In Thomas Carlyle's earlier days, when he followed a better inspiration
than his present,--when his writings were steeped, not in cynicism, but
in the pure human love of his fellow beings,--in the days when he did
not worship Force, but Truth and Goodness,--in those days, it was the
fashion of critics to pass the most sweeping censures on his writings
as "affected," "unintelligible," "extravagant." But he worked his way
on, in spite of that superficial criticism,--he won for himself an
audience; he gained renown; he became authentic. _Now_, the same class
of critics admire and praise whatever he writes. For the rule with
most critics is that of the bully in school and college,--to tyrannize
over the new boys, to abuse the strangers, but to treat with respect
whoever has bravely fought his way into a recognized position. Carlyle
has fought his way into the position of a great literary chief,--so
now he may be ever so careless, ever so willful, and he will be spoken
of in high terms by all monthlies and quarterlies. When he deserved
admiration, he was treated with cool contempt; now that he deserves
the sharpest criticism, not only for his false moral position, but
for his gross literary sins, the critics treat him with deference and
respect.
But let us say beforehand that we can never write of Thomas Carlyle
with bitterness. We have received too much good from him in past
days. He is our "Lost Leader," but we have loved and honored him as
few men were ever loved and honored. It is therefore with tenderness,
and not any cold, indifferent criticism, that we find fault with him
now. We shall always be grateful to the real Carlyle, the old Carlyle
of "Sartor Resartus," of the "French Revolution," of the "Life of
Schiller," of "Heroes and Hero-Worship," and of that long and noble
series of articles in the Edinburgh, Foreign Review, Westminster, and
Frazer, each of which illuminated some theme, and threw the glory of
genius over whatever his mind touched or his pencil drew.
* * * * *
Carlyle's "Frederick the Great"[25] seems to us a badly written book.
Let us consider the volume containing the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth chapters. Nothing in these chapters is brought out clearly.
When we have finished the book, the mind is filled with a confusion of
vague images. We know that Mr. Carlyle is not bound to "provide us
with brains" as well as with a history, but neither was he so bound in
other days. Yet no such confusion was left after reading the "French
Revolution." How brilliantly distinct was every leading event, every
influential person, every pathetic or poetic episode, in that charmed
narrative! Who can forget Carlyle's account of the "Menads," the
King's "Flight to Varennes," the Constitutions that "would not march,"
the "September Massacres," "Charlotte Corday,"--every chief tragic
movement, every grotesque episode, moving forward, distinct and clear,
to the final issue, "a whiff of grapeshot"? Is there anything like that
in this confused "Frederick"?
Compare, for example, the chapters on Voltaire in the present volume
with the article on Voltaire published in 1829.
The sixteenth book is devoted to the ten years of peace which followed
the second Silesian war. These were from 1746 to 1756. The book
contains fifteen chapters. Carlyle begins, in chapter i., by lamenting
that there is very little to be known or said about these ten years.
"Nothing visible in them of main significance but a crash of authors'
quarrels, and the crowning visit of Voltaire." Yet one would think
that matter enough might be found in describing the immense activity
of Friedrich, of which Macaulay says, "His exertions were such as were
hardly to be expected from a human body or a human mind." During these
years Frederick brought a seventh part of his people into the army,
and organized and drilled it under his own personal inspection, till
it became the finest in Europe. He compiled a code of laws, in which
he, among the first, abolished torture. He made constant journeys
through his dominions, examining the condition of manufactures,
arts, commerce, and agriculture. He introduced the strictest economy
into the expenditures of the state. He indulged himself, indeed,
in various architectural extravagances at Berlin and Potsdam,--but
otherwise saved every florin for his army. He wrote "Memoirs of the
House of Brandenburg," and an epic poem on the "Art of War." But our
author disdains to give us an account of these things. They are not
picturesque, they can be told in only general terms, and Carlyle
will tell us only what an eyewitness could see or a listener hear.
Accordingly, instead of giving us an account of these great labors of
his hero, he inserts (chapter ii.) "a peep at Voltaire and his divine
Emilie," "a visit to Frederick by Marshal Saxe;" (chapter iii.) a long
account of Candidate Linsenbarth's visit to the king; "Sir Jonas Hanway
stalks across the scene;" the lawsuit of Voltaire about the Jew Hirsch;
"a demon news-writer gives an idea of Friedrich;" the quarrel of
Voltaire and Maupertuis; "Friedrich is visible in Holland to the naked
eye for some minutes."
