unbounded. Circumstance has fixed limits that no effort can transcend.
Novalis complained in bitter words, as we know, of the mechanical,
prosaic, utilitarian, cold-hearted character of _Wilhelm Meister_,
constituting it an embodiment of 'artistic Atheism,' while English
critics as loudly found fault with its author for being a mystic.
Exactly the same discrepancy is possible in respect of Mr. Carlyle's
own writings. In one sense he may be called mystic and transcendental,
in another baldly mechanical and even cold-hearted, just as Novalis
found Goethe to be in _Meister_. The latter impression is inevitable in
all who, like Goethe and like Mr. Carlyle, make a lofty acquiescence in
the positive course of circumstance a prime condition at once of wise
endeavour and of genuine happiness. The splendid fire and unmeasured
vehemence of Mr. Carlyle's manner partially veil the depth of this
acquiescence, which is really not so far removed from fatalism. The
torrent of his eloquence, bright and rushing as it is, flows between
rigid banks and over hard rocks. Devotion to the heroic does not prevent
the assumption of a tone towards the great mass of the unheroic, which
implies that they are no more than two-legged mill horses, ever treading
a fixed and unalterable round. He practically denies other consolation
to mortals than such as they may be able to get from the final and
conclusive Kismet of the oriental. It is fate. Man is the creature of
his destiny. As for our supposed claims on the heavenly powers: What
right, he asks, hadst thou even to be? Fatalism of this stamp is the
natural and unavoidable issue of a born positivity of spirit, uninformed
by scientific meditation. It exists in its coarsest and most childish
kind in adventurous freebooters of the type of Napoleon, and in a noble
and not egotistic kind in Oliver Cromwell's pious interpretation of the
order of events by the good will and providence of God.
Two conspicuous qualities of Carlylean doctrine flow from this fatalism,
or poetised utilitarianism, or illumined positivity. One of them is a
tolerably constant contempt for excessive nicety in moral distinctions,
and an aversion to the monotonous attitude of praise and blame. In a
country overrun and corroded to the heart, as Great Britain is, with
cant and a foul mechanical hypocrisy, this temper ought to have had its
uses in giving a much-needed robustness to public judgment. One might
suppose, from the tone of opinion among us, not only that the difference
between right and wrong marks the most important aspect of conduct,
which would be true; but that it marks the only aspect of it that
exists, or that is worth considering, which is most profoundly false.
Nowhere has Puritanism done us more harm than in thus leading us to take
all breadth, and colour, and diversity, and fine discrimination, out of
our judgments of men, reducing them to thin, narrow, and superficial
pronouncements upon the letter of their morality, or the precise
conformity of their opinions to accepted standards of truth, religious
or other. Among other evils which it has inflicted, this inability to
conceive of conduct except as either right or wrong, and,
correspondingly in the intellectual order, of teaching except as either
true or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit of _parti-pris_
which has led to the rooting of so much injustice, disorder, immobility,
and darkness in English intelligence. No excess of morality, we may be
sure, has followed this excessive adoption of the exclusively moral
standard. '_Quand il n'y a plus de principes dans le coeur_,' says De
Senancourt, '_on est bien scrupuleux sur les apparences publiques et sur
les devoirs d'opinion_.' We have simply got for our pains a most
unlovely leanness of judgment, and ever since the days when this temper
set in until now, when a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has steadily
and powerfully tended to straiten character, to make action mechanical,
and to impoverish art. As if there were nothing admirable in a man save
unbroken obedience to the letter of the moral law, and that letter read
in our own casual and local interpretation; and as if we had no
faculties of sympathy, no sense for the beauty of character, no feeling
for broad force and full-pulsing vitality.
To study manners and conduct and men's moral nature in such a way, is as
direct an error as it would be to overlook in the study of his body
everything except its vertebral column and the bony framework. The body
is more than mere anatomy. A character is much else besides being
virtuous or vicious. In many of the characters in which some of the
finest and most singular qualities of humanity would seem to have
reached their furthest height, their morality was the side least worth
discussing. The same may be said of the specific rightness or wrongness
of opinion in the intellectual order. Let us condemn error or
immorality, when the scope of our criticism calls for this particular
function, but why rush to praise or blame, to eulogy or reprobation,
when we should do better simply to explore and enjoy? Moral
imperfection is ever a grievous curtailment of life, but many exquisite
flowers of character, many gracious and potent things, may still thrive
in the most disordered scene.
