CARLYLE'S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT
Through all the material struggles Carlyle's mind at Craigenputtock was
gradually shaping itself round a theory of the Universe and Man, from
which he drew inspiration in his future life work. Through his
contributions to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable an original
vein of thought and feeling which had its origin in the study of German
literature. Carlyle's studies and musings took coherent, or, as some
would say incoherent, shape in _Sartor Resartus_,--a book which
appropriately was written in the stern solitude of Craigenputtock.
In order to acquire an adequate understanding of Carlyle as a thinker,
attention has to be paid to the two dominating influences of his mental
life--his early home training and German literature. In regard to the
former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much. He came of a sturdy
Covenanting stock. Carlyle himself has left a graphic description of the
religious environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father
belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a certain John
Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first Latin, worshipped in a little
house thatched with heath. Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the
rugged heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a
photograph: 'Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when
I look back.... Most figures of them in my time were hoary old men; men
so like evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and gentlemen of
Christ I have nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal clergy in any
country in the world.... Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of
those old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names,
employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew, but whose portraits
are yet clear to me as in a mirror. Their heavy-laden, patient,
ever-attentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away,
wife away for ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like
a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of
these good people, their well-saved coarse old clothes, tailed
waistcoats down to mid-thigh--all this I occasionally see as with eyes
sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon
it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the
drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them.' And what a
glimpse we have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting
religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David Hope, the farmer
who refused to postpone family worship in order to take in his grain.
David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with the
words: 'Such a raging wind risen will drive the stooks into the sea if
let alone.' 'Wind!' answered David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has
been appointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' Far away from the
simple Covenanting creed of his father and mother Carlyle wandered, but
to the last the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained vivid
with him, though fed from quite other sources than the Bible and the
_Shorter Catechism_.
Much has been said of Carlyle's father, but it is highly probable that
to his mother he owed most during his early years. The temperament of
the Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like James Carlyle
were essentially stern, self-centred, unemotional. Fighting like the
Jews, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they had no time
for cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to go to the
stake on behalf of religious liberty, they exercised a repressive, not
to say despotic, influence in their own households. With them education
meant not the unfolding of the individual powers of the children, but
the ruthless crushing of them into a theological mould. Religion in such
an atmosphere became loveless rather than lovely, and might have had
serious influences of a reactionary nature but for the caressing
tenderness of the mother. With a heart which overflowed the ordinary
theological boundaries, the mother in many sweet and hidden ways
supplied the emotional element, which had been crushed out of the father
by a narrow conception of life and duty. Carlyle's experience may be
judged from his references to his parents. He always speaks of his
father with profound respect and admiration; towards his mother his
heart goes forth with a devotion which became stronger as the years
rolled on. Carlyle's love of his mother was as beautiful as it was
sacred. Long after Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood,
his heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His system of
thought, indeed, might well be defined as Calvinism minus Christianity.
Had Carlyle not come into contact with German thought, he would probably
have jogged along the path of literature in more or less conventional
fashion. In fact, nothing is more remarkable than the comparatively
commonplace nature of Carlyle's early contributions to literature.
Germany touched the deepest chords of his nature. With German ideas and
emotions his mind was saturated, and _Sartor Resartus_ was the outcome.
To that book students must go for a glance into Carlyle's mind while he
was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence. In June 1821, as Mr
Froude tells us, took place what may be called Carlyle's conversion--his
triumph over his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To understand
this phase of Carlyle's life, we must pause for a little to consider
German literature, whence Carlyle derived spiritual relief and
consolation.
What, then, was the nature of the message of peace which Germany,
through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, brought to the storm-tossed soul of
Carlyle? When Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic
conceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were struggling
for mastery in the field of thought. The orthodox conception, into which
he had been born, and with which his father and mother had fronted the
Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern thought. Carlyle's
belief in Christianity as a revelation seems to have dropped from him
without much of a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot.
His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual hunger, from an
inability to fill the place vacated by the old beliefs. Had he lived
fifty years earlier, Carlyle would have been invited to find salvation
in the easy-going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, or to
content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity known as Moderatism.
Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers of Edinburgh taught
that this was the best possible world, and that the highest wisdom
consisted in frowning upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable.
The French Revolution had revolutionised men's thoughts and feelings.
