_Later Thoughts and Jottings_
There is surely at present an inexplicable _rapport_ (all the more
piquant from its contradictoriness) between that deceas'd author and our
United States of America--no matter whether it lasts or not[13] As we
Westerners assume definite shape, and result in formations and fruitage
unknown before, it is curious with what a new sense our eyes turn to
representative outgrowths of crises and personages in the Old World.
Beyond question, since Carlyle's death, and the publication of Froude's
memoirs, not only the interest in his books, but every personal bit
regarding the famous Scotchman--his dyspepsia, his buffetings, his
parentage, his paragon of a wife, his career in Edinburgh, in the
lonesome nest on Craigenputtock moor, and then so many years in
London--is probably wider and livelier to-day in this country than
in his own land. Whether I succeed or no, I, too, reaching across the
Atlantic and taking the man's dark fortune-telling of humanity and
politics, would offset it all, (such is the fancy that comes to me,)
by a far more profound horoscope-casting of those themes--G. F.
Hegel's.[14]
First, about a chance, a never-fulfill'd vacuity of this pale cast of
thought--this British Hamlet from Cheyne row, more puzzling than the
Danish one, with his contrivances for settling the broken and spavin'd
joints of the world's government, especially its democratic dislocation.
Carlyle's grim fate was cast to live and dwell in, and largely embody,
the parturition agony and qualms of the old order, amid crowded
accumulations of ghastly morbidity, giving birth to the new.
But conceive of him (or his parents before him) coming to America,
recuperated by the cheering realities and activity of our people and
country--growing up and delving face-to-face resolutely among us here,
especially at the West--inhaling and exhaling our limitless air and
eligibilities--devoting his mind to the theories and developments
of this Republic amid its practical facts as exemplified in Kansas,
Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, or Louisiana. I say _facts_, and
face-to-face confrontings--so different from books, and all those
quiddities and mere reports in the libraries, upon which the man (it
was wittily said of him at the age of thirty, that there was no one in
Scotland who had glean'd so much and seen so little,) almost wholly fed,
and which even his sturdy and vital mind but reflected at best.
Something of the sort narrowly escaped happening. In 1835, after more
than a dozen years of trial and non-success, the author of "Sartor
Resartus" removing to London, very poor, a confirmed hypochondriac,
"Sartor" universally scoffed at, no literary prospects ahead,
deliberately settled on one last casting throw of the literary
dice--resolv'd to compose and launch forth a book on the subject of
_the French Revolution_--and if that won no higher guerdon or prize than
hitherto, to sternly abandon the trade of author forever, and emigrate
for good to America. But the venture turn'd out a lucky one, and there
was no emigration.
Carlyle's work in the sphere of literature as he commenced and carried
it out, is the same in one or two leading respects that Immanuel
Kant's was in speculative philosophy. But the Scotchman had none of the
stomachic phlegm and never-perturb'd placidity of the Konigsberg sage,
and did not, like the latter, understand his own limits, and stop when
he got to the end of them. He clears away jungle and poisonvines and
underbrush--at any rate hacks valiantly at them, smiting hip and thigh.
