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CRITICAL
MISCELLANIES
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I.
ESSAY 2: CARLYLE
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1904
CONTENTS
Mr. Carlyle's influence, and degree of its durability 135
His literary services 139
No label useful in characterising him 142
The poetic and the scientific temperaments 144
Rousseau and Mr. Carlyle 147
The poetic method of handling social questions 149
Impotent unrest, and his way of treating it 152
Founded on the purest individualism 154
Mr. Carlyle's historic position in the European reaction 157
Coleridge 159
Byron 161
Mr. Carlyle's victory over Byronism 163
Goethe 164
Mr. Carlyle's intensely practical turn, though veiled 166
His identification of material with moral order 169
And acceptance of the doctrine that the end justifies the means 170
Two sets of relations still regulated by pathological principle 172
Defect in Mr. Carlyle's discussion of them 174
His reticences 176
Equally hostile to metaphysics and to the extreme pretensions
of the physicist 177
Natural Supernaturalism, and the measure of its truth 179
Two qualities flowing from his peculiar fatalism:--
(1) Contempt for excess of moral nicety 182
(2) Defect of sympathy with masses of men 186
Perils in his constant sense of the nothingness of life 188
Hero-worship, and its inadequateness 189
Theories of the dissolution of the old European order 193
Mr. Carlyle's view of the French Revolution 195
Of the Reformation and Protestantism 197
Inability to understand the political point of view 199
CARLYLE.
The new library edition of Mr. Carlyle's works may be taken for the
final presentation of all that the author has to say to his
contemporaries, and to possess the settled form in which he wishes his
words to go to those of posterity who may prove to have ears for them.
The canon is definitely made up. The golden Gospel of Silence is
effectively compressed in thirty fine volumes. After all has been said
about self-indulgent mannerisms, moral perversities, phraseological
outrages, and the rest, these volumes will remain the noble monument of
the industry, originality, conscientiousness, and genius of a noble
character, and of an intellectual career that has exercised on many
sides the profoundest sort of influence upon English feeling. Men who
have long since moved far away from these spiritual latitudes, like
those who still find an adequate shelter in them, can hardly help
feeling as they turn the pages of the now disused pieces which they were
once wont to ponder daily, that whatever later teachers may have done in
definitely shaping opinion, in giving specific form to sentiment, and in
subjecting impulse to rational discipline, here was the friendly
fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark, here the prophet
who first smote the rock.
That with this sense of obligation to the master, there mixes a less
satisfactory reminiscence of youthful excess in imitative phrases, in
unseasonably apostolic readiness towards exhortation and rebuke, in
interest about the soul, a portion of which might more profitably have
been converted into care for the head, is in most cases true. A hostile
observer of bands of Carlylites at Oxford and elsewhere might have been
justified in describing the imperative duty of work as the theme of many
an hour of strenuous idleness, and the superiority of golden silence
over silver speech as the text of endless bursts of jerky rapture, while
a too constant invective against cant had its usual effect of developing
cant with a difference. To the incorrigibly sentimental all this was
sheer poison, which continues tenaciously in the system. Others of
robuster character no sooner came into contact with the world and its
fortifying exigencies, than they at once began to assimilate the
wholesome part of what they had taken in, while the rest falls gradually
and silently out. When criticism has done its just work on the
disagreeable affectations of many of Mr. Carlyle's disciples, and on the
nature of Mr. Carlyle's opinions and their worth as specific
contributions, very few people will be found to deny that his influence
in stimulating moral energy, in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy
of enthusiasm, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand,
and the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has
not been surpassed by any teacher now living.
One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty
years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his
own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in
the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in
progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and
haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully
visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become
equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no
countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with
hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of
institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of
poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it
could be regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has
boldly and often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting
the objects which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applying with
energetic spirit to the task of preparing a sounder state for our
successors. The relations between master and servant, between capitalist
and labourer, between landlord and tenant, between governing race and
subject race, between the feelings and intelligence of the legislature
and the feelings and intelligence of the nation, between the spiritual
power, literary and ecclesiastical, and those who are under it--the
anarchy that prevails in all these, and the extreme danger of it, have
been with Mr. Carlyle a never-ending theme. What seems to many of us the
extreme inefficiency or worse of his solutions, still allows us to feel
grateful for the vigour and perspicacity with which he has pressed on
the world the urgency of the problem.
