could assert more forcibly, emphatically, and frequently than Carlyle
that morality or justice is the one indispensable thing; that justice
means the law of God; that the sole test of the merits of any human
law is its conformity to the divine law; and that, as he puts it,
all history is an 'inarticulate Bible, and in a dim intricate manner
reveals the divine appearances in this lower world. For God did make
this world, and does for ever govern it; the loud roaring loom of
time, with all its French revolutions, Jewish revelations, "weaves
the vesture thou seest Him by." There is no biography of a man, much
less any history or biography of a nation, but wraps in it a message
out of heaven, addressed to the hearing ear and the not-hearing.' It
is needless to quote particular passages. This clearly is the special
doctrine of Carlyle, embodied in all his works; preached in season
and (often enough) out of season; which possesses him rather than is
possessed by him; the sum and substance of the message which he had
to deliver to the world, and spent his life and energy in delivering
with emphasis. And yet we are constantly told that Carlyle was a cynic
who believed in nothing but brute force. If such a criticism came
only from those who had been repelled by his style from reading his
books—or again, only from the shallow and Pharisaical, who mistake
any attack upon the arrangements to which they owe their comfort for
an attack upon the eternal laws of the universe—it might be dismissed
with contempt. And this is, indeed, all that much of the average
talk about Carlyle deserves. But there is a more solid ground in
the objection, which brings us in face of Carlyle's most disputable
teaching, and is worth considering.
We have, in fact, to consider the principle so often ascribed to him
that Might makes Right; and this may be interpreted into the immoral
doctrine that force is the one thing admirable, and success the sole
test of merit. Cromwell was right because he cut off Charles's head,
and Charles wrong because he lost his head. Frederick's political
immorality is condoned because Frederick succeeded in making Prussia
great; Napoleon was right so long as he was victorious, and was
condemned because he ended in St. Helena. That, as some critics
suppose, was Carlyle's meaning, and they very naturally denounce it as
an offensive and cynical theory.
Now in one sense Carlyle's doctrine is the very reverse of this.
His theory is the opposite one, that Right makes Might. He admires
Cromwell, for example, and Cromwell is the hero after his own heart,
expressly on the ground that Cromwell is the perfect embodiment of
the Puritan principle, and that the essence of Puritanism was to 'see
God's own law made good in this world.... Eternal justice; that God's
will be done on earth as it is in heaven; corollaries enough will flow
from that, if that be there; if that be not there, no corollary good
for much will flow.' How does a doctrine apparently at least implying
an unqualified belief in the absolute supremacy of right, a conviction
that nothing but the rule of right can give a satisfactory basis for
any human arrangement, get itself transmuted into an appearance of the
opposite, of being a kind of Hobbism, deducing all morality from sheer
force? Such transmutations, or apparent meetings of opposite extremes,
are not uncommon, and the process might perhaps be most forcibly
illustrated by a history of the old Puritans themselves. But it will
be quite enough for my purpose to indicate, as briefly as may be,
Carlyle's own method, which is of course guided as well by his temper
as by his primary assumptions. He is predisposed in every way to take
the sternest view of morality. He means by virtue, by no means an
indiscriminate extension of all-comprehending benevolence, of goodwill
to rogues and scoundrels, or amiable desire that everybody should have
as pleasant a time of it as possible. Justice, according to him, and
the most stringent and unflinching justice, is the essential basis
of all morality. Love, doubtless, is the fulfilling of the law; but
along with that truth you must also recognise the awful and mysterious
truth, that hell itself is one product of the divine love. Love itself
implies the destruction of evil and of the evil-doers. From this
assumption it is not surprising if much modern philanthropy appeared
to him as mere sentimentalism, a weak sympathy even for the suffering
which is the divinely appointed remedy for social diseases, the mere
effeminate shrinking from the surgical knife. The cardinal virtue from
which all others might be inferred is not benevolence, but veracity,
respect for facts and hatred of shams. This was not with Carlyle, as
with some of his teachers, an abstract theorem of metaphysics, but the
expression of his whole character, of that Puritanic fervour which
tested all doctrine by its immediate practical influence upon the
will, and which forced even his poetical imagination to spend itself
not in creating images, but in realising as vividly as possible the
actual facts of history.
