The numerous articles called forth by Carlyle's "Reminiscences,"
both in this country and in England, while varying greatly in the
proportions in which they mix their praise and blame, leave no doubt
that there has occurred a very strong revulsion of feeling about
him, so strong in England that we are told that the subscriptions
for a proposed memorial to him have almost if not entirely ceased.
The censure which Carlyle's friends are visiting on Mr. Froude for
his indiscretion in printing the book, though deserved, has done but
little to mitigate the severity of the judgment passed on the writer
himself. In fact, we are inclined to believe that Mr. Froude's want
of judgment rather helps to deepen the surprise and disappointment
with which the book has been received, as affording an additional
proof of the feebleness of Carlyle's own powers in estimating the
people about him. That, after heaping contempt on so many of whom
the world has been accustomed to think highly, he should have
retained to the last his confidence in, and respect for, a person
capable of dealing his fame such a deadly blow as Mr. Froude, not
unnaturally increases the irritation with which the public has read
his recollections of his friends and contemporaries. The
"disillusion and disenchantment" worked by the book, in so far as it
affects Carlyle's fame as a prophet, is, of course, a misfortune,
and a very serious one. What it was he preached when his preaching
first startled the world, but very few now undertake to say, and
these few by no means agree in their story. His influence,
apparently, was not of the kind which reaches a man through
articulate speech, but rather that which comes through the blast of
a trumpet or the marching tune of a good band, and fills the heart
with a feeling of capacity for high endeavor, though one cannot say
in what particular field it is to be displayed. But though he
founded no school and taught no system of morals, his eminence as
a mere preacher was one of the very valuable possessions of the
Anglo-Saxon world, as a sort of standing protest against the
materialistic tendencies of the age; and this eminence rested a good
deal on the popular conception of the elevation of his own
character. This conception has undoubtedly, whether justly or
unjustly, been greatly shaken, if not destroyed, by the revelation
that invidious comparison between himself and others was almost a
habit of his life; that, while preaching patient endurance, he did
not himself endure patiently even the minor ills of existence; that,
when looking at the fine equipages at Hyde Park Corner, he had to
support himself by "sternly thinking"--"yes, and perhaps none of you
could do what I am at;" that his mental attitude during the
preparation of most of his books was that of a man not properly
appreciated who was going to cast pearls before swine; or, in other
words, the attitude of an ordinary literary man burdened with too
much vanity for his powers, and more concerned about the effect his
work was likely to have on his personal fortunes than on the mental
or moral condition of the world. While full of contempt for
sciolists and pretenders and newspapers, he wrote, and was ready to
write, on the American war without any knowledge of the facts, and
scorned Darwinism without ever bestowing a thought on it. Carlyle's
public were long ago conscious, as one of his critics has said, that
he canted prodigiously about cant, and talked voluminously in praise
of silence; but then it recognized that much repetition has always
the air of cant, and that to persuade men to be silent, as well as
to do anything else, one must talk a great deal. A prophet has to be
diffuse and loud, and often shrill, and his disciples will always
forgive any number of mistakes in method or manner as long as they
believe that behind the preaching there is perfect simplicity and
self-forgetfulness. That this belief has been weakened in many minds
with regard to Carlyle by the "Reminiscences" there is no question,
and the consequence of it is that the Anglo Saxon world has lost one
of its best possessions; and it is a kind of possession which no
apologies or explanations, and no proof of Mr. Froude's
indiscretion, can restore.
There is, however, some compensation in the catastrophe. If there
was nothing positive in Carlyle's moral teachings, if nobody could
extract from his earlier utterances anything more definite than
advice to "be up and doing with a heart for every fate," there was
in the political teachings of his later works something very
positive and definite, and something which he managed to surround
with some of the diviner light of his first arraignments of modern
civilization. There is, for instance, nothing in literature more
ingenious than the way in which he presents Cromwell as the apostle
of "truth" during the campaigns in Ireland after the death of the
King. He lets slip no opportunity of setting forth the importance of
those military operations as a means of bringing "truth" to the
Irish, so much so that the reader at last begins to expect the
revelation of some formula in which the Lord-General presented the
truth to them. But long before the end is reached one finds that the
only truth which Cromwell was spreading in Ireland was the simple
one that anybody who resisted him in arms would probably be knocked
on the head. This collocation of truth and superiority of physical
force, and of falsehood and weakness, was, in fact, worked into all
Carlyle's writings of a political character, and did, through his
writings, become a very positive political influence after the
generation which was roused by the first blasts of his moral trumpet
had grown old, or had passed away. To most men under fifty, in fact,
Carlyle is more known as a very truculent political philosopher
than as a moralist, and most of his later imitators--Mr. Froude for
one--have imitated him rather in preparing the way of the Strong
Man in government, and recommending the helpless and forlorn to
strip for a salutary dozen on the bare back, than in preaching
self-knowledge or the inner worship of the "veracities."
That the effect of this on English politics has been bad, and very
bad, during the past thirty years few will deny. It beyond question
has had an evil influence on English opinion both about Ireland and
about India, and about the civil war in the United States. It had
much to do with the production of that great scandal, the defence of
Governor Eyre, by nearly the whole of London society. Nay, we think
we are not far wrong in saying that it did much to prepare the way
for that remarkable episode in English history, the late
administration of Lord Beaconsfield, with its jingo fever; its
lavish waste of blood and treasure; its ferocious assertion of the
beauty of national selfishness; its contempt for all that portion of
the population of Turkey which was weak and subject and unhappy.
When one contrasts the spirit in which John Stuart Mill approached
all such subjects in his day, his patient pursuit of the facts, his
almost over-earnest efforts to get at the point of view of those who
differed with him, his steady indifference to his own fame in
dealing with all public questions, and then reads the contemptuous
way in which Carlyle disposes of him in the "Reminiscences," one
gets, we were going to say, an almost painful sense of the contrast
between the influence of the two men on their day and generation.
In so far as the "Reminiscences," therefore, ruin Carlyle as a
politician, their publication must be considered a gain for the
English race. The particular political vice his influence fostered,
that nobody who cannot thrash you in fight is worth listening to,
is, it must be said, a vice peculiar to the English race. It is only
in the Anglo-Saxon forum that a man of foreign birth and unfamiliar
ways of thinking has to obtain a _locus standi_ by making himself an
object of physical terror. The story which has lately gone the
rounds of the papers, of Carlyle's discussion with some Irishman who
got the better of him in an argument in support of the logical right
of the Irish to manage their own affairs, in which he met his
opponent in the last resort in half-humorous vehemence by informing
him that he would cut his throat before he would let him have his
independence, is not a bad expression of the spirit which has
governed English policy in dealing with dependent communities. There
is a certain wisdom and justice in exacting from every malcontent
who asks for great changes in his condition some strong proof of his
earnestness; but it is a test which has to be applied with great
discretion, which nations that have made a great fortune with a
strong right hand are not likely to apply with discretion, and which
is apt to make weakness seem ridiculous as well as contemptible. The
history of English politics for fifty years at least has been the
history of the efforts of the nation to accustom itself to some
other than the English standard of political respectability, to
familiarize itself with the idea that pacific people, and poor
people, and queer people had something to say for themselves, and
were entitled to a place in the world. To the success of that effort
it is safe to say that Mr. Carlyle's political writings have been
more or less of an obstacle, and that the destruction of his
influence will contribute something to the solution of some of the
more serious pending problems of English politics.