This is very unsatisfactory. Reports of eyewitnesses are, no doubt,
picturesque and valuable; but so only on condition of being properly
arranged, and tending, in their use, toward some positive result. Then
the tone of banter, of irony, almost of persiflage, is discouraging. If
the whole story of Friedrich is so unintelligible, uninteresting, or
incommunicable, why take the trouble to write it? The _poco-curante_
air with which he narrates, as though it were of no great consequence
whether he told his story or not, contrasts wonderfully with his early
earnestness. Carlyle writes this history like a man thoroughly _blasé_.
Impossible for him to take any interest in it himself,--how, then, does
he expect to interest us? Has he not himself told us, in his former
writings, that the man who proposes to teach others anything must be
good enough to believe it first himself?
Here is the problem we have to solve. How came this change from the
Carlyle of the Past to the Carlyle of the Present,--from Carlyle the
universal believer to Carlyle the universal skeptic,--from him to whom
the world was full of wonder and beauty, to him who can see in it
nothing but Force on the one side and Shams on the other? What changed
that tender, loving, brave soul into this hard cynic? And how was it,
as Faith and Love faded out of him, that the life passed from his
thought, the glory from his pen, and the page, once alive with flashing
ideas, turned into this confused heap of rubbish, in which silver
spoons, old shoes, gold sovereigns, and copper pennies are pitched out
promiscuously, for the patient reader to sift and pick over as he can?
In reading the Carlyle of thirty years ago, we were like California
miners,--come upon a rich _placer_, never before opened, where we could
all become rich in a day. Now the reader of Carlyle is a _chiffonier_,
raking in a heap of street dust for whatever precious matters may turn
up.
To investigate this question is our purpose now,--and in doing so we
will consider, in succession, these two Carlyles.
I. It was about the year 1830 that readers of books in this vicinity
became aware of a new power coming up in the literary republic.
Opinions concerning him varied widely. To some he seemed a Jack Cade,
leader of rebels, foe to good taste and all sound opinions. Especially
did his admiration for Goethe and for German literature seem to many
preposterous and extravagant. It was said of these, that "the force
of folly could no further go,"--that they "constituted a burlesque
too extravagant to be amusing." The tone of Carlyle was said to be of
"unbounded assumption;" his language to be "obscure and barbarous;" his
ideas composed of "extravagant paradoxes, familiar truths or familiar
falsehoods;" "wildest extravagance and merest silliness."
But to others, and especially to the younger men, this new writer
came, opening up unknown worlds of beauty and wonder. A strange
influence, unlike any other, attracted us to his writing. Before we
knew his name, we knew _him_. We could recognize an article by our new
author as soon as we opened the pages of the Foreign Review, Edinburgh,
or Westminster, and read a few paragraphs. But it was not the style,
though marked by a singular freedom and originality--not the tone of
kindly humor, the good-natured irony, the happy illustrations brought
from afar,--not the amount of literary knowledge, the familiarity with
German, French, Italian, Spanish literature,--not any or all of these
which so bewitched us. We knew a young man who used to walk from a
neighboring town to Boston every week, in order to read over again two
articles by Carlyle in two numbers of the Foreign Review lying on a
table in the reading-room of the Athenæum. This was his food, in the
strength of which he could go a week, till hunger drove him back to
get another meal at the same table. We knew other young men and young
women who taught themselves German in order to read for themselves
the authors made so luminous by this writer. Those were counted
fortunate who possessed the works of our author, as yet unpublished
in America,--his "Life of Schiller," his "German Romance," his Review
articles. What, then, was the charm,--whence the fascination?
To explain this we must describe a little the state of literature and
opinion in this vicinity at the time when Carlyle's writings first made
their appearance.
Unitarianism and Orthodoxy had fought their battle, and were resting
on their arms. Each had intrenched itself in certain positions, each
had won to its side most of those who legitimately belonged to it.