Kant did the like in his sphere, and it was all he profess'd to do;
his labors have left the ground fully prepared ever since--and greater
service was probably never perform'd by mortal man. But the pang and
hiatus of Carlyle seem to me to consist in the evidence everywhere that
amid a whirl of fog and fury and cross-purposes, he firmly believ'd he
had a clue to the medication of the world's ills, and that his bounden
mission was to exploit it.[15]
There were two anchors, or sheet-anchors, for steadying, as a last
resort, the Carlylean ship. One will be specified presently. The other,
perhaps the main, was only to be found in some mark'd form of personal
force, an extreme degree of competent urge and will, a man or men "born
to command." Probably there ran through every vein and current of the
Scotchman's blood something that warm'd up to this kind of trait and
character above aught else in the world, and which makes him in my
opinion the chief celebrater and promulger of it in literature--more
than Plutarch, more than Shakspere. The great masses of humanity stand
for nothing--at least nothing but nebulous raw material; only the big
planets and shining suns for him. To ideas almost invariably languid or
cold, a number-one forceful personality was sure to rouse his eulogistic
passion and savage joy. In such case, even the standard of duty
hereinafter rais'd, was to be instantly lower'd and vail'd. All that
is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were
distasteful to him from the first, and as he grew older they became
hateful and contemptible. For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating
faculty such as his, the bearings he persistently ignored were
marvellous. For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic
principle, to each and every State of the current world, not so much
of helping it to perfect legislators and executives, but as the only
effectual method for surely, however slowly, training people on a large
scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves (the ultimate
aim of political and all other development)--to gradually reduce the
fact of _governing_ to its minimum, and to subject all its staffs
and their doings to the telescopes and microscopes of committees and
parties--and greatest of all, to afford (not stagnation and obedient
content, which went well enough with the feudalism and ecclesiasticism
of the antique and medieval world, but) a vast and sane and recurrent
ebb and tide action for those floods of the great deep that have
henceforth palpably burst forever their old bounds--seem never to have
enter'd Carlyle's thought. It was splendid how he refus'd any compromise
to the last. He was curiously antique. In that harsh, picturesque, most
potent voice and figure, one seems to be carried back from the present
of the British islands more than two thousand years, to the range
between Jerusalem and Tarsus. His fullest best biographer justly says of
him:
He was a teacher and a prophet, in the Jewish sense of the word. The
prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent
spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had
interpreted correctly the sign of their own times, and their prophecies
were fulfill'd. Carlyle, like them, believ'd that he had a special
message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that
belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen.
He has told us that our most cherish'd ideas of political liberty, with
their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress
which has seem'd to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy
and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The
principles of his teachings are false. He has offer'd himself as a guide
upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself
would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on
the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors,
he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his
teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his
place among the inspired seers.
To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, and no matter
how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should
the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor
his unsurpass'd conscience, his unique method, and his honest fame.
Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there less
of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it
could more heartily respect.
The second main point of Carlyle's utterance was the idea of _duty being
done_. (It is simply a new codicil--if it be particularly new, which
is by no means certain--on the time-honor'd bequest of dynasticism,
the mould-eaten rules of legitimacy and kings.) He seems to have been
impatient sometimes to madness when reminded by persons who thought
at least as deeply as himself, that this formula, though precious, is
rather a vague one, and that there are many other considerations to a
philosophical estimate of each and every department either.
Altogether, I don't know anything more amazing than these persistent
strides and throbbings so far through our Nineteenth century of
perhaps its biggest, sharpest, and most erudite brain, in defiance
and discontent with everything; contemptuously ignoring, (either from
constitutional inaptitude, ignorance itself, or more likely because he
demanded a definite cure-all here and now,) the only solace and solvent
to be had.
There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior
human identity, (in its moral completeness, considered as _ensemble_,
not for that moral alone, but for the whole being, including physique,)
a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without
what is called education, (though I think it the goal and apex of all
education deserving the name)--an intuition of the absolute balance, in
time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud,
frivolity, hoggishness--this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe
and general unsettledness, we call _the world_; a soul-sight of that
divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of
things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however
momentous, like a leash'd dog in the hand of the hunter. Such soul-sight
and root-centre for the mind--mere optimism explains only the surface
or fringe of it--Carlyle was mostly, perhaps entirely without. He seems
instead to have been haunted in the play of his mental action by a
spectre, never entirely laid from first to last, (Greek scholars,
I believe, find the same mocking and fantastic apparition attending
Aristophanes, his comedies,)--the spectre of world-destruction.
How largest triumph or failure in human life, in war or peace, may
depend on some little hidden centrality, hardly more than a drop of
blood, a pulse-beat, or a breath of air! It is certain that all these
weighty matters, democracy in America, Carlyleism, and the temperament
for deepest political or literary exploration, turn on a simple point in
speculative philosophy.
