II

Carlyle stands at all times, at all places, for the hero, for power of

will, authority of character, adequacy, and obligation of personal

force. He offsets completely, and with the emphasis of a clap of

thunder, the modern leveling impersonal tendencies, the "manifest

destinies," the blind mass movements, the merging of the one in the

many, the rule of majorities, the no-government, no-leadership,

_laissez-faire_ principle. Unless there was evidence of a potent,

supreme, human will guiding affairs, he had no faith in the issue;

unless the hero was in the saddle, and the dumb blind forces well bitted

and curbed beneath him, he took no interest in the venture. The cause of

the North, in the War of the Rebellion, failed to enlist him or touch

him. It was a people's war; the hand of the strong man was not

conspicuous; it was a conflict of ideas, rather than of personalities;

there was no central and dominating figure around which events revolved.

He missed his Cromwell, his Frederick. So far as his interest was

aroused at all, it was with the South, because he had heard of the

Southern slave-driver; he knew Cuffee had a master, and the crack of his

whip was sweeter music to him than the crack of antislavery rifles,

behind which he recognized only a vague, misdirected philanthropy.

Carlyle did not see things in their relation, or as a philosopher; he

saw them detached, and hence more or less in conflict and opposition. We

accuse him of wrong-headedness, but it is rather inflexibleness of mind

and temper. He is not a brook that flows, but a torrent that plunges and

plows. He tried poetry, he tried novel-writing in his younger days, but

he had not the flexibility of spirit to succeed in these things; his

moral vehemence, his fury of conviction, were too great.

Great is the power of reaction in the human body; great is the power of

reaction and recoil in all organic nature. But apparently there was no

power of reaction in Carlyle's mind; he never reacts from his own

extreme views; never looks for the compensations, never seeks to place

himself at the point of equilibrium, or adjusts his view to other

related facts. He saw the value of the hero, the able man, and he

precipitated himself upon this fact with such violence, so detached it

and magnified it, that it fits with no modern system of things. He was

apparently entirely honest in his conviction that modern governments and

social organizations were rushing swiftly to chaos and ruin, because the

hero, the natural leader, was not at the head of affairs,--overlooking

entirely the many checks and compensations, and ignoring the fact that,

under a popular government especially, nations are neither made nor

unmade by the wisdom or folly of their rulers, but by the character for

wisdom and virtue of the mass of their citizens. "Where the great mass

of men is tolerably right," he himself says, "all is right; where they

are not right, all is wrong." What difference can it make to America,

for instance, to the real growth and prosperity of the nation, whether

the ablest man goes to Congress or fills the Presidency or the second or

third ablest? The most that we can expect, in ordinary times at least,

is that the machinery of universal suffrage will yield us a fair sample

of the leading public man,--a man who fairly represents the average

ability and average honesty of the better class of the citizens. In

extraordinary times, in times of national peril, when there is a real

strain upon the state, and the instinct of self-preservation comes into

play, then fate itself brings forward the ablest men. The great crisis

makes or discovers the great man,--discovers Cromwell, Frederick,

Washington, Lincoln. Carlyle leaves out of his count entirely the

competitive principle that operates everywhere in nature,--in your field

and garden as well as in political states and amid teeming

populations,--natural selection, the survival of the fittest. Under

artificial conditions the operation of this law is more or less checked;

but amid the struggles and parturition throes of a people, artificial

conditions disappear, and we touch real ground at last. What a sorting

and sifting process went on in our army during the secession war, till

the real captains, the real leaders, were found; not Fredericks, or

Wellingtons, perhaps, but the best the land afforded!

The object of popular government is no more to find and elevate the

hero, the man of special and exceptional endowment, into power, than the

object of agriculture is to take the prizes at the agricultural fairs.

It is one of the things to be hoped for and aspired to, but not one of

the indispensables. The success of free government is attained when it

has made the people independent of special leaders, and secured the free

and full expression of the popular will and conscience. Any view of

American politics, based upon the failure of the suffrage always, or

even generally, to lift into power the ablest men, is partial and

unscientific. We can stand, and have stood, any amount of mediocrity in

our appointed rulers; and perhaps in the ordinary course of events

mediocrity is the safest and best. We could no longer surrender

ourselves to great leaders, if we wanted to. Indeed, there is no longer

a call for great leaders; with the appearance of the people upon the

scene, the hero must await his orders. How often in this country have

the people checked and corrected the folly and wrong-headedness of their

rulers! It is probably true, as Carlyle says, that "the smallest item of

human Slavery is the oppression of man by his Mock-Superiors;" but shall

we accept the other side of the proposition, that the grand problem is

to find government by our Real Superiors? The grand problem is rather to

be superior to all government, and to possess a nationality that finally

rests upon principles quite beyond the fluctuations of ordinary

politics. A people possessed of the gift of Empire, like the English

stock, both in Europe and in America, are in our day beholden very

little to their chosen rulers. Otherwise the English nation would have

been extinct long ago.

