Carlyle's greatest merits; and if he obtained emphasis at the cost
of exaggeration, overstatement, grotesque straining of language and
imagery, and much substantial error as to facts, I can only say that
the service remains, and is inestimable. But there is a less pleasing
qualification to be made. The objection to the ballot as a purely
mechanical arrangement is combined, as we have just seen, with the
objection founded upon the prevalence of fools. That stinging phrase,
'mostly fools,' has stuck in our throats. The prophet who tells us
that we are wicked may be popular—perhaps, because our consciences
are on his side; but the prophet who calls us fools is likely to
provoke our wrath. I, at least, never met a man who relished that
imputation, even if he admitted it to contain a grain of truth.
But, palatable or not, it is clearly fundamental with Carlyle.
The world is formed of 'dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll
hither and thither, whithersoever they are led;' the great men are
the 'guides of the dull host, who follow them as by an irrevocable
decree.' They are the heroes to whom alone are granted real powers
of vision and command; realities amongst shams, and knowers amongst
vague feelers after knowledge. We need not ask how this theory was
reached; whether it is the spontaneous sentiment of a proud and
melancholy character, or really a fair estimate of the facts; or,
again, a deduction from the 'hero' doctrine. With that doctrine, at
any rate, it naturally coincides. To exalt the stature of your hero,
you must depress his fellows. If Gulliver is to be a giant, he must
go to Lilliput. There is, however, a gap in the argument which is
characteristically neglected by Carlyle. He would never have fairly
accepted the doctrine—whose was it?—that, though a man may be wiser
than anybody there is something wiser than he—namely, everybody.
The omission is critical, and has many consequences. For one may
fully admit Carlyle's estimate: one may hold the difference between
a Shakespeare and an average contributor to the poet's corner of a
newspaper, or between a born leader of men, a Cromwell and a Chatham,
and the enormous majority of his followers, as something hardly
expressible in words: one may admit that the history of thought or
society reveals the more clearly, the more closely it is studied, the
height to which the chosen few tower above the average; one may even
diminish the percentage of the wise from a tenth to a hundredth or a
thousandth: and yet one may hold to the superior wisdom of the mass.
No ballot-box, it is true, will make the folly of the nine equal to
the wisdom of the one. Or it can tend that way only if the foolish
majority have some sense of the need of superior guidance. But the
ignorance and folly of mankind, their incapacity for forming any
trustworthy judgment on any given point, may also be consistent with
a capacity for groping after truth, and they have the advantage of
trying experiments on a large scale. The fact that a creed commends
itself to the instincts of many men in many ages is a better
proof—Carlyle himself being the judge—that it contains some truth
than the isolated judgment of the most clearsighted philosopher. The
fact that an institution actually makes men happy and calls forth
their loyalty is a more forcible argument in its favour than the
opinion of the most experienced statesman. And, therefore, the fact
that any society is chiefly made up of fools is quite consistent with
the belief that it is collectively the organ through which truth
gradually manifests itself and wins a wider recognition. _Securus
judicat orbis_ may be a true maxim if we interpret it to mean that
the world decides—not as the experimenter but as the experiment.
Carlyle systematically overlooks this blind semi-conscious process
of co-operation upon which the 'hero' is really as dependent as the
dull flock which he leads. History, as he is fond of saying, is
the essence of innumerable biographies. To find the essence of the
biographies, again, he goes to the essential biographies; that is,
to the biographies of the men who give the impulse, not of those who
passively submit to the impulse. This apotheosis of the individual is
dictated by his imaginative idiosyncrasy, as much as by his theory
of history. He must have the picturesque concrete fact; the living
hero to be the incarnation of the idea; and, accordingly, history in
his page is like a gigantic panorama in which the painter sacrifices
everything to obtain the strongest contrasts, and makes his lights
stand out against vast breadths of unspeakable gloom. The hero is thus
made to sum up the whole effectual force, and all that is done by the
Greeks is attributed to the arm of Achilles. Some awkward results
follow. Frederick is a hero who has obvious moral defects, and readers
are startled by Carlyle's worship of such an idol. Yet it follows
from the assumptions. For Frederick, in Carlyle's theory, means the
development of the German nation. That the growth of the German
influence in Europe was a phenomenon which naturally and rightfully
excited Carlyle's strongest enthusiasm requires no demonstration.
If the credit of that, as of every other great achievement, must be
given to some solitary hero, Frederick doubtless has the best claim
to the honour. We may no doubt say that Frederick, in spite of this,
was selfish and cynical, and may confine our praises to allowing
his possession of perspicacity enough to see the capabilities of
his position. A great man may do an involuntary service to mankind,
because his genius inclines him to range himself on the side of the
strongest forces, and therefore of what we vaguely call progress. But
the hero-worshipper naturally regards him as not merely an instrument,
but the conscious and efficient cause of the progress itself.
Hence, too, the apparent immorality which some people discern in
Carlyle's denunciations of 'red tape' formulas, and the ordinary
conventions of society. Undoubtedly, such fetters must snap like
packthread when opposed to the deeper forces which govern the growth
of nations. No set of engagements on paper will keep a nation on its
legs if it is rotten at the core, or maintain a balance of power
between forces which are daily growing unequal. It is idle to suppose
that any contract could bind, or otherwise can preserve, the vitality
of effete institutions. And hence arise a good many puzzling questions
for political casuistry. It is hard to say at what precise point it
becomes necessary to snap the bonds, and when the necessity of change
makes revolution, with all its mischiefs, preferable to stagnation.
The hero-worshipper who regards his idol as the supreme moving
force, has to make him also the infallible judge in such matter. He
stands above—not the ultimate rules of morality, but—the whole system
of regulations and compromises by which men must govern themselves
in normal times—and decides when they must be suspended in the name
of the higher law. The only appeal from his decision is the appeal
to facts. If the apparent hero be really self-seeking and vulgarly
ambitious, he and his empire will be crushed like Napoleon's. If, on
the whole, his decision be right, as inspired from above, he will lay
the foundations of a new order on an unshakable basis. And, therefore,
Carlyle is naturally attracted to the revolutionary periods, when
the underlying forces come to the surface; when the foundations of
the great deep are broken up, all conventions summarily swept aside,
and the direct as well as the ultimate attention is to the great
principles of its social life. Therefore he sympathises with Mirabeau,
who had 'swallowed all formulas,' and still more with Cromwell,
whose purpose, in his view, was to make the laws of England a direct
application of the laws of God. Puritan and Jacobin are equally
impatient for the instantaneous advent of the millennium, and so far
attract equally the man who shares their hatred of compromise and
temporising with the world.
Here we come to the final problem. Cromwell's Parliament, he says,
failed in their attempt to realise their 'noble, and surely necessary,
attempt.' Nay, they 'could not but fail;' they had 'the sluggishness,
the slavish half-and-halfness, the greediness, the cowardice, and
general fatuity and falsity of some ten million men against it—alas!
the whole world and what we call the Devil and all his angels against
it!' This is the true revolutionary doctrine. The fact that a reform
would only succeed fully if men were angels is with the ordinary
Conservative a reason for not reforming at all; and with your genuine
fanatic a reason not for declining the impracticable, but for
denouncing the facts. We have, however, to ask how it fits in with
any such theory of progress as was possible for Carlyle. For some
such theory must be held by anyone who makes the victory of truth and
justice over shams and falsehoods a corner-stone of his system. It
has been asked, in fact, whether there is not a gross inconsistency
here. If Cromwell's success proved him to be a hero, did not the
Restoration upset the proof? The answer, frequently and emphatically
given by Carlyle, as in the lecture on the hero as king, is an obvious
one. Cromwell represents an intermediate stage between Luther and the
French Revolution. Luther told the Pope that he was a 'chimera;' and
the French gave the same piece of information to other 'chimeras.'
The whole process is a revolt against certain gigantic shams, and the
success very inadequately measured by any special incident in the
struggle. The French Revolution, with all its horrors, was a 'return
to truth,' though, as it were, to a truth 'clad in hellfire:' and
its advent should be hailed as 'shipwrecked mariners might hail the
sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless seas and waves.'
And throughout this vast revolutionary process, our hope rests
upon the 'certainty of heroes being sent us;' and that certainty
'shines like a polestar, through murk dustclouds, and all manner of
down-rushing and conflagration.'
It is well that we have a 'certainty' of the coming hero; for the
essay seems to show the weakness of all excessive reliance upon
individuals. Cromwell's life, as he tells us emphatically, was the
life of the Commonwealth, and Cromwell's life was at the mercy of a
'stray bullet.' Where then is a certainty of progress in a world
thus dependent upon solitary heroes, in a wilderness of fools, liable
to be snuffed out at a moment's notice? So far as certainty means a
scientific conviction resting on the observation of facts, we, of
course, cannot have it. It is a certainty which follows from our
belief in the overruling power which will send heroes when there is
work for heroes to do. And Carlyle can at times, especially in his
earlier writings, declare his faith in such a progress with full
conviction. 'The English Whig,' says Herr Teufelsdröckh, 'has, in the
second generation, become an English Radical, who, in the third, it
is to be hoped, will become an English rebuilder. Find mankind where
thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster
or slower; the phœnix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings,
filling earth with her music; or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral
swansong immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and
sing the clearer.' And the phrase, as I think, gives the theory which
in fact is more or less explicitly contained in all Carlyle's writings.
It is plain, however, that progress, so understood, is a progress
consistent with long periods of the reverse of progress. It implies an
alternation of periods of reconstruction and vital energy with others
of decay and degeneration. And in this I do not know that Carlyle
differs from other philosophers. Few people are sanguine enough to
hold that every generation improves upon the preceding. But the modern
believer in progress undoubtedly believes that this actual generation
is better than the last, and that the next will be better still; and
is very apt to impute bad motives to anyone who differs from him.
Here, of course, he must come into flat opposition to Carlyle. For
Carlyle, to put it briefly, regarded the present state of things as
analogous to that of the Lower Empire; a time of dissolution of old
bonds and of a general ferment which was destroying the very tissues
of society. So far he agrees, of course, with many Conservatives; but
he differs from them in regarding the process as necessary, and even
ultimately beneficial. The disease is one which must run its course;
the best hope is that it may run it quickly; the attempt to suppress
the symptoms and to regain health by making time run backwards is
simply chimerical. Thus he was in the painful position of one who sees
a destructive process going on of which he recognises the necessity
whilst all the immediate results are bad.
To the ardent believer in progress such a state of mind is, of course,
repulsive. It implies misanthropy, cynicism, and disbelief in mankind.
Nor can anybody deny that Carlyle's gloomy and dyspeptic constitution
palpably biassed his view of his contemporaries as well as of their
theories. The 'mostly fools' expresses a deeply-rooted feeling, and we
might add 'mostly bores,' and to a great extent humbugs. And this, of
course, implies a very low estimate of the powers of unheroic mankind,
and therefore of their rights. If most men are fools, their right
to do as they please is a right to knock their heads against stone
walls. Carlyle perhaps overlooked the fact that even that process may
be useful training for fools. But even here he asserted a doctrine
wrongly applied rather than false in principle. It shocks one to find
an open advocacy of slavery for black Quashee. But we must admit,
and admit for the reasons given by Carlyle, that even slavery may be
better than sheer anarchy and barbarism; that, historically speaking,
the system of slavery represents a necessary stage in civilisation;
and therefore that the simple abolition of slavery—a recognition of
unconditional 'right' without reference to the possession of the
instincts necessary for higher kinds of society—might be disguised
cruelty. The error was in the hasty assumption that his Quashee
was, in fact, in this degraded state; and the haste to accept this
disheartening belief was but too characteristic. That liberty might
mean barbarism was true; that it actually did mean it in certain given
cases was a rash assumption too much in harmony with his ordinary
aversion to the theorists of his time.
