CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE
It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and the sociologist
to be superseded. In the march of events the specialist is fated to be
left behind. The influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As
the present writer has elsewhere said:--Carlyle has been called a
prophet. The word in these days has only a vague meaning. Probably
Carlyle earned the name in consequence of the oracular and denunciatory
elements in his later writings. Then, again, the word prophet has come
to be associated with the thought of a foreteller of future events. A
prophet in the true sense of the word is not one who foretells the
future, but one who revives and keeps alive in the minds of his
contemporaries a vivid sense of the great elemental facts of life. Why
is it that the Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of
temperament and all degrees of culture? Because in it, especially in the
Psalms, Job, and the writings of Isaiah and his brother prophets,
serious people are brought face to face with the great mysteries, God,
Nature, Man, Death, etc.--mysteries, however, which only rush in upon
the soul of man in full force on special occasions, in hours of lonely
meditation, or by the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life
the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, Eternities, and
Silences, become so weak that even good men have sorrowfully to admit
that they live lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it:
"Each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will."
The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate utterance to keep
alive in the minds of his countrymen a deep, abiding sense of life's
mystery, sacredness, and solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle
did for the moderns. In the whole range of modern literature, it is
impossible to match Carlyle's magnificent passages in _Sartor Resartus_,
in which, under a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal
emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form the warp and woof of
human life.
Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to those mechanical
scientists who imagine that Nature can be measured by tape-lines, and
duly labelled in museums:--
'System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature
remains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all
Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and
measured square-miles. 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, of its little native Creek 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
(_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 Aeons of Aeons. We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a
Volume it is,--whose Author and Writer is God.'
Agree or disagree with Carlyle's views of the Ultimate Reality as we
may, there can be nothing but harmony with the spirit which breathes in
the following:--
'Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou the "Living
Garment of God"? O Heavens, is it in very deed, He, then, that ever
speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves
in me?
'Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, and
Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than
Dayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice
to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping in unknown tumults;
like soft streamings of celestial music to my too-exasperated heart,
came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a
charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my Father's!'
The mystery and fleetingness of life with its awful counterpart death,
are the commonplaces of every hour, but who but Carlyle has rendered
them with such inspirational power?
'Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body; and
forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What
Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of
Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science;
one madly dashed to pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his
fellow:--and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls
away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some
wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this
mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding
grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created,
fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully
across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's
mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage; can the
Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality
and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped
in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But
whence?--O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that
it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.
'We _are such stuff_
As Dreams are made of, and our little Life
Is rounded with a sleep?'
A fervid perception of the evanescence and sorrows of life is the root
of Carlyle's pathos, which is unsurpassed in literature. It leads him to
some beautiful contrasts between childhood and manhood, positively
idyllic in their charm.
'Happy season of Childhood!' exclaims Teufelsdroeckh: 'Kind Nature, that
art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut with
auroral radiance; and for thy Nurseling hast provided a soft swathing of
Love and infinite Hope, wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced-round
(_umgaeukelt_) by sweetest Dreams! If the paternal Cottage still shuts us
in, its roof still screens us; with a Father we have as yet a prophet,
priest and king, and an Obedience that makes us Free. The young spirit
has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time; as yet
Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean; years to
the child are as ages; ah! the secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or
quicker decay and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric,
from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in
a motionless Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling
Universe is forever denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair
Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou
too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles;
thou too, with old Arnauld, must say in stern patience: "Rest? Rest?
Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?" Celestial Nepenthe! though a
Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee
not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the
eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For, as yet, sleep and
waking are one: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and
everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if
in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no
fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stone fruit, of which the fewest can
find the kernel.'
Carlyle's pathos touches its most sombre mood when he is dwelling upon
the common incidents of daily life as painted on the background of
Eternity. In his '_Cromwell_,' he breaks forth in a beautiful meditation
while dealing with a commonplace reference in one of the letters of
Cromwell:--'Mrs St John came down to breakfast every morning in that
summer visit of the year 1638, and Sir William said grave grace, and
they spake polite devout things to one another, and they are vanished,
they and their things and speeches,--all silent like the echoes of the
old nightingales that sang that season, like the blossoms of the old
roses. O Death! O Time!'
Severe comment has been made upon Carlyle's attitude towards science.
There was this excuse for his contemptuous attitude--science in its
early days fell into the hands of Dryasdusts. So absorbed were these men
in analysing Nature, that they missed the sense of mystery and beauty
which is the essence of all poetry and all religion. In the hands of the
Dryasdusts, Nature was converted into a museum in which everything was
duly labelled. During the mania for analysis, it was forgotten that
there is a great difference between the description and the explanation
of phenomena. In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle rescues science from the grip
of the pedant and restores it to the poet. 'Wonder, is the basis of
Worship; the reign of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man; only
at certain stages (as the present), it is, for some short season, a
reign _in partibus infidelium_.' That progress of Science, which is to
destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration,
finds small favour with Teufelsdroeckh, much as he otherwise venerates
these two latter processes.
'Shall your Science,' exclaims he, 'proceed in the small chink-lighted,
or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind
become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere
Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you
call Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which
the scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's
in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it alive, could prosecute
without shadow of a heart,--but one other of the mechanical and menial
handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too
noble an organ? I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps
poisonous; at best, dies like Cookery with the day that called it forth;
does not live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading
harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase to all Time.'
* * * * *
'The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and
worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried
the whole _Mecanique Celeste_ and _Hegel's Philosophy_, and the epitome
of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single
head,--is but a pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let
those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.'
In the sphere of ethics, Carlyle's influence has been inspirational in
the highest sense. To a generation which had to choose between the
ethics of a conventional theology and the ethics of a cold, prosaic
utilitarianism, Carlyle's treatment of the whole subject of duty came as
a revelation. If in the sphere of social relationships he did not
contribute to the settlement of the theoretic side of complex problems,
he did what was equally important--he roused earnest minds to a sense of
the urgency and magnitude of the problem, awakened the feeling of
individual responsibility, and quickened the sense of social duty which
had grown weak during the reign of _laissez faire_. If Carlyle had no
final message for mankind, if he brought no gospel of glad tidings, he
nevertheless did a work which was as important as it was pressing. In
the form of a modern John the Baptist, the Chelsea Prophet with not a
little of the wilderness atmosphere about him, preached in grimly
defiant mood to a pleasure-loving generation the great doctrines which
lie at the root of all religions--the doctrines of Repentance,
Righteousness, and Retribution.