"Human virtue," Carlyle wrote in 1850, "if we went down to the roots of

it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere

abundant as the light of the sun." This may well offset his more

pessimistic statement, that "there are fools, cowards, knaves, and

gluttonous traitors, true only to their own appetite, in immense

majority in every rank of life; and there is nothing frightfuller than

to see these voting and deciding." If we "went down to the roots of it,"

this statement is simply untrue. "Democracy," he says, "is, by the

nature of it, a self-canceling business, and gives, in the long run, a

net result of _zero_."

Because the law of gravitation is uncompromising, things are not,

therefore, crushed in a wild rush to the centre of attraction. The very

traits that make Carlyle so entertaining and effective as a historian

and biographer, namely, his fierce, man-devouring eyes, make him

impracticable in the sphere of practical politics.

Let me quote a long and characteristic passage from Carlyle's Latter-Day

Pamphlets, one of dozens of others, illustrating his misconception of

universal suffrage:--

"Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The

ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most

harmonious, exquisitely constitutional manner; the ship, to get round

Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for and fixed

with adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely

careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting,

ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get

around the Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian winds will blow you ever

back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councilors from Chaos,

will nudge you with most chaotic 'admonition;' you will be flung half

frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your

iceberg councilors and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get

around Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship;--yes, indeed, the

ship's crew may be very unanimous, which, doubtless, for the time being,

will be very comfortable to the ship's crew and to their Phantasm

Captain, if they have one; but if the tack they unanimously steer upon

is guiding them into the belly of the Abyss, it will not profit them

much! Ships, accordingly, do not use the ballot-box at all; and they

reject the Phantasm species of Captain. One wishes much some other

Entities--since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of

laws--could be brought to show as much wisdom and sense at least of

self-preservation, the _first_ command of nature. Phantasm Captains with

unanimous votings,--this is considered to be all the law and all the

prophets at present."

This has the real crushing Carlylean wit and picturesqueness of

statement, but is it the case of democracy, of universal suffrage fairly

put? The eternal verities appear again, as they appear everywhere in our

author in connection with this subject. They recur in his pages like

"minute-guns," as if deciding, by the count of heads, whether Jones or

Smith should go to Parliament or to Congress was equivalent to sitting

in judgment upon the law of gravitation. What the ship in doubling Cape

Horn would very likely do, if it found itself officerless, would be to

choose, by some method more or less approaching a count of heads, a

captain, an ablest man to take command, and put the vessel through. If

none were able, then indeed the case were desperate; with or without the

ballot-box, the abyss would be pretty sure of a victim. In any case

there would perhaps be as little voting to annul the storms, or change

the ocean currents, as there is in democracies to settle ethical or

scientific principles by an appeal to universal suffrage. But Carlyle

was fated to see the abyss lurking under, and the eternities presiding

over, every act of life. He saw everything in fearful gigantic

perspective. It is true that one cannot loosen the latchet of his shoe

without bending to forces that are cosmical, sidereal; but whether he

bends or not, or this way or that, he passes no verdict upon them. The

temporary, the expedient,--all those devices and adjustments that are of

the nature of scaffolding, and that enter so largely into the

administration of the coarser affairs of this world,--were with Carlyle

equivalent to the false, the sham, the phantasmal, and he would none of

them. As the ages seem to have settled themselves for the present and

the future, in all civilized countries,--and especially in

America,--politics is little more than scaffolding; it certainly is not

the house we live in, but an appurtenance or necessity of the house. A

government, in the long run, can never be better or worse than the

people governed. In voting for Jones for constable, am I voting for or

against the unalterable laws of the universe,--an act wherein the

consequences of a mistake are so appalling that voting had better be

dispensed with, and the selection of constables be left to the

evolutionary principle of the solar system?

