unelevated positivity of the eighteenth century; eager also for some
recognition of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly unsatisfied
by the transcendentalism of the English and Scotch philosophic
reactions; he found in Goethe that truly free and adequate positivity
which accepts all things as parts of a natural or historic order, and
while insisting on the recognition of the actual conditions of this
order as indispensable, and condemning attempted evasions of such
recognition as futile and childish, yet opens an ample bosom for all
forms of beauty in art, and for all nobleness in moral aspiration. That
Mr. Carlyle has reached this high ground we do not say. Temperament has
kept him down from it. But it is after this that he has striven. The
tumid nothingness of pure transcendentalism he has always abhorred. Some
of Mr. Carlyle's favourite phrases have disguised from his readers the
intensely practical turn of his whole mind. His constant presentation
of the Eternities, the Immensities, and the like, has veiled his almost
narrow adherence to plain record without moral comment, and his often
cynical respect for the dangerous, yet, when rightly qualified and
guided, the solid formula that What is, is. The Eternities and
Immensities are only a kind of awful background. The highest souls are
held to be deeply conscious of these vast unspeakable presences, yet
even with them they are only inspiring accessories; the true interest
lies in the practical attitude of such men towards the actual and
palpable circumstances that surround them. This spirituality, whose
place in Mr. Carlyle's teaching has been so extremely mis-stated, sinks
wholly out of sight in connection with such heroes as the coarse and
materialist Bonaparte, of whom, however, the hero-worshipper in earlier
pieces speaks with some laudable misgiving, and the not less coarse and
materialist Frederick, about whom no misgiving is permitted to the loyal
disciple. The admiration for military methods, on condition that they
are successful, for Mr. Carlyle, like Providence, is always on the side
of big and victorious battalions, is the last outcome of a devotion to
vigorous action and practical effect, which no verbal garniture of a
transcendental kind can hinder us from perceiving to be more purely
materialist and unfeignedly brutal than anything which sprung from the
reviled thought of the eighteenth century.
It is instructive to remark that another of the most illustrious
enemies of that century and all its works, Joseph de Maistre, had the
same admiration for the effectiveness of war, and the same extreme
interest and concern in the men and things of war. He, too, declares
that 'the loftiest and most generous sentiments are probably to be found
in the soldier;' and that war, if terrible, is divine and splendid and
fascinating, the manifestation of a sublime law of the universe. We
must, however, do De Maistre the justice to point out, first, that he
gave a measure of his strange interest in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr.
Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of the honours
of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second
place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a
fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a
divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely
defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of
Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will,
tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this
and the absolutism of the mystic.
[7] _Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, 7ième entretien._
'Nature,' he says in one place, 'keeps silently a most exact
Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most evanescent item,
Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks
down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism;
Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or
one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in
consequence of that--Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously
as Fate (for this _is_ Fate that is writing); and at the end of the
account you will have it all to pay, my friend.'[8]
[8] _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, No. V. p. 247.
That is to say, there is a law of recompense for communities of men, and
as nations sow, even thus they reap. But what is Mr. Carlyle's account
of the precise nature and operation of this law? What is the original
distinction between an act of veracity and a blunder? Why was the blow
struck by the Directory on the Eighteenth Fructidor a blunder, and that
struck by Bonaparte on the Eighteenth Brumaire a veracity? What
principle of registration is that which makes Nature debtor to Frederick
the Second for the seizure of Silesia, and Bonaparte debtor to Nature
for 'trampling on the world, holding it tyrannously down?' It is very
well to tell us that 'Injustice pays itself with frightful compound
interest,' but there are reasons for suspecting that Mr. Carlyle's
definition of the just and the unjust are such as to reduce this and all
his other sentences of like purport to the level of mere truism and
repetition. If you secretly or openly hold that to be just and veracious
which is successful, then it needs no further demonstration that
penalties of ultimate failure are exacted for injustice, because it is
precisely the failure that constitutes the injustice.
This is the kernel of all that is most retrograde in Mr. Carlyle's
teaching. He identifies the physical with the moral order, confounds
faithful conformity to the material conditions of success, with loyal
adherence to virtuous rule and principle, and then appeals to material
triumph as the sanction of nature and the ratification of high heaven.
