David Masson

“ The irregular ridge of the Old Town, with its main street of lofty antique houses rising gradually from Holyrood up to the craggy Castle; the chasm between the Old Town and the New, showing grassy slopes by day, and glittering supernaturally with lamps at night; the New Town itself, like a second city spilt out of the Old, fairly built of stone, and stretching downwards over new heights and hollows, with gardens intermixed, till it reaches the flats of the Forth! ”

“ The greatest burden in the world is Superstition, not only of ceremonies in the Church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home. What greater weakening, what more subtle stratagem against our Christian warfare, when, besides the gross body of real transgressions to encounter, we shall be terrified by a vain and shadowy menacing of faults that are not! When things indifferent shall be set to overfront us, under the banners of Sin, what wonder if we be routed, and, by this art of our Adversary, fall into the subjection of worst and deadliest offences! ”

“ But, if credit enough is not given to my own solemn affirmation, nor to this Public Testimony, Thee, Lord God, I make finally my witness, who explorest the inmost recesses of the spirit, who triest the reins, and knowest the secret motives of the breast, a Searcher of hearts to whom, as if by thorough dissection, all things are bare. Thee, God, Thee I call as my witness, who shalt one day be my Judge and the Judge of all, whether it is not the case that men see in this heart of mine what Thou seest not. ”

“ Nothing finer than that letter has come to light, or ever can come to light, in all Carlyle’s correspondence:—
“And now, my dear friend, a long, long adieu! One advice; and, as a parting one, consider, value it. Cultivate the milder dispositions of your heart. Subdue the more extravagant visions of the brain. In time your abilities must be known. Among your acquaintance they are already beheld with wonder and delight. By those whose opinion will be valuable they hereafter will be appreciated. Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved! ”

“ If he had not Sir Walter Scott’s positive conviction that every man ought to be either a laird or a lawyer, casting in authorship as a mere addition if it were to be practised at all, he at least led so full and keen a life, and was drawn forth on so many sides by nature, society, and the unseen, that Literature, out of the actual moments in which he was engaged in it, must have seemed to him a mere bagatelle, a mere fantastic echo of not a tithe of life. ”

“ The shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguered Truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas, wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge? ”

“ No such poetry of artist-like delight in beauty of scenery, the soft and luscious in colour, form, language, and sound, pervaded at the same time by such a fine and high vein of pensive reflectiveness, had appeared in Scotland for many a day. ”

“ If there shall be found some one who will defend civil liberty more freely than here, yet certainly it will hardly be in a greater or more illustrious example; and truly, if the belief is that a deed of such arduous and famous example was not attempted and so prosperously finished without divine inspiration, there may be reason to think that the celebration and defence of the same with such applauses was also by the same aid and impulse,—an opinion I would much rather see entertained by all than have any other happiness of genius, judgment, or diligence, attributed to myself. ”

“ Or, again, if we will have an image of that which from its nature is unimaginable, then, in our efforts to be as pure and abstract as possible, we find ourselves driven, as I have said, into a fancy of mind as a kind of clear aërial transparency, unbounded or of indefinite bounds, and yet not a dead transparency, but a transparency full of pulses, powers, motions, and whirls, capable in a moment of clouding itself, ceasing to be a transparency, and becoming some strange solid phantasmagory, as of a landscape smiling in sunshine or a sky dark with a storm. ”

“ Imagine farther that this Army had somehow come to be constituted, through its entire mass, on Cromwell's extraordinary principle, announced by him to Hampden at the beginning of the war, that the power of an army depends ultimately on the "spirit," or intrinsic moral mood, of the individuals composing it. Imagine that the atoms of this army were all "men of a spirit," men who had not fought as hirelings, but as earnest partakers in a great cause. Imagine them, if you like, as an army of fanatics. This phrase, however, might mislead, unless qualified. ”

“ Is it possible to read your Proposals of the benefits of a Free State without reflecting upon your tutor's 'All this will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me'? Come, come, Sir: lay the Devil aside; do not proceed with so much malice and against knowledge. Act like a man, that a good Christian may not be afraid to pray for you. Was it not you that scribbled a justification of the murder of the King against Salmasius, and made it good too thus: that murder was an action meritorious compared with your superior wickedness? ”

