accorded to an autobiographical sketch by St. John the Baptist.
It would, one may suppose, have contained some remarks not very
palatable to refined society. The scoffers indeed would have covered
their delight in an opportunity for lowering a great reputation by
a plausible veil of virtuous indignation. The Pharisees would have
taken occasion to dwell upon the immoral contempt of the stern prophet
for the maxims of humdrum respectability. The Sadducees would have
aired their orthodoxy by lamenting his open denunciations of shams,
which, in their opinion, were quite as serviceable as real beliefs.
Both would have agreed that nothing but a mean personal motive could
have prompted such an outrageous utterance of discontent. And the
good, kindly, well-meaning people—for, doubtless, there were some
such even at the court of Herod—would have been sincerely shocked
at the discovery that the vehement denunciations to which they had
listened were in good truth the utterance of a tortured and unhappy
nature, which took in all sincerity a gloomy view of the prospects of
their society and the intrinsic value of its idols, instead of merely
getting up indignation for purposes of pulpit oratory. They—complacent
optimists, as kindly people are apt to be—have made up their minds
that a genuine philosopher is always a benevolent, white-haired
old gentleman, overflowing with philanthropic sentiment, convinced
that all is for the best, and that even the 'miserable sinners'
are excellent people at bottom; and are grievously shocked at the
discovery that anybody can still believe in the existence of the
devil as a potent agent in human affairs. If we have any difficulty
in imagining such criticisms, we may easily realise them by reading
certain criticisms upon the 'Reminiscences' of the last prophet—for
we may call him a prophet whatever we think of the sources of his
inspiration—who has passed from among us. The reflection which has
most frequently occurred to me is one put with characteristic force
by Carlyle himself in describing the sight of Charles X. going to see
the portrait of 'the child of miracle.' 'How tragical are men once
more; how merciless withal to one another! I had not the least pity
for Charles Dix's pious pilgriming to such an object: the poor mother
of it, and her immense hopes and pains, I did not even think of them.'
And so, the average criticism of that most tragical and pathetic
monologue—in reality a soliloquy to which we have somehow been
admitted—that prolonged and painful moan of remorse and desolation
coming from a proud and intensely affectionate nature in its direst
agony—a record which will be read with keen sympathy and interest when
ninety-nine of a hundred of the best contemporary books have been
abandoned to the moths—has been such as would have been appropriate
for the flippant assault of some living penny-a-liner upon the
celebrities of to-day. The critics have had an eye for nothing but the
harshness and the gloom, and have read without a tear, without even a
touch of sympathy, a confession more moving, more vividly reflecting
the struggles and the anguish of a great man, than almost anything in
our literature.
Enough of this: though in speaking of Carlyle at this time it is
impossible to pass it over in complete silence. I intend only to
say something of Carlyle's teaching, which seems to be as much
misunderstood by some critics as his character. It should require
little impartiality or insight at the present day to do something like
justice to a teacher who belonged essentially to a past generation.
When Carlyle was still preaching upon questions of the day, my
juvenile sympathies—such as they were—were always on the side of his
opponents. But he and his opinions have passed into the domain of
history, and we can, or at least we should, judge of them as calmly
as we can of Burke and of Milton. In the year 1789 you might have
sympathised with Mackintosh, or with Tom Paine, rather than with the
great opponent of the Revolution; and you may even now hold that they
were more in the right as to the immediate issues than Burke. But it
would, indeed, be a narrow mind which could not now perceive that
Burke, as a philosophic writer upon politics, towers like a giant
amidst pigmies above the highest of his contemporaries; and that
the value of his principles is scarcely affected by the particular
application. Though Carlyle touched upon more recent events, we can
already make the same distinction, and we must make it if we would
judge fairly in his case.
