamentally sincere,‘ that great man may well have been and was: but to deny that, like hundreds of other men of his age and faith, he habitually abode in a spiritual region in which the dividing line between the genuine and the spurious forms of religious emotion was continually getting obscured, and words which were at one moment the outpourings of a devout soul, sank at another moment into the merest cant of the conventicle—to deny this, is surely not only to shut the eyes to certain obvious features in Cromwell’s career, but to leave many of his otherwise easily explicable utterances unexplained. Carlyle applies his own theory to these with courage: but as regards the more unctuously and offensively pietistic among them, not without effort; nor is the result successful. Fortunately, however, it is pre-eminently as a man of action that Cromwell lives for his countrymen of all political schools and religious sects; and since the time has now come when they can agree to differ as to his motives, Carlyle’s too heroic theory of him need not, and does not, any longer irritate even those who are least in sympathy with it. They willingly acquiesce in Carlyle’s canonisation of the Lord Protector; for they feel that he has earned a right to his saint, by drawing them so masterly a portrait of the man.