“ Never surely did a youth leave the academic halls of England more full of fair promise than Milton, when, at the age of twenty-three, he quitted Cambridge to reside at his father’s house, amid the quiet beauties of a rural neighbourhood some twenty miles distant from London. Fair in person, with a clear fresh complexion, light brown hair which parted in the middle and fell in locks to his shoulders, clear grey eyes, and a well-knit frame of moderate proportions—there could not have been found a finer picture of pure and ingenuous English youth. ”

“ It is impossible to suppose that Carlyle, at this period of his life or at any other, can have been all unhappy, even when he thought himself most unhappy. There must have been ardours and glows of soul, great joys and exhilarations, corresponding to the complexity of nervous endowment that could descend to such depths of sadness. From himself we learn, in particular, how the society of Irving, whether in their Annandale meetings, or in Irving’s visits to Edinburgh, had always an effect upon his spirits like that of sunrising upon night or fog. ”

“ For some years England had been in such a state of theological ferment that it was impossible not to inquire how much of the traditional Orthodoxy had real warrant in the Bible and how much was mere matter of inveterate opinion; in one important particular Milton, to his own surprise, had found himself standing out publicly as the champion of what was thought a horrible heresy; might it not be well to go over the whole ground, and fix one's whole Christian creed so as to be able to give an account of it, when called upon, in every other particular? ”

“ You have rightly marked out for yourself the path of virtue in that theatre of the world on which you have entered; but remember that the path is common so far to virtue and vice, and that you have yet to advance to where the path divides itself into two. And you ought now betimes to prepare yourself for leaving this common path, pleasant and flowery, and for being able the more readily, with your own will, though with labour and danger, to climb that arduous and difficult one which is the slope of virtue only. ”

“ One might say of Swift that he had far less of belief in a God than of belief in a Devil. He is like a man walking on the earth and among the busy haunts of his fellow-mortals, observing them and their ways, and taking his part in the bustle, all the while, however, conscious of the tuggings downward of secret chains reaching into the world of the demons. Hence his ferocity, his misanthropy, his sæva indignatio, all of them true forms of energy, imparting unusual potency to a life, but forms of energy bred of communion with what outlies nature on the lower or infernal side. ”

“ It may now without arrogance be asserted that German Literature has effected much for humanity in this respect,—that a moral-psychological tendency pervades it, introducing not ascetic timidity, but free culture in accordance with nature, and a cheerful obedience to law; and therefore I have observed with pleasure Mr. Carlyle’s admirably profound study of this Literature, and I have noticed with sympathy how he has not only been able to discover the beautiful and human, the good and great, in us, but has also contributed what was his own, and has endowed us with the treasures of his genius. ”

“ In short, that in Milton's scheme which is now obsolete is its determinate intertwining of the whole business of the acquisition of knowledge with the process of reading in other languages than the vernacular. This taken out of the Scheme, all the rest lasts, and is as good now, and perhaps as needful, as it was in Milton's time. Above all, the noble moral glow that pervades the Tract on Education, the mood of magnanimity in which it is conceived and written, and the faith it inculcates in the powers of the young human spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are merits everlasting. ”

“ If we desire to be of the former, nothing better for us, nothing nobler, than a Free Commonwealth; if we will needs condemn ourselves to be of the latter, despairing of our own virtue, industry, and the number of our able men, we may then, conscious of our own unworthiness to be governed better, sadly betake us to our befitting thraldom: yet, choosing out of our own number one who hath best aided the people and best merited against tyranny, the space of a reign or two we may chance to live happily enough, or tolerably. ”

“ If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain. ”

“ Accordingly, in all great poets there may be discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world figured as a poor little ball pendent in space and moving forward out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. But in this respect Shakespeare exceeds them all; and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more religious, more spiritual, more profoundly metaphysical, than he. Into an inordinate amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of sensible things, infuse the peculiar moral germ of Christianity, and you have the religion of Shakespeare. ”

“ It is lamentably true, blessed Truth: the foundations of the world have long been out of course; the gates of Earth and Hell have conspired together to intercept our joyful meeting and our holy kisses. With what a wearied, tired wing have I flown over nations, kingdoms, cities, towns, to find out precious Truth! ”

“ Atrocity horrible and before unheard of, savagery such that, good God, were all the Neros of all times and ages to come to life again, what a shame they would feel at having contrived nothing equally inhuman! Verily, verily, Angels are horrorstruck, men are amazed; heaven itself seems to be astounded by these cries, and the earth itself to blush with the shed blood of so many innocent men. ”