The most obvious of all remarks about Carlyle is one expressed (I
think) by Sir Henry Taylor in the phrase that he was 'a Calvinist who
had lost his creed.' Rather we should say he was a Calvinist who had
dropped the dogmas out of his creed. It is no doubt a serious question
what remains of a creed when thus eviscerated; or, again, how long it
is likely to survive such an operation. But for the present purpose it
is enough to say that what remained for Carlyle was the characteristic
temper of mind and the whole mode of regarding the universe. He often
declared that the Hebrew Scriptures, though he did not adhere to the
orthodox view of their authority, contained the most tenable theory
of the world ever propounded to mankind. Without seeking to define
what was the element which he had preserved, and what it was that
he had abandoned, or attempting the perilous task of drawing a line
between the essence and accidents of a creed, it is in any case clear
that Carlyle was as Scottish in faith as in character; that he would
have taken and imposed the Covenant with the most thoroughgoing and
_ex-animo_ assent and consent; and that the difference between him
and his forefathers was one rather of particular beliefs than of
essential sentiment. He had changed rather the data upon which his
convictions were based than the convictions themselves. He revered
what his fathers revered, but he revered the same principle in
other manifestations, and to them this would naturally appear as a
profanation, whilst from his point of view it was but a legitimate
extension of their fundamental beliefs.
The more one reads Carlyle the further one traces the consequences of
this belief. The Puritan creed, one may say, is not popular at the
present day for reasons which might easily be assigned; and those
who dislike it in any form are not conciliated by the omission of
its external peculiarities. And, on the other hand, the omission
naturally alienates many who would otherwise sympathise. When Carlyle
speaks of 'the Eternities' and 'the Silences,' he is really using a
convenient periphrasis for thoughts more naturally expressed by most
people in the language peculiar to Cromwell—the translation is often
given side by side with the original in the comments upon Cromwell's
letters and speeches—and his mode of speech is dictated by the feeling
that the old dogmatic forms are too narrow and too much associated
with scholastic pedantry to be appropriate in presence of such awful
mysteries. He is, as Teufelsdröckh would have said, dropping the old
clothes of belief only that he may more fittingly express the living
reality.
To Carlyle, for example, the later developments of Irvingism, the
speaking with tongues, and so forth, appeared as simply contemptible,
or, when sanctioned by the friend whose memory he cherished so
pathetically, as inexpressibly pitiable. It was a hopeless attempt to
cling to the worn-out rags, a dropping of the substance to grasp the
shadow; ending, therefore, in a mere grotesque caricature of belief
which made genuine belief all the more difficult of attainment. You
are seeking for outward signs and wonders when you should be impressed
by the profound and all-pervading mysteries of the universe; and
therefore falling into the hands of mere charlatans, and taking the
morbid hysterics of over-excited women for the revelation conveyed
by all nature to those who have ears to hear. Has not the word
'spiritual,' till now expressive of the highest emotions possible to
human beings, got itself somehow stained and debased by association
with the loathsome tricks practised by impostors aided by the prurient
curiosity of their dupes? The perversion of the highest instincts
which leads a man in his very anxiety to find a true prophet and
spiritual leader to put up with some miserable Cagliostro—a quack
working 'miracles' by sleight of hand and phosphorus—appeared to
Carlyle, and surely appeared to him most rightly, as the saddest of
all conceivable aberrations of human nature; saddest because some men
with a higher strain of character are amenable to such influences.
But when Carlyle came to specify what was and what was not quackery
of this kind, and included much that was still sacred to others, he
naturally had to part company with many who would otherwise have
sympathised. Miss Martineau, he tells us, was described as not only
stripping herself naked, but stripping to the bone. Carlyle seems to
some people to be performing this last operation, though to himself it
appeared in the opposite light.
To Carlyle himself the liberation from the old clothes or external
casing of belief constituted what he regarded as equivalent to the
conversion of the 'old Christian people.' He emerged, he tells us,
into a higher atmosphere, and gained a 'constant inward happiness that
was quite royal and supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient
and insignificant:' a happiness, he adds, which he never quite lost,
though in later years it suffered more frequent eclipse. For this he
held himself to be 'endlessly indebted' to Goethe; for Goethe had in
his own fashion trod the same path and achieved the same victory.
Conversion, as meaning the conscious abandonment of beliefs which
have once formed an integral and important part of a man's life, is
a process which indeed must be very exceptional with all men of real
force of character. Carlyle, it is plain, was so far from undergoing
such a process, that he retained much which would have been little in
harmony with the teaching of his master. For, whilst everybody can
see that Goethe reached a region of philosophic serenity, we must
take Carlyle's 'royal and supreme happiness' a little on trust. If
his earlier writings have some gleams of the happier mood, we are
certainly much more frequently in the region of murky gloom, shrouded
by the Tartarean and 'fuliginous' vapours of the lower earth. If his
studies of Goethe and German literature opened a door of escape from
the narrow prejudices which made the air of Edinburgh oppressive to
him, they certainly did not help him to shake off the old Puritan
sentiments which were bred in the bone, and no mere external trapping.