The degree of durability which his influence is likely to possess with
the next and following generations is another and rather sterile
question, which we are not now concerned to discuss. The unrestrained
eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong individuality has precipitated
in his written style may, in spite of the poetic fineness of his
imagination, which no historian or humorist has excelled, still be
expected to deprive his work of that permanence which is only secured by
classic form. The incorporation of so many phrases, allusions,
nicknames, that belong only to the hour, inevitably makes the vitality
of the composition conditional on the vitality of these transient and
accidental elements which are so deeply imbedded in it. Another
consideration is that no philosophic writer, however ardently his words
may have been treasured and followed by the people of his own time, can
well be cherished by succeeding generations, unless his name is
associated through some definable and positive contribution with the
central march of European thought and feeling. In other words, there is
a difference between living in the history of literature or belief, and
living in literature itself and in the minds of believers. Mr. Carlyle
has been a most powerful solvent, but it is the tendency of solvents to
become merely historic. The historian of the intellectual and moral
movements of Great Britain during the present century, will fail
egregiously in his task if he omits to give a large and conspicuous
space to the author of _Sartor Resartus_. But it is one thing to study
historically the ideas which have influenced our predecessors, and
another thing to seek in them an influence fruitful for ourselves. It is
to be hoped that one may doubt the permanent soundness of Mr. Carlyle's
peculiar speculations, without either doubting or failing to share that
warm affection and reverence which his personality has worthily inspired
in many thousands of his readers. He has himself taught us to separate
these two sides of a man, and we have learnt from him to love Samuel
Johnson without reading much or a word that the old sage wrote.
'Sterling and I walked westward,' he says once, 'arguing copiously, but
_except_ in opinion not disagreeing.'
It is none the less for what has just been said a weightier and a rarer
privilege for a man to give a stirring impulse to the moral activity of
a generation, than to write in classic style; and to have impressed the
spirit of his own personality deeply upon the minds of multitudes of
men, than to have composed most of those works which the world is said
not willingly to let die. Nor, again, is to say that this higher renown
belongs to Mr. Carlyle, to underrate the less resounding, but most
substantial, services of a definite kind which he has rendered both to
literature and history. This work may be in time superseded with the
advance of knowledge, but the value of the first service will remain
unimpaired. It was he, as has been said, 'who first taught England to
appreciate Goethe;' and not only to appreciate Goethe, but to recognise
and seek yet further knowledge of the genius and industry of Goethe's
countrymen. His splendid drama of the French Revolution has done, and
may be expected long to continue to do, more to bring before our
slow-moving and unimaginative public the portentous meaning of that
tremendous cataclysm, than all the other writings on the subject in the
English language put together. His presentation of Puritanism and the
Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most elevating period of
the national history in any way really intelligible. The Life of
Frederick the Second, whatever judgment we may pass upon its morality,
or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a model of
laborious and exhaustive narration of facts not before accessible to the
reader of history. For all this, and for much other work eminently
useful and meritorious even from the mechanical point of view, Mr.
Carlyle deserves the warmest recognition. His genius gave him a right to
mock at the ineffectiveness of Dryasdust, but his genius was also too
true to prevent him from adding the always needful supplement of a
painstaking industry that rivals Dryasdust's own most strenuous toil.
Take out of the mind of the English reader of ordinary cultivation and
the average journalist, usually a degree or two lower than this, their
conceptions of the French Revolution and the English Rebellion, and
their knowledge of German literature and history, as well as most of
their acquaintance with the prominent men of the eighteenth century, and
we shall see how much work Mr. Carlyle has done simply as schoolmaster.
This, however, is emphatically a secondary aspect of his character, and
of the function which he has fulfilled in relation to the more active
tendencies of modern opinion and feeling. We must go on to other ground,
if we would find the field in which he has laboured most ardently and
with most acceptance. History and literature have been with him, what
they will always be with wise and understanding minds of creative and
even of the higher critical faculty--only embodiments, illustrations,
experiments, for ideas about religion, conduct, society, history,
government, and all the other great heads and departments of a complete
social doctrine. From this point of view, the time has perhaps come when
we may fairly attempt to discern some of the tendencies which Mr.
