applied to the works of Carlyle. Now, we may have much or little faith
in Carlyle as a philosopher or as a historian. Half-lights and
half-truths may be the utmost which, in these departments, his works
will be found to yield. But the total want of sympathy is the more
noteworthy, because the resemblances, though partial, are both numerous
and substantial between these two remarkable men and powerful writers,
as well in their strength as in their weakness. Both are honest; and
both, notwithstanding honesty, are partisans. Each is vastly, though
diversely, powerful in expression; and each is more powerful in
expression than in thought. Both are, though variously, poets using the
vehicle of prose. Both have the power of portraitures, extraordinary for
vividness and strength. For comprehensive disquisition, for balanced and
impartial judgments, the world will probably resort to neither; and if
Carlyle gains on the comparison in his strong sense of the inward and
the ideal, he loses in the absolute and violent character of his
one-sidedness. Without doubt, Carlyle's licentious though striking
peculiarities of style have been of a nature allowably to repel, so far
as they go, one who was so rigid as Macaulay in his literary orthodoxy,
and who so highly appreciated, and with such expenditure of labor, all
that relates to the exterior or body of a book. Still, if there be
resemblances so strong, the want of appreciation, which has possibly
been reciprocal, seems to be partly of that nature which Aristotle would
have explained by his favorite proverb, [Greek: keramens keramei].[D]
The discrepancy is like the discrepancy of colors that are too near.
Carlyle is at least a great fact in the literature of his time, and has
contributed largely,--in some respects too largely,--toward forming its
characteristic habits of thought. But on these very grounds he should
not have been excluded from the horizon of a mind like Macaulay's, with
all its large and varied and most active interests....
[D] Potter [detests] potter.
There have been other men of our own generation, though very few, who if
they have not equaled have approached Macaulay in power of memory, and
who have certainly exceeded him in the unfailing accuracy of their
recollections; and yet not in accuracy as to dates or names or
quotations, or other matters of hard fact, when the question was one
simply between ay and no. In these he may have been without a rival. In
a list of kings, or popes, or senior wranglers, or prime ministers, or
battles, or palaces, or as to the houses in Pall Mall or about Leicester
Square, he might be followed with implicit confidence. But a large and
important class of human recollections are not of this order:
recollections for example of characters, of feelings, of opinions; of
the intrinsic nature, details, and bearings of occurrences. And here it
was that Macaulay's wealth "was unto him an occasion of falling." And
that in two ways. First, the possessor of such a vehicle as his memory
could not but have something of an overweening confidence in what it
told him; and quite apart from any tendency to be vain or overbearing,
he could hardly enjoy the benefits of that caution which arises from
self-interest, and the sad experience of frequent falls. But what is
more, the possessor of so powerful a fancy could not but illuminate with
the colors it supplied, the matters which he gathered into his great
magazine, wherever the definiteness of their outline was not so rigid as
to defy or disarm the action of the intruding and falsifying faculty.
Imagination could not alter the date of the battle of Marathon, of the
Council of Nice, or the crowning of Pepin; but it might seriously or
even fundamentally disturb the balance of light and dark in his account
of the opinions of Milton or of Laud, or his estimate of the effects of
the Protectorate or the Restoration, or of the character and even the
adulteries of William III. He could detect justly this want of dry light
in others; he probably suspected it in himself; but it was hardly
possible for him to be enough upon his guard against the distracting
action of a faculty at once so vigorous, so crafty, and so pleasurable
in its intense activity.
Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of partisanship
against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been and probably
much more will be said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously
tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is
among the very rarest as well as the most precious of human virtues. But
there never was a writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This
during his lifetime was the belief of his friends, but was hardly
admitted by opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out
of the range of controversy. He wrote for truth, but of course for truth
such as he saw it; and his sight was colored from within. This color,
once attached, was what in manufacture is called a mordant; it was a
fast color: he could not distinguish between what his mind had received
and what his mind had imparted. Hence, when he was wrong, he could not
see that he was wrong; and of those calamities which are due to the
intellect only, and not the heart, there can hardly be a greater....
