IV

Carlyle had an enormous egoism, but to do the work he felt called on to

do, to offset and withstand the huge, roaring, on-rushing modern world

as he did, required an enormous egoism. In more senses than one do the

words applied to the old prophet apply to him: "For, behold, I have made

thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls

against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes

thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the

land." He was a defenced city, an iron pillar, and brazen wall, in the

extent to which he was riveted and clinched in his own purpose and aim,

as well as in his attitude of opposition or hostility to the times in

which he lived.

Froude, whose life of Carlyle in its just completed form, let me say

here, has no equal in interest or literary value among biographies since

his master's life of Sterling, presents his hero to us a prophet in the

literal and utilitarian sense, as a foreteller of the course of events,

and says that an adequate estimate of his work is not yet possible. We

must wait and see if he was right about democracy, about America,

universal suffrage, progress of the species, etc. "Whether his message

was a true message remains to be seen." "If he was wrong he has misused

his powers. The principles of his teaching are false. He has offered

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."

But the man was true; there can be no doubt about that, and when such is

the case the message may safely be left to take care of itself. We have

got the full force and benefit of it in our own day and generation,

whether our "cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred

corollaries," prove illusions or not. All high spiritual and prophetic

utterances are instantly their own proof and justification, or they are

naught. Does Mr. Froude really mean that the prophecies of Jeremiah and

Isaiah have become a part of the permanent "spiritual inheritance of

mankind" because they were literally fulfilled in specific instances,

and not because they were true from the first and always, as the

impassioned yearnings and uprisings and reachings-forth of high

God-burdened souls at all times are true? Regarded merely as a

disturbing and overturning force, Carlyle was of great value. There

never was a time, especially in an era like ours, when the opinion and

moral conviction of the race did not need subsoiling, loosening up from

the bottom,--the shock of rude, scornful, merciless power. There are ten

thousand agencies and instrumentalities titillating the surface,

smoothing, pulverizing, and vulgarizing the top. Chief of these is the

gigantic, ubiquitous newspaper press, without character and without

conscience; then the lyceum, the pulpit, the novel, the club,--all

_cultivating_ the superficies, and helping make life shallow and

monotonous. How deep does the leading editorial go, or the review

article, or the Sunday sermon? But such a force as Carlyle disturbs our

complacency. Opinion is shocked, but it is deepened. The moral and

intellectual resources of all men have been added to. But the literal

fulfillment and verification of his prophecies,--shall we insist upon

that? Is not a prophet his own proof, the same as a poet? Must we summon

witnesses and go into the justice-court of fact? The only questions to

be asked are: Was he an inspired man? was his an authoritative voice?

did he touch bottom? was he sincere? was he grounded and rooted in

character? It is not the stamp on the coin that gives it its value,

though on the bank-note it is. Carlyle's words were not promises, but

performances; they are good now if ever. To test him by his political

opinions is like testing Shakespeare by his fidelity to historical fact

in his plays, or judging Lucretius by his philosophy, or Milton or Dante

by their theology. Carlyle was just as distinctively an imaginative

writer as were any of these men, and his case is to be tried on the same

grounds. It is his utterances as a seer touching conduct, touching duty,

touching nature, touching the soul, touching life, that most concern

us,--the ideal to be cherished, the standard he held to.

Carlyle was a poet touched with religious wrath and fervor, and he

confronted his times and country as squarely and in the same spirit as

did the old prophets. He predicts nothing, foretells nothing, except

death and destruction to those who depart from the ways of the Lord, or,

in modern phrase, from nature and truth. He shared the Hebraic sense of

the awful mystery and fearfulness of life and the splendor and

inexorableness of the moral law. His habitual mood was not one of

contemplation and enjoyment, but of struggle and "desperate hope." The

deep biblical word fear,--fear of the Lord,--he knew what that meant, as

few moderns did.

He was antagonistic to his country and his times, and who would have had

him otherwise? Let him be the hammer on the other side that clinches the

nail. He did not believe in democracy, in popular sovereignty, in the

progress of the species, in the political equality of Jesus and Judas;

in fact, he repudiated with mingled wrath and sorrow the whole American

idea and theory of politics: yet who shall say that his central doctrine

of the survival of the fittest, the nobility of labor, the exaltation of

justice, valor, pity, the leadership of character, truth, nobility,

wisdom, etc., is really and finally inconsistent with, or inimical to,

that which is valuable and permanent and formative in the modern

movement? I think it is the best medicine and regimen for it that could

be suggested,--the best stay and counterweight. For the making of good

democrats, there are no books like Carlyle's, and we in America need

especially to cherish him, and to lay his lesson to heart.

It is his supreme merit that he spoke with absolute sincerity; not

according to the beliefs, traditions, conventionalities of his times,

for they were mostly against him, but according to his private and

solemn conviction of what the will of his Maker with reference to

himself was. The reason why so much writing and preaching sounds hollow

and insincere compared with his is that the writers and speakers are

mostly under the influence of current beliefs or received traditions;

they deliver themselves of what they have been taught, or what is

fashionable and pleasant; they draw upon a sort of public fund of

conviction and sentiment and not at all from original private resources,

as he did. It is not their own minds or their own experience they speak

from, but a vague, featureless, general mind and general experience. We

drink from a cistern or reservoir and not from a fountain-head. Carlyle

always takes us to the source of intense personal and original

conviction. The spring may be a hot spring, or a sulphur spring, or a

spouting spring,--a geyser, as Froude says, shooting up volumes of steam

and stone,--or the most refreshing and delicious of fountains (and he

seems to have been all these things alternately); but in any case it was

an original source and came from out the depths, at times from out the

Plutonic depths.