The vast waste which this limitation of prospect entails is the most
grievous rejection of moral treasure, if it be true that nothing
enriches the nature like wide sympathy and many-coloured
appreciativeness. To a man like Macaulay, for example, criticism was
only a tribunal before which men were brought to be decisively tried by
one or two inflexible tests, and then sent to join the sheep on the one
hand, or the goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences
passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness
and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite
of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack.
Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding,
with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr.
Carlyle's essay on the same man. Mr. Carlyle knows as well as Macaulay
how blind and stupid a creed was English Toryism a century ago, but he
seizes and reproduces the character of his man, and this was much more
than a matter of a creed. So with Burns. He was drunken and unchaste and
thriftless, and Mr. Carlyle holds all these vices as deeply in
reprobation as if he had written ten thousand sermons against them; but
he leaves the fulmination to the hack moralist of the pulpit or the
press, with whom words are cheap, easily gotten, and readily thrown
forth. To him it seems better worth while, having made sure of some
sterling sincerity and rare genuineness of vision and singular human
quality, to dwell on, and do justice to that, than to accumulate
commonplaces as to the viciousness of vice. Here we may perhaps find the
explanation of the remarkable fact that though Mr. Carlyle has written
about a large number of men of all varieties of opinion and temperament,
and written with emphasis and point and strong feeling, yet there is
hardly one of these judgments, however much we may dissent from it,
which we could fairly put a finger upon as indecently absurd or futile.
Of how many writers of thirty volumes can we say the same?
That this broad and poetic temper of criticism has special dangers, and
needs to have special safeguards, is but too true. Even, however, if we
find that it has its excesses, we may forgive much to the merits of a
reaction against a system which has raised monstrous floods of sour cant
round about us, and hardened the hearts and parched the sympathies of
men by blasts from theological deserts. There is a point of view so
lofty and so peculiar that from it we are able to discern in men and
women something more than, and apart from, creed and profession and
formulated principle; which indeed directs and colours this creed and
principle as decisively as it is in its turn acted on by them, and this
is their character or humanity. The least important thing about Johnson
is that he was a Tory; and about Burns, that he drank too much and was
incontinent; and if we see in modern literature an increasing tendency
to mount to this higher point of view, this humaner prospect, there is
no living writer to whom we owe more for it than Mr. Carlyle. The same
principle which revealed the valour and godliness of Puritanism, has
proved its most efficacious solvent, for it places character on the
pedestal where Puritanism places dogma.
* * * * *
The second of the qualities which seem to flow from Mr. Carlyle's
fatalism, and one much less useful among such a people as the English,
is a deficiency of sympathy with masses of men. It would be easy enough
to find places where he talks of the dumb millions in terms of fine and
sincere humanity, and his feeling for the common pathos of the human
lot, as he encounters it in individual lives, is as earnest and as
simple, as it is invariably lovely and touching in its expression. But
detached passages cannot counterbalance the effect of a whole compact
body of teaching. The multitude stands between Destiny on the one side,
and the Hero on the other; a sport to the first, and as potter's clay to
the second. _'Dogs, would ye then live for ever?_' Frederick is truly or
fabulously said to have cried to a troop who hesitated to attack a
battery vomiting forth death and destruction. This is a measure of Mr.
Carlyle's own valuation of the store we ought to set on the lives of the
most. We know in what coarse outcome such an estimate of the dignity of
other life than the life heroic has practically issued; in what
barbarous vindication of barbarous law-breaking in Jamaica, in what
inhuman softness for slavery, in what contemptuous and angry words for
'Beales and his 50,000 roughs,' contrasted with gentle words for our
precious aristocracy, with 'the politest and gracefullest kind of woman'
to wife. Here is the end of the Eternal Verities, when one lets them
bulk so big in his eyes as to shut out that perishable speck, the human
race.
'They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen,' he says in one
place, 'what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, that this world
is after all but a show--a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All
deep souls see into that.'[12] Yes; but deep souls dealing with the
practical questions of society, do well to thrust the vision as far from
them as they can, and to suppose that this world is no show, and
happiness and misery not mere appearances, but the keenest realities
that we can know. The difference between virtue and vice, between wisdom
and folly, is only phenomenal, yet there is difference enough. 'What
_shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!_' Burke cried in the
presence of an affecting incident. Yet the consciousness of this made
him none the less careful, minute, patient, systematic, in examining a
policy, or criticising a tax. Mr. Carlyle, on the contrary, falls back
on the same reflection for comfort in the face of political confusions
and difficulties and details, which he has not the moral patience to
encounter scientifically. Unable to dream of swift renovation and wisdom
among men, he ponders on the unreality of life, and hardens his heart
against generations that will not know the things that pertain unto
their peace. He answers to one lifting up some moderate voice of protest
in favour of the masses of mankind, as his Prussian hero did: '_Ah, you
do not know that damned race!_'[13]
[12] _Hero-Worship_, p. 43.