Controversy had done all it could, and had come to an end. Among the
Unitarians, the so-called "practical preaching" was in vogue; that is,
ethical and moral essays, pointing out the goodness of being good,
and the excellence of what was called "moral virtue." There was, no
doubt, a body of original thinkers and writers,--better thinkers and
writers, it may be, than we have now,--who were preparing the way for
another advance. Channing had already unfolded his doctrine of man,
of which the central idea is, that human nature is not to be moulded
by religion, but to be developed by it. Walker, Greenwood, Ware, and
their brave associates, were conducting this journal with unsurpassed
ability. But something more was needed. The general character of
preaching was not of a vitalizing sort. It was much like what Carlyle
says of preaching in England at the same period: "The most enthusiastic
Evangelicals do not preach a Gospel, but keep describing how it should
and might be preached; to awaken the sacred fire of faith is not their
endeavor; but at most, to describe how faith shows and acts, and
scientifically to distinguish true faith from false." It is "not the
Love of God which is taught, but the love of the Love of God."
According to this, God was outside of the world, at a distance from
his children, and obliged to communicate with them in this indirect
way, by breaking through the walls of natural law with an occasional
miracle. There was no door by which he could enter into the sheepfold
to his sheep. Miracles were represented, even by Dr. Channing, as
abnormal, as "violations of the laws of nature;" something, therefore,
unnatural and monstrous, and not to be believed except on the best
evidence. God could not be supposed to break through the walls of this
house of nature, except in order to speak to his children on some
great occasions. That he had done it, in the case of Christianity,
could be proved by the eleven volumes of Dr. Lardner, which showed the
Four Gospels to have been written by the companions of Christ, and not
otherwise.
The whole of this theory rested, it will be observed, on a sensuous
system of mental philosophy. "All knowledge comes through the senses,"
was its foundation. Revelation, like every other form of knowledge,
must come through the senses. A miracle, which appeals to the sight,
touch, hearing, is the only possible proof of a divine act. For,
in the last analysis, all our theology rests on our philosophy.
Theology, being belief, must proceed according to those laws of belief,
whatever they are, which we accept and hold. The man who thinks that
all knowledge comes through the senses must receive his theological
knowledge also that way, and no other. This was the general opinion
thirty or forty years ago; hence this theory of Christianity, which
supposes that God is obliged to break his own laws in order to
communicate it.
But the result of this belief was harmful. It tended to make
our religion formal, our worship a mere ceremony; it made real
communication with God impossible; it turned prayer into a
self-magnetizing operation; it left us virtually "without God and hope
in the world." Thanks to Him who never leaves himself without a witness
in the human heart, this theory was often nullified in practice by the
irrepressible instincts which it denied, by the spiritual intuitions
which it ridiculed. Even Professor Norton, its chief champion, had
a heart steeped in the sweetest piety. Denying, intellectually, all
intuitions of God, Duty, and Immortality, his beautiful and tender
hymns show the highest spiritual insight. Still it cannot be denied
that this theory tended to dry up the fountains of religious faith
in the human heart, and to leave us in a merely mechanical and
unspiritualized world.
Now the first voice which came to break this enchantment was, to many,
the voice of Thomas Carlyle. It needed for this end, it always needs, a
man who could come face to face with Truth. Every great idol-breaker,
every man who has delivered the world from the yoke of Forms, has been
one who was able to see the substance of things, who was gifted with
the insight of realities. Forms of worship, forms of belief, at first
the channels of life, through which the Living Spirit flowed into human
hearts, at last became petrified, incrusted, choked. A few drops of the
vital current still ooze slowly through them, and our parched lips,
sucking these few drops, cling all the more closely to the form as it
becomes less and less a vehicle of life. The poorest word, old and
trite, is precious when there is no open vision. We do well continually
to resort to the half-dead form, "till the day dawn, and the day-star
arise in our hearts."
But at last there comes a man capable of dispensing with the form,--a
man endowed with a high degree of the intuitive faculty,--a born seer,
a prophet, seeing the great realities of the universe with open vision.
The work of such a man is to break up the old formulas and introduce
new light and life. This work was done for the Orthodox thirty years
ago by the writings of Coleridge; for the Unitarians in this vicinity,
by the writings of Thomas Carlyle.