The most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man--the problem
on whose solution science, art, the bases and pursuits of nations, and
everything else, including intelligent human happiness, (here to-day,
1882, New York, Texas, California, the same as all times, all lands,)
subtly and finally resting, depends for competent outset and argument,
is doubtless involved in the query: What is the fusing explanation and
tie--what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human
identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c., on the one side, of
and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole of the material objective
universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and space, on the
other side? Immanuel Kant, though he explain'd or partially explain'd,
as may be said, the laws of the human understanding, left this question
an open one. Schelling's answer, or suggestion of answer, is (and very
valuable and important, as far as it goes,) that the same general and
particular intelligence, passion, even the standards of right and wrong,
which exist in a conscious and formulated state in man, exist in an
unconscious state, or in perceptible analogies, throughout the entire
universe of external Nature, in all its objects large or small, and all
its movements and processes--thus making the impalpable human mind,
and concrete nature, notwithstanding their duality and separation,
convertible, and in centrality and essence one. But G. F. Hegel's fuller
statement of the matter probably remains the last best word that has
been said upon it, up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just
epitomized, he so carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything
in it, with certain serious gaps now for the first time fill'd, that it
becomes a coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far
as there can be any answer) to the foregoing question--a system which,
while I distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to,
revise, and even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth
to-day, in its entirety, illuminating the thought of the universe, and
satisfying the mystery thereof to the human mind, with a more consoling
scientific assurance than any yet.
According to Hegel the whole earth, (an old nucleus-thought, as in the
Vedas, and no doubt before, but never hitherto brought so absolutely to
the front, fully surcharged with modern scientism and facts, and made
the sole entrance to each and all,) with its infinite variety, the
past, the surroundings of to-day, or what may happen in the future,
the contrarieties of material with spiritual, and of natural with
artificial, are all, to the eye of the _ensemblist_, but necessary sides
and unfoldings, different steps or links, in the endless process
of Creative thought, which, amid numberless apparent failures and
contradictions, is held together by central and never-broken unity--not
contradictions or failures at all, but radiations of one consistent
and eternal purpose; the whole mass of everything steadily, unerringly
tending and flowing toward the permanent _utile_ and _morale_, as rivers
to oceans. As life is the whole law and incessant effort of the visible
universe, and death only the other or invisible side of the same, so the
_utile_, so truth, so health are the continuous-immutable laws of the
moral universe, and vice and disease, with all their perturbations, are
but transient, even if ever so prevalent expressions.
To politics throughout, Hegel applies the like catholic standard and
faith. Not any one party, or any one form of government, is absolutely
and exclusively true. Truth consists in the just relations of objects to
each other. A majority or democracy may rule as outrageously and do as
great harm as an oligarchy or despotism--though far less likely to
do so. But the great evil is either a violation of the relations just
referr'd to, or of the moral law. The specious, the unjust, the cruel,
and what is called the unnatural, though not only permitted but in a
certain sense, (like shade to light,) inevitable in the divine scheme,
are by the whole constitution of that scheme, partial, inconsistent,
temporary, and though having ever so great an ostensible majority, are
certainly destin'd to failures, after causing great suffering.
Theology, Hegel translates into science.[16] All apparent contradictions
in the statement of the Deific nature by different ages, nations,
churches, points of view, are but fractional and imperfect expressions
of one essential unity, from which they all proceed--crude endeavors or
distorted parts, to be regarded both as distinct and united. In short
(to put it in our own form, or summing up,) that thinker or analyzer
or overlooker who by an inscrutable combination of train'd wisdom and
natural intuition most fully accepts in perfect faith the moral unity
and sanity of the creative scheme, in history, science, and all life
and time, present and future, is both the truest cosmical devotee or
religioso, and the profoundest philosopher. While he who, by the spell
of himself and his circumstance, sees darkness and despair in the sum
of the workings of God's providence, and who, in that, denies or
prevaricates, is, no matter how much piety plays on his lips, the most
radical sinner and infidel.