Carlyle's application of these principles brings out a remarkable
result. 'Puritanism,' he says, 'was a genuine thing, for Nature
has adopted it, and it has grown and grows. I say sometimes, that
everything goes by wager of battle in this world; that _strength_,
well understood, is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if
it can succeed it is a right thing.' This is one form of Carlyle's
essential principle, and is it not also the essential principle of Mr.
Darwin's famous theory? It is an explicit assertion of the doctrine
of the struggle for existence, though applied here to Knox and the
Puritans instead of to the origin of species. And yet, as we may
note in passing, the evolutionists are, as a fact, the most ready to
condemn Carlyle's immorality, whilst Carlyle could never find words
adequate to express his contempt for them. In that thorough carrying
out of this principle, Carlyle is approaching that profound problem
which in one shape or other haunts all philosophies: What kind of
victory may we expect for right in this world? If Might and Right
were strictly identical, it would seem here that we might start
indifferently from either basis. 'This succeeds; therefore it is
right,' would be as tenable an argument as—'This is right; therefore
it will succeed.' Yet one doctrine has an edifying sound, and the
other seems to be the very reverse of edifying. Moralists vie with
each other in proclaiming their belief in the ultimate success of good
causes, and yet indignantly deny that the goodness of a cause should
be inferred from its success. We agree to applaud the prophecy, cited
with applause by Carlyle himself, that Napoleon's empire would fail
because founded upon injustice; but we are startled by an inference
from the failure to the injustice. But why should there be so vast a
difference in what seem to be equivalent modes of reasoning? Carlyle's
answer would follow from the words just cited. You must, he says,
'give a thing time.' Nobody can deny the temporary prosperity of
the wicked, and certainly Carlyle could not deny that injustice may
flourish long before it produces the inevitable crash. 'The mills of
God grind slowly, though they grind exceeding small.' And, therefore,
it may make all the difference whether we make the success the premiss
or the conclusion. For though, in the long run, the good causes may
be trusted to succeed in time, and we may see in history the proof
that they have succeeded, yet at any moment the test of success may be
precarious whilst that of justice is infallible. We may distinguish
the wheat from the tares before the reaper has cast one aside and
preserved the other. At the moment the injustice of Napoleon's empire
was manifest, though the cracks and fissures which were to cause its
crumbling were still hidden from any observer.
By what signs, then, other than the ultimate test of success, can
we discern the just from the unjust? That, of course, is the vital
point which must decide upon the character of Carlyle's morality; and
it is one which, in my opinion, he cannot be said to have answered
distinctly. He gives, indeed, a test satisfactory to himself, and he
enforces and applies it with superabundant energy and variety of
phrase. That is right, one may say briefly, which will 'work.' The
sham is hollow, and must be crushed in the tug and wrestle of the
warring world. The reality survives and gathers strength. Veracity in
equivalent phrase is the condition of vitality. Truth endures; the
lie perishes. But in applying this or his vast vocabulary of similar
phrases, we come to a difficulty. 'The largest veracity ever _done_
in Parliament' was, he says, Sir Robert Peel's abolition of the Corn
Laws. But how can you _do_ a veracity? What is a lie?—a question, as
he observes, worth asking by the 'practical English mind;' and to
which he accordingly proceeds to give an answer. He insists, that
is, very eloquently and vehemently, upon the inevitable results of
all lying, and of all legislative and other action which proceeds
upon the assumption of a falsity or an error which passes itself off
for a truth. In all which I, for one, admit that there is not only
truth, but truth nobly expressed and applied to the confutation of
some most pestilent errors; and yet, as one must also admit, there
is still an ambiguity. May it not, in fact, cover that exaltation
of mere success which is so often objected to him? Some tyrannical
institution—slavery, for example—lives and flourishes through long
ages. Is it thereby justified? Is it not a fact, and if fact and truth
are the same things, is it not a truth sanctioned by the eternal
veracities and so forth, and therefore entitled to our respect? This
is one more form of that fundamental problem which really perplexes
Carlyle's moral teaching, and which he has at least the merit of
bringing into prominence, though not of answering. In fact, we may
recognise in it an ancient philosophical controversy not yet set
at rest; for, since the beginning of ethical theorising, thinkers
of various schools have tried in one way or other to deduce virtue
from truth, and to identify all vice with error. But the reference
is enough to show the difference of Carlyle's method. He might
respect the metaphysician who held a doctrine so far analogous to his
own; but the metaphysical method appeared to him as a mere formal
logic-chopping where the essence of the teaching escaped amidst barren
demonstrations of verbal identities.