Carlyle was not a reconciler. When he saw a fact, he saw it with such

intense and magnifying eyes, as I have already said, that it became at

once irreconcilable with other facts. He could not and would not

reconcile popular government, the rule of majorities, with what he knew

and what we all know to be popular follies, or the proneness of the

multitude to run after humbugs. How easy for fallacies, speciosities,

quackeries, etc., to become current! That a thing is popular makes a

wise man look upon it with suspicion. Are the greatest or best books the

most read books? Have not the great principles, the great reforms, begun

in minorities and fought their way against the masses? Does not the

multitude generally greet its saviors with "Crucify him, crucify him"?

Who have been the martyrs and the persecuted in all ages? Where does the

broad road lead to, and which is the Narrow Way? "Can it be proved that,

since the beginning of the world, there was ever given a universal vote

in favor of the worthiest man or thing? I have always understood that

true worth, in any department, was difficult to recognize; that the

worthiest, if he appealed to universal suffrage, would have but a poor

chance."

Upon these facts Carlyle planted himself, and the gulf which he saw open

between them and the beauties of universal suffrage was simply immense.

Without disputing the facts here, we may ask if they really bear upon

the question of popular government, of a free ballot? If so, then the

ground is clean shot away from under it. The world is really governed

and led by minorities, and always will be. The many, sooner or later,

follow the one. We have all become abolitionists in this country, some

of us much to our surprise and bewilderment; we hardly know yet how it

happened; but the time was when abolitionists were hunted by the

multitude. Marvelous to relate, also, civil service reform has become

popular among our politicians. Something has happened; the tide has

risen while we slept, or while we mocked and laughed, and away we all go

on the current. Yet it is equally true that, under any form of

government, nothing short of events themselves, nothing short of that

combination of circumstances which we name fate or fortune, can place

that exceptional man, the hero, at the head of affairs. If there are no

heroes, then woe to the people who have lost the secret of producing

great men.

The worthiest man usually has other work to do, and avoids politics.

Carlyle himself could not be induced to stand for Parliament. "Who would

govern," he says, "that can get along without governing? He that is

fittest for it is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained." But

constrained he cannot be, yet he is our only hope. What shall we do? A

government by the fittest can alone save mankind, yet the fittest is

not forthcoming. We do not know him; he does not know himself. The case

is desperate. Hence the despair of Carlyle in his view of modern

politics.

Who that has read his history of Frederick has not at times felt that he

would gladly be the subject of a real king like the great Prussian, a

king who was indeed the father of his people; a sovereign man at the

head of affairs with the reins of government all in his own hands; an

imperial husbandman devoted to improving, extending, and building up his

nation as the farmer his farm, and toiling as no husbandman ever toiled;

a man to reverence, to love, to fear; who called all the women his

daughters, and all the men his sons, and whom to see and to speak with

was the event of a lifetime; a shepherd to his people, a lion to his

enemies? Such a man gives head and character to a nation; he is the head

and the people are the body; currents of influence and of power stream

down from such a hero to the life of the humblest peasant; his spirit

diffuses itself through the nation. It is the ideal state; it is

captivating to the imagination; there is an artistic completeness about

it. Probably this is why it so captivated Carlyle, inevitable artist

that he was. But how impossible to us! how impossible to any

English-speaking people by their own action and choice; not because we

are unworthy such a man, but because an entirely new order of things has

arrived, and arrived in due course of time, through the political and

social evolution of man. The old world has passed away; the age of the

hero, of the strong leader, is gone. The people have arrived, and sit in

judgment upon all who would rule or lead them. Science has arrived,

everything is upon trial; private judgment is supreme. Our only hope in

this country, at least in the sphere of governments, is in the

collective wisdom of the people; and, as extremes so often meet, perhaps

this, if thoroughly realized, is as complete and artistic a plan as the

others. The "collective folly" of the people, Carlyle would say, and

perhaps during his whole life he never for a moment saw it otherwise;

never saw that the wisdom of the majority could be other than the

no-wisdom of blind masses of unguided men. He seemed to forget, or else

not to know, that universal suffrage, as exemplified in America, was

really a sorting and sifting process, a search for the wise, the truly

representative man; that the vast masses were not asked who should rule

over them, but were asked which of two candidates they preferred, in

selecting which candidates what of wisdom and leadership there was

available had had their due weight; in short, that democracy alone makes

way for and offers a clear road to natural leadership. Under the

pressure of opposing parties, all the political wisdom and integrity

there is in the country stand between the people, the masses, and the

men of their choice.