Carlyle has initiated or accelerated and deepened, though assuredly many
years must elapse before any adequate measure can be taken of their
force and final direction.
It would be a comparatively simple process to affix the regulation
labels of philosophy; to say that Mr. Carlyle is a Pantheist in religion
(or a Pot-theist, to use the alternative whose flippancy gave such
offence to Sterling on one occasion[1]), a Transcendentalist or
Intuitionist in ethics, an Absolutist in politics, and so forth, with
the addition of a crowd of privative or negative epithets at discretion.
But classifications of this sort are the worst enemies of true
knowledge. Such names are by the vast majority even of persons who think
themselves educated, imperfectly apprehended, ignorantly interpreted,
and crudely and recklessly applied. It is not too much to say that nine
out of ten people who think they have delivered themselves of a
criticism when they call Mr. Carlyle a Pantheist, could neither explain
with any precision what Pantheism is, nor have ever thought of
determining the parts of his writings where this particular monster is
believed to lurk. Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the
trouble of thinking. As I once wrote elsewhere:
[1] _Life of John Sterling_, p. 153.
'The readiness to use general names in speaking of the greater subjects,
and the fitness which qualifies a man to use them, commonly exist in
inverse proportions. If we reflect on the conditions out of which
ordinary opinion is generated, we may well be startled at the profuse
liberality with which names of the widest and most complex and variable
significance are bestowed on all hands. The majority of the ideas which
constitute most men's intellectual stock-in-trade have accrued by
processes quite distinct from fair reasoning and consequent conviction.
This is so notorious, that it is amazing how so many people can go on
freely and rapidly labelling thinkers or writers with names which they
themselves are not competent to bestow, and which their hearers are not
competent either to understand generally, or to test in the specific
instance.'
These labels are rather more worthless than usual in the present case,
because Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical and defiantly
inconsistent; and, therefore, the term which might correctly describe
one side of his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a
wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications
necessary to make any one of the regular epithets fairly applicable
would have to be so many, that the glosses would virtually overlay the
text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by
discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what
pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine means, or
what it is worth, but what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their
character, their relations to one another, and what that is worth.
With most men and women the master element in their opinions is
obviously neither their own reason nor their own imagination,
independently exercised, but only mere use and wont, chequered by
fortuitous sensations, and modified in the better cases by the
influence of a favourite teacher; while in the worse the teacher is the
favourite who happens to chime in most harmoniously with prepossessions,
or most effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among the superior
minds the balance between reason and imagination is scarcely ever held
exactly true, nor is either firmly kept within the precise bounds that
are proper to it. It is a question of temperament which of the two
mental attitudes becomes fixed and habitual, as it is a question of
temperament how violently either of them straitens and distorts the
normal faculties of vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head,
which would usually be better described as a thin head, may and
constantly does fall into a confirmed manner of judging character and
circumstance, so narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to
make common sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine
name of reason. Excess on the other side leads people into emotional
transports, in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth, the
difficulty of discovering the truth, the narrowness of the way that
leads thereto, the merits of intellectual precision and definiteness,
and even the merits of moral precision and definiteness, are all
effectually veiled by purple or fiery clouds of anger, sympathy, and
sentimentalism, which imagination has hung over the intelligence.
The familiar distinction between the poetic and the scientific temper is
another way of stating the same difference. The one fuses or
crystallises external objects and circumstances in the medium of human
feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of
objects and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the
facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification
of these relations. There is, too, a corresponding distinction between
the aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects
of nature are able to present, according as we scrutinise them with a
view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which
they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our
tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other
emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side
for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet.
The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in
an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a
Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world,
the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those
whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly
monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed
with one set of attributes by scientific intelligence, and with another
by sentiment, fancy, and imaginative association.