“ Hence those glances from heaven to earth and to the underworld which earth conceals, those shafts of reasoned insight into the roots of all things, those lightning gleams of speculation to its last extreme, that wealth of maxims of worldly prudence outrivalling and double-distilling the essence of all that is in Bacon’s Essays, those hints and reaches towards an ultimate philosophy both of nature and of human life, which have made Shakespeare’s writings till now, and will make them henceforth, a perennial amazement. ”

“ Shakespeare lived and died, we may say, in the pre-scientific period; he lived and died in the belief of the fixedness of our earth in space and the diurnal wheeling round her of the ten spectacular spheres. Not the less was he Shakespeare; and none of us dares to say that there is now in the world, or has recently been, a more superb thinking apparatus of its order than his mind was, a spiritual transparency of larger diameter, or vivid with grander gleamings and pulses. ”

“ It is a greater honour to make a king than to be one. Your proper name minds you of being St. George for England; you surname prompts you to stand for order: then let not panic fears, punctilios of human policy, or state formalities, beguile you (whom we look upon as Jethro's magistrate, who was a man of courage, fearing God, dealing truly, and hating covetousness) of that immarescible crown of glory due to you, whom we hope that God hath designed to be the repairer of the breach and the temporal redeemer of your native country. ”

“ Not the less it is depressing to Scottish patriotism nowadays to remember how long the turmoil lasted, how all-engrossing it was, and how much of native faculty and aspiration of the finer, deeper, and quieter sorts it must have stifled and extinguished. For the first twenty years after the Reformation there is the compensation, indeed, of the oratory and pre-eminent prose energy of Knox, and of the great literary fame and exquisite Latinity of Buchanan; but from the year 1580 onwards till 1725, or thereabouts, what a long tract of sterility in the literary annals of Scotland! ”

“ Controversy enough remained to give occasion to plenty of polemical prose; but about the middle of her reign, when England, once more great and powerful abroad as in the time of the Edwards, settled down within herself into a new lease of social order and leisure under an ascertained government, there began an outburst of literary genius such as no age or country had ever before witnessed. The literary fecundity of that period of English history which embraces the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and the whole of the reign of James I. (1580-1625) is a perpetual astonishment to us all. ”

“ Is it nothing to be able to walk along the whole length of her noble Union Street, whether on fair summer mornings, when the sun is shining, or again in the frosty winter nights, when the eye is held by the undulating perspective of the lamps, and the very houses glitter keenly in the starlight, and the aurora borealis is seen dancing at its best in the northward sky over the chasm from Union Bridge? ”

“ Not slowly to build up a grand poem of continuous ideal action, not quietly and at leisure to weave forth tissues of fantastic imagery, not perseveringly and laboriously to prosecute one track of speculation and bring it to a close, not earnestly and courageously to throw one’s whole soul into a work of moral agitation and reform, was now what was regarded as natural in literature. ”

“ More precious by far to Carlyle than all the acquaintanceships Edinburgh afforded, or could afford, was his correspondence with Goethe. It was to this great intellect, this German soul of light and adamant, now verging on his eightieth year, and whom he was never to behold in the flesh, that his thoughts turned incessantly in his domestic musings in Comely Bank, or in his walks anywhere, with or without Jeffrey, between Arthur Seat and the Corstorphines. ”

“ And this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of man, which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, specifically human. That which is the essence of all worth, all beauty, all humour, all genius, is open or secret reference to the supernatural; and this is sorrow. The attitude of a finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be that of an exile, grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for an unknown home.
As we consider this frame of mind to have been characteristic of Shakespeare, so we find that as a poet he has not forgotten to represent it. ”

“ In this age of a hundred sciences, all tramping on Nature’s outside with their flags up, and marching her round and round, and searching her through and through for her secrets, and flinging into the public forum their heaps of results, how is it possible to call mind the same as it was a generation or two ago, when the sciences were fewer, their industry more leisurely, and their discoveries less frequent? ”

“ But it is Literature that reads us the lesson most fully and convincingly. Some of those great men of action have left little or no direct speech of themselves. They mingled their minds with the rage of things around them; they worked, and strove, and died. But the books we have from all periods, the poems, the songs, the treatises, the pleadings—some of them from men great also in the world of action, but most from men who only looked on, and thought, and tried to rule the spirit, or to find how it might be ruled—these remain with us and can be studied yet microscopically. ”