Undoubtedly popular government will, in the main, be like any other

popular thing,--it will partake of the conditions of popularity; it

will seldom elevate the greatest; it will never elevate the meanest; it

is based upon the average virtue and intelligence of the people.

There have been great men in all countries and times who possessed the

elements of popularity, and would have commanded the suffrage of the

people; on the other hand, there have been men who possessed many

elements of popularity, but few traits of true greatness; others with

greatness, but no elements of popularity. These last are the reformers,

the innovators, the starters, and their greatness is a discovery of

after-times. Popular suffrage cannot elevate these men, and if, as

between the two other types, it more frequently seizes upon the last, it

is because the former is the more rare.

But there is a good deal of delusion about the proneness of the

multitude to run after quacks and charlatans: a multitude runs, but a

larger multitude does not run; and those that do run soon see their

mistake. Real worth, real merit, alone wins the permanent suffrage of

mankind. In every neighborhood and community the best men are held in

highest regard by the most persons. The world over, the names most

fondly cherished are those most worthy of being cherished. Yet this does

not prevent that certain types of great men--men who are in advance of

their times and announce new doctrines and faiths--will be rejected and

denied by their contemporaries. This is the order of nature. Minorities

lead and save the world, and the world knows them not till long

afterward.

No man perhaps suspects how large and important the region of

unconsciousness in him, what a vast, unknown territory lies there back

of his conscious will and purpose, and which is really the controlling

power of his life. Out of it things arise, and shape and define

themselves to his consciousness and rule his career. Here the influence

of environment works; here the elements of race, of family; here the

Time-Spirit moulds him and he knows it not; here Nature, or Fate, as we

sometimes name it, rules him and makes him what he is.

In every people or nation stretches this deep, unsuspected background.

Here the great movements begin; here the deep processes go on; here the

destiny of the race or nation really lies. In this soil the new ideas

are sown; the new man, the despised leader, plants his seed here, and if

they be vital they thrive, and in due time emerge and become the

conscious possession of the community.

None knew better than Carlyle himself that, whoever be the ostensible

potentates and lawmakers, the wise do virtually rule, the natural

leaders do lead. Wisdom will out: it is the one thing in this world that

cannot be suppressed or annulled. There is not a parish, township, or

community, little or big, in this country or in England, that is not

finally governed, shaped, directed, built up by what of wisdom there is

in it. All the leading industries and enterprises gravitate naturally to

the hands best able to control them. The wise furnish employment for

the unwise, capital flows to capital hands as surely as water seeks

water.

"Winds blow and waters roll

Strength to the brave."

There never is and never can be any government but by the wisest. In all

nations and communities the law of nature finally prevails. If there is

no wisdom in the people, there will be none in their rulers; the virtue

and intelligence of the representative will not be essentially different

from that of his constituents. The dependence of the foolish, the

thriftless, the improvident, upon his natural master and director, for

food, employment, for life itself, is just as real to-day in America as

it was in the old feudal or patriarchal times. The relation between the

two is not so obvious, so intimate, so voluntary, but it is just as

vital and essential. How shall we know the wise man unless he makes

himself felt, or seen, or heard? How shall we know the master unless he

masters us? Is there any danger that the real captains will not step to

the front, and that we shall not know them when they do? Shall we not

know a Luther, a Cromwell, a Franklin, a Washington?

"Man," says Carlyle, "little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to

obey superiors; he is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay,

he could not be gregarious otherwise; he obeys those whom he esteems

better than himself, wiser, braver, and will forever obey such; and ever

be ready and delighted to do it." Think in how many ways, through how

many avenues, in our times, the wise man can reach us and place himself

at our head, or mould us to his liking, as orator, statesman, poet,

philosopher, preacher, editor. If he has any wise mind to speak, any

scheme to unfold, there is the rostrum or pulpit and crowds ready to

hear him, or there is the steam power press ready to disseminate his

wisdom to the four corners of the earth. He can set up a congress or a

parliament and really make and unmake the laws, by his own fireside, in

any country that has a free press. "If we will consider it, the

essential truth of the matter is, every British man can now elect

_himself_ to Parliament without consulting the hustings at all. If there

be any vote, idea, or notion in him, or any earthly or heavenly thing,

cannot he take a pen and therewith autocratically pour forth the same

into the ears and hearts of all people, so far as it will go?" ("Past

and Present.") Or, there is the pulpit everywhere waiting to be worthily

filled. What may not the real hero accomplish here? "Indeed, is not this

that we call spiritual guidance properly the soul of the whole, the life

and eyesight of the whole?" Some one has even said, "Let me make the

songs of a nation and I care not who makes the laws." Certainly the

great poet of a people is its real Founder and King. He rules for

centuries and rules in the heart.