However true it may be that Macaulay was a far more consummate workman
in the manner than in the matter of his works, we do not doubt that the
works contain, in multitudes, passages of high emotion and ennobling
sentiment, just awards of praise and blame, and solid expositions of
principle, social, moral, and constitutional. They are pervaded by a
generous love of liberty; and their atmosphere is pure and bracing,
their general aim and basis morally sound. Of the qualifications of this
eulogy we have spoken, and have yet to speak. But we can speak of the
style of the works with little qualification. We do not indeed venture
to assert that his style ought to be imitated. Yet this is not because
it was vicious, but because it was individual and incommunicable. It was
one of those gifts of which, when it had been conferred, Nature broke
the mold. That it is the head of all literary styles we do not allege;
but it is different from them all, and perhaps more different from them
all than they are usually different from one another. We speak only of
natural styles, of styles where the manner waits upon the matter, and
not where an artificial structure has been reared either to hide or to
make up for poverty of substance.
It is paramount in the union of ease in movement with perspicuity of
matter, of both with real splendor, and of all with immense rapidity and
striking force. From any other pen, such masses of ornament would be
tawdry; with him they are only rich. As a model of art concealing art,
the finest cabinet pictures of Holland are almost his only rivals. Like
Pascal, he makes the heaviest subject light; like Burke, he embellishes
the barrenest. When he walks over arid plains, the springs of milk and
honey, as in a march of Bacchus, seem to rise beneath his tread. The
repast he serves is always sumptuous, but it seems to create an appetite
proportioned to its abundance; for who has ever heard of the reader that
was cloyed with Macaulay? In none, perhaps, of our prose writers are
lessons such as he gives of truth and beauty, of virtue and of freedom,
so vividly associated with delight. Could some magician but do for the
career of life what he has done for the arm-chair and the study, what a
change would pass on the face (at least) of the world we live in, what
an accession of recruits would there be to the professing followers of
virtue!...
The truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like many more of
us, to go out hobby-riding, but from the portentous vigor of the animal
he mounted was liable more than most of us to be run away with. His
merit is that he could keep his seat in the wildest steeple-chase; but
as the object in view is arbitrarily chosen, so it is reached by cutting
up the fields, spoiling the crops, and spoiling or breaking down the
fences needful to secure for labor its profit, and to man at large the
full enjoyment of the fruits of the earth. Such is the overpowering glow
of color, such the fascination of the grouping in the first sketches
which he draws, that when he has grown hot upon his work he seems to
lose all sense of the restraints of fact and the laws of moderation; he
vents the strangest paradoxes, sets up the most violent caricatures, and
handles the false weight and measure as effectively as if he did it
knowingly. A man so able and so upright is never indeed wholly wrong. He
never for a moment consciously pursues anything but truth. But truth
depends, above all, on proportion and relation. The preterhuman
vividness with which Macaulay sees his object, absolutely casts a shadow
upon what lies around; he loses his perspective; and imagination,
impelled headlong by the strong consciousness of honesty in purpose,
achieves the work of fraud. All things for him stand in violent contrast
to one another. For the shadows, the gradations, the middle and
transition touches, which make up the bulk of human life, character,
and action, he has neither eye nor taste. They are not taken account of
in his practice, and they at length die away from the ranges of his
vision.
In Macaulay all history is scenic; and philosophy he scarcely seems to
touch, except on the outer side, where it opens into action. Not only
does he habitually present facts in forms of beauty, but the fashioning
of the form predominates over, and is injurious to, the absolute and
balanced presentation of the subject. Macaulay was a master in
execution, rather than in what painting or music terms expression. He
did not fetch from the depths, nor soar to the heights; but his power
upon the surface was rare and marvelous, and it is upon the surface that
an ordinary life is passed and that its imagery is found. He mingled,
then, like Homer, the functions of the poet and the chronicler: but what
Homer did was due to his time; what Macaulay did, to his temperament.