Admiring with profoundest admiration the spectacle of an inflexible
will, when armed with a long-headed insight into means and quantities
and forces as its instrument, and yet deeply revering the abstract ideal
of justice; dazzled by the methods and the products of iron resolution,
yet imbued with traditional affection for virtue; he has seen no better
way of conciliating both inclinations than by insisting that they point
in the same direction, and that virtue and success, justice and victory,
merit and triumph, are in the long run all one and the same thing. The
most fatal of confusions. Compliance with material law and condition
ensures material victory, and compliance with moral condition ensures
moral triumph; but then moral triumph is as often as not physical
martyrdom. Superior military virtues must unquestionably win the verdict
of Fate, Nature, Fact, and Veracity, on the battle-field, but what then?
Has Fate no other verdicts to record than these? and at the moment while
she writes Nature down debtor to the conqueror, may she not also have
written her down his implacable creditor for the moral cost of his
conquest?
The anarchy and confusion of Poland were an outrage upon political
conditions, which brought her to dependence and ruin. The manner of the
partition was an outrage on moral conditions, for which each of the
nations that profited by it paid in the lawlessness of Bonaparte. The
preliminaries of Léoben, again, and Campo-Formio were the key to
Waterloo and St. Helena. But Mr. Carlyle stops short at the triumph of
compliance with the conditions of material victory. He is content to
know that Frederick made himself master of Silesia, without considering
that the day of Jena loomed in front. It suffices to say that the whiff
of grape-shot on the Thirteenth Vendémiaire brought Sans-culottism to
order and an end, without measuring what permanent elements of disorder
were ineradicably implanted by resort to the military arm. Only the
failures are used to point the great historical moral, and if Bonaparte
had died in the Tuileries in all honour and glory, he would have ranked
with Frederick or Francia as a wholly true man. Mr. Carlyle would then
no more have declared the execution of Palm 'a palpable, tyrannous,
murderous injustice,' than he declares it of the execution of Katte or
Schlubhut. The fall of the traitor to fact, of the French monarchy, of
the windbags of the first Republic, of Charles I., is improved for our
edification, but then the other lesson, the failure of heroes like
Cromwell, remains isolated and incoherent, with no place in a morally
regulated universe. If the strength of Prussia now proves that Frederick
had a right to seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further
whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist
assume, from the fact of the restoration, and the consequent
obliteration of Cromwell's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a
phantasm captain?
Apart from its irreconcilableness with many of his most emphatic
judgments, Mr. Carlyle's doctrine about Nature's registration of the
penalties of injustice is intrinsically an anachronism. It is worse than
the Catholic reaction, because while De Maistre only wanted Europe to
return to the system of the twelfth century, Mr. Carlyle's theory of
history takes us back to times prehistoric, when might and right were
the same thing. It is decidedly natural that man in a state of nature
should take and keep as much as his skill and physical strength enable
him to do. But society and its benefits are all so much ground won from
nature and her state. The more natural a method of acquisition, the less
likely is it to be social. The essence of morality is the subjugation of
nature in obedience to social needs. To use Kant's admirable
description, concert _pathologically_ extorted by the mere necessities
of situation, is exalted into a _moral_ union. It is exactly in this
progressive substitution of one for the other that advancement consists,
that Progress of the Species at which, in certain of its forms, Mr.
Carlyle has so many gibes.
That, surely, is the true test of veracity and heroism in conduct. Does
your hero's achievement go in the pathological or the moral direction?
Does it tend to spread faith in that cunning, violence, force, which
were once primitive and natural conditions of life, and which will still
by natural law work to their own proper triumphs in so far as these
conditions survive, and within such limits, and in such sense, as they
permit; or, on the contrary, does it tend to heighten respect for civic
law, for pledged word, for the habit of self-surrender to the public
good, and for all those other ideas and sentiments and usages which have
been painfully gained from the sterile sands of egotism and selfishness,
and to which we are indebted for all the untold boons conferred by the
social union on man?
Viewed from this point, the manner of the achievement is as important as
is its immediate product, a consideration which it is one of Mr.
Carlyle's most marked peculiarities to take into small account.
Detesting Jesuitism from the bottom of his soul, he has been too willing
to accept its fundamental maxim, that the end justifies the means. He
has taken the end for the ratification or proscription of the means, and
stamped it as the verdict of Fate and Fact on the transaction and its
doer. A safer position is this, that the means prepare the end, and the
end is what the means have made it. Here is the limit of the true law of
the relations between man and fate. Justice and injustice in the law,
let us abstain from inquiring after.
