Dr. Samuel Johnson, during a long life, cherished an aversion, Platonic
rather than militant, for Scotland and the Scotch. Had any one told him
that out of the land where oats were fed to men there should issue,
soon after his death, a master of romance, an incomparable singer, and
a historian without rival, we can well imagine the emphasis with which
he would have said, “Tut! tut! sir, that is impossible!” Nevertheless,
for the best part of a century Scotland has shed her influence through
the world in the genius of Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Thomas
Carlyle; and she has taken sweet vengeance on the burly Doctor himself
by creating in James Boswell not only the best of British biographers,
but one so far the best that no other can be named worthy to stand
second to him. We now celebrate the centenary of the last of these
great Scotchmen,--Thomas Carlyle,--and it is fitting that we should
survey his life and work.[4]
[4] First printed in _The Forum_, New York, December, 1895.
In a time like our own, when literature on either side of the
Atlantic lacks original energy; when the best minds are busy with
criticism rather than with creation; when ephemeral story-tellers
and spineless disciples of culture pass for masters, and sincere
but uninspired scholars have our respect but move us not,--we shall
do well to contemplate anew the man who by his personality and his
books has nobly swayed two generations of the English-speaking race,
and who, as the years recede, looms more and more certainly as the
foremost modern British man of letters. Men may look distorted to
their contemporaries, like the figures in a Chinese picture; but Time,
the wisest of painters, sets them in their true perspective, gives
them their just proportions, and reveals their permanent features
in light and shade. And sufficient time has now elapsed for us to
perceive that Carlyle belongs to that thrice-winnowed class of literary
primates whom posterity crowns. He holds in the nineteenth century a
position similar to Johnson’s in the eighteenth, and to Milton’s in the
seventeenth,--each masterful, but in a different way; each typifying
his age without losing his individuality; all brothers in preëminence.
When, for convenience’ sake, we classify Carlyle among men of letters,
we fail to describe him adequately. The phrase suggests too little.
Charles Lamb, the lovable, is the true type of men of letters, who
illuminate, sweeten, delight, and entertain us. Carlyle was far more:
he was a mighty moral force, using many forms of literature--criticism,
biography, history, pamphlets--as its organs of expression. He had,
as the discerning Goethe said of him, “unborrowed principles of
conviction,” by which he tested the world. He felt the compulsion of
a great message intrusted to him. There rings through most of his
utterances the uncompromising “Thus saith the Lord” of the Hebrew
prophets,--a tone which, if it do not persuade us, we call arrogant,
yet which speaks the voice of conscience to those who give it heed.
What, then, was his message?--what those “unborrowed principles of
conviction” by which he judged his time?
Born in the poor village of Ecclefechan on December 4, 1795, his
childhood and youth were spent amid those stern conditions by which,
rather than by affluence, brave, self-reliant, earnest characters are
moulded. His parents were Calvinists, to whom religion was the chief
concern, and who taught him by example the severe virtues of that
grim sect. Next to religion, and its active manifestation in a pious
life, they prized education, begrudging themselves no sacrifices by
which their son might attend the University of Edinburgh. They wished
him to be a minister, but when he came to maturity he recognized
his unfitness for that vocation and abandoned it. They acquiesced
regretfully, little dreaming that he who refused to be confined in some
Annandale pulpit should become the foremost preacher of his age.
Carlyle’s reluctance was rooted in conscientious scruples. He began
by questioning the authority of his Church; he went on to sift the
authority of the Bible. Little by little the whole wondrous fabric
of supernatural Christianity crumbled before him. He could not but
be honest with himself; he could not but see how Hebrew legend had
overgrown the stern ethical code attributed to Moses; how the glosses
of Paul and Augustine and a hundred later religionists had changed or
perverted the simple teaching of Christ. Awestruck, he beheld the God
of his youth vanish out of the world. He wandered in the wilderness of
doubt; he wrestled daily and nightly with despair. And then slowly,
painfully, after brooding through long years, he saw the outlines
of a larger faith emerge from the gloom. He fortified himself by
acknowledging that, since righteousness is eternal, it cannot perish
when we reject whatever opinions some Council of Westminster, of Trent,
or of Nice may have resolved about it.