This applies to all Carlyle's preachings about contemporary politics;
the weakest of his writings are those in which his rash dogmatism,
coloured by his gloomy temperament, was employed upon unfamiliar
topics. But the pith and essence of them all is the intense conviction
that the one critical point for modern statesmen is the creation
of a healthy substratum to the social structure. That the lives of
the great masses are squalid, miserable, and vicious, and must be
elevated by the spread of honesty, justice, and the unflinching
extirpation of corrupt elements, the substitution of rigorous rulers
for idle professors of official pedantry, busy about everything but
the essential—that is the sum and substance of the teaching. That
he attributes too much to the legislative power, and has too little
belief in the capacities of the average man, may be true enough.
But this one thing must be said in conclusion. The bitterness, the
gloom, even the apparent brutality, is a proof of the strength of his
sympathies. He is savage with the physician because he is appalled
at the virulence of the disease and the inadequacy of the remedy. He
may shriek 'quack' too hastily, and be too ready to give over the
patient as desperate. And yet I am frequently struck by a contrast. I
meet a good friend who holds up his hands at Carlyle's ferocity. We
talk, and I find that he holds that in politics we are all going to
sheer destruction or 'shooting Niagara'; that the miserable Radicals
are sapping all public spirit; that faith is being undermined by
malcontents and atheists; that the merchant has become a gambler,
and the tradesman a common cheat; that the 'British workman' is a
phrase which may be used with the certainty of provoking a sneer; and,
briefly, that there is not a class in the country which is not on the
highroad to decay, or an institution beyond the reach of corruption.
And yet my friend sits quietly down and enjoys his dinner as heartily
as if he were expecting the millennium. What shall I say? That he does
not believe what he says, or that his digestive apparatus was in most
enviable order? I know not; but certainly Carlyle was not capable of
this. He took things too terribly in earnest. When workmen scamped
the alterations in his house, or the railway puffed its smoke into
his face, he saw visible symbols of modern degeneracy, and thought
painfully of the old honest wholesome life in Annandale—of steady
God-fearing farmers and self-respecting workmen. All that swept away
by progress and 'prosperity beyond example'! That was his reflection;
perhaps it was very weak, as certainly it was very unpleasant to worry
himself about what he could not help, and sprang, let us say, all from
a defective digestion. And yet, though I cannot think without pity
of the man of genius who felt so keenly and thought so gloomily of
the evils around us, I feel infinitely more respect for his frame of
mind than for that of the man who, sharing, verbally at least, this
opinion, can let it calmly lie in his mind without the least danger to
his personal comfort.
_THE STATE TRIALS_
It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on the
whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not generally
share that impression; and, on the contrary, have said a great many
fine things about the charm of conversing with the choice minds of
all ages, with the _innuendo_, to use the legal phrase, that they
themselves modestly demand some place amongst the aforesaid choice
minds. But at times we are disposed to retort upon our teachers. Are
you not, we observe, exceedingly given to humbug? The youthful student
takes the poet's ecstasies and agonies in solemn earnest. We who have
grown a little wiser cannot forget with what complacency the poet has
often devised a new agony; how he has set it to a pretty tune; how he
has treasured up his sorrows and despairs to make his literary stock
in trade, has taken them to market, and squabbled with publishers and
writhed under petty critics, and purred and bridled under judicious
flattery; and we begin to resent his demand upon our sympathies.