There are two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some
degree by the primitive and pathological principle of repression and
main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal
and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are constantly
straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in
the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the
predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and
unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as
the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be
ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occupied the same
moral and social level as the best of their generation. We are amply
justified in employing towards them, wherever their offences endanger
order, the same methods of coercion which originally made society
possible. No tenable theory about free will or necessity, no theory of
praise and blame that will bear positive tests, lays us under any
obligation to spare either the comfort or the life of a man who indulges
in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr. Carlyle has done much to
wear this just and austere view into the minds of his generation, and in
so far he has performed an excellent service.
The second set of relations in which the pathological element still so
largely predominates are those between nations. Separate and independent
communities are still in a state of nature. The tie between them is only
the imperfect, loose, and non-moral tie of self-interest and material
power. Many publicists and sentimental politicians are ever striving to
conceal this displeasing fact from themselves and others, and evading
the lesson of the outbreaks that now and again convulse the civilised
world. Mr. Carlyle's history of the rise and progress of the power of
the Prussian monarchy is the great illustration of the hold which he has
got of the conception of the international state as a state of nature;
and here again, in so far as he has helped to teach us to study the past
by historic methods, he has undoubtedly done laudable work.
Yet have we not to confess that there is another side to this kind of
truth, in both these fields? We may finally pronounce on a given way of
thinking, only after we have discerned its goal. Not knowing this, we
cannot accurately know its true tendency and direction. Now, every
recognition of the pathological necessity should imply a progress and
effort towards its conversion into moral relationship. The difference
between a reactionary and a truly progressive thinker or group of ideas
is not that the one assumes virtuousness and morality as having been the
conscious condition of international dealings, while the other asserts
that such dealings were the lawful consequence of self-interest and the
contest of material forces; nor is it that the one insists on viewing
international transactions from the same moral point which would be the
right one, if independent communities actually formed one stable and
settled family, while the other declines to view their morality at all.
The vital difference is, that while the reactionary writer rigorously
confines his faith within the region of facts accomplished, the other
anticipates a time when the endeavour of the best minds in the civilised
world, co-operating with every favouring external circumstance that
arises, shall have in the international circle raised moral
considerations to an ever higher and higher pre-eminence, and in
internal conditions shall have left in the chances and training of the
individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to
anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or
other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at
the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to
close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure
that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of the
present.
Mr. Carlyle's influence, however, was at its height before this idolatry
of the soldier became a paramount article in his creed; and it is
devoutly to be hoped that not many of those whom he first taught to
seize before all things fact and reality, will follow him into this
torrid air, where only forces and never principles are facts, and where
nothing is reality but the violent triumph of arbitrarily imposed will.
There was once a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek and
cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste energy and hope in
seeking lights which it is not given to man ever to find, with a solemn
assurance added that in frank and untrembling recognition of
circumstance the spirit of man may find a priceless, ever-fruitful
contentment. The prolonged and thousand-times repeated glorification of
Unconsciousness, Silence, Renunciation, all comes to this: We are to
leave the region of things unknowable, and hold fast to the duty that
lies nearest. Here is the Everlasting Yea. In action only can we have
certainty.
* * * * *
The reticences of men are often only less full of meaning than their
most pregnant speech; and Mr. Carlyle's unbroken silence upon the modern
validity and truth of religious creeds says much. The fact that he
should have taken no distinct side in the great debate as to revelation,
salvation, inspiration, and the other theological issues that agitate
and divide a community where theology is now mostly verbal, has been the
subject of some comment, and has had the effect of adding one rather
peculiar side to the many varieties of his influence. Many in the
dogmatic stage have been content to think that as he was not avowedly
against them, he might be with them, and sacred persons have been known
to draw their most strenuous inspirations from the chief denouncer of
phantasms and exploded formulas. Only once, when speaking of Sterling's
undertaking the clerical burden, does he burst out into unmistakable
description of the old Jew stars that have now gone out, and wrath
against those who would persuade us that these stars are still aflame
and the only ones. That this reserve has been wise in its day, and has
most usefully widened the tide and scope of the teacher's popularity,
one need not dispute. There are conditions when indirect solvents are
most powerful, as there are others, which these have done much to
prepare, when no lover of truth will stoop to declarations other than
direct. Mr. Carlyle has assailed the dogmatic temper in religion, and
this is work that goes deeper than to assail dogmas.