Critics have spoken as though Carlyle had become a disciple of
some school of German metaphysics. It is, doubtless, true enough
that he valued the great German thinkers as representing to his
mind a victorious reaction against the scepticism of Hume, or the
materialism of Hume's French successors. But he sympathised with
the general tendency without caring to bewilder himself in any of
the elaborate systems evolved by Kant or his followers. The reader,
he says in the earlier essay on Novalis, 'would err widely who
supposed that this transcendental system of metaphysics was a mere
intellectual card-castle, or logical hocus-pocus ... without any
bearing on the practical interests of men. On the contrary ... it
is the most serious in its purport of all philosophies propounded
in these latter ages;' and he proceeds to indicate their purport,
and to hint, as one writing for uncongenial readers, his respect
for German 'mysticism.' He thought, that is, that these mystics,
transcendentalists, and so forth, were vindicating faith against
scepticism, idealism against materialism, a belief in the divine order
against atheistic negations; and, moreover, that their fundamental
creed was inexpugnable, resting on a basis of solid reason instead
of outworn dogma. As for the superstructure, the systems of this
or that wonderful professor to explain the universe in general, he
probably held them to be 'card-castles'—mere cobwebs of the brain—at
best arid, tentative gropings in the right direction. He had far
too much of true Scottish shrewdness—even in the higher regions of
thought—to trust body or soul to the truth of such flimsy materials.
This comes out in his view of Coleridge, who so far sympathised with
him as to have imbibed consolation from the same sources. No reader
of the life of Sterling can forget the chapter—one of the most vivid
portraits ever drawn even by Carlyle—devoted to Coleridge as the
oracle of the 'innumerable brave souls' still engaged in the London
turmoil—a portrait which suggests incidentally how much was left
unspoken in the hastier touches of the 'Reminiscences.' We can see
the oracle not answering your questions, nor decidedly setting out
towards an answer, but accumulating 'formidable apparatus, logical
swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary
and vehiculatory gear for setting out; ending by losing himself in
the morass and in the mazes of theosophic philosophy,' where now and
then 'glorious islets' would rise out of the haze, only to be lost
again in the surrounding gloom. In his talk, as in him, 'a ray of
heavenly inspiration struggled in a tragically ineffectual degree
against the weakness of flesh and blood.' He had 'skirted the deserts
of infidelity,' but 'had not had the courage, in defiance of pain
and terror, to press resolutely across such deserts to the new firm
lands of faith beyond.' Many disciples have of course seen more in
Coleridge; but even his warmest admirers must admit the general truth
of the picture, and confess that if Coleridge cast a leaven of much
virtue into modern English speculation, he never succeeded in working
out a downright answer to the philosophical perplexities of his day,
or in promulgating a distinct rule of faith or life. To Carlyle this
was enough to condemn Coleridge as a teacher. Coleridge, in his view,
failed because he adhered to the 'old clothes;' tried desperately
to breathe life into dead creeds; and, encumbered with such burdens,
could not make the effort necessary to cross the 'desert.' He
lingered fatally round the starting-point, and succeeded only in
starting 'strange spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory hybrids, and
ecclesiastical chimeras which now roam the earth in a very lamentable
manner.'
The judgment is in many ways characteristic of Carlyle. To the genuine
Puritan a creed is nothing which does not immediately embody itself
in a war-cry. It must have a direct forcible application to life. It
must divide light from darkness, distinguish friends from enemies—both
external and internal—nerve your arms for the battle, and plant your
feet on solid standing-ground. It must be no flickering ray in the
midst of gloom, but a steady, unquenchable light—a permanent 'star to
every wandering bark.' Coleridge would stimulate only to uncertain
musings, instead of animating to strenuous endeavour. The same
sentiment utters itself in Carlyle's favourite exaltation of silence
above speech—a phrase paradoxical if literally taken, but in substance
an emphatic assertion of the futility of the uncertain meanderings in
the regions of abstract speculation which hinder a man from girding
himself at once to deadly wrestle with the powers of darkness.