I am the more assured in recounting Hegel a little freely here,[17] not
only for offsetting the Carlylean letter and spirit-cutting it out
all and several from the very roots, and below the roots--but to
counterpoise, since the late death and deserv'd apotheosis of Darwin,
the tenets of the evolutionists. Unspeakably precious as those are to
biology, and henceforth indispensable to a right aim and estimate in
study, they neither comprise or explain everything--and the last word or
whisper still remains to be breathed, after the utmost of those
claims, floating high and forever above them all, and above technical
metaphysics. While the contributions which German Kant and Fichte and
Schelling and Hegel have bequeath'd to humanity--and which English
Darwin has also in his field--are indispensable to the erudition of
America's future, I should say that in all of them, and the best of
them, when compared with the lightning flashes and flights of the old
prophets and _exaltés_, the spiritual poets and poetry of all lands,
(as in the Hebrew Bible,) there seems to be, nay certainly is, something
lacking--something cold, a failure to satisfy the deepest emotions
of the soul--a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which the old
_exaltés_ and poets supply, and which the keenest modern philosophers so
far do not.
Upon the whole, and for our purposes, this man's name certainly belongs
on the list with the just-specified, first-class moral physicians of
our current era--and with Emerson and two or three others--though
his prescription is drastic, and perhaps destructive, while theirs is
assimilating, normal and tonic. Feudal at the core, and mental offspring
and radiation of feudalism as are his books, they afford ever-valuable
lessons and affinities to democratic America. Nations or individuals, we
surely learn deepest from unlikeness, from a sincere opponent, from the
light thrown even scornfully on dangerous spots and liabilities. (Michel
Angelo invoked heaven's special protection against his friends and
affectionate flatterers; palpable foes he could manage for himself.) In
many particulars Carlyle was indeed, as Froude terms him, one of those
far-off Hebraic utterers, a new Micah or Habbakuk. His words at times
bubble forth with abysmic inspiration. Always precious, such men; as
precious now as any time. His rude, rasping, taunting, contradictory
tones--what ones are more wanted amid the supple, polish'd,
money--worshipping, Jesus-and-Judas-equalizing, suffrage-sovereignty
echoes of current America? He has lit up our Nineteenth century with the
light of a powerful, penetrating, and perfectly honest intellect of
the first class, turn'd on British and European politics, social life,
literature, and representative personages--thoroughly dissatisfied with
all, and mercilessly exposing the illness of all. But while he announces
the malady, and scolds and raves about it, he himself, born and bred in
the same atmosphere, is a mark'd illustration of it.
Notes:
[13] It will be difficult for the future--judging by his books, personal
dissympathies, &c.,--to account for the deep hold this author has taken
on the present age, and the way he has color'd its method and thought.
I am certainly at a loss to account for it all as affecting myself.
But there could be no view, or even partial picture, of the middle and
latter part of our Nineteenth century, that did not markedly include
Thomas Carlyle. In his case (as so many others, literary productions,
works of art, personal identities, events,) there has been an impalpable
something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better text,
(it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional,
living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations
and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to--those
reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy--even from
the most erudite and sincere mind of Europe.
[14] Not the least mentionable part of the case, (a streak, it may
be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast their
gravity,) is that although neither of my great authorities during their
lives consider'd the United States worthy of serious mention, all the
principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day collected
and bound up under the conspicuous title: _Speculations for the use of
North America, and Democracy there with the relations of the same to
Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of
the vastest,) from the Old World to the New._
[15] I hope I shall not myself fall into the error I charge upon him, of
prescribing a specific for indispensable evils. My utmost pretension is
probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively curative power
of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers, by the claims,
and general movement and result, of ideas. Something of the latter kind
seems to me the distinctive theory of America, of democracy, and of the
modern--or rather, I should say, it _is_ democracy, and _is_ the modern.
[16] I am much indebted to J. Gostick's abstract.
[17] I have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to Carlyle'
s everlurking pessimism and world-decadence, but as presenting the most
thoroughly _American points of view_ I know. In my opinion the above
formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New
World democracy in the creative realms of time and space. There is that
about them which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the vitality
of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration
to, or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they
were born in Germany, or in the old world at all. While a Carlyle, I
should say, is quite the legitimate European product to be expected.