The contentiousness of rival schools of philosophy has obscured the
application of the same distinction to the various orders of fact more
nearly and immediately relating to man and the social union. One school
has maintained the virtually unmeaning doctrine that the will is free,
and therefore its followers never gave any quarter to the idea that man
was as proper an object of scientific scrutiny morally and historically,
as they could not deny him to be anatomically and physiologically. Their
enemies have been more concerned to dislodge them from this position,
than to fortify, organise, and cultivate their own. The consequences
have not been without their danger. Poetic persons have rushed in where
scientific persons ought not to have feared to tread. That human
character and the order of events have their poetic aspect, and that
their poetic treatment demands the rarest and most valuable qualities of
mind, is a truth which none but narrow and superficial men of the world
are rash enough to deny. But that there is a scientific aspect of these
things, an order among them that can only be understood and criticised
and effectually modified scientifically, by using all the caution and
precision and infinite patience of the truly scientific spirit, is a
truth that is constantly ignored even by men and women of the loftiest
and most humane nature. In such cases misdirected and uncontrolled
sensibility ends in mournful waste of their own energy, in the certain
disappointment of their own aims, and where such sensibility is backed
by genius, eloquence, and a peculiar set of public conditions, in
prolonged and fatal disturbance of society.
Rousseau was the great type of this triumphant and dangerous sophistry
of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking
nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning a
man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded
life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever lived.
Community of method, like misery, makes men acquainted with strange
bed-fellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral worth may
notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the same method,
and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of
them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a
retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and
right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a
factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly solved by
external observation and history. In connection with each of them has
been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimentalism, when
circumstances draw away the mask. Not the least conspicuous of the
disciples of Rousseau was Robespierre. His works lay on the table of the
Committee of Public Safety. The theory of the Reign of Terror was
invented, and mercilessly reduced to practice, by men whom the visions
of Rousseau had fired, and who were not afraid nor ashamed to wade
through oceans of blood to the promised land of humanity and fine
feeling. We in our days have seen the same result of sentimental
doctrine in the barbarous love of the battle-field, the retrograde
passion for methods of repression, the contempt for human life, the
impatience of orderly and peaceful solution. We begin with introspection
and the eternities, and end in blood and iron. Again, Rousseau's first
piece was an anathema upon the science and art of his time, and a
denunciation of books and speech. Mr. Carlyle, in exactly the same
spirit, has denounced logic mills, warned us all away from literature,
and habitually subordinated discipline of the intelligence to the
passionate assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks
respectfully of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is
using the term in a special sense of his own, and confounding it with
'the exact summary of human _Worth_,' as in one place he defines it.
Thus, instead of co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual
energy, virtue with intelligence, right action of the will with
scientific processes of the understanding, he has either placed one
immeasurably below the other, or else has mischievously insisted on
treating them as identical. The dictates of a kind heart are of superior
force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory
resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works
easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse.
All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes
hard sentiment and sometimes soft sentiment, above reason and method.
In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody
else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right and an eager desire
for social activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away from him
the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that
our social action is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting
perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual
self-possession, to have added another name to the illustrious catalogue
of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his
sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an
imaginative and highly emotional manner. Depth of benevolent feeling is
unhappily no proof of fitness for handling complex problems, and a fine
sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing
effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the
composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any
reason for supposing that the author would have made a competent
Commissioner of Works.
Why should society, with its long and deep-hidden processes of growth,
its innumerable intricacies and far-off historic complexities, be as an
open book to any reader of its pages who brings acuteness and passion,
but no patience nor calm accuracy of meditation? Objects of thought and
observation far simpler, more free from all blinding and distorting
elements, more accessible to direct and ocular inspection, are by
rational consent reserved for the calmest and most austere moods and
methods of human intelligence. Nor is denunciation of the conditions of
a problem the quickest step towards solving it. Vituperation of the fact
that supply and demand practically regulate certain kinds of bargain, is
no contribution to systematic efforts to discover some more moral
regulator. Take all the invective that Mr. Carlyle has poured out
against political economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according to
M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire inadequateness of political
economy to sum up the laws and conditions of a healthy social state--and
no one more than the present writer deplores the mischief which the
application of the maxims of political economy by ignorant and selfish
spirits has effected in confirming the worst tendencies of the
commercial character--yet is it not a first condition of our being able
to substitute better machinery for the ordinary rules of self-interest,
that we know scientifically how those rules do and must operate? Again,
in another field, it is well to cry out: 'Caitiff, we hate thee,' with a
'hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the
scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and
disappearance from the scene of things.'[2] But this is slightly vague.