This was the secret of the enthusiasm felt for Carlyle, in those
days, by so many of the younger men and women. He taught us to look at
realities instead of names, at substance instead of surface,--to see
God in the world, in nature, in life, in providence, in man,--to see
divine truth and beauty and wonder everywhere around. He taught that
the only organ necessary by which to see the divine in all things was
sincerity, or inward truth. And so he enabled us to escape from the
form into the spirit, he helped us to rise to that plane of freedom
from which we could see the divine in the human, the infinite in the
finite, God in man, heaven on earth, immortality beginning here,
eternity pervading time. This made for us a new heaven and a new earth,
a new religion and a new life. Faith was once more possible, a faith
not bought by the renunciation of mature reason or the beauty and glory
of the present hour.
But all this was taught us by our new prophet, not by the intellect
merely, but by the spirit in which he spoke. He did not seem to be
giving us a new creed, so much as inspiring us with a new life. That
which came from his experience went into ours. Therefore it might
have been difficult, in those days, for any of his disciples to state
what it was that they had learned from him. They had not learned his
doctrine,--they had absorbed it. Hence, very naturally, came the
imitations of Carlyle, which so disgusted the members of the old
school. Hence the absurd Carlylish writing, the feeble imitations by
honest, but weak disciples of the great master. It was a pity, but not
unnatural, and it soon passed by.
As Carlyle thus did his work, not so much by direct teaching as by an
influence hidden in all that he said, it did not much matter on what
subject he wrote,--the influence was there still. But his articles
on Goethe were the most attractive, because he asserted that in this
patriarch of German literature he had found one who saw in all things
their real essence, one whose majestic and trained intelligence could
interpret to us in all parts of nature and life the inmost quality, the
_terza essenza_, as the Italian Platonists called it, which made each
itself. Goethe was announced as the prophet of Realism. He, it should
seem, had perfectly escaped from words into things. He saw the world,
not through dogmas, traditions, formulas, but as it was in itself. To
him
"the world's unwithered countenance
Was fresh as on creation's day."
Consider the immense charm of such hopes as these! No wonder that the
critics complained that the disciples of Carlyle were "insensible
to ridicule." What did they care for the laughter, which seemed to
them, in their enthusiasm, like "the crackling of thorns under the
pot." Ridicule, in fact, never touches the sincere enthusiast. It is
a good and useful weapon against affectation, but it falls, shivered
to pieces, from the magic breastplate of truth. No sincere person,
at work in a cause which he knows to be important, ever minds being
laughed at.
But besides his admirable discussions of Goethe, Carlyle's "Life of
Schiller" opened the portals of German literature, and made an epoch in
biography and criticism. It was a new thing to read a biography written
with such enthusiasm,--to find a critic who could really write with
reverence and tender love of the poet whom he criticised. Instead of
taking his seat on the judicial bench, and calling his author up before
him to be judged as a culprit, Carlyle walks with Schiller through the
circles of his poems and plays, as Dante goes with Virgil through the
Inferno and Paradiso. He accepts the great poet as his teacher and
master,[26] a thing unknown before in all criticism. It was supposed
that a biographer would become a mere Boswell if he looked up to his
hero, instead of looking down on him. It was not understood that it was
that "angel of the world," Reverence, which had exalted even a poor,
mean, vain fool, like Boswell, and enabled him to write one of the best
books ever written. It was not his reverence for Johnson which made
Boswell a fool,--his reverence for Johnson made him, a fool, capable of
writing one of the best books of modern times.
This capacity of reverence in Carlyle--this power of perceiving a
divine, infinite quality in human souls--tinges all his biographical
writing with a deep religious tone. He wrote of Goethe, Schiller,
Richter, Burns, Novalis, even Voltaire, with reverence. He could
see their defects easily enough, he could playfully expose their
weaknesses; but beneath all was the sacred undertone of reverence for
the divine element in each,--for that which God had made and meant them
to be, and which they had realized more or less imperfectly in the
struggle of life. The difference between the reverence of a Carlyle
and that of a Boswell is, that one is blind and the other intelligent.
The one worships his hero down to his shoes and stockings, the other
distinguishes the divine idea from its weak embodiment.
Two articles from this happy period--that on the "Signs of the Times"
and that called "Characteristics"--indicate some of Carlyle's leading
ideas concerning right thinking and right living. In the first, he
declares the present to be an age of mechanism,--not heroic, devout,
or philosophic. All things are done by machinery. "Men have no faith
in individual endeavor or natural force." "Metaphysics has become
material." Government is a machine. All this he thinks evil. The
living force is in the individual soul,--not mechanic, but dynamic.