The 'History' of Macaulay, whatever else it may be, is the work not of a
journeyman but of a great artist, and a great artist who lavishly
bestowed upon it all his powers. Such a work, once committed to the
press, can hardly die. It is not because it has been translated into a
crowd of languages, nor because it has been sold in hundreds of
thousands, that we believe it will live; but because, however open it
may be to criticism, it has in it the character of a true and very high
work of art....
Whether he will subsist as a standard and supreme authority is another
question. Wherever and whenever read, he will be read with fascination,
with delight, with wonder. And with copious instruction too; but also
with copious reserve, with questioning scrutiny, with liberty to reject
and with much exercise of that liberty. The contemporary mind may in
rare cases be taken by storm; but posterity, never. The tribunal of the
present is accessible to influence; that of the future is incorrupt. The
coming generations will not give Macaulay up; but they will probably
attach much less value than we have done to his _ipse dixit_. They will
hardly accept from him his net solutions of literary, and still less of
historic problems. Yet they will obtain, from his marked and telling
points of view, great aid in solving them. We sometimes fancy that ere
long there will be editions of his works in which his readers may be
saved from pitfalls by brief, respectful, and judicious commentary; and
that his great achievements may be at once commemorated and corrected by
men of slower pace, of drier light, and of more tranquil, broad-set,
and comprehensive judgment. For his works are in many respects among the
prodigies of literature; in some, they have never been surpassed. As
lights that have shone through the whole universe of letters, they have
made their title to a place in the solid firmament of fame. But the tree
is greater and better than its fruit; and greater and better yet than
the works themselves are the lofty aims and conceptions, the large
heart, the independent, manful mind, the pure and noble career, which in
this Biography have disclosed to us the true figure of the man who wrote
them.
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
(1831-)
[Illustration: EDWIN L. GODKIN]
Among the men in the United States who through the agency of the press
have molded intelligent public opinion, Edwin Lawrence Godkin deserves
an honorable place. In the columns of the New York Nation and the New
York Evening Post, he has for a generation given editorial utterance to
his views upon economic, civic, political, and international questions,
this work being supplemented by occasional incisive and scholarly
articles in the best periodicals. His clientele has been drawn mainly
from that powerful minority which is made up of the educated, thoughtful
men and women of the country. To this high function Mr. Godkin has
contributed exceptional gifts and qualifications; and that in its
exercise he has been a force for good, is beyond dispute.
Born in Moyne, Ireland, in 1831, he was educated at Queen's College,
Belfast. Then came the more practical education derived from a
familiarity with men and things, for in early manhood he began newspaper
work as war correspondent, in Turkey and the Crimea, of the London Daily
News. As correspondent of this paper he came to the United States and
settled here, being admitted to the New York bar in 1858. But journalism
was to be his life work; and in 1865 he became the editor of The Nation,
a weekly,--succeeding the Round Table, but at once taking a much more
important place as a journal of political and literary discussion,--and
the next year its proprietor. In 1881 he also became one of the owners
and the controlling editor of the New York Evening Post, a daily, and
his contributions since then have appeared in both papers, which bear to
each other the relation of a daily and weekly edition. Thus he has been
in active journalistic service for more than thirty years.
From this slight biographical outline it may be seen that Mr. Godkin
brought to the pursuit of his profession and to the study of American
institutions some valuable qualifications. A college-bred man of wide
experience, an adoptive American able to judge by the comparative
method, a careful student of the philosophy of government, from
Aristotle to Sir Henry Maine, his views combine in an unusual degree the
practical and the theoretical. No doubt he has in his writings what to
some will seem the defect of his quality. There is in him a certain
haughtiness of temper, and what seems like impatient contempt for the
opponent in argument, which, conjoined with a notable power of invective
and satire in dealing with what he deems to be fallacious, are likely to
arouse opposition. Hence the feeling in some quarters that Mr. Godkin is
not at heart an American, but a captious critic, with sympathies ill
suited to a democratic government.