There had been revealed to man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or
Mechanical philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, had
done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. Carlyle could find no
spiritual sustenance in the purely mechanical theory of life which was
offered as the substitute for the theory of the Churches. There was
another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to which Carlyle
clung when he could no longer keep hold of the Supernatural. In
Transcendentalism, Carlyle found salvation.
What are the leading conceptions of the German form of salvation? The
answer to this will give the key to _Sartor Resartus_, and to Carlyle's
whole mental outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the great
objection to Christianity was the breach it made between the natural and
the supernatural. Between them there was a great gulf which could only
fitfully and temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students who were
being inoculated with scientific ideas of law and order, were bewildered
by a theory of life which had no organic relation to the great germinal
ideas of the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, the
French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in which everything, from
the movements of solar masses to the movements of the soul, were
interpreted in terms of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the
Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much of its charm, and
stunted the emotions on the side of wonder and admiration. The world was
reduced to a vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary
embodiment of material particles in a highly complex and unique form.
Instead of being what it was to the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the
Universe to the materialist resembled a prison in which the walls
gradually closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed under the
ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression made upon him by the
materialistic view of life. As he says, 'The materialistic theory, which
reduces all things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, so
Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.'
_Sartor Resartus_ is studded with vigorous protests against the
mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just as distasteful to Carlyle, and
equally mechanical in spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as
a huge clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock-maker, whose
duty consisted in seeing that the clock kept good time and was in all
respects thoroughly reliable. The Germans attacked the problem from the
other side. They did not abolish the supernatural with the materialists,
or seek it in another world with the theologians; they found the
supernatural in the natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel and Goethe had one reply:--Reduce matter to its
constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize the principle of
life; it evades you like a spirit; in this principle everything lives
and moves and has its being. German philosophy from Kant has been
occupied in attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great
process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe attempted to represent
this as the energising principle of life and duty. The spiritual cannot
be weighed in the scales of logic; it refuses to be put upon the
dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things is best seen by
the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper, from his mechanical and
utilitarian standpoint, sees not the Divine vision. This has been called
Pantheism. Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and
Materialism, and is the root thought of _Sartor Resartus_, which may be
taken as Carlyle's Confession of Faith. A few extracts will justify the
foregoing analysis. The transcendental view of Nature is expressed by
Carlyle thus:--'Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with scientific
nomenclature, experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing,
to be bottled up in Leyden jars, and sold over counter; but the native
sense of man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, proclaims
it to be a living thing--ah, an unspeakable, God-like thing, towards
which the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe,
devout prostration and humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then
in silence.' Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in its tone: 'For
Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit; the manifestation of
Spirit, were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible,
nay, the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible,
what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher celestial Invisible,
unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright.'
The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take their root in his
speculative view of the Universe--a view which demands careful analysis
if the student hopes to understand Carlyle's strength and weakness. It
is not meant that Carlyle's mind remained anchored to the philosophic
idealism of _Sartor_. In later days he professed contempt for
transcendental moonshine, but his contempt was for the form and jargon
of the schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to the end.
After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage, his views took more and
more an anthropomorphic mould, till in many of his writings he seems
practically a Theist. But at root Carlyle's thought was more
Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the German conception of
the Ultimate Reality? The German answer grew out of an attempt to get
rid of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the father of all the
Empiricists, in giving logical effect to Berkeleyism, concluded that
just as we know nothing of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so
of the inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental impressions. We
can combine and recombine these impressions as we choose, but from them
we cannot deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of mind.
Hume would not sanction belief in causation as a universal law. All that
could be said was that certain things happened in a certain manner so
frequently as to give rise to a law of expectation. But this is not to
solve, but to evade the problem? We are still driven to ask, What is
matter? What is motion? What is force? How do we get our knowledge of
the material world, and is that knowledge reliable? These are wide
questions that cannot be adequately handled here. It was a favourite
argument of Comte and his followers, that man's first conceptions of
Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they were anthropomorphic.
Theology was, therefore, dethroned without ceremony. But science is as
anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee that the great facts
of Nature are as we think them. We talk of Force, but our idea of Force
is taken from experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature. It is
well known, for example, that the secondary qualities of objects,
colour, &c., do not exist in Nature. Our personality is so inextricably
mixed with the material universe that it is impossible to formulate a
philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a product of Nature, and
which sharply defines the provinces of the two.