This is but a new version of the Puritan contempt for the vain
speculations of human wisdom when he is himself conscious of an inner
light guiding him infallibly through the labyrinths of the world.
The Puritan contempt for æsthetic enjoyments springs from the same
root, and is equally characteristic of Carlyle. He can never see much
difference between fiction and lying. 'Fiction,' he says, 'or idle
falsity of any kind was never tolerable, except in a world which did
itself abound in practical lies and solid shams.... A serious soul,
can it wish, even in hours of relaxation, that you should fiddle
empty nonsense to it? A serious soul would desire to be entertained
either with silence or with what was truth, and had fruit in it, and
was made by the Maker of us all,'—a doctrine which will clearly not
commend itself to an æsthetic world. 'Poetry, fiction in general, he
(Carlyle the father) had universally seen treated as not only idle,
but false and criminal,' and the son adhered to the opinion except
so far as he came to admit that fiction might in a sense be truth.
The ground-feeling is still that of some old Puritan, preaching,
like Baxter, as 'a dying man to dying men,' and at most tolerant of
anything not directly tending to edification. Carlyle, of course,
belonged emphatically to the imaginative as distinguished from the
speculative order of minds. He was a man of intuitions, not of
discursive thought: who felt before he reasoned: to whom it was a
mental necessity that a principle should clothe itself in concrete
flesh and blood, and if possible in some definite historical hero,
before he could fully believe in it. He wanted vivid images in place
of abstract formulas. His indifference to the metaphysical was not
simply that of the practical man who regards all such inquiries
as leading to hopeless and bottomless quagmires of doubt and a
paralysis of all active will; as an attempt, doomed to failure from
the beginning, to get off your own shadow, and to twist and twirl
till your pigtail hangs before you; though this, too, counts for much
in his teaching; but it was also the antipathy of the imaginative
mind to the passionless analyser who 'explains' the living organism
by reducing it to a dead mechanism. It is, indeed, remarkable that
Carlyle had a certain comparative respect even for the materialist
and utilitarian whom he so harshly denounced. Such a man was at
least better than the ineffectual dilettante or dealer in small
shams and phantasms. Anything thoroughgoing, even a thoroughgoing
rejection of the highest elements of life, so far deserved respect
as at least affording some firm starting-point. But, for the most
part, the scientific frame of mind, so far as it implies a tranquil
dissecting of concrete phenomena into their dead elements, jarred
upon every fibre of his nature. Political economy, which treats
society as a complex piece of machinery, and the logic which resolves
the universe itself into a mere heap of separable atoms, seemed to
him hopelessly barren, and uninteresting to the higher mind. Mill's
talk and books—which specially represented this mode of thought for
him—were 'sawdustish;' for what is sawdust but the dead product of
a living growth deprived of its organising principle and reduced
to mere dry indigestible powder? To the poetic as to the religious
nature of Carlyle, such a process was to make the whole world weary,
stale, flat and unprofitable. Carlyle, therefore, must be judged as
a poet, and not as a dealer in philosophic systems; as a seer or a
prophet, not as a theorist or a man of calculations. And, therefore,
if I were attempting any criticism of his literary merits, I should
dwell upon his surpassing power in his peculiar province. Admitting
that every line he wrote has the stamp of his idiosyncrasies, and
consequently requires a certain congeniality of temperament in the
reader, I should try to describe the strange spell which it exercises
over the initiated. If you really hate the grotesque, the gloomy, the
exaggerated, you are of course disqualified from enjoying Carlyle. You
must take leave of what ordinarily passes even for common-sense, of
all academical canons of taste, and of any weak regard for symmetry
or simplicity before you enter the charmed circle. But if you can get
rid of your prejudices for the nonce, you will certainly be rewarded
by seeing visions such as are evoked by no other magician. The
common-sense reappears in the new shape of strange vivid flashes of
humour and insight casting undisputed gleams of light into many dark
places; and dashing off graphic portraits with a single touch. And if
you miss the serene atmosphere of calmer forms of art, it is something
to feel at times as no one but Carlyle can make you feel, that each
instant is the 'conflux of two eternities;' that our little lives, in
his favourite Shakespearean phrase, are 'rounded with a sleep;' that
history is like the short space lighted up by a flickering taper in
the midst of infinite glooms and mysteries, and its greatest events
brief scenes in a vast drama of conflicting forces, where the actors
are passing in rapid succession—rising from and vanishing into the
all-embracing darkness. And if there is something oppressive to the
imagination when we stay long in this singular region, over which the
same inspiration seems to be brooding which created the old Northern
mythology with its grim gigantesque, semi-humorous figures, we are
rewarded by the vividness of the pictures standing out against the
surrounding emptiness; some little groups of human figures, who lived
and moved like us in the long-past days; or of vignettes of scenery,
like the Alpine sunrise in the 'Sartor Resartus,' or the sight of
sleeping Haddington from the high moorland in the 'Reminiscences,' as
bright and vivid for us as our own memories, and revealing unsuspected
sensibilities in the writer. Though he scorned the word-painters
and description-mongers, no one was a better landscape painter.