It is not scientific. There are caitiffs and caitiffs. There is a more
and a less of scoundrelism, as there is a more and a less of black
annihilation, and we must have systematic jurisprudence, with its
classification of caitiffs and its graduated blasting. Has Mr. Carlyle's
passion, or have the sedulous and scientific labours of that Bentham,
whose name with him is a symbol of evil, done most in what he calls the
Scoundrel-province of Reform within the last half-century? Sterling's
criticism on Teufelsdröckh told a hard but wholesome truth to
Teufelsdröckh's creator. 'Wanting peace himself,' said Sterling, 'his
fierce dissatisfaction fixes on all that is weak, corrupt, and imperfect
around him; and instead of a calm and steady co-operation with all those
who are endeavouring to apply the highest ideas as remedies for the
worst evils, he holds himself in savage isolation.'[3]
[2] _Latter-Day Pamphlets._ II. Model Prisons, p. 92.
[3] Letter to Mr. Carlyle, in the _Life_, Pt. ii. ch. ii.
Mr. Carlyle assures us of Bonaparte that he had an instinct of nature
better than his culture was, and illustrates it by the story that during
the Egyptian expedition, when his scientific men were busy arguing that
there could be no God, Bonaparte, looking up to the stars, confuted them
decisively by saying: 'Very ingenious, Messieurs; but _who made_ all
that?' Surely the most inconclusive answer since coxcombs vanquished
Berkeley with a grin. It is, however, a type of Mr. Carlyle's faith in
the instinct of nature, as superseding the necessity for patient logical
method; a faith, in other words, in crude and uninterpreted sense.
Insight, indeed, goes far, but it no more entitles its possessor to
dispense with reasoned discipline and system in treating scientific
subjects, than it relieves him from the necessity of conforming to the
physical conditions of health. Why should society be the one field of
thought in which a man of genius is at liberty to assume all his major
premisses, and swear all his conclusions?
* * * * *
The deep unrest of unsatisfied souls meets its earliest solace in the
effective and sympathetic expression of the same unrest from the lips of
another. To look it in the face is the first approach to a sedative. To
find our discontent with the actual, our yearning for an undefined
ideal, our aspiration after impossible heights of being, shared and
amplified in the emotional speech of a man of genius, is the beginning
of consolation. Some of the most generous spirits a hundred years ago
found this in the eloquence of Rousseau, and some of the most generous
spirits of this time and place have found it in the writer of the
_Sartor_. In ages not of faith, there will always be multitudinous
troops of people crying for the moon. If such sorrowful pastime be ever
permissible to men, it has been natural and lawful this long while in
præ-revolutionary England, as it was natural and lawful a century since
in præ-revolutionary France. A man born into a community where political
forms, from the monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow
shams disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is
mainly official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself
alike from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and the spirit
of truth, and where literature does not as a rule permit itself to
discuss serious subjects frankly and worthily[4]--a community, in
short, where the great aim of all classes and orders with power is by
dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern stopping
of the ears, somehow to keep the social pyramid on its apex, with the
fatal result of preserving for England its glorious fame as a paradise
for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a hell for the
poor--why, a man born into all this with a heart something softer than a
flint, and with intellectual vision something more acute than that of a
Troglodyte, may well be allowed to turn aside and cry for moons for a
season.
[4] Written in 1870.
Impotent unrest, however, is followed in Mr. Carlyle by what is socially
an impotent solution, just as it was with Rousseau. To bid a man do his
duty in one page, and then in the next to warn him sternly away from
utilitarianism, from political economy, from all 'theories of the moral
sense,' and from any other definite means of ascertaining what duty may
chance to be, is but a bald and naked counsel. Spiritual nullity and
material confusion in a society are not to be repaired by a
transformation of egotism, querulous, brooding, marvelling, into
egotism, active, practical, objective, not uncomplacent. The moral
movements to which the instinctive impulses of humanity fallen on evil
times uniformly give birth, early Christianity, for instance, or the
socialism of Rousseau, may destroy a society, but they cannot save it
unless in conjunction with organising policy. A thorough appreciation
of fiscal and economic truths was at least as indispensable for the life
of the Roman Empire as the acceptance of a Messiah; and it was only in
the hands of a great statesman like Gregory VII. that Christianity
became at last an instrument powerful enough to save civilisation. What
the moral renovation of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now
Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the doctrine of Mr.