The real answer is here again a new version of the old Puritan answer.
The Puritan fell back upon the will of God revealed through the Bible,
whose authority was manifest by the inner light. If the wicked were
allowed to triumph for a time, there was no danger of being misled by
their success, for they were condemned in advance by the plain fact
of their renunciation of the inspired guide. For Carlyle, the 'hero'
takes the place of, or rather is put side by side with, the older
organs of inspiration. Every hero conveys in fact a new revelation to
mankind; he conveys a divine message, not, it is true, with infallible
precision, or without an admixture of human error, but still the very
kernel and essence of his teaching. He may come as prophet, king,
poet, or philosopher, and you may reject or accept his message at your
peril. You may recognise it, as the Puritan recognised the authority
of his Bible, by the spontaneous witness of your higher nature, and
you will recognise it so long as you have not given yourself up to
believe a lie. And if you demand some external proofs you must be
referred, not to some particular signs and wonders, but to what you
may, if you please, call the 'success' of the message; the fact,
that is, that the hero has contributed some permanent element to the
thoughts and lives of mankind, that he has revealed some enduring
truth, created some permanent symbol of our highest feelings, or
wrought some organic change in the very structure of society. There
is a danger undoubtedly of confounding some temporary crystal palace
or dazzling edifice of mere glass with an edifice founded on the rock
and solid as the pyramids. The hero may be confounded with the sham,
as unfortunately shams and realities are most frequently confounded in
this world. But they differ for all that, and the true man recognises
the difference, as the religious man knows the hypocrite from the
saint. The test is indifferently the truth or the soundness of the
work; they must coincide; but the test can only be applied by one who
really loves the truth.
It is easy to point out the dangers of this position. It rests, after
all, you may say upon the individual conviction, and lends itself
too easily to that kind of dogmatism in which Carlyle indulged so
freely, and which consists in asserting that any doctrine or system
which he dislikes is an incarnate lie, and pronouncing that it is
therefore doomed to failure. And, on the other hand, it may be equally
perverted in the opposite direction by claiming a sacred character
for every 'lie' not yet exploded. Carlyle, beyond all question, was a
man of intense prejudices, and the claim to inspiration, even to the
inspiration of our teachers, very easily passes into a deification of
our own prejudices. No one was more liable to that error; but it is
better worth our while to look at some other aspect of his teaching.
For we may surely accept without hesitation one application of the
doctrine, which is of the first importance with Carlyle, and which
he has taught so incessantly and impressively, that to him more than
to any other man may be attributed the general recognition of its
truth. The success of any system of thought—the permanent influence,
that is, of any great man or of any great institution—must be due
to the truth which it contained, or to its real value to mankind.
This doctrine has become so much of a commonplace, and harmonises
so fully with all modern historical methods, that we are apt to
overlook the service done by Carlyle in its explicit assertion and
rigorous application to facts. When he was delivering his lectures
upon hero-worship, intelligent people were still in the attitude of
mind represented, for example, by Gibbon's famous explanation of the
success of Christianity, as due, amongst other things, to the zeal of
the early believers, as if the zeal required no explanation; when,
on the other side, it was thought proper to explain Mahometanism,
not by the admixture of genuine truth which it contained, but as a
simple imposture. Carlyle still speaks like a man advancing a disputed
theory when he urges in this latter case that to explain the power of
Mahomet's sword, you must explain the force which wielded the sword;
and that the ingenious hypothesis of a downright cheat will by no
means serve the turn. This doctrine is now generally accepted, unless
by a few clever people who still cherish the wire-pulling heresy which
makes history a puppet-show manipulated by ingenious scoundrels,
instead of a vast co-operation of organic forces. Carlyle, however,
has done more than any writer to make such barren and degrading
explanations impossible for all serious thinkers. His 'Cromwell'
has at least exploded once for all the simple-minded 'hypocrisy'
theory, as the essay upon Johnson destroyed the ingenious doctrine
that a man could write a good book simply because he was a fool.