It is perhaps idle to dwell upon characteristics which one either
feels or cannot be persuaded into feeling. Those to whom he is on
the whole repugnant may admit him to be occasionally a master of the
picturesque; and sometimes endeavour to put him out of court on the
strength of this formula. A mere dealer, many exclaim, in oddities
and grotesques, who will sacrifice anything to produce a startling
effect, whose portraits are caricatures, whose style is torn to pieces
by excessive straining after emphasis, and who systematically banishes
all those half-tones which are necessary to faithful portraiture in
the search after incessant contrasts of light and shade.
Let us first remark in regard to this that Carlyle himself
peremptorily and emphatically denied that the distinction here assumed
between the poet and the philosopher could be more than superficial.
The philosopher only reaches his goal so far as his analysis leads
to a synthesis, or as his abstract speculations can be embodied in
definite concrete vision. And the poet is a mere idler, with no
substantial or permanent value in him, unless he is uttering thoughts
equally susceptible of philosophical exposition. 'The hero,' he says,
'can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to
the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess I have no
notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The
poet who could merely sit on a chair and compose stanzas could never
make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the heroic warrior, unless
he himself were an heroic warrior too.' To this doctrine—though with
various logical distinctions and qualifications which seem incongruous
with Carlyle's vehement dogmatic utterances—I, for one, would
willingly subscribe; and I hold further that in strenuously asserting
and enforcing it Carlyle was really laying down the fundamental
doctrine of all sound criticism, whether of art or literature or
life. Any teaching, that is, which attempts to separate the poet from
the man as though his excellence were to be measured by a radically
different set of tests is, to my mind, either erroneous or trifling
and superficial. The point at which one is inclined to part company
with this teaching is different. I do not condemn Carlyle for judging
the poet as he judges the hero, for the substantial worth of the man
whom it reveals to us; but I admit that his ideal man has a certain
stamp of Puritanical narrowness. So, for example, there is something
characteristic in his judgments not only of Coleridge, but of Lamb
or Scott. He judges Lamb as the spoilt child of Cockney circles, as
the Baptist in his garment of camel's hair might have judged some
favourite courtier cracking jokes for the amusement of Herodias'
daughter. And of Scott, though he strives to do justice to the pride
of all Scotchmen, and admits Scott's merit in breathing life into the
past, his real judgment is based upon the maxim that literature must
have higher aims 'than that of harmlessly amusing indolent languid
men.' Scott was not one who had gone through spiritual convulsions,
who had 'dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and throes,' but on the
whole a prosperous easy-going gentleman, who found out the art of
'writing impromptu novels to buy farms with;' and who can therefore
by no means claim the entire devotion of the rigorous ascetic prophet
to whom happiness is inconceivable except as the reward of victorious
conflicts with the deadly enemies of the soul. To me it seems that
the error in such judgments is one of omission; but the omission is
certainly considerable. For Carlyle's tacit assumption seems to be
that the conscience should be not only the supreme but the single
faculty of the soul; that morality is not only a necessary but the
sole condition of all excellence; and, therefore, that an ethical
judgment is not merely implied in every æsthetic judgment, but is
the sole essence and meaning of it. Our minds, according to some
of his Puritan teachers, should be so exclusively set upon working
out our salvation that every kind of aim not consciously directed
to this ultimate end is a trifling which is closely akin to actual
sin. Carlyle, accepting or unconsciously imbibing the spirit of such
teaching, reserves his whole reverence for rigid and lofty natures,
deserving beyond all question of reverence, but wanting in elements
essential to the full development of our natures, and therefore, in
the long run, to a broad morality.