Obiter Dicta

by Augustine Birrell

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 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 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

Genres: Essays

83 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1884

About the author

The Right Honourable Augustine Birrell was an English politician, barrister, academic and author. He was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1907 to 1916, resigning in the immediate aftermath of the Easter Rising.

Birrell was the son of a Baptist minister. He was educated at Amersham Hall school and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he was made an Honorary Fellow in 1879. He started work in a solicitor's office in Liverpool but was called to the Bar in 1875, becoming a QC in 1893.

In 1888 he married Eleanor Tennyson, daughter of the poet Frederick Locker-Lampson and widow of Lionel Tennyson, son of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. They had two sons, one of whom, Frankie (1889–1935) was later a journalist and critic and associated with the Bloomsbury Group.

From 1896 to 1899 he was Professor of Comparative Law at University College, London. President of the Board of Education, 1905-7; won appreciation by his conduct of the 'Education Bill.' He possessed a curious type of humour which found expression in sayings known in the House of Commons and the Press as 'Birrellisms.' A noted Liberal speaker on political platforms.

He retired from political life in 1916. Lived at Elm Park Road, Chelsea, and devoted himself to literary work.

Essayist and critic; distinguished as a writer by the winning and informal quality of his style.

Author, Obiter Dicta; Res Judicatae; Men, Women and Books; Life of Charlotte Brontë; Sir Frank Lockwood, etc. Published an edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson; also Browning's Poems, etc.
(Burke, Knightage; The Times, Nov. 21, 1933.)

Reviews

[T Collen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with all the other reviewers. Although Birrell's writing seems somehow stuffy and dated, this book is worth reading.

Here's a gem from page 23, "... close your wide mouth and cease shrieking."

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author has a wry style that's quite appealing, even though the content is somewhat remote from us now. Surprisingly readable.

[Avis Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

Available at Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7299

[Cera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a vague sense that it irritated me, but that I liked it enough that I bought it & the sequel at Powells for cheap, so maybe I'm remembering something else?

[Galicius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting commentaries on Cellini, Johnson, Browning.