Obiter Dicta
Birrell, Augustine, 1850-1933
English
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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.
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