Religion is a calculation of expediency, not an impulse of worship; no
thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of man to his invisible Father,
the Fountain of all goodness, beauty, and truth, but a contrivance by
which a small quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a much
larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. "Virtue is pleasure, is profit."
"In all senses we worship and follow after power, which may be called a
physical pursuit." (Ah, Carlyle of the Present! does not that wand of
thine old true self touch thee?) "No man now loves truth, as truth must
be loved, with an infinite love; but only with a finite love, and, as
it were, _par amours_."
In the other article, "Characteristics," printed two years later, in
1831, he unfolds the doctrine of "Unconsciousness" as the sign of
health in soul as well as body. He finds society sick everywhere; he
finds its religion, literature, science, all diseased, yet he ends
the article, as the other was ended, in hope of a change to something
better.
These two articles may be considered as an introduction to his next
great work, "Sartor Resartus," or the "Clothes-Philosophy." Here, in a
vein of irony and genial humor, he unfolds his doctrine of substance
and form. The object of all thought and all experience is to look
through the clothes to the living beneath them. According to his book,
all human institutions are the clothing of society; language is the
garment of thought, the heavens and earth the time-vesture of the
Eternal. So, too, are religious creeds and ceremonies the clothing
of religion; so are all symbols the vesture of some idea; so are
the crown and sceptre the vesture of government. This book is the
autobiography of a seeker for truth. In it he is led from the shows of
things to their innermost substance, and as in all his other writings,
he teaches here also that sincerity, truthfulness, is the organ by
which we are led to the solid rock of reality, which underlies all
shows and shams.
II. We now come to treat of Carlyle in his present aspect,--a much
less agreeable task. We leave Carlyle the generous and gentle, for
Carlyle the hard cynic. We leave him, the friend of man, lover of
his race, for another Carlyle, advocate of negro slavery, worshiper
of mere force, sneering at philanthropy, and admiring only tyrants,
despots, and slaveholders. The change, and the steps which led to it,
chronologically and logically, it is our business to scrutinize,--not a
grateful occupation indeed, but possibly instructive and useful.
Thomas Carlyle, after spending his previous life in Scotland, and from
1827 to 1834 in his solitude at Craigenputtoch, removed to London
in the latter year, when thirty-eight years old. Since then he has
permanently resided in London, in a house situated on one of the quiet
streets running at right angles with the Thames. He came to London
almost an unknown man; he has there become a great name and power
in literature. He has had for friends such men as John Stuart Mill,
Sterling, Maurice, Leigh Hunt, Browning, Thackeray, and Emerson. His
"French Revolution" was published in 1837; "Sartor Resartus" (published
in Frazer in 1833, and in Boston in a volume in 1836) was put forth
collectively in 1838; and in the same year his "Miscellanies" (also
collected and issued in Boston in 1838) were published in London, in
four volumes. "Chartism" was issued in 1839. He gave four courses
of Lectures in Willis's rooms "to a select but crowded audience,"
in 1837, 1838, 1839, and 1840. Only the last of these--"Heroes and
Hero-Worship"--was published. "Past and Present" followed in 1843,
"Oliver Cromwell" in 1845. In 1850 he printed "Latter-Day Pamphlets,"
and subsequently his "Life of Sterling" (1851), and the four volumes,
now issued, of "Frederick the Great."
The first evidence of an altered tendency is perhaps to be traced in
the "French Revolution." It is a noble and glorious book; but, as one
of his friendly critics has said, "its philosophy is contemptuous and
mocking, and it depicts the varied and gigantic characters which stalk
across the scene, not so much as responsible and living mortals, as
the mere mechanical implements of some tremendous and irresistible
destiny." In "Heroes and Hero-Worship" the habit has grown of revering
mere will, rather than calm intellectual and moral power. The same
thing is shown in "Past and Present," in "Cromwell," and in "Latter-Day
Pamphlets," which the critic quoted above says is "only remarkable as
a violent imitation of himself, and not of his better self." For the
works of this later period, indeed, the best motto would be that verse
from Daniel: "He shall exalt himself, and magnify himself, and speak
marvelous things; neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, but
in his stead shall he honor the God of Forces, a god whom his fathers
knew not."