But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism promises
to perform. Idealism is simply Materialism turned upside down. The only
difference between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that the
one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all practical purposes, it
signifies little whether mind is the temporary embodiment of an idea, or
the temporary product of a highly specialised form of matter. In either
case, man has no more freedom than the bubble upon the surface of the
stream. We may discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically
as we please, the result is the same--absorption in the universal.
Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves man a prisoner in the hands of
Fate. The only difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the
prisoner's neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegelianism adds fringes
and embroidery. If there is no appeal from Nature's dread sentence, the
less poetry and embroidery there is about the doleful business the
better.
In _Sartor Resartus_, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely, of the peace
which came over his soul when he discovered that the universe was not
mechanical but Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What
consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not appear in his life.
What a contrast between the poetic optimism of _Sartor_ and the
heavily-charged pessimism of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos,
exclaims that God does nothing. Carlyle's life abundantly illustrates
the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland, Idealism sinks into
scepticism more bitter and gloomy than the unbelief of Naturalism.
Carlyle approached the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong
standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed. A poet, he had the
poetic dread of analysis, and his spirit revolted at the spectacle of
Nature on the dissecting-table. He waged a life-long warfare against
science. As the present writer has elsewhere remarked:--'Carlyle never
could tolerate the evolution theory. He always spoke with the utmost
contempt of Darwin, and everything pertaining to the development
doctrines. It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an
evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism between Carlyle and
Spencer disappears on closer inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the
universe as in very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us
that through every crystal and through every grass blade, but most
through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams, he is
simply saying in the language of poetry what Spencer says in the
language of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained and
energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution is as emphatic as
Carlyle on the absolute distinction between right and wrong. Carlyle and
all the German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the Kantian
categorical imperative. Surely the Evolutionists in the matter of an
imperative out-rival the Intuitionalists, when, in addition to the
dictates of conscience, they can call as a witness and sanction to
morality the testimony of all-embracing experience. In his famous
saying, Might is Right, Carlyle was unconsciously formulating one aspect
of evolutionary ethics. Carlyle did not mean anything so silly as that
brute force and ethical sanctions are identical; what he meant was that
in the long run Righteousness will prove the mightiest force in the
universe. What is this but another version of the Spencerian doctrine of
the survival of the fittest, which, in the most highly evolved state of
society, will mean the survival of the best? In the highest social state
the only Might that will survive will be the Might which is rooted in
Right. Carlyle's contemptuous attitude towards science is deeply to be
deplored. He waged bitter warfare against the evolution theory, quite
oblivious of the fact that by means of it there was revealed a deeper
insight into the Power behind Nature, and into the ethical constitution
of the universe, than ever entered into the minds of transcendental
philosophers.'
It is taken for granted that Carlyle's thoughts have no organic unity.
He is looked upon as a stimulating, but confused, writer, as a thinker
of original, but incoherent, power. True, he has not a logical mind, and
pays no deference to the canons of the schools or the market-place. But
there is a method in Carlyle's apparent caprice. When analysed, his
thoughts are discovered to have unity. His transcendentalism embraces
the ethic as well as the cosmic side of life. In the sphere of morals,
as of science, his writings are one long tumultuous protest against the
mechanical philosophy and the utilitarian theory of morals. From his
essay on Voltaire we take the following:--'It is contended by many that
our mere love of personal Pleasure or Happiness, as it is called, acting
in every individual with such clearness as he may easily have, will of
itself lead him to respect the rights of others, and wisely employ his
own.... Without some belief in the necessary eternal, or, which is the
same thing, in the supra mundane divine nature of Virtue existing in
each individual, could the moral judgment of a thousand or a thousand
thousand individuals avail us'? More picturesquely, Carlyle denounces
the utilitarian system in these words: 'What then? Is the heroic
inspiration we name Virtue but some passion, some bubble of the blood,
bubbling in the direction others profit by? I know not; only this I
know. If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all
astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion, man may front much. But what
in these dull, unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience to the
diseases of the Liver? Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our
stronghold: there, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer
sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things _he_ has
provided for his Elect'! The exponent of such a theory of ethics will
have a natural distaste for the rational or calculating side of conduct.