This opinion is not justified by a fair examination of his writings. He
has on the contrary and in the true sense proved himself a true
American. He has spoken wise words upon many of the social and political
problems of our day. He has defended democracy from the charge of
failure, pointing out that here in the United States social defects,
wrongly ascribed by foreign critics to the form of government, have been
incidental to the settling of a vast new country. He has stated with
clearness and cogency the inadvisability of allowing the government
paternal power in finance and tariff legislation. He has preached the
difference between cheap jingoism or political partisanship, and the
enlightened Americanism which puts its finger upon weak points,
criticizing in order to correct and purify. Mr. Godkin, in this, has
been a consistent worker in a cause of which Lowell was a noble prophet.
And in regard of literary excellence, his editorial writing is often a
model of lucid, sinewy English style; while his more deliberated essays
have been admirable for calm dignity, polish, and organic exposition,
with an air of good breeding over it all. The influence of such a man,
both as writer and thinker, especially in a land like the United States,
has been most salutary.
THE DUTY OF CRITICISM IN A DEMOCRACY
From 'Problems of Modern Democracy.' Copyright 1896, by Charles
Scribner's Sons, New York
No intelligent man can or ought to ignore the part which hope of better
things plays in our present social system. It has largely, among the
working classes, taken the place of religious belief. They have brought
their heaven down to earth, and are literally looking forward to a sort
of New Jerusalem, in which all comforts and many of the luxuries of life
will be within easy reach of all. The great success of Utopian works
like Bellamy's shows the hold which these ideas have taken of the
popular mind. The world has to have a religion of some kind, and the
hope of better food and clothing, more leisure, and a greater variety of
amusements, has become the religion of the working classes. Hope makes
them peaceful, industrious, and resigned under present suffering. A
Frenchman saw a ragged pauper spend his last few cents on a lottery
ticket, and asked him how he could commit such a folly. "In order to
have something to hope for," he said. And from this point of view the
outlay was undoubtedly excusable. It is literally hope which makes the
world go round, and one of the hardest things an educated man who opens
his mouth about public affairs has to do, is to say one word or anything
to dampen or destroy it. Yet his highest duty is to speak the truth.
Luckily, there is one truth which can always be spoken without offense,
and that is that on the whole the race advances through the increase of
intelligence and the improvement of character, and has not advanced in
any other way. The great amelioration in the condition of the working
classes in Europe within this century, including the increasing power of
the trades-unions, is the result not of any increase of benevolence in
the upper classes, but of the growth of knowledge and self-reliance and
foresight among the working classes themselves. The changes in
legislation which have improved their condition are changes which they
have demanded. When a workingman becomes a capitalist, and raises
himself in any way above his early condition, it is rarely the result of
miracle or accident. It is due to his superior intelligence and thrift.
Nothing, on the whole, can be more delusive than official and other
inquiries into the labor problem through commissions and legislative
committees. They all assume that there is some secret in the relations
of labor and capital which can be found out by taking testimony. But
they never find anything out. Their reports during the last fifty years
would make a small library, but they never tell us anything new. They
are meant to pacify and amuse the laborer, and they do so; but to their
constant failure to do anything more we owe some of the Socialist
movement. The Socialists believe this failure due to want of will, and
that Karl Marx has discovered the great truth of the situation, which
is, that labor is entitled to the whole product. The great law which
Nature seems to have prescribed for the government of the world, and the
only law of human society which we are able to extract from history, is
that the more intelligent and thoughtful of the race shall inherit the
earth and have the best time, and that all others shall find life on the
whole dull and unprofitable. Socialism is an attempt to contravene this
law and insure a good time to everybody, independently of character and
talents; but Nature will see that she is not frustrated or brought to
naught, and I do not think educated men should ever cease to call
attention to this fact; that is, ever cease to preach hopefulness, not
to everybody, but to good people. This is no bar to benevolence to bad
people or any people; but our first duty is loyalty to the great
qualities of our kind, to the great human virtues which raise the
civilized man above the savage.