Only earnest souls who have experienced the wrench which comes when
we first break away from the bondage of an artificial religion, and
perceive that the moral law may be something very different from
dogmas, know the pang it costs. The dread of losing the truth when
errors are thrown over--nay, the apparent hopelessness of being able
to decide what is truth--causes many to hesitate, and some to turn
back. Carlyle was not, of course, the first in Britain to tread the
desolate path from Superstition into Rationalism. In the eighteenth
century--to go no farther back--two very eminent minds had preceded
him; but in both Hume and Gibbon the intellectual predominated over
the moral nature, and to temperaments like theirs the pangs of new
birth are always less acute. It is because in Carlyle the moral nature
preponderated--intense, fiery, and enduring--that he became the
spokesman of myriads who since him have had a similar experience.
If we were to hazard a generalization which should sum up the
nineteenth century, might we not affirm that the chief business of
the century has been to establish a basis of conduct in harmony with
what we actually know of the laws governing the universe? Hitherto,
for ages together, men have not consciously done this, but they have
accepted standards handed down to them by earlier men, who compounded
these standards out of little knowledge, much ignorance, legend,
and hearsay. Skeptics there have always been, but usually, like the
skeptics who flourished in the last century, they have differed from
the doubters in ours by the degree of their moral intensity. Whether
we turn to Carlyle or to George Eliot, we find each tirelessly busy in
substituting for the worn-out tenets of the past, springs of belief and
conduct worthy to satisfy a more enlightened conscience.
Here, then, we have the corner-stone of Carlyle’s influence. Our world
is a moral world; conscience and righteousness are eternal realities,
independent of the vicissitudes of any church. If we seek for a
definite statement of Carlyle’s creed, we shall be disappointed; he
never formulated any. After breaking loose from one prison, he would
have scoffed at the idea of voluntarily locking himself up in another.
He held that to possess a moral sense is to possess its justification;
that conscience is a fact transcending logic just as consciousness or
life itself does. In the presence of this supreme fact he cared little
for its genealogy. The immanence of God was to him an ever-present,
awful verity.
Likewise, when we come to examine his philosophy, we discover that he
constructed no formal system. He absorbed the doctrine of Kant and
his followers, and may be classed, by those who insist that every
man shall have a label, among the transcendentalists: but his main
interest was the application of moral laws to life, the trial of men
and institutions in the court of conscience, rather than the exercise
of the intellect in metaphysical speculations. The mystery of evil
may not be explained for some ages, if ever; while we argue about it,
evil grows: the one indispensable duty for all of us, he would say, is
to combat evil in ourselves and in society now and here. The stanch
seaman, when his ship founders, does not waste time in meditating why
it should be that water will sink a ship, but he lashes together a
raft, if haply he may thereby come off safe.
In these respects we behold Carlyle a true representative of his time.
Before the vast bulk of sin and sorrow and pain he did not cower; he
would fight it manfully. But the smoke of battle darkened him. The
spectacle of mankind, dwelling in Eternity, yet ignorant of their
heritage, pursuing “desires whose purpose ends in Time;” of souls
engaged from dawn to dusk of their swift-fleeting existence, not on
soul’s business, but on body’s business, worshiping idols they know
to be false, deceiving, persecuting, slaying each other,--confirmed
a tendency to pessimism to which his early Calvinism had predisposed
him. But Carlyle’s pessimism must not be confounded with Swift’s
misanthropy, or with Leopardi’s blank despair, or with the despicable
Schopenhauer’s cosmic negation of good. Carlyle was neither cynic nor
misanthrope. He might exclaim with Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities,
all is vanity!” but he would mean that the ways and works of man are
vain in comparison with his possibilities, and with the incalculable
worth of righteousness. “Man’s unhappiness, as I construe,” he says,
“comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him
which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even the _Shadow of
Ourselves_.”