Probably this apostasy from his better faith had begun, before this,
to show itself in conversation. At least Margaret Fuller, in a letter
dated 1846, finds herself in his presence admiring his brilliancy, but
"disclaiming and rejecting almost everything he said." "For a couple of
hours," says she, "he was talking about poetry, and the whole harangue
was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind." "All
Carlyle's talk, another evening," says she, "was a defence of mere
force,--success the test of right; if people would not behave well, put
collars round their necks; find a hero, and let them be his slaves."
"Mazzini was there, and, after some vain attempts to remonstrate,
became very sad. Mrs. Carlyle said to me, 'These are but opinions to
Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his
friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of
life and death.'"
As this mood of Mr. Carlyle comes out so strongly in the "Latter-Day
Pamphlets," it is perhaps best to dwell on them at greater leisure.
The first is "The Present Time." In this he describes Democracy as
inevitable, but as utterly evil; calls for a government; finds most
European governments, that of England included, to be shams and
falsities,--no-government, or drifting, to be a yet greater evil. The
object, he states, is to find the noblest and best men to govern.
Democracy fails to do this; for universal balloting is not adequate to
the task. Democracy answered in the old republics, when the mass were
slaves, but will not answer now. The United States are no proof of its
success, for (1st) anarchy is avoided merely by the quantity of cheap
land, and (2d) the United States have produced no spiritual results,
but only material. Democracy in America is no-government, and "its only
feat is to have produced eighteen millions of the greatest _bores_ ever
seen in the world." Mr. Carlyle's plan, therefore, is to find, somehow,
the _best man_ for a ruler, to make him a despot, to make the mass of
the English and Irish slaves, to beat them if they will not work, to
shoot them if they still refuse. The only method of finding this best
man, which he suggests, is to _call for him_. Accordingly, Mr. Thomas
Carlyle _calls_, saying, "Best man, come forward, and govern."
The sum, therefore, of his recipe for the diseases of the times is
SLAVERY.
The second pamphlet is called "Model Prisons," and the main object of
this is to ridicule all attempts at helping men by philanthropy or
humanity. The talk of "Fraternity" is nonsense, and must be drummed
out of the world. Beginning with model prisons, he finds them much
too good for the "scoundrels" who are shut up there. He would have
them whipped and hung (seventy thousand in a year, we suppose, as in
bluff King Harry's time, with no great benefit therefrom). "Revenge,"
he says, "is a right feeling against bad men,--only the excess of it
wrong." The proper thing to say to a bad man is, "Caitiff, I hate
thee." "A collar round the neck, and a cart-whip over the back," is
what he thinks would be more just to criminals than a model prison. The
whole effort of humanity should be to help the industrious and virtuous
poor; the criminals should be swept out of the way, whipt, enslaved,
or hung. As for human brotherhood, he does not admit brotherhood
with "scoundrels." Particularly disgusting to him is it to hear this
philanthropy to bad men called Christianity. Christianity, he thinks,
does not tell us to love the bad, but to hate them as God hates them.
According, probably, to his private expurgated version of the Gospel,
"that ye may be the children of your Father in heaven, whose sun rises
only on the good, and whose rain falls only on the just."
"Downing Street" and "New Downing Street" are fiery tirades against
the governing classes in England. Mr. Carlyle says (according to his
inevitable refrain), that England does not want a reformed Parliament,
a body of talkers, but a reformed Downing Street, a body of workers.
He describes the utter imbecility of the English government, and calls
loudly for some able man to take its place. Two passages are worth
quoting; the first as to England's aspect in her foreign relations,
which is quite as true for 1864 as for 1854.
"How it stands with the Foreign Office, again, one still less knows.
Seizures of Sapienza, and the like sudden appearances of Britain in
the character of Hercules-Harlequin, waving, with big bully-voice,
her sword of sharpness over field-mice, and in the air making horrid
circles (horrid Catherine-wheels and death-disks of metallic terror
from said huge sword) to see how they will like it. Hercules-Harlequin,
the Attorney Triumphant, the World's Busybody!"