He bewails his gloom and loneliness, and the isolation of his soul in

the paths in which he was called to walk. In many ways he was an exile,

a wanderer, forlorn or uncertain, like one who had missed the road,--at

times groping about sorrowfully, anon desperately hewing his way through

all manner of obstructions. He presents the singular anomaly of a great

man, of a towering and unique genius, such as appears at intervals of

centuries, who was not in any sense representative, who had no

precursors and who left no followers,--a man isolated, exceptional,

towering like a solitary peak or cone set over against the main ranges.

He is in line with none of the great men, or small men, of his age and

country. His message is unwelcome to them. He is an enormous reaction or

rebound from the all-leveling tendencies of democracy. No wonder he

thought himself the most solitary man in the world, and bewailed his

loneliness continually. He was the most solitary. Of all the great men

his race and country have produced, none, perhaps, were quite so

isolated and set apart as he. None shared so little the life and

aspirations of their countrymen, or were so little sustained by the

spirit of their age. The literature, the religion, the science, the

politics of his times were alike hateful to him. His spirit was as

lonely as a "peak in Darien." He felt himself on a narrow isthmus of

time, confronted by two eternities,--the eternity past and the eternity

to come. Daily and hourly he felt the abysmal solitude that surrounded

him. Endowed with the richest fund of sympathy, and yet sympathizing

with so little; burdened with solicitude for the public weal, and yet in

no vital or intimate relation with the public he would serve; deeply

absorbed in the social and political problems of his time, and yet able

to arrive at no adequate practical solution of them; passionately

religious, and yet repudiating all creeds and forms of worship;

despising the old faiths, and disgusted with the new; honoring science,

and acknowledging his debt to it, yet drawing back with horror from

conclusions to which science seemed inevitably to lead; essentially a

man of action, of deeds, of heroic fibre, yet forced to become a "writer

of books;" a democrat who denounced democracy; a radical who despised

radicalism; "a Puritan without a creed."

These things measure the depth of his sincerity; he never lost heart or

hope, though heart and hope had so little that was tangible to go upon.

He had the piety and zeal of a religious devotee, without the devotee's

comforting belief; the fiery earnestness of a reformer, without the

reformer's definite aims; the spirit of science, without the scientific

coolness and disinterestedness; the heart of a hero, without the hero's

insensibilities; he had strugglings, wrestlings, agonizings, without any

sense of victory; his foes were invisible and largely imaginary, but all

the more terrible and unconquerable on that account. Verily was he

lonely, heavy laden, and at best full of "desperate hope." His own work,

which was accomplished with such pains and labor throes, gave him no

satisfaction. When he was idle, his demon tormented him with the cry,

"Work, work;" and when he was toiling at his tasks, his obstructions,

torpidities, and dispiritments nearly crushed him.

It is probably true that he thought he had some special mission to

mankind, something as definite and tangible as Luther had. His stress

and heat of conviction were such as only the great world-reformers have

been possessed of. He was burdened with the sins and follies of mankind,

and _must_ mend them. His mission was to mend them, but perhaps in quite

other ways than he thought. He sought to restore an age fast

passing,--the age of authority, the age of the heroic leader; but toward

the restoration of such age he had no effect whatever. The tide of

democracy sweeps on. He was like Xerxes whipping the sea. His real

mission he was far less conscious of, for it was what his search for the

hero implied and brought forward that he finally bequeathed us. If he

did not make us long for the strong man to rule over us, he made us love

all manly and heroic qualities afresh, and as if by a new revelation of

their value. He made all shallownesses and shams wear such a face as

they never before wore. He made it easier for all men to be more

truthful and earnest. Hence his final effect and value was as a fountain

of fresh moral conviction and power. The old stock truths perpetually

need restating and reapplying on fresh grounds and in large and

unexpected ways. And how he restated them and reinforced them! veracity,

sincerity, courage, justice, manliness, religiousness,--fairly burning

them into the conscience of his times. He took the great facts of

existence out of the mouths of priests, out of their conventional

theological swathing, where they were fast becoming mummified, and

presented them _quick_ or as living and breathing realities.

It may be added that Carlyle was one of those men whom the world can

neither make nor break,--a meteoric rock from out the fiery heavens,

bound to hit hard if not self-consumed, and not looking at all for a

convenient or a soft place to alight,--a blazing star in his literary

expression, but in his character and purpose the most tangible and

unconquerable of men. "Thou, O World, how wilt thou secure thyself

against this man? Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas, nor by thy

gibbets and law penalties restrain him. He eludes thee like a Spirit.

Thou canst not forward him, thou canst not hinder him. Thy penalties,

thy poverties, neglects, contumelies: behold, all these are good for

him."