These being the elements of Carlyle’s moral nature, let us look for a
moment at the world which he was to test by his “unborrowed principles
of conviction.” He came on the scene during the decade of reaction
which followed the battle of Waterloo. Official Europe, confounding
the ambition of Napoleon with the causes underlying the Revolution,
supposed that in crushing one it had destroyed the other. The motto of
the Old Régime had been _Privilege_, of the New it was _Merit_. The
revived political fashions of the eighteenth century, though cut by
such elegant tailors as Metternich, Castlereagh, and Polignac, chafed a
generation which had grown used to a freer costume. At any time there
yawns between the ideals and the practices of society a discrepancy
which provokes the censure of the philosopher and the sarcasm of the
cynic; but in a time like the Restoration, when some men consciously
repudiated and none sincerely believed the system thrust upon them,
the chasm between profession and performance must open wider still,
revealing not only the noble failures born of earnest but baffled
endeavor, but also all the hideous growths of hypocrisy, of deceptions,
insincerities, and intellectual fraud. And in very truth the Old Régime
resuscitated by Europe’s oligarchs was doubly condemned,--first, as
being unfitted to the new age; and, secondly, as having marked in the
eighteenth century, when it flourished, the logical conclusion of a
political and social epoch. In 1820 the trunk and main branches of the
tree of Feudalism were dead: he was not a wise man who imagined that
the still surviving upper branches would long keep green.
Not alone in the political constitution of society were momentous
changes operating. They but represented the attempt of man to work
out, in his civic and social relations, ideas which had already
penetrated his religion and his philosophy. Distil those ideas to
their inmost essence, its name is _Liberty_. The old Church, whether
Roman or Protestant, lay rotting at anchor in the land-locked bayou
of Authority; and the pioneers of the new convictions, abandoning her
and her cargo of antiquated dogmas, had pushed on across intervening
morasses to the shore of the illimitable sea; yea, they were launching
thereon their skiffs of modern pattern, and resolutely, hopefully
steering whither their consciences pointed. Better the storms of the
living ocean than the miasma of that stagnant, scum-breeding pool!
But a church is of all institutions that to which men cling most
stubbornly, paying it lip-service long after its doctrines have ceased
to shape their conduct or to lift their aspirations; trying to believe,
in spite of their unbelief, that it will continue to be to them a
source of strength as it once was to their fathers; preserving forms,
but veneering them with contradictory meanings; coming at last to
declare that an institution must be kept, if for no other reason than
because it once fulfilled the purposes for which it is now inadequate.
The aroma of association has for some minds the potency of original
inspiration. Who can ponder on life without perceiving that whereas
in their business, their possessions, their love, and their hate,
men resent dictation; in matters beyond the scope of experience, and
consequently beyond proof,--as the conditions of a future life,--men
credulously accept the guidance of others quite as ignorant as
themselves, from whom in their business or their passions they would
submit to no interference?
Needless to say the revived Old Régime intrenched itself behind
whatever church it found standing,--in Prussia the Lutheran, in England
the Anglican, in Scotland the Calvinist, in the Latin countries the
Roman. The ecclesiastical institution might not humanize the masses,
but at least it held them in check; it might not spiritualize the
classes, but it taught them that in rallying to its support they were
best guarding their own privileges. Metternich, whom we call the
representative of the Restoration, did not scruple to announce that,
as the dangers which threatened Church and State were identical, the
Church could be saved only by upholding the State. Not for the first
time in history was the priest a policeman in disguise.
Into this world of transition Thomas Carlyle strode with his store of
unborrowed principles. Right or wrong, his convictions were his own;
therefore they were realities that need not fear a conflict with ghosts
of dead convictions and insincerities.