Not even Comte himself has harder words for metaphysics than Mr.
Carlyle. 'The disease of Metaphysics' is perennial. Questions of Death
and Immortality, Origin of Evil, Freedom and Necessity, are ever
appearing and attempting to shape something of the universe. 'And ever
unsuccessfully: for what theorem of the Infinite can the Finite render
complete?... Metaphysical Speculation as it begins in No or Nothingness,
so it must needs end in nothingness; circulates and must circulate in
endless vortices; creating, swallowing--itself.'[9] Again, on the other
side, he sets his face just as firmly against the excessive pretensions
and unwarranted certitudes of the physicist. 'The course of Nature's
phases on this our little fraction of a Planet is partially known to us:
but who knows what deeper courses these depend on; what infinitely
larger Cycle (of causes) our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow
every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident may have become
familiar; but does the Minnow understand the Ocean tides and periodic
Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's Eclipses, by all
which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time
to time (_un_-miraculously enough) be quite overset and reversed? Such a
minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable
All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious course of
Providence through Æons of Æons.'[10] The inalterable relativity of
human knowledge has never been more forcibly illustrated; and the two
passages together fix the limits of that knowledge with a sagacity truly
philosophic. Between the vagaries of mystics and the vagaries of
physicists lies the narrow land of rational certainty, relative,
conditional, experimental, from which we view the vast realm that
stretches out unknown before us, and perhaps for ever unknowable;
inspiring men with an elevated awe, and environing the interests and
duties of their little lives with a strange sublimity. 'We emerge from
the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge
again into the Inane.... But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not;
Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery.'[11]
[9] 'Characteristics,' _Misc. Ess._, iii. pp. 356-358. Rousseau in the
same way makes the Savoyard Vicar declare that '_jamais le jargon de la
métaphysique n'a fait découvrir une seule vérité, et il a rempli la
philosophie d'absurdités dont on a honte, sitôt qu'on les dépouille de
leurs grands mots_.'--_Emile_, liv. iv.
[10] _Sartor Resartus_, bk. iii. ch. viii. p. 249.
[11] _Ib._ p. 257.
Natural Supernaturalism, the title of one of the cardinal chapters in
Mr. Carlyle's cardinal book, is perhaps as good a name as another for
this two-faced yet integral philosophy, which teaches us to behold with
cheerful serenity the great gulf which is fixed round our faculty and
existence on every side, while it fills us with that supreme sense of
countless unseen possibilities, and of the hidden, undefined movements
of shadow and light over the spirit, without which the soul of man falls
into hard and desolate sterility. In youth, perhaps, it is the latter
aspect of Mr. Carlyle's teaching which first touches people, because
youth is the time of indefinite aspiration; and it is easier, besides,
to surrender ourselves passively to these vague emotional impressions,
than to apply actively and contentedly to the duty that lies nearest,
and to the securing of 'that infinitesimallest product' on which the
teacher is ever insisting. It is the Supernaturalism which stirs men
first, until larger fulness of years and wider experience of life draw
them to a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in Naturalism. This last
is the mood which Mr. Carlyle never wearies of extolling and enjoining
under the name of Belief; and the absence of it, the inability to enter
into it, is that Unbelief which he so bitterly vituperates, or, in
another phrase, that Discontent, which he charges with holding the soul
in such desperate and paralysing bondage.
Indeed, what is it that Mr. Carlyle urges upon us but the search for
that Mental Freedom, which under one name or another has been the goal
and ideal of all highest minds that have reflected on the true
constitution of human happiness? His often enjoined Silence is the first
condition of this supreme kind of liberty, for what is silence but the
absence of a self-tormenting assertiveness, the freedom from excessive
susceptibility under the speech of others, one's removal from the
choking sandy wilderness of wasted words? Belief is the mood which
emancipates us from the paralysing dubieties of distraught souls, and
leaves us full possession of ourselves by furnishing an unshaken and
inexpugnable base for action and thought, and subordinating passion to
conviction. Labour, again, perhaps the cardinal article in the creed, is
at once the price of moral independence, and the first condition of that
fulness and accuracy of knowledge, without which we are not free, but
the bounden slaves of prejudice, unreality, darkness, and error. Even
Renunciation of self is in truth only the casting out of those
disturbing and masterful qualities which oppress and hinder the free,
natural play of the worthier parts of character. In renunciation we thus
restore to self its own diviner mind.