In more primitive times, and amid more rudely organized communities, the

hero, the strong man, could step to the front and seize the leadership

like the buffalo of the plains or the wild horse of the pampas; but in

our time, at least among English-speaking races, he must be more or less

called by the suffrage of the people. It is quite certain that, had

there been a seventeenth or eighteenth century Carlyle he would not have

seen the hero in Cromwell, or in Frederick, that the nineteenth century

Carlyle saw in each. In any case, in any event, the dead rule us more

than the living; we cannot escape the past. It is not merely by virtue

of the sunlight that falls now, and the rain and dew that it brings,

that we continue here; but by virtue of the sunlight of æons of past

ages.

"This land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from

epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and

eternal proprietors are these following and their representatives, if

you can find them: all the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each

in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle

out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true

and valiant thing in England." "Work? The quantity of done and forgotten

work that lies silent under my feet in this world, and escorts and

attends me and supports and keeps me alive, wheresoever I walk or stand,

whatsoever I think or do, gives rise to reflections!" In our own

politics, has our first President ever ceased to be President? Does he

not still sit there, the stern and blameless patriot, uttering counsel?

Carlyle had no faith in the inherent tendency of things to right

themselves, to adjust themselves to their own proper standards; the

conservative force of Nature, the checks and balances by which her own

order and succession is maintained; the Darwinian principle, according

to which the organic life of the globe has been evolved, the higher and

more complex forms mounting from the lower, the true _palingenesia_, the

principle or power, name it Fate, name it Necessity, name it God, or

what you will, which finally lifts a people, a race, an age, and even a

community above the reach of choice, of accident, of individual will,

into the region of general law. So little is life what we make it, after

all; so little is the course of history, the destiny of nations, the

result of any man's purpose, or direction, or will, so great is Fate, so

insignificant is man! The human body is made up of a vast congeries or

association of minute cells, each with its own proper work and function,

at which it toils incessantly night and day, and thinks of nothing

beyond. The shape, the size, the color of the body, its degree of health

and strength, etc.,--no cell or series of cells decides these points; a

law above and beyond the cell determines them. The final destiny and

summing up of a nation is, perhaps, as little within the conscious will

and purpose of the individual citizens. When you come to large masses,

to long periods, the law of nature steps in. The day is hot or the day

is cold, the spring is late or the spring is early; but the inclination

of the earth's axis makes the winter and summer sure. The wind blows

this way and blows that, but the great storms gyrate and travel in one

general direction. There is a wind of the globe that never varies, and

there is the breeze of the mountain that is never two days alike. The

local hurricane moves the waters of the sea to a depth of but a few

feet, but the tidal impulse goes to the bottom. Men and communities in

this world are often in the position of arctic explorers, who are making

great speed in a given direction while the ice-floe beneath them is

making greater speed in the opposite direction. This kind of progress

has often befallen political and ecclesiastical parties in this country.

Behind mood lies temperament; back of the caprice of will lies the fate

of character; back of both is the bias of family; back of that, the

tyranny of race; still deeper, the power of climate, of soil, of

geology, the whole physical and moral environment. Still we are free men

only so far as we rise above these. We cannot abolish fate, but we can

in a measure utilize it. The projectile force of the bullet does not

annul or suspend gravity; it uses it. The floating vapor is just as true

an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche.

Carlyle, I say, had sounded these depths that lie beyond the region of

will and choice, beyond the sphere of man's moral accountability; but in

life, in action, in conduct, no man shall take shelter here. One may

summon his philosophy when he is beaten in battle, and not till then.

You shall not shirk the hobbling Times to catch a ride on the

sure-footed Eternities. "The times are bad; very well, you are there to

make them better." "The public highways ought not to be occupied by

people demonstrating that motion is impossible." ("Chartism.")