THE GOSPEL OF SILENCE
Ogi has been wandering about the cave with a discontented expression on
his face, showing a disposition to growl at whatever gets in his way.
Mrs. Ogi, whose job is to notice domestic weather-signs, inquires: “What
is the matter with you?”
Says Ogi: “I have to write an uninteresting chapter.”
“Why don’t you skip it?”
“I can’t, because it deals with an interesting man.” As she cannot guess
that riddle, he goes on to complain: “If only I had been writing this
book twenty-five years ago, when I thought ‘Sartor Resartus’ the most
delightful book ever penned! But I went on, and got an overdose of
Carlyle. I read almost all that Gospel of Silence in forty volumes; and
now I sit and ask: what did I learn from it? Some facts, of course:
history and biography. But did I get a single valid idea, one sound
conclusion about life?”
“Explain it quickly, and pass on,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“I explain the human race, blocked from the future by a sheet-steel
door. We need the acetylene torch of spiritual fervor; also we need the
engineering brain, to say: “Put it here, and here, and cut the hinges.”
In the face of this task, some of the wielders of the torch go off and
get drunk. Others fall down on their knees and pray. Others forbid us to
touch the door, because God made it and it is His will. Others write
noble verses with perfect rhymes, to the effect that man is born to
trouble, and great art teaches us to endure discomfort with dignity.
Others take fire with zeal, and proceed to butt the door down with their
heads. They butt and butt, until their heads ache. I realize how
undignified it is to describe a great master of English prose as a
‘sorehead’; yet there happens to be no other word in the language that
so tells the story of Thomas Carlyle.”
He was the son of a carpenter in Scotland, and suffered from poverty and
neglect, and through a long life from indigestion. He complained
pathetically that Emerson ate pie and was well, while he ate plain
oatmeal and was miserable. He was irritable, and hard to get along
with--we are privileged to know about this, because both he and his wife
wrote endless letters to their friends, detailing their domestic
troubles, and these letters are published in many volumes, and we can
read both sides and take our choice. Tennyson refused assent to the
proposition that the Carlyles should have married elsewhere; because
then there would have been four miserable people instead of two.
Carlyle made himself, and also his literary style; he was a hack writer,
biographer and translator, and struggled along with a dissatisfied young
wife in a lonely country cottage. “Sartor Resartus” was written at the
age of thirty-five, and sketches the philosophy of an imaginary German
professor, whose name translated means “Devil’s Dung”; this professor’s
philosophy being based upon the discovery that everything in
civilization is merely clothes, the outside of things, the shams and
pretensions and conventions. It is funny to imagine our statesmen and
diplomats and prominent society personages stripped, not merely of their
medals and ribbons, but also of their shirts and trousers; very few of
them would look imposing--and the same applies to civilization with its
proprieties, moralities and religions. This work of uproarious mischief
fell absolutely flat in well-dressed and well-mannered England, and
Emerson and a few people in far-off Boston had to inform the British
cultured classes that they had a new prophet among them.
The teaching of “Sartor Resartus” is entirely negative; and when you ask
what Carlyle had to contribute to constructive thinking about our
hateful social system, the answer is: nonsense. He saw the evils, and
scolded at them--and scolded equally hard at the forces which are to
remedy the evils. Carlyle had contempt for the people, out of whose lap
he had sprung; he despised democracy and the whole machinery of popular
consent. He repaid America for discovering him by ridiculing the Union
cause; he denounced the reform bill of 1867 as “Shooting Niagara.”
Carlyle’s way to set the world right is revealed to us in a book called
“Hero-Worship.” First we have to find the Great Man; and then we have to
obey him. “Obedience is the primary duty of man”--meaning, of course,
the man like you and me, who is spelled with a little m. The one who is
spelled with a capital letter is the Autocrat, who makes us do what we
ought to do. “A nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants
never came to much in the world.”
Our Great Tyrant sets us all hard at work. He makes us build houses and
cultivate farms--but no machinery or railroads, because these constitute
Industrialism, which is a Mammon-Monster. If we do our work by machinery
we have leisure, and that is dangerous; we must have Work, and then more
Work, our one safe Deliverance from Devil-Mischief--you see how one
picks up the style of the “Gospel of Silence”!
Having got the houses built, what next? Why then, to save us from the
Idleness-Imp we set to work knocking the houses down with cannon-balls.
I don’t mean that Carlyle always advocated war; what he did was to
glorify systems of government which historically have resulted and
psychologically must result in war. At the age of fifty-eight, having
surveyed the whole of history, our Scotch hero-worshipper selected the
greatest of human heroes to become the subject of a grand state
biography in six volumes: and whom do you suppose this hero turns out to
be? Frederick of Prussia, who stole Silesia from his cousin, and seized
Poland and divided it up among Austria, Russia and himself; Jonathan
Wild the Great, founder of the Hohenzollern Heroism, and
great-great-grandfather of our World War!
I dutifully read those six large volumes, and studied the series of
charts in which the strategy of Frederick’s military campaigns is set
forth. I learned a fascinating parlor game, which consists in moving
here and there little black and white oblongs representing regiments and
brigades and divisions and other military formations of human beings.
The white oblongs represent your own human beings, and the black oblongs
represent the human beings you propose to destroy; you pound them to
pieces with artillery, you sweep them with volleys of musketry, you
charge them with cavalry and chop them with sabres--and then you move up
other oblongs, called reserves, and continue the procedure. It is safer
to play this game on paper, because when you get through, you can throw
the paper into the waste-basket, and do not have some tens of thousands
of dead and mutilated men and horses decaying all over your back yard.
A pitiful ending for a Prophet and Preacher who aspires to the Remaking
of Mankind in Capital Letters! Just a poor, bewildered old dotard,
dyspeptic and crotchety, helpless and blundering, aspiring to a certain
end and working to the opposite end.
“But why should anyone consider such a man great?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“I have been trying to formulate that to myself. It is because he had
the grace to be unhappy about our modern world. He did not get drunk on
moonshine; he did not tell himself that God was going to do what it was
obviously the business of men to do. He didn’t persuade himself that
Evolution was going to do it, or that Time was going to do it, or that
Faith was going to do it. He didn’t prattle about one increasing purpose
running through the ages, or about one far-off divine event to which the
whole creation moves. He didn’t decide to dream his dream and hold it
true, or to have moments when he felt he could not die. He didn’t tell
us that Love will conquer at the last, or that his faith was large in
Time--”
“This appears to be a transition,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Precisely. We are about to begin a new chapter: The Lullaby Laureate,
or Queen Victoria’s Super-Soothing Syrup.”