Or see the following description of the sort of rulers who prevail in
England, no less than in America:--
"If our government is to be a No-Government, what is the matter who
administers it? Fling an orange-skin into St. James Street, let the man
it hits be your man. He, if you bend him a little to it, and tie the
due official bladders to his ankles, will do as well as another this
sublime problem of balancing himself upon the vortexes, with the long
loaded pole in his hand, and will, with straddling, painful gestures,
float hither and thither, walking the waters in that singular manner
for a little while, till he also capsize, and be left floating feet
uppermost,--after which you choose another."
Concerning which we may say, that if this is the result of monarchy and
aristocracy in England, we can stick a little longer to our democracy
in America. Mr. Carlyle says that the object of all these methods is to
find the ablest man for a ruler. He thinks our republican method very
insufficient and absurd,--much preferring the English system,--and then
tells us that this is the outcome of the latter; that you might as well
select your ruler by throwing an orange-skin into the street as by the
method followed in England.
Despotism, tempered by assassination, seems to be Carlyle's notion of a
good government.
The pamphlet "Stump-Orator" is simply a bitter denunciation of all
talking, speech-making, and writing, as the curse of the time, and ends
with the proposition to cut out the tongues of one whole generation, as
an act of mercy to them and a blessing to the human race.
Thus this collection of "Latter-Day Pamphlets" consists of the
bitterest cynicism. Carlyle sits in it, as in a tub, snarling at
freedom, yelping at philanthropy, growling at the English government,
snapping at all men who speak or write, and ending with one long howl
over the universal falsity and hollowness of mankind in general.
After which he proceeds to his final apotheosis of despotism pure and
simple, in this "Life of Frederick the Great." Of this it is not
necessary to say more than that Frederick, being an absolute despot,
but a very able one, having plunged Europe into war in order to steal
Silesia, is everywhere admired, justified, or excused by Carlyle, who
reserves his rebukes and contempt for those who find fault with all
this.
That, with these opinions, Carlyle should have taken sides with the
slaveholders' conspiracy against the Union is not surprising. His
sympathies were with them; first, as slaveholders, secondly, as
aristocrats. He hates us because we are democrats, and he loves them
because they are despots and tyrants. Long before the outbreak of the
rebellion, he had ridiculed emancipation, and denounced as folly and
evil the noblest deed of England,--the emancipation of her West India
slaves. In scornful, bitter satire, he denounced England for keeping
the fast which God had chosen, in undoing the heavy burdens, letting
the oppressed go free, and breaking every yoke. He ridiculed the black
man, and described the poor patient African as "Quashee, steeped to
the eyes in pumpkin." In the hateful service of oppression he had
already done his best to uphold slavery and discourage freedom. And
while he fully believed in enslaving the laboring population, black or
white, and driving it to work by the cart-whip, he as fully abhorred
republicanism everywhere, and most of all in the United States.
He had exhausted the resources of language in vilifying American
institutions. It was a matter of course, therefore, that at the
outbreak of this civil war all his sympathies should be with those who
whip women and sell babies.
How is it that this great change should have taken place? Men
change,--but not often in this way. The ardent reformer often hardens
into the stiff conservative. The radical in religion is very likely to
join the Catholic Church. If a Catholic changes his religion, he goes
over to atheism. To swing from one extreme to another, is a common
experience. But it is a new thing to see calmness in youth, violence in
age,--to find the young man wise and all-sided, the old man bigoted and
narrow.
We think the explanation to be this.
Thomas Carlyle from the beginning has not shown the least appreciation
of the essential thing in Christianity. Brought up in Scotland,
inheriting from Calvinism a sense of truth, a love of justice, and a
reverence for the Jewish Bible, he has never passed out of Judaism
into Christianity. To him, Oliver Cromwell is the best type of true
religion; inflexible justice the best attribute of God or man. He is
a worshiper of Jehovah, not of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus
Christ. He sees in God truth and justice; he does not see in him
love. He is himself a prophet after the type of Elijah and John the
Baptist. He is the voice crying in the wilderness; and we may say of
him, therefore, as was said of his prototype, "He was a burning and a
shining light, and ye were willing, for a season, to rejoice in his
light,"--but not always,--not now.
Carlyle does not, indeed, claim to be a Jew, or to reject Christ. On
the contrary, he speaks of him with very sincere respect. He seems,
however, to know nothing of him but what he has read in Goethe about
the "worship of sorrow." The Gospel appears to him to be, essentially,
a worship of sorrow. That Christ "came to save sinners,"--of that
Carlyle has not the faintest idea. To him the notion of "saving
sinners" is only "rose-water philanthropy." He does not wish them
saved, he wishes them damned,--swept into hell as soon as convenient.