Naturally, one of the first facts that amazed him was the monstrous
unreality in that transitional society. By the census the people of
Great Britain were rated as Christians; by their acts they seemed
little better than barbarians. What availed the Established Church, in
which livings were assigned at the pleasure of some dissolute noble,
fox-hunting parsons were given the cure of souls, and worldlings or
unbelievers rose to be bishops? Could the loudest protestations explain
the existence of great, gaunt, brutalized masses, beyond the pale of
human charity; every _horse_ sleek, well lodged, and well fed, but
innumerable _men_ dying of hunger or lodged in the almshouse? Can that
be true civilization in which the various constituents recognize no
interdependence, and only a few usurp benefits which are pernicious
unless they be free to all? Respectability, and not virtue,--that,
Carlyle declared, was John Bull’s ideal, and he opened fire upon its
chief allies, Sham and Cant. He spared no prejudices, he respected no
institutions. With sarcasm until then unknown in English, he unmasked
one artificiality after another, disclosing the cruelty or the
hypocrisy which lurked behind it, and setting over against it the true
nature of the thing it pretended to be. To interpret such conditions by
the criterion of conscience was to condemn them.
But Carlyle’s mission was not merely to destroy: he shattered error
in order that the clogged fountain of truth might once more gush
forth. Before eyes long dimmed with gazing on insincerity, he would
hold up shining patterns of sincerity; souls groping for guidance,
he would stay and comfort by precedents of strength; hearts pursuing
false idols, he would chasten by examples of truth. Men talked--and
nowhere more pragmatically than in the churches--as if God, after
having imparted his behests to a few Hebrews ages ago, had retired into
some remote empyrean, and busied himself no more with the affairs of
men. But to Carlyle the immanence of God was an ever-present reality,
manifesting itself throughout all history and in every individual
conscience, but nowise more clearly than in the careers of great men.
Thus he made it his business to set before his contemporaries models
worthy of veneration, for he recognized that worship is a primary
moral need. “Great men,” he says, “are the inspired (speaking and
acting) Texts of that divine _Book of Revelations_, whereof a Chapter
is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named _History_.”
In this spirit he introduced Goethe, the latest of the heroes, to
English readers, as the man who, from amid chaos similar to that which
bewildered them, had climbed to a position where life could be lived
nobly, rationally, well. “Close your Byron, open your Goethe,” was his
advice to those in whom Byron’s mingled defiance and sentimentality
found an echo. He showed in Cromwell how religious zeal is something
very different from a phantom faith. He laid bare the truth in Mahomet.
He made Luther live again. And all to the end that he might convince
his dazed contemporaries that in no age, if we look deeply, shall we
look in vain for concrete, living examples of those qualities which
are indispensable to right action; that salvation--the purging of the
character--is won by exercising virtues, and not by conforming to a
stereotyped routine; that the authority of conscience is a present
fact, not a mere mechanism which God wound up and gave to the Hebrews,
and has been transmitted in poor repair by them to us. As an antidote
to sterilizing doubt, Carlyle prescribed the simple remedy which sums
up the wisdom of all the sages: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,
which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have
become clearer.” In this fashion did Carlyle discharge his mission as
a moral regenerator. We live as individuals, and to the individual
conscience he made his appeal, caring little for the organization of
principles into institutions. Rather, like every individualist, did
he incline to deprecate the numbing effect of institutions. Let each
unit be righteous, in order that whatever the collective units shall
establish may be righteous too.
Bearing this in mind, we shall understand Carlyle’s attitude toward
the great social and intellectual movements of his time. The watchword
which had inspired generous minds at the end of the last century
was _Liberty_, and after the thunders of the Napoleonic wars that
had drowned it died away, it rang out its summons more clearly than
before, never again to be quite deadened, despite all the efforts of
the Old Régime. The application of the theory of Liberty to government
resulted in setting up Democracy as the ideal political system.
Since every citizen in the State bears, directly or indirectly, his
fraction of the burden of taxation, and since he is affected by the
laws, and interested, even to the point of laying down his life, in
the preservation of his country, Democracy declares that he should
have an equal part with every other citizen in determining what the
taxes and policy of his State shall be; and it thrusts upon him the
responsibility of choosing his own governors and representatives. To
Carlyle this ideal seemed a chimera. Honest, just, and intelligent
government is of all social contrivances the most difficult: by
what miracle, therefore, shall the sum of the opinions of a million
voters, severally ignorant, be intelligent? As well blow a million
soap-bubbles, each thinner than gossamer, and expect that collectively
they will be hard as steel! Or, admitting that the representatives
Demos chooses be not so incompetent as itself, how shall they be kept
disinterested? Their very numbers not only make them unmanageable,
but so divide responsibility that any individual among them can
shift from his own shoulders the blame for corrupt or harmful laws.
Moreover, popular government means party government, and that means
compromise. To Carlyle, principles were either right or wrong, and
between right and wrong he saw no neutral ground for compromise. Party
government cleaves to expediency, which at best is only a half-truth;
but half-truth is also half-error, and any infinitesimal taint of error
vitiates the truth to which it clings. Finally, Democracy substitutes
a new, many-headed tyranny--more difficult to destroy because
many-headed--for the tyranny it would abolish.
Such objections Carlyle urged with consummate vigor. He foresaw, too,
many of the other evils which have accompanied the development of
this system to impair its efficacy, such as the rise of a class of
professional politicians, of political sophists, of corrupt “bosses,”
expert in the art of wheedling the ignorant many, and thereby of
frustrating the initial purpose of the system. His opposition did not
spring from desire to see the masses down-trodden, but from conviction
that they need guidance and enlightenment, and that they are therefore
no more competent to choose their own law-makers than children are to
choose their own teachers. In knowledge of public affairs Demos is
still a child, innocent, well-intentioned, if you will; but ignorant,
and by this system left to the mercy of the unscrupulous.
This brings us to consider the charge that Carlyle, in his exaltation
of the Strong Man, worshiped crude force. Let us grant that on the
surface the accusation seems plausible; but when we seek deeper, we
shall discover that he exalts Cromwell and Frederick, not because
they were despots, but because, in his judgment, they knew better
than any other man, or group of men, in their respective countries,
how to govern. Their ability was their justification; their force,
but the symbol of their ability. “Weakness”--Carlyle was fond of
quoting--“is the only misery.” What is ignorance but weakness (through
lack of training) of the intellect? In the incessant battle of
life,--and few men have been more constantly impressed than Carlyle
by the battle-aspect of life,--weakness of whatever kind succumbs to
strength. Evil perpetually marshals its forces against Good,--positive,
aggressive forces, to be overcome neither by inertia, nor indifference,
nor half-hearted compromise, but by hurling stronger forces of Good
against them. Interpreting Carlyle’s views thus, we perceive why he
extolled the Strong Man and distrusted the aggregate ignorance of
Democracy. Furthermore, we must not forget that he never considered
politics the prime business of life: first, make the masses righteous,
next, enlightened, and then they will naturally organize a righteous
and enlightened government. When Carlyle rejoined to the zealots of
Democracy or other panaceas, “Adopt your new system if you must, will
not the same old human units operate it? Were it not wiser to perfect
them first?”--he antagonized the spirit of the age: wisely or not,
only time can show. Those of us who would reject his arguments would
nevertheless admit that Democracy is still on trial.
With equal fearlessness he attacked the cheap optimism based on
material prosperity, which brags of the enormous commercial expansion
made possible by the invention of machinery; which boasts of the rapid
increase in population--so many more million mouths to feed and bodies
to clothe, and so much more food and raiment produced--from decade to
decade. These facts, he insisted, are not of themselves evidences of
progress. Your inventions procure greater comfort, a more exuberant
luxury; but do comfort and luxury necessarily build up character?--do
they not rather unbuild it? Are your newly bred millions of bodies
more than bodies? Take a census of souls, has _their_ number increased?
Though your steam-horse carries you fifty miles an hour, have you
thereby become more virtuous? Though the lightning bears your messages,
have you gained bravery? Of old, your aristocracy were soldiers: is
the brewer who rises from his vats to the House of Lords--is any
other man owing his promotion to the tradesman’s skill in heaping
wealth--more worshipful than they? Let us not say that this amazing
industrial expansion may not conduce to the uplifting of character; but
let us strenuously affirm that it is of itself no indication of moral
progress, and that, if it fail to be accompanied by a corresponding
spiritual growth, it will surely lead society by the Byzantine
high-road to effeminacy, exhaustion, and death.
A different gospel, this, from that which Carlyle’s great rival,
Macaulay, was preaching,--Macaulay, who lauded the inventor of a useful
machine above all philosophers! Different from the optimism--which
gauges by bulk--of the newspapers and the political haranguers!
Different, because true! Yet, though it sounded harsh, it stirred
consciences,--which smug flatterings and gratulations can never do;
and it gave a tremendous impetus to that movement which has come
to overshadow all others,--the movement to reconstruct society
on a basis, not of privilege, not of bare legality, but of mutual
obligations.
Any inventory, however brief, of Carlyle’s substance, would be
incomplete without some reference to his quarrel with Science. To
Science a large part of the best intelligence of our age has been
devoted,--a sign of the breaking away of the best minds from the
cretinizing quibbles of theology into fields where knowledge can
be ascertained. It is a truism that Science has advanced farther
in our century than in all preceding time. By what paradox, then,
should Carlyle slight its splendid achievements? Was it not because
he revolted from the materialistic tendency which he believed to be
inseparable from Science, a tendency which predominated a generation
ago more than it does to-day? Materialism Carlyle regarded as a
Gorgon’s head, the sight of which would inevitably petrify man’s moral
nature.
Moreover, Carlyle’s method differed radically from that of the
scientific man, who describes processes and investigates relations,
but does not explain causes. Pledged to his allegiance to tangible
facts, the man of science looks at things serially, pays heed to an
individual as a link in an endless chain rather than as an individual,
lays emphasis on averages rather than on particulars. To him this
method is alone honest, and, thanks to it, a single science to-day
commands more authenticated facts than all the sciences had fifty
years ago. But there are facts of supreme importance which, up to the
present at least, this method does not solve. The mystery of the origin
of life still confronts us. Consciousness, the Sphinx, still mutely
challenges the caravans which file before her. The revelations of
Science seem, under one aspect, but descriptions of the habitations of
life from the protoplasmic cell up to the human body. Immense though
the value of such a register be, we are, not deceived into imagining
that it explains ultimates. How came life into protoplasm at all?
Whence each infinitesimal increment of life, recognizable at last in
the budding of some new organ? And when we arrive at man, whence came
his personality? Each of us is not only one in a genealogical series
stretching back to the unreasoning, conscienceless _amœba_, but a
clearly defined individual, a little world in himself, to whom his
love, his sorrow, his pain and joy and terror, transcend in vividness
all the experiences of all previous men: a microcosm, having its own
immediate relations--absolute relations--with the infinite macrocosm.
Science, bent on establishing present laws, measures by æons, counts by
millions, and has warrant for ignoring your brief span or mine; but to
you and me these few decades are all in all. However it may fare with
the millions, you and I have vital, pressing needs, to supply which the
experience of the entire animal kingdom can give us no help. Upon these
most human needs Carlyle fastened, to the exclusion of what he held to
be unnecessary to the furtherance of our spiritual welfare. He busied
himself with ultimates and the Absolute. Not the stages of development,
but the development attained; not the pedigree of conscience, but
conscience as the supreme present reality; not the species, but the
individual,--were his absorbing interests.
Thus we see how Carlyle approached the great questions of life
invariably as a moralist. Mere erudition, which too often tends away
from the human, did not attract him. Science, which he beheld still
unspiritualized, he undervalued: what boots it to know the “mileage
and tonnage” of the universe, when our foremost need is to build up
character? In politics, in philosophy, in religion, likewise, he set
this consideration above all others: before its august presence outward
reforms dwindled into insignificance.
