Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVI, No. 5, May 1850Various
General
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVI, No. 5, May 1850
Various
Literature -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals
The reader of Carlyle will find nothing new in principle, and little new
in phraseology, in this pamphlet, but it is still fresh and racy, and
exhibits the author hammering as lustily as ever on his old anvil, with
his old tools. The picture given of the poor simple Pope, with the New
Testament in his hand—the pitying contempt with which Lamartine is
alluded to—and the view of American democracy—will be found the most
readable portions of the pamphlet. Lamartine, with his fine French
phrases and sentimentalities, looks small enough as subjected to the
surly tests of such an Icelandic critic as Carlyle—“a most eloquent,
fair-spoken literary gentleman, whom thoughtless persons took for a
prophet, priest, and heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee
friend of mine discerned to be properly ‘the first stump-orator in the
world, standing, too, on the highest stump for the time.’ _A sorrowful
spectacle to all men of reflection during the time he lasted, that poor
M. de Lamartine_; with nothing in him but melodious wind and _soft
sowder_, which he and others took for something divine, and not
diabolic! Sad enough: the eloquent latest impersonation of
Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare persuasively that
_it_ is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a little, in such cases;
all balloons do and must give up their gas in the pressure of things,
and are collapsed in a sufficiently wretched manner before long.” The
wise Yankee friend alluded to here is, we suppose, Mr. Emerson.
Carlyle, though he seems with De Tocqueville, to consider Democracy
inevitable in Europe, still despises and hates it, and thinks that even
in America it is nothing more than “Anarchy _plus_ the constable.” His
view of the United States, sufficiently contemptuous as a whole, closes
with a bitter, sardonic jest, which we think will make the tour of the
world, and injure us more than a thousand Trollopes and Basil Halls. He
asks, “What great human soul, what great thought, what great, noble
thing that one could worship, or loyally admire, has yet been produced
there?” We might answer this question easily, but Carlyle answers it in
a sufficiently provoking manner—“What have they done? They have doubled
their population every twenty years. They have begotten, with a rapidity
beyond recorded example, _eighteen millions of the greatest bores_ ever
seen in this world before—that, hitherto, is their feat in History.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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