[13] Carlyle's _Frederick_, vi. 363.
* * * * *
There is no passage which Mr. Carlyle so often quotes as the sublime--
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
If the ever present impression of this awful, most moving, yet most
soothing thought, be a law of spiritual breadth and height, there is
still a peril in it. Such an impression may inform the soul with a
devout mingled sense of grandeur and nothingness, or it may blacken into
cynicism and antinomian living for self and the day. It may be a solemn
and holy refrain, sounding far off but clear in the dusty course of work
and duty; or it may be the comforting chorus of a diabolic drama of
selfishness and violence. As a reaction against religious theories which
make humanity over-abound in self-consequence, and fill individuals with
the strutting importance of creatures with private souls to save or
lose, even such cynicism as Byron's was wholesome and nearly
forgivable. Nevertheless, the most important question that we can ask of
any great teacher, as of the walk and conversation of any commonest
person, remains this--how far has he strengthened and raised the
conscious and harmonious dignity of humanity; how stirred in men and
women, many or few, deeper and more active sense of the worth and
obligation and innumerable possibilities, not of their own little lives,
one or another, but of life collectively; how heightened the
self-respect of the race? There is no need to plant oneself in a fool's
paradise, with no eye for the weakness of men, the futility of their
hopes, the irony of their fate, the dominion of the satyr and the tiger
in their hearts. Laughter has a fore-place in life. All this we may see
and show that we see, and yet so throw it behind the weightier facts of
nobleness and sacrifice, of the boundless gifts which fraternal union
has given, and has the power of giving, as to kindle in every breast,
not callous to exalted impressions, the glow of sympathetic endeavour,
and of serene exultation in the bond that makes 'precious the soul of
man to man.'
This renewal of moral energy by spiritual contact with the mass of men,
and by meditation on the destinies of mankind, is the very reverse of
Mr. Carlyle's method. With him, it is good to leave the mass, and fall
down before the individual, and be saved by him. The victorious hero is
the true Paraclete. 'Nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.' And this
is really the kernel of the Carlylean doctrine. The whole human race
toils and moils, straining and energising, doing and suffering things
multitudinous and unspeakable under the sun, in order that like the
aloe-tree it may once in a hundred years produce a flower. It is this
hero that age offers to age, and the wisest worship him. Time and nature
once and again distil from out of the lees and froth of common humanity
some wondrous character, of a potent and reviving property hardly short
of miraculous. This the man who knows his own good cherishes in his
inmost soul as a sacred thing, an elixir of moral life. The Great Man is
'the light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the
world; a flowing light fountain, in whose radiance all souls feel that
it is well with them.' This is only another form of the anthropomorphic
conceptions of deity. The divinity of the ordinary hierophant is clothed
in the minds of the worshippers with the highest human qualities they
happen to be capable of conceiving, and this is the self-acting
machinery by which worship refreshes and recruits what is best in man.
Mr. Carlyle has another way. He carries the process a step further,
giving back to the great man what had been taken for beings greater than
any man, and summoning us to trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of
heroic chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many mansions, the
boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond polytheism. But each altar is
individual and apart, and the reaction of this isolation upon the
egotistic instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident. It is
good for us to build temples to great names which recall special
transfigurations of humanity; but it is better still, it gives a firmer
nerve to purpose and adds a finer holiness to the ethical sense, to
carry ever with us the unmarked, yet living tradition of the voiceless
unconscious effort of unnumbered millions of souls, flitting lightly
away like showers of thin leaves, yet ever augmenting the elements of
perfectness in man, and exalting the eternal contest.
Mr. Carlyle has indeed written that generation stands indissolubly woven
with generation; 'how we inherit, not Life only, but all the garniture
and form of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel, as our
fathers and primeval grandfathers from the beginning have given it to
us;' how 'mankind is a living, indivisible whole.'[14] Even this,
however, with the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in
connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not incorporated with
the body of the writer's doctrine. It does not neutralise the general
lack of faith in the cultivable virtue of masses of men, nor the
universal tone of humoristic cynicism with which all but a little band,
the supposed salt of the earth, are treated. Man is for Mr. Carlyle, as
for the Calvinistic theologian, a fallen and depraved being, without
much hope, except for a few of the elect. The best thing that can happen
to the poor creature is that he should be thoroughly well drilled. In
other words, society does not really progress in its bulk; and the
methods which were conditions of the original formation and growth of
the social union, remain indispensable until the sound of the last
trump. Was there not a profound and far-reaching truth wrapped up in
Goethe's simple yet really inexhaustible monition, that if we would
improve a man, it were well to let him believe that we already think him
that which we would have him to be. The law that _noblesse oblige_ has
unwritten bearings in dealing with all men; all masses of men are
susceptible of an appeal from that point: for this Mr. Carlyle seems to
make no allowance.