But, as everything which is real has two sides, that of _truth_ and
that of _love_,--it usually happens that he who only sees _one_ side at
last ceases even to see that. All goodness, to Carlyle, is truth,--in
man it is sincerity, or love of reality, sight of the actual facts,--in
God it is justice, divine adherence to law, infinite guidance of the
world and of every human soul according to a strict and inevitable
rule of righteousness. At first this seems to be a providence,--and
Carlyle has everywhere, in the earlier epoch, shown full confidence in
Providence. But believe only in justice and truth,--omit the doctrine
of forgiveness, redemption, salvation,--and faith in Providence
becomes sooner or later a despairing fatalism. The dark problem of evil
remains insoluble without the doctrine of redemption.
So it was that Carlyle, seeing at first the chief duty of man to be
the worship of reality, the love of truth, next made that virtue to
consist in sincerity, or being in earnest. Truth was being true to
one's self. In this lay the essence of heroism. So that Burns, being
sincere and earnest, was a hero,--Odin was a hero,--Mohammed was a
hero,--Cromwell was a hero,--Mirabeau and Danton were heroes,--and
Frederick the Great was a hero. That which was first the love of truth,
and caused him to reverence the calm intellectual force of Schiller and
Goethe, soon became earnestness and sincerity, and then became power.
For the proof of earnestness is power. So from power, by eliminating
all love, all tenderness, as being only rose-water philanthropy, he at
last became a worshiper of mere will, of force in its grossest form.
So he illustrates those lines of Shakespeare in which this process is
so well described. In "Troilus and Cressida" Ulysses is insisting on
the importance of keeping everything in its place, and giving to the
best things and persons their due priority. Otherwise, mere force will
govern all things.
"Strength would be lord of imbecility,"--
as Carlyle indeed openly declares that it ought to be,--
"And the rude son should strike his father dead,"
which Carlyle does not quite approve of in the case of Dr. Francia. But
why not, if he maintains that strength is the measure of justice?
"Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names and so should justice, too.
_Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And, last, eat up himself._"
Just so, in the progress of Carlyle's literary career, first, force
became right,--then, everything included itself in power,--next, power
was lost in will, and will in mere caprice or appetite. From his
admiration for Goethe, as the type of intellectual power, he passed to
the praise of Cromwell as the exponent of will, and then to that of
Frederick, whose appetite for plunder and territory was seconded by
an iron will and the highest power of intellect; but whose ambition
devoured himself, his country, and its prosperity, in the mad pursuit
of victory and conquest.
The explanation, therefore, of our author's lapse, is simply this, that
he worshiped truth divorced from love, and so ceased to worship truth,
and fell into the idolatry of mere will. Truth without love is not
truth, but hard, willful opinion, just as love without truth is not
love, but weak good-nature and soft concession.
Carlyle has no idea of that sublime feature of Christianity, which
shows to us God caring more for the one sinner who repents than the
ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance. To him one just
person deserves more care than ninety-nine sinners. Yet it is strange
that he did not learn from his master, Goethe, this essential trait
of the Gospel. For Goethe, in a work translated by Carlyle himself,
distinguishes between the three religions thus. The ethnic or Gentile
religions, he says, reverence _what is above us_,--the religion of the
philosopher reverences _what is on our own level_,--but Christianity
reverences _what is beneath us_. "This is the last step," says Goethe,
"which mankind were destined to attain,--to recognize humility
and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace and wretchedness, as
divine,--nay, _even on sin and crime to look not as hindrances, but to
honor and love them as furtherances of what is holy_."
On sin and crime, as we have seen, Carlyle looks with no such
tenderness. But if he does not care for the words of Christ, teaching
us that we must forgive if we hope to be forgiven, if he does not care
for the words of his master, Goethe, he might at least remember his own
exposition of this doctrine in an early work, where he shows that the
poor left to perish by disease infect a whole community, and declares
that the safety of all is involved in the safety of the humblest.
In 1840, when he wrote "Chartism," Carlyle seems to have known better
than he did in 1855, when he wrote these "Latter-Day Pamphlets." _Then_
he said:--
"To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a
nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissible manner made
away, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith."