Caroline Fox, in her "Memoirs of Old Friends," reports a smart saying
about Carlyle, current in her time, which has been current in some form
or other ever since; namely, that he had a large capital of faith
uninvested,--carried it about him as ready money, I suppose, working
capital. It is certainly true that it was not locked up in any of the
various social and religious safe-deposits. He employed a vast deal of
it in his daily work. It took not a little to set Cromwell up, and
Frederick. Indeed, it is doubtful if among his contemporaries there was
a man with so active a faith,--so little invested in paper securities.
His religion, as a present living reality, went with him into every
question. He did not believe that the Maker of this universe had retired
from business, or that he was merely a sleeping partner in the concern.
"Original sin," he says, "and such like are bad enough, I doubt not; but
distilled sin, dark ignorance, stupidity, dark corn-law, bastile and
company, what are they?" For creeds, theories, philosophies, plans for
reforming the world, etc., he cared nothing, he would not invest one
moment in them; but the hero, the worker, the doer, justice, veracity,
courage, these drew him,--in these he put his faith. What to other
people were mere obstructions were urgent, pressing realities to
Carlyle. Every truth or fact with him has a personal inclination, points
to conduct, points to duty. He could not invest himself in creeds and
formulas, but in that which yielded an instant return in force, justice,
character. He has no philosophical impartiality. He has been broken up;
there have been moral convulsions; the rock stands on end. Hence the
vehement and precipitous character of his speech,--its wonderful
picturesqueness and power. The spirit of gloom and dejection that
possesses him, united to such an indomitable spirit of work and
helpfulness, is very noteworthy. Such courage, such faith, such unshaken
adamantine belief in the essential soundness and healthfulness that lay
beneath all this weltering and chaotic world of folly and evil about
him, in conjunction with such pessimism and despondency, was never
before seen in a man of letters. I am reminded that in this respect he
was more like a root of the tree of Igdrasil than like a branch; one of
the central and master roots, with all that implies, toiling and
grappling in the gloom, but full of the spirit of light. How he delves
and searches; how much he made live and bloom again; how he sifted the
soil for the last drop of heroic blood! The Fates are there, too, with
water from the sacred well. He is quick, sensitive, full of tenderness
and pity; yet he is savage and brutal when you oppose him, or seek to
wrench him from his holdings. His stormy outbursts always leave the
moral atmosphere clear and bracing; he does not communicate the gloom
and despondency he feels, because he brings us so directly and
unfailingly in contact with the perennial sources of hope and faith,
with the life-giving and the life-renewing. Though the heavens fall, the
orbs of truth and justice fall not. Carlyle was like an unhoused soul,
naked and bare to every wind that blows. He felt the awful cosmic chill.
He could not take shelter in the creed of his fathers, nor in any of the
opinions and beliefs of his time. He could not and did not try to fend
himself against the keen edge of the terrible doubts, the awful
mysteries, the abysmal questions and duties. He lived and wrought on in
the visible presence of God. This was no myth to him, but a terrible
reality. How the immensities open and yawn about him! He was like a man
who should suddenly see his relations to the universe, both physical and
moral, in gigantic perspective, and never through life lose the awe, the
wonder, the fear, the revelation inspired. The veil, the illusion of the
familiar, the commonplace, is torn away. The natural becomes the
supernatural. Every question, every character, every duty, was seen
against the immensities, like figures in the night against a background
of fire, and seen as if for the first time. The sidereal, the cosmical,
the eternal,--we grow familiar with these or lose sight of them
entirely. But Carlyle never lost sight of them; his sense of them became
morbidly acute, preternaturally developed, and it was as if he saw
every movement of the hand, every fall of a leaf, as an emanation of
solar energy. A "haggard mood of the imagination" (his own phrase) was
habitual with him. He could see only the tragical in life and in
history. Events were imminent, poised like avalanches that a word might
loosen. We see Jeffries perpetually amazed at his earnestness, the
gradations in his mind were so steep; the descent from the thought to
the deed was so swift and inevitable that the witty advocate came to
look upon him as a man to be avoided.
"Daily and hourly," he says (at the age of thirty-eight), "the world
natural grows more of a world magical to me; this is as it should be.
Daily, too, I see that there is no true poetry but in _reality_."
"The gist of my whole way of thought," he says again, "is to raise the
natural to the supernatural." To his brother John he wrote in 1832: "I
get more earnest, graver, not unhappier, every day. The whole creation
seems more and more divine to me, the natural more and more
supernatural." His eighty-five years did not tame him at all, did not
blunt his conception of the "fearfulness and wonderfulness of life."
Sometimes an opiate or an anæsthetic operates inversely upon a
constitution, and, instead of inducing somnolence, makes the person
wildly wakeful and sensitive. The anodyne of life acted this way upon
Carlyle, and, instead of quieting or benumbing him, filled him with
portentous imaginings and fresh cause for wonder. There is a danger that
such a mind, if it takes to literature, will make a mess of it. But
Carlyle is saved by his tremendous gripe upon reality. Do I say the
ideal and the real were one with him? He made the ideal _the_ real, and
the only real. Whatever he touched he made tangible, actual, and vivid.
Ideas are hurled like rocks, a word blisters like a branding-iron, a
metaphor transfixes like a javelin. There is something in his sentences
that lays hold of things, as the acids bite metals. His subtle thoughts,
his marvelous wit, like the viewless gases of the chemist, combine with
a force that startles the reader.
Carlyle differs from the ordinary religious enthusiast in the way he
bares his bosom to the storm. His attitude is rather one of gladiatorial
resignation than supplication. He makes peace with nothing, takes refuge
in nothing. He flouts at happiness, at repose, at joy. "There is in man
a _higher_ than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and
instead thereof find blessedness." "The life of all gods figures itself
to us as a sublime sadness,--earnestness of infinite battle against
infinite labor. Our highest religion is named the 'Worship of Sorrow.'
For the Son of Man there is no noble crown, well worn or even ill worn,
but is a crown of thorns." His own worship is a kind of defiant
admiration of Eternal Justice. He asks no quarter, and will give none.
He turns upon the grim destinies a look as undismayed and as
uncompromising as their own. Despair cannot crush him; he will crush it.
The more it bears on, the harder he will work. The way to get rid of
wretchedness is to despise it; the way to conquer the devil is to defy
him; the way to gain heaven is to turn your back upon it, and be as
unflinching as the gods themselves. Satan may be roasted in his own
flames; Tophet may be exploded with its own sulphur. "Despicable biped!"
(Teufelsdrökh is addressing himself.) "What is the sum total of the
worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of
Tophet, too, and all that the devil and man may, will, or can do against
thee! Hast thou not a heart? Canst thou not suffer what so it be, and as
a child of freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet
while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it."
This is the "Everlasting No" of Teufelsdrökh, the annihilation of self.
Having thus routed Satan with his own weapons, the "Everlasting Yea" is
to people his domain with fairer forms; to find your ideal in the world
about you. "Thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same
ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or of
that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic?" Carlyle's
watchword through life, as I have said, was the German word _Entsagen_,
or renunciation. The perfect flower of religion opens in the soul only
when all self-seeking is abandoned. The divine, the heroic attitude is:
"I ask not Heaven, I fear not Hell; I crave the truth alone,
withersoever it may lead." "Truth! I cried, though the heavens crush me
for following her; no falsehood, though a celestial lubberland were the
price of apostasy." The truth,--what is the truth? Carlyle answers: That
which you believe with all your soul and all your might and all your
strength, and are ready to face Tophet for,--that, for you, is the
truth. Such a seeker was he himself. It matters little whether we agree
that he found it or not. The law of this universe is such that where the
love, the desire, is perfect and supreme, the truth is already found.
That is the truth, not the letter but the spirit; the seeker and the
sought are one. Can you by searching find out God? "Moses cried, 'When,
O Lord, shall I find thee? God said, Know that when thou hast sought
thou hast already found me.'" This is Carlyle's position, so far as it
can be defined. He hated dogma as he hated poison. No direct or dogmatic
statement of religious belief or opinion could he tolerate. He abandoned
the church, for which his father designed him, because of his inexorable
artistic sense; he could not endure the dogma that the church rested
upon, the pedestal of clay upon which the golden image was reared. The
gold he held to, as do all serious souls, but the dogma of clay he
quickly dropped. "Whatever becomes of us," he said, referring to this
subject in a letter to a friend when he was in his twenty-third year,
"never let us cease to behave like honest men."