There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the
first is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second
is that he should believe in the acceptability of his message. It was
the whole tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second.
The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle's alleged
gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and
as a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his
'liver' is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a
'Sartor Resartus,' it would be a vastly more tolerable thing than it is.
Diseases do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes with
the healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle's private faults and
literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in the
situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult
to say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal
predilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage
egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp
Carlyle's gospel. 'Ruskin,' says a critic, 'did, all the same, verily
believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself.' This is certainly a
distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has
not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have
believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God,
because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin,
themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was
not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief
in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his
message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St Francis,
Bunyan, Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable
variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man
as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear
and without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not
only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.
But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment must
absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's sense
of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has
the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets--humour. A man
must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan
delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half-converted
Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of
cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion
was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of
its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow.
So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and
literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had
seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of
them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and
eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something
elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the
passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates
that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in the
Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick
night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through
unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more ... and we go on, if
not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones.'
The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the
founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern
rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or
valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive
tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual
system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the
trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the
trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual
intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic
is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.
But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up
the position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind,
and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion.
When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using
words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by
bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an
extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant
is the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering
from 'nerves,' which is about as sensible as talking about a man
suffering from ten fingers. We speak of 'liver' and 'digestion' when we
mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the same
manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the
danger of fallacy.
But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial
overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat
different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they
bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all.
Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to
forget that there are two parts of a logical process--the first the
choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it; and
humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound
reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound
assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational
and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as 'He did not prove the
very thing with which he started,' or 'The whole of his case rested upon
a pure assumption,' two peculiarities which may be found by the curious
in the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how constantly one
hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently without
troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense,
as it were, of the real colour and character of a man's assumption. For
instance, two men will argue about whether patriotism is a good thing
and never discover until the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan is
basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become
as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist
denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal
who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.
* * * * *
Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments but
assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of
the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed
directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be
true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and
more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where
his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and
beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the
age of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress which
assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth
century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century
according to him depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to
be.
He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which
threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but
the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real
ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last
era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there
has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.
Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him,
as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of
common-sense. Mysticism and common-sense alike consist in a sense of the
dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally
demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common-sense are
alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have
no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist in
breaking through formulas, old and new, to these old and silent and
ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times
over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and
woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for
the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness,
it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe.
About hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice
to Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he
sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were
a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his
philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory
of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and
arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some
questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not
that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided
and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous
and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in
them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to
rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's tone
invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with
admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity.
Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his hero
worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great
men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were
more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and
his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship of
valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part of
all healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact that
he, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of that
modern habit of what is vulgarly called 'Going the whole hog.' Often in
matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. This
remarkable modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion, politics,
and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunities
to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which
existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace,
Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, and
optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged
to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the
pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse
him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with this
mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take the same view of the
wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at Donnybrook Fair. It was
this species of insane logic which led him into his chief errors, never
his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example. Carlyle's defence of
slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in argument and in
moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took it up from the passion
for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence of aristocracy. He
blundered, of course, because he did not see that slavery has nothing in
the world to do with aristocracy, that it is, indeed, almost its
opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its thoughtful defenders
have made for aristocracy was that a few persons could more rapidly and
firmly decide public affairs in the interests of the people. But slavery
is not even supposed to be a government for the good of the governed. It
is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors.
Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery uses
the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a
spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should be
ruled and guided for his own good like a child--for a child who is
always ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual
existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contradiction to that
human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that a man should be owned
like a tool for someone else's good, as if he had no personal destiny
in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle's
because we think that it is a curious example of the waste and unclean
places into which that remarkable animal, 'the whole hog,' more than
once led him.
In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an
unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic
which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for
once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately
deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example.
Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern
times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though
Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle
being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat,
they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and
pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to
everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,
embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges
himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with
which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as
a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient
necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it
can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many at
last.