Carlyle, which, while in name a renunciation of self, has all its
foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, notwithstanding the
method of _Emile_, treats man as a part of a collective whole,
contracting manifold relations and owing manifold duties; and he always
appeals to the love and sympathy which an imaginary God of nature has
implanted in the heart. His aim is unity. Mr. Carlyle, following the
same method of obedience to his own personal emotions, unfortified by
patient reasoning, lands at the other extremity, and lays all his stress
on the separatist instincts. The individual stands alone confronted by
the eternities; between these and his own soul exists the one central
relation. This has all the fundamental egotism of the doctrine of
personal salvation, emancipated from fable, and varnished with an
emotional phrase. The doctrine has been very widely interpreted, and
without any forcing, as a religious expression for the conditions of
commercial success.
If we look among our own countrymen, we find that the apostle of
self-renunciation is nowhere so beloved as by the best of those whom
steady self-reliance and thrifty self-securing and a firm eye to the
main chance have got successfully on in the world. A Carlylean
anthology, or volume of the master's sentences, might easily be
composed, that should contain the highest form of private liturgy
accepted by the best of the industrial classes, masters or men. They
forgive or overlook the writer's denunciations of Beaver Industrialisms,
which they attribute to his caprice or spleen. This is the worst of an
emotional teacher, that people take only so much as they please from
him, while with a reasoner they must either refute by reason, or else
they must accept by reason, and not at simple choice. When trade is
brisk, and England is successfully competing in the foreign markets, the
books that enjoin silence and self-annihilation have a wonderful
popularity in the manufacturing districts. This circumstance is
honourable both to them and to him, as far as it goes, but it furnishes
some reason for suspecting that our most vigorous moral reformer, so far
from propelling us in new grooves, has in truth only given new firmness
and coherency to tendencies that were strongly marked enough in the
national character before. He has increased the fervour of the country,
but without materially changing its objects; there is all the less
disguise among us as a result of his teaching, but no radical
modification of the sentiments which people are sincere in. The most
stirring general appeal to the emotions, to be effective for more than
negative purposes, must lead up to definite maxims and specific
precepts. As a negative renovation Mr. Carlyle's doctrine was perfect.
It effectually put an end to the mood of Byronism. May we say that with
the neutralisation of Byron, his most decisive and special work came to
an end? May we not say further, that the true renovation of England, if
such a process be ever feasible, will lie in a quite other method than
this of emotion? It will lie not in more moral earnestness only, but in
a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work
and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The
poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not
intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but
all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is
this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble
situation. We need light more than heat; intellectual alertness, faith
in the reasoning faculty, accessibility to new ideas. To refuse to use
the intellect patiently and with system, to decline to seek scientific
truth, to prefer effusive indulgence of emotion to the laborious and
disciplined and candid exploration of new ideas, is not this, too, a
torpid unveracity? And has not Mr. Carlyle, by the impatience of his
method, done somewhat to deepen it?
It is very well to invite us to moral reform, to bring ourselves to be
of heroic mind, as the surest way to 'the blessed Aristocracy of the
Wisest.' But how shall we know the wisest when we see them, and how
shall a nation know, if not by keen respect and watchfulness for
intellectual truth and the teachers of it? Much as we may admire Mr.
Carlyle's many gifts, and highly as we may revere his character, it is
yet very doubtful whether anybody has as yet learnt from him the
precious lesson of scrupulosity and conscientiousness in actively and
constantly using the intelligence. This would have been the solid
foundation of the true hero-worship.