Whether his portraits are accurate or not, they are at least set
before us as conceivable and consistent human beings. The prosaic
historian and biographer takes the average verdict of commonplace
observers: if he is a partisan, he is content with the contemporary
caricatures of the party to which he belongs; if he wishes to be
impartial, he strikes a rough average between opposite errors; and if
he wishes to be dazzling, he calmly combines incompatible judgments.
Macaulay's works, with all their merits, are a perfect gallery of such
portraits—rhetorically excellent, but hopelessly flimsy in substance:
of angelic Whigs and fiendish Tories, and of strange monsters like
his Bacon and his Boswell, made by quietly heaping together meanness
and wisdom, sense and folly, and inviting you to accept a string of
paradoxes as a sober statement of fact. The truly imaginative writer
has to go deeper than this. He begins where the rhetorician ends. A
great work, as he instinctively sees, implies a great force. A man
can only leave his mark upon history so far as he is animated, and
therefore worthy to be animated, by a great idea. The secret of his
nature is to be discovered by a sympathetic imagination acting by
a kind of poetical induction. Gathering together all his recorded
acts and utterances, the masses of recorded facts, preserved, often
in hopeless confusion and misrepresentation, by his contemporaries,
you must brood over them till at last you gain a clear vision of the
underlying unity of character which manifests itself in these various
ways. Then, at last, you may recognise the true hero, and discover
unsuspected unity of purpose and strength of conviction, where the
hasty judgments passed by contemporaries and those who set them
upon isolated fragments of his career, make a bewildering chaos of
inconsistency. The process is admirably illustrated in the study of
Cromwell, and the result has the merit of being at least a possible,
if not a correct, theory of a great man.
This, again, is connected with another aspect of Carlyle's
teaching—as valuable, though perhaps its value is not even now as
generally recognised. For the tendency of his mind is always to
substitute what is sometimes called the dynamical for the merely
mechanical view of history. It is a necessity for his imagination
to penetrate as much to the centre instead of remaining at the
circumference; to unveil the actual forces which govern the working of
the superficial phenomena, instead of losing himself in the external
phenomena themselves. The true condition for understanding history
is to gain a clear perception of the genuine beliefs, the wants and
passions which actually sway men's souls, instead of working simply
at the complicated wheels and pulleys of the political machinery,
or accepting the masses of idle verbiage which conceal our true
thoughts from ourselves and from each other. An implicit faith in the
potency of the machinery, and an equal neglect of the real driving
force, was, in his view, the original sin of political theory. The
constitution-mongers of the Delolme or Siéyès type, the men who
fancied that government (as one of them said) was like 'a dance where
everything depended on the disposition of the figures,' and nothing,
therefore, on the nature of the dancers, have pretty well passed away.
Carlyle saw the same vital fallacies in such nostrums as the ballot
or the scheme so enthusiastically advocated by Hare and Mill. 'If of
ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation,
how in the name of wonder will you get a ballot-box to grind you out
a wisdom from the votes of those ten men? Never by any conceivable
ballot-box, nor by all the machinery in Bromwicham or out of it, will
you attain such a result.' Whether Carlyle was right or wrong in the
particular application I do not presume to say. Such a change as
the ballot may perhaps imply more than a mere change of machinery.
But I certainly cannot doubt that he is right in the essence of his
contention: that a perception of the difference between the merely
mechanical details and the vital forces of a society is essential
to any sound political theorising; and that half our pet schemes of
reform fail just from this cause, that they expect to change the
essence by modifying the surface, and are therefore equivalent to
plans for obtaining mechanical results without expending energy.