He will depreciate the mechanical, and give undue emphasis to the
inspirational. His heroes will be not men of placid temperament,
methodical habits, and utilitarian aims, but men of mystical and
passionate natures, spasmodic in action, and guided by ideas not easily
justified at the bar of utility.
Just as in the sphere of speculative thought, he has profound contempt
for the Diderots and Voltaires, with their mechanical views of the
Universe, so in practical affairs Carlyle has contempt for the men who
endeavour to further their aims by appealing to commonplace motives by
means of commonplace methods. Specially opposed is he to the tendency of
the age to rely for progress, not upon appeals to the great elemental
forces of human nature, but upon organisations, committees, and all
kinds of mechanism. In his remarkable essay, 'Signs of the Times,' we
have ample verification of our exposition. After talking depreciatingly
of the mechanical tendency of the prevailing philosophies, Carlyle
comments upon the mechanical nature of the reforming agencies of
civilisation. The intense Egoism of his nature rebels against any kind
of Socialism or Collectivism. He says: 'Were we required to characterise
this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it,
not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Heroic Age, but, above
all, the Mechanical Age. It is the age of machinery in every outward and
inward sense of that word.... Men are grown mechanical in head and
heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour,
and in natural force of any kind.... We may trace this tendency in all
the great manifestations of our time: in its intellectual aspect, the
studies it most favours, and its manner of conducting them; in its
practical aspects, its politics, art, religious work; in the whole
sources, and throughout the whole current of its spiritual, no less than
its material, activity.' With Carlyle the secrets of Nature and Life
were discoverable, not so much by the intellect as by the heart. The man
with the large heart, rather than the clear head, saw furthest into the
nature of things. The history of German thought is strewn with the wreck
of systems based upon the Carlylian doctrine of intuition. Schelling and
Hegel showed the puerility to which great men are driven when they
started to construct science out of their own intuitions, instead of
patiently and humbly sitting down to study Nature. Tyndall has left on
record his gratitude to Carlyle. Tyndall had grip of the scientific
method, and was able to allow Carlyle's inspiration to play upon his
mind without fear of harm; but how many waverers has Carlyle driven from
the path of reason into the bogs of mysticism?
Carlyle's impatience with reasoning and his determination to follow the
promptings of _a priori_ conceptions gave his system of ethics a
one-sided cast, and made him needlessly aggressive towards what in his
day was called Utilitarianism, but what has now come to be known as
Evolutionary Ethics. What is the chief end of man considered as a moral
agent? The answer of the Christian religion is as intelligible as it is
comprehensive. Man's duty consists in obeying the laws of God revealed
in Nature and in the Bible. But apart from revelation, where is the
basis of ethical authority? Debarred from accepting the Christian view,
and instinctively repelled from Utilitarianism, Carlyle found refuge in
the Fichtean and similar systems of ethics. By substituting Blessedness
for Happiness as the aim of ethical endeavour, Carlyle endeavoured to
preserve the heroic attitude which was associated with Supernaturalism.
In his view, it was more consistent with human dignity to trust for
inspiration to a light within than painfully to piece together fragments
of human experience and ponder the inferences to be drawn therefrom.
In his 'Data of Ethics,' Herbert Spencer shows the hollowness of
Carlyle's distinction between Blessedness and Happiness. As Spencer puts
it: 'Obviously the implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of
Happiness, and this implication at once suggests the question, What mode
of feeling is this? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is
necessarily one of three states--painful, indifferent, or
pleasurable.... If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the
blessed life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only
by the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It is a life
which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end, and the
assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness lapses.... In
brief, blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence
increased happiness, positive or negative in some consciousness or
other; and disappears utterly if we assume that the actions called
blessed are known to cause decrease of happiness in others as well as in
the actor.'