[14] 'Organic Filaments' in the _Sartor_, bk. iii. ch. vii.
Every modification of society is one of the slow growths of time, and to
hurry impatiently after them by swift ways of military discipline and
peremptory law-making, is only to clasp the near and superficial good.
It is easy to make a solitude and call it peace, to plant an iron heel
and call it order. But read Mr. Carlyle's essay on Dr. Francia, and then
ponder the history of Paraguay for these later years and the accounts of
its condition in the newspapers of to-day. 'Nay, it may be,' we learn
from that remarkable piece, 'that the benefit of him is not even yet
exhausted, even yet entirely become visible. Who knows but, in unborn
centuries, Paragueno men will look back to their lean iron Francia, as
men do in such cases to the one veracious person, and institute
considerations?'[15] Who knows, indeed, if only it prove that their
lean iron Francia, in his passion for order and authority, did not stamp
out the very life of the nation? Where organic growths are concerned,
patience is the sovereign law; and where the organism is a society of
men, the vital principle is a sense in one shape or another of the
dignity of humanity. The recognition of this tests the distinction
between the truly heroic ruler of the stamp of Cromwell, and the
arbitrary enthusiast for external order like Frederick. Yet in more than
one place Mr. Carlyle accepts the fundamental principle of democracy.
'It is curious to consider now,' he says once, 'with what fierce,
deep-breathed doggedness the poor English Nation, drawn by their
instincts, held fast upon it [the Spanish War of Walpole's time, in
Jenkins' Ear Question], and would take no denial of it, as if they had
surmised and seen. For the instincts of simple, guileless persons
(liable to be counted stupid by the unwary) are sometimes of prophetic
nature, and spring from the deep places of this universe!'[16] If the
writer of this had only thought it out to the end, and applied the
conclusions thereof to history and politics, what a difference it would
have made.
[15] _Misc. Ess._ vi. 124.
[16] _Frederick_, iv. 390.
* * * * *
No criticism upon either Mr. Carlyle or any other modern historian,
possessed of speculative quality, would be in any sense complete which
should leave out of sight his view of the manner and significance of the
break-up of the old European structure. The historian is pretty sure to
be guided in his estimate of the forces which have contributed to
dissolution in the past, by the kind of anticipation which he entertains
of the probable course of reconstruction. Like Comte, in his ideas of
temporal reconstruction, Mr. Carlyle goes back to something like the
forms of feudalism for the model of the industrial organisation of the
future; but in the spiritual order he is as far removed as possible from
any semblance of that revival of the old ecclesiastical forms without
the old theological ideas, which is the corner-stone of Comte's edifice.
To the question whether mankind gained or lost by the French Revolution,
Mr. Carlyle nowhere gives a clear answer; indeed, on this subject more
even than any other, he clings closely to his favourite method of simple
presentation, streaked with dramatic irony. No writer shows himself more
alive to the enormous moment to all Europe of that transaction; but we
hear no word from him on the question whether we have more reason to
bless or curse an event that interrupted, either subsequently to retard
or to accelerate, the transformation of the West from a state of war, of
many degrees of social subordination, of religious privilege, of
aristocratic administration, into a state of peaceful industry, of equal
international rights, of social equality, of free and equal tolerance of
creeds. That this process was going on prior to 1789 is undeniable. Are
we really nearer to the permanent establishment of the new order, for
what was done between 1789 and 1793? or were men thrown off the right
track of improvement by a movement which turned exclusively on abstract
rights, which dealt with men's ideas and habits as if they were
instantaneously pliable before the aspirations of any government, and
which by its violent and inconsiderate methods drove all these who
should only have been friends of order into being the enemies of
progress as well? There are many able and honest and republican men who
in their hearts suspect that the latter of the two alternatives is the
more correct description of what has happened. Mr. Carlyle is as one who
does not hear the question. He draws its general moral lesson from the
French Revolution, and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns,
from king to churl, that imposture must come to an end. But for the
precise amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for
the political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its
dramatic significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject,
nor even evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.