* * * * *
Let thus much have been said on the head of temperament. The historic
position also of every writer is an indispensable key to many things in
his teaching.[5] We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's case, that he was
born in the memorable year when the French Revolution, in its narrower
sense, was closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the great century
of emancipation and illumination was ending darkly in battles and
confusion. During his youth the reaction was in full flow, and the lamp
had been handed to runners who not only reversed the ideas and methods,
but even turned aside from the goal of their precursors. Hopefulness and
enthusiastic confidence in humanity when freed from the fetters of
spiritual superstition and secular tyranny, marked all the most
characteristic and influential speculations of the two generations
before '89. The appalling failure which attended the splendid attempt to
realise these hopes in a renewed and perfected social structure, had no
more than its natural effect in turning men's minds back, not to the
past of Rousseau's imagination, but to the past of recorded history. The
single epoch in the annals of Europe since the rise of Christianity, for
which no good word could be found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The
hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries was
passed lightly over by men who had only eyes for the moral obliquity of
the church of the Encyclopædia. The brilliant but profoundly inadequate
essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the outcome in Mr. Carlyle of the
same reactionary spirit. Nobody now, we may suppose, who is competent to
judge, thinks that that estimate of 'the net product, of the tumultuous
Atheism' of Diderot and his fellow-workers, is a satisfactory account of
the influence and significance of the Encyclopædia; nor that to sum up
Voltaire, with his burning passion for justice, his indefatigable
humanity, his splendid energy in intellectual production, his righteous
hatred of superstition, as merely a supreme master of _persiflage_, can
be a process partaking of finality. The fact that to the eighteenth
century belong the subjects of more than half of these thirty volumes,
is a proof of the fascination of the period for an author who has never
ceased to vilipend it. The saying is perhaps as true in these matters as
of private relations, that hatred is not so far removed from love as
indifference is. Be that as it may, the Carlylean view of the eighteenth
century as a time of mere scepticism and unbelief, is now clearly
untenable to men who remember the fervour of Jean Jacques, and the more
rational, but not any less fervid faith of the disciples of
Perfectibility. But this was not so clear fifty years since, when the
crash and dust of demolition had not so subsided as to let men see how
much had risen up behind. The fire of the new school had been taken from
the very conflagration which they execrated, but they were not held back
from denouncing the eighteenth century by the reflection that, at any
rate, its thought and action had made ready the way for much of what is
best in the nineteenth.
[5] The dates of Mr. Carlyle's principal compositions are these:--_Life
of Schiller_, 1825; _Sartor Resartus_, 1831; _French Revolution_, 1837;
_Chartism_, 1839; _Hero-Worship_, 1840; _Past and Present_, 1843;
_Cromwell_, 1845; _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 1850; _Friedrich the Second_,
1858-1865; _Shooting Niagara_, 1867.
Mr. Carlyle himself has told us about Coleridge, and the movement of
which Coleridge was the leader. That movement has led men in widely
different ways. In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps
of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous ephemera still suck a
little spiritual moisture. In another it led to the sacramental and
sacerdotal developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among men with
strong practical energy, to the benevolent bluster of a sort of
Christianity which is called muscular because it is not intellectual. It
would be an error to suppose that these and the other streams that have
sprung from the same source, did not in the days of their fulness
fertilise and gladden many lands. The wordy pietism of one school, the
mimetic rites of another, the romping heroics of the third, are
degenerate forms. How long they are likely to endure, it would be rash
to predict among a nation whose established teachers and official
preachers are prevented by an inveterate timidity from trusting
themselves to that disciplined intelligence, in which the superior minds
of the last century had such courageous faith.
Mr. Carlyle drank in some sort at the same fountain. Coleridgean ideas
were in the air. It was there probably that he acquired that sympathy
with the past, or with certain portions of the past, that feeling of the
unity of history, and that conviction of the necessity of binding our
theory of history fast with our theory of other things, in all of which
he so strikingly resembles the great Anglican leaders of a generation
ago, and in gaining some of which so strenuous an effort must have been
needed to modify the prepossessions of a Scotch Puritan education. No
one has contributed more powerfully to that movement which, drawing
force from many and various sides, has brought out the difference
between the historian and the gazetteer or antiquary. One half of _Past
and Present_ might have been written by one of the Oxford chiefs in the
days of the Tracts. Vehement native force was too strong for such a man
to remain in the luminous haze which made the Coleridgean atmosphere. A
well-known chapter in the _Life of Sterling_, which some, indeed, have
found too ungracious, shows how little hold he felt Coleridge's ideas
to be capable of retaining, and how little permanent satisfaction
resided in them. Coleridge, in fact, was not only a poet but a thinker
as well; he had science of a sort as well as imagination, but it was not
science for headlong and impatient souls. Mr. Carlyle has probably never
been able to endure a subdivision all his life, and the infinite
ramifications of the central division between object and subject might
well be with him an unprofitable weariness to the flesh.