To German philosophy and literature Carlyle owed his critical method, by
which he all but revolutionised criticism as understood by his Edinburgh
and London contemporaries. Carlyle began his apprenticeship with the
Edinburgh Reviewers, in whose hand criticism never lost its political
bias. Apart from that, criticism up till the time of Carlyle was mainly
statical. The critic was a kind of literary book-keeper who went upon
the double-entry system. On one page were noted excellences, on the
other defects, and when the two columns were _totalled_ the debtor and
creditor side of the transaction was set forth. Where, as in the cases
of Burns and Byron, genius was complicated with moral aberration,
anything like a correct estimate was impossible. The result was that in
Scotland criticism oscillated between the ethical severity of the pulpit
and the daring laxity of free thought. As the Edinburgh Reviewers could
not afford to set the clergy at defiance, they had to pay due respect to
conventional tastes and standards. Carlyle faced the question from a
different standpoint. He introduced into criticism the dynamic principle
which he found in the Germans, particularly in Goethe. In contemplating
a work of Art, the Germans talk much of the importance of seizing upon
the creative spirit, what Hegel called the Idea. The thought of Goethe
and Hegel, though differently expressed, resolves itself into the
conception of a life principle which shapes materials into harmony with
innate forms. In the sphere of life the determining factors are the
inner vitalities, which, however, are susceptible to the environment.
The critic who would realise his ideal does not go about with literary
and ethical tape-lines: he seeks to understand the spirit which animated
the author as shewn in his works and his life, and then studies the
influence of his environment. That this is a correct description of
Carlyle's critical method is evidenced by his own remarks in his essay
on Burns. He says: 'If an individual is really of consequence enough to
have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have
always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with
all the springs and relations of his character. How did the world and
man's life from his particular position represent themselves to his
mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without: how
did he modify these from within?'
This attention to the inner springs of character gives the key to
Carlyle's critical work. How fruitful this was is seen in his essay on
Burns. He steered an even course between the stern moralists, whose
indignation at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to the genius of
Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemians, who thought that by bidding
defiance to the conventionalities and moralities Burns proved his title
to the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly with us in much
spirituous devotion and rhymeless doggerel at the return of each 25th of
January. While laying bare the springs of Burns' genius, Carlyle, with
unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak point in the poet's
moral nature. So faithfully did Carlyle apply his critical method that
he may be considered to have said the final word about Burns.
When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral force he must have had in
his mind the ethical tone of Carlyle's critical writing--a tone which
had its roots in the idea that judgment upon a man should be determined,
not by isolated deviations from conventional or even ethical standards,
but by consideration of the deep springs of character from which flow
aspirations and ideals. In his _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ Carlyle
elaborates his critical theory thus: 'On the whole, we make too much of
faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults?
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who
is called there "the man according to God's own heart?" David, the
Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough--blackest crimes--there was no
want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask: Is this your
man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a
shallow one. What are faults? What are the outward details of a life, if
the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled,
never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten?... The deadliest sin, I say,
were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin: that is death....
David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I
consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress
and warfare here below.'
This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to invest with a new and
living interest large sections of literary criticism. Burns, Johnson,
Cromwell and others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the
hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied with the facile
criticism of conventional reviewers, it was a revelation to come into
contact with a writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind great
inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical outlook; it was like
stepping out of a museum, or a dissecting-room into the free, fresh,
breezy air of Nature.
Moreover, Carlyle's interest in the soul is not of an antiquarian
nature; he studies his heroes as if they were ancestors of the Carlyle
family. He broods over their letters as if they were the letters of his
own flesh and blood, and his comments resemble the soliloquisings of a
pathos stricken kinsman rather than the conscious reflections of a
literary man. It is noteworthy that Carlyle's critical powers are
limited by his sympathies. His method, though suggestive of scientific
criticism, is largely influenced by the personal equation. Face to face
with writers like Scott and Voltaire, he flounders in helpless
incompetency. He tries Scott, the writer of novels, by purely Puritan
standards. Because there is in Scott no signs of soul-struggles, no
conscious devotion to heroic ends, no introspective torturings, Carlyle
sets himself to a process of belittling. So with Voltaire. Carlyle's
failure in this sphere was due to the fact that he overdid the ethical
side of criticism and became a pulpiteer; he was false to his own
principle of endeavouring to seize the dominant idea. Because Scott and
Voltaire were not dominated by the Covenanting idea, Carlyle dealt with
them in a tone of disparagement. Carlyle admired Goethe, but he
certainly made no attempt to cultivate Goethe's catholicity. Let us not
fall into Carlyle's mistake, and condemn him for qualities which were
incompatible with his temperament. After all has been said, English
literature stands largely indebted to Carlyle the critic.