There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable as that of
the United States. The chief advantage of democratic government is, in a
country like this, the enormous force it can command on an emergency. By
"emergency" I mean the suppression of an insurrection or the conduct of
a foreign war. But it is not equally strong in the ordinary work of
administration. A good many governments, by far inferior to it in
strength, fill the offices, collect the taxes, administer justice, and
do the work of legislation with much greater efficiency. One cause of
this inefficiency is that the popular standard in such matters is low,
and that it resents dissatisfaction as an assumption of superiority.
When a man says these and those things ought not to be, his neighbors,
who find no fault with them, naturally accuse him of giving himself
airs. It seems as if he thought he knew more than they did, and was
trying to impose his plans on them. The consequence is that in a land of
pure equality, as this is, critics are always an unpopular class, and
criticism is in some sense an odious work. The only condemnation passed
on the governmental acts or systems is apt to come from the opposite
party in the form of what is called "arraignment," which generally
consists in wholesale abuse of the party in power, treating all their
acts, small or great, as due to folly or depravity, and all their public
men as either fools or knaves. Of course this makes but small impression
on the public mind. It is taken to indicate not so much a desire to
improve the public service as to get hold of the offices, and has as a
general rule but little effect. Parties lose their hold on power through
some conspicuously obnoxious acts or failures; never, or very rarely,
through the judgments passed on them by hostile writers or orators. And
yet nothing is more necessary to successful government than abundant
criticism from sources not open to the suspicion of particular interest.
There is nothing which bad governments so much dislike and resent as
criticism, and have in past ages taken so much pains to put down. In
fact, a history of the civil liberty would consist largely of an account
of the resistance to criticism on the part of rulers. One of the first
acts of a successful tyranny or despotism is always the silencing of the
press or the establishment of a censorship.
Popular objection to criticism is however senseless, because it is
through criticism--that is, through discrimination between two things,
customs, or courses--that the race has managed to come out of the woods
and lead a civilized life. The first man who objected to the general
nakedness, and advised his fellows to put on clothes, was the first
critic. Criticism of a high tariff recommends a low tariff; criticism of
monarchy recommends a republic; criticism of vice recommends virtue. In
fact, almost every act of life, in the practice of a profession or the
conduct of a business, condemns one course and suggests another. The
word means _judging_, and judgment is the highest of the human
faculties, the one which most distinguishes us from the animals.
There is probably nothing from which the public service of the country
suffers more to-day than the silence of its educated class; that is, the
small amount of criticism which comes from the disinterested and
competent sources. It is a very rare thing for an educated man to say
anything publicly about the questions of the day. He is absorbed in
science, or art, or literature, in the practice of his profession, or in
the conduct of his business; and if he has any interest at all in public
affairs, it is a languid one. He is silent because he does not much
care, or because he does not wish to embarrass the administration or
"hurt the party," or because he does not feel that anything he could say
would make much difference. So that on the whole, it is very rarely that
the instructed opinion of the country is ever heard on any subject. The
report of the Bar Association on the nomination of Maynard in New York
was a remarkable exception to this rule. Some improvement in this
direction has been made by the appearance of the set of people known as
the "Mugwumps," who are, in the main, men of cultivation. They have been
defined in various ways. They are known to the masses mainly as
"kickers"; that is, dissatisfied, querulous people, who complain of
everybody and cannot submit to party discipline. But they are the only
critics who do not criticize in the interest of party, but simply in
that of good government. They are a kind of personage whom the bulk of
the voters know nothing about and find it difficult to understand, and
consequently load with ridicule and abuse. But their movement, though
its visible recognizable effects on elections may be small, has done
inestimable service in slackening the bonds of party discipline, in
making the expression of open dissent from party programmes respectable
and common, and in increasing the unreliable vote in large States like
New York. It is of the last importance that this unreliable vote--that
is, the vote which party leaders cannot count on with certainty--should
be large in such States. The mere fear of it prevents a great many
excesses.