In England, the greatest literary organ of the Revolution was
unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic
lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over
the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific
work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with
all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some
gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly
tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a
revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had
fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the
many-eyed minuteness and sustained pulsing force of Byron, has still the
full swell and tide and energy of genius: he is as lawless in his
disrespect for some things established. He had the unspeakable advantage
of being that which, though not in this sense, only his own favourite
word of contempt describes, respectable; and, for another thing, of
being ruggedly sincere. Carlylism is the male of Byronism. It is
Byronism with thew and sinew, bass pipe and shaggy bosom. There is the
same grievous complaint against the time and its men and its spirit,
something even of the same contemptuous despair, the same sense of the
puniness of man in the centre of a cruel and frowning universe; but
there is in Carlylism a deliverance from it all, indeed the only
deliverance possible. Its despair is a despair without misery. Labour in
a high spirit, duty done, and right service performed in fortitudinous
temper--here was, not indeed a way out, but a way of erect living
within.
Against Byronism the ordinary moralist and preacher could really do
nothing, because Byronism was an appeal that lay in the regions of the
mind only accessible by one with an eye and a large poetic feeling for
the infinite whole of things. It was not the rebellion only in
_Manfred_, nor the wit in _Don Juan_, nor the graceful melancholy of
_Childe Harold_, which made their author an idol, and still make him one
to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of
it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of
Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's
work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a
sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part
showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the
universal forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness of his
achievement and endurance takes a complexion of greatness from the
vague immensity that surrounds and impalpably mixes with it.
Remember further, that while in Byron the outcome of this was rebellion,
in Carlyle its outcome is reverence, a noble mood, which is one of the
highest predispositions of the English character. The instincts of
sanctification rooted in Teutonic races, and which in the corrupt and
unctuous forms of a mechanical religious profession are so revolting,
were mocked and outraged, where they were not superciliously ignored, in
every line of the one, while in the other they were enthroned under the
name of Worship, as the very key and centre of the right life. The
prophet who never wearies of declaring that 'only in bowing down before
the Higher does man feel himself exalted,' touched solemn organ notes,
that awoke a response from dim religious depths, never reached by the
stormy wailings of the Byronic lyre. The political side of the
reverential sentiment is equally conciliated, and the prime business of
individuals and communities pronounced to be the search after worthy
objects of this divine quality of reverence. While kings' cloaks and
church tippets are never spared, still less suffered to protect the
dishonour of ignoble wearers of them, the inadequateness of aggression
and demolition, the necessity of quiet order, the uncounted debt that we
owe to rulers and to all sorts of holy and great men who have given this
order to the world, all this brought repose and harmony into spirits
that the hollow thunders of universal rebellion against tyrants and
priests had worn into thinness and confusion. Again, at the bottom of
the veriest _frondeur_ with English blood in his veins, in his most
defiant moment there lies a conviction that after all something known as
common sense is the measure of life, and that to work hard is a
demonstrated precept of common sense. Carlylism exactly hits this and
brings it forward. We cannot wonder that Byronism was routed from the
field.
* * * * *
It may have been in the transcendently firm and clear-eyed intelligence
of Goethe that Mr. Carlyle first found a responsive encouragement to the
profoundly positive impulses of his own spirit.[6] There is, indeed, a
whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and bright composure of the
one, and the vehemence, passion, masterful wrath, of the other; and the
vast, incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing
corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous contempt and
indifference, sometimes express and sometimes only very significantly
implied, for forms of intellectual activity that do not happen to be
personally congenial. But each is a god, though the one sits ever on
Olympus, while the other is as one from Tartarus. There is in each,
besides all else, a certain remarkable directness of glance, an
intrepid and penetrating quality of vision, which defies analysis.
Occasional turgidity of phrase and unidiomatic handling of language do
not conceal the simplicity of the process by which Mr. Carlyle pierces
through obstruction down to the abstrusest depths. And the important
fact is that this abstruseness is not verbal, any more than it is the
abstruseness of fog and cloud. His epithet, or image, or trope, shoots
like a sunbeam on to the matter, throwing a transfigurating light, even
where it fails to pierce to its central core.
[6] _Positive._ No English lexicon as yet seems to justify the use of
this word in one of the senses of the French _positif_, as when a
historian, for instance, speaks of the _esprit positif_ of Bonaparte. We
have no word, I believe, that exactly corresponds, so perhaps _positive_
with that significance will become acclimatised. A distinct and separate
idea of this particular characteristic is indispensable.