Are not poetry and art a terrible waste of energy in a world where
so much energy is already being dissipated? The great musician,
according to the well-worn anecdote, hears the people crying for
bread in the street, and the wave of emotion passing through his mind
comes out in the shape, not of active benevolence, but of some new
and exquisite jangle of sounds. It is all very well. The musician,
it is probable enough, could have done nothing better. But there are
times when we feel that we would rather have the actual sounds, the
downright utterance of an agonised human being, than the far-away echo
of passion set up in the artistic brain. We prefer the roar of the
tempest to the squeaking of the Æolian harp. We tire of the skilfully
prepared sentiment, the pretty fancies, the unreal imaginations, and
long for the harsh, crude, substantial fact, the actual utterance of
men struggling in the dire grasp of unmitigated realities. We want
to see Nature itself, not to look at the distorted images presented
in the magical mirror of a Shakespeare. The purpose of playing is,
as that excellent authority is constantly made to repeat, to show
the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. But, upon
that hypothesis, why should we not see the age itself instead of
being bothered by impossible kings and queens and ghosts mixed up
in supernatural catastrophes? If this theory of art be sound, is
not the most realistic historian the only artist? Nay, since every
historian is more or less a sophisticator, should we not go back to
the materials from which histories are made?
I feel some touch of sympathy for those simple-minded readers who
avowedly prefer the police reports to any other kind of literature.
There at least they come into contact with solid facts; shocking, it
may be, to well-regulated minds, but possessing all the charm of their
brutal reality; not worked into the carefully doctored theories and
rose-coloured pictures set forth by the judicious author, whose real
aim is to pose as an amiable and interesting being. It is true that
there are certain objections to such studies. They generally imply a
wrong state of mind in the student. He too often reads, it is to be
feared, with that pleasure in loathsome details which seems to spring
from a survival of the old cruel instincts capable of finding pleasure
in the sight of torture and bloodshed. Certainly one would not, even
in a passing phrase, suggest that the indulgence of such a temper can
be anything but loathsome. But it is not necessary to assume this evil
propensity in all cases; or what must be our judgment of the many
excellent members of society who studied day by day the reports of the
Tichborne case, for example, and felt that there was a real blank in
their lives when the newspapers had to fill their columns with nothing
better than discussions of international relations and social reforms?
You might perhaps laugh at such a man if he asserted that he was
conscientiously studying human nature. But you might give him credit
if he replied that he was reading a novel which atoned for any defects
of construction by the incomparable interest of reality. And the reply
would be more plausible in defence of another kind of reading. When
literature palls upon me I sometimes turn for relief to the great
collection of State Trials. They are nothing, you may say, but the
police reports of the past. But it makes all the difference that they
are of the past. I may be ashamed of myself when I read some hideous
revelation of modern crime, not to stimulate my ardour as a patriot
and a reformer, but to add a zest to my comfortable chair in the club
window or at the bar of my favourite public-house. But I can read
without such a pang of remorse about Charles I. and the regicides. I
can do nothing for them. I cannot turn the tide of battle at Naseby,
or rush into the streets with the enthusiastic Venner. They make no
appeal to me for help, and I have not to harden my heart by resisting,
but only feel a sympathy which cannot be wasted because it could not
be turned to account. I may indulge in it, for it strengthens the bond
between me and my ancestors. My sense of relationship is stimulated
and strengthened as I gaze at the forms sinking slowly beyond my grasp
down into the abyss of the past, and try in imagination to raise them
once more to the surface. I do all that I can for them in simply
acknowledging that they form a part of the great process in which I
am for the instant on the knife-edge of actual existence, and unreal
only in the sense in which the last motion of my pen is unreal now.
'I was once,' says one of the earliest performers, 'a looker-on of
the pageant as others be here now, but now, woe is me! I am a player
in that doleful tragedy.' This 'now' is become our 'once,' and we
may leave it to the harmless enthusiasts who play at metaphysics to
explain or to darken the meaning of the familiar phrase. Whatever
time may be—a point, I believe, not quite settled—there is always a
singular fascination in any study which makes us vividly conscious
of its ceaseless lapse, and gives us the sense of rolling back the
ever-closing scroll. Historians, especially of the graphic variety,
try to do that service for us; but we can only get the full enjoyment
by studying at first-hand direct contemporary reports of actual words
and deeds.