Such was the substance of Carlyle’s message. Remarkable as is its
range, profound as is its import, it required for its consummation the
unique powers of utterance which Carlyle possessed. Among the masters
of British prose he holds a position similar to that of Michael Angelo
among the masters of painting. Power, elemental, titanic, rushing
forth from an inexhaustible moral nature, yet guided by art, is the
quality in both which first startles our wonder. The great passages in
Carlyle’s works, like the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sixtine Chapel,
have no peers: they form a new species, of which they are the only
examples. They seem to defy the ordinary canons of criticism; but if
they break the rules it is because whoever made the rules did not
foresee the possibility of such works. Transcendent Power, let it
take whatever shape it will,--volcano, torrent, Cæsar, Buonarotti,
Carlyle,--proclaims: “Here I am,--a fact: make of me what you can! You
shall not ignore me!”
Of Carlyle’s style we may say that, whether one likes it or not, one
can as little ignore it as fail to perceive that he makes it serve,
with equal success, whatever purpose he requires. It can explain, it
can laugh, it can draw tears; it can inveigh, argue, exhort; it can
tell a story or preach a sermon. Carlyle has, it is computed, the
largest vocabulary in English prose. His endowment of imagination and
of humor beggars all his competitors. None of them has invented so
many new images, or given to old images such fresh pertinence. Your
first impression, on turning to other writings after his, is that they
are pale, and dim, and cold: such is the fascination inalienable from
power. Excess there may be in so vehement a genius; repetition there
must be in utterances poured out during sixty years; an individuality
so intense must have an equally individual manner; but there is,
rightly speaking, no mannerism, for mannerism implies affectation, and
Carlyle’s primal instinct was sincerity. His expression is an organic
part of himself, and shares his merits and defects.
Carlyle won his first reputation as a historian; singularly enough, his
achievements in history have temporarily suffered a partial eclipse.
Teachers in our colleges refer to them dubiously or not at all. Does
the fault lie with these same teachers, or with Carlyle? A glance at
the methods of the school of historical students which has sprung up
during the last generation will explain the disagreement.
History, like every other branch of intellectual activity, has
responded to the doctrines of Evolution. That most fertile working
hypothesis has proved, when applied here, not less fruitful than
in other fields. It has caused the annals of the past to be
reinvestigated, every document, record, and monument to be gathered
up, and the results have been set forth from the new point of view.
Evolutionary science, as we saw above, fixes its attention primarily
on the processes of development, and regards the individual, in
comparison with a species or the race, as a negligible quantity. A
similar spirit has guided historical students. They have turned away
from “great captains with their guns and drums,” away from figure-head
monarchs, away from the achievements of even the mightiest individuals,
to scrutinize human action in its collective forms, the rise and
supremacy and fall of institutions, the growth of parties, the waxing
and waning of organisms like Church or State, in whose many-centuried
existence individual careers are swallowed up. Using the methods of
Science, these students have persuaded themselves that history also is
a science, which, in truth, it can never be. Judicial temper, patience,
veracity,--the qualities which they rightly magnify,--were not invented
by them, nor are these the only qualities required in writing history.
Speaking broadly, facts lie within the reach of any diligent searcher.
But a fact is a mere pebble in a brook until some David comes to put
it in his sling. True history is the arrangement and interpretation of
facts, and--more difficult still--insight into motives: for this there
must be art, there must be imagination.
To the disciples of the “scientific school” it may be said that the
heaping up of great stores of facts--the collection of manuscripts,
the cataloguing of documents, the shoveling all together in thick
volumes prefaced by forty pages of bibliography, each paragraph
floating on a deep, viscous stream of notes, each volume bulging with a
score of appendices--is in no high sense history, but the accumulation
of material therefor. It bears the same relation to history as the
work of the quarryman to that of the architect; most worthy in itself,
and evidently indispensable, but not the same. Stand before some noble
edifice,--Lincoln Cathedral, for instance, with its incomparable site,
its symmetry and majestic proportions: scan it until you feel its
personality and realize that this is a living idea, the embodiment of
strength and beauty and aspiration and awe,--and you will not confound
the agency of the stone-cutters who quarried the blocks with that of
the architect in whose imagination the design first rose. Neither
should there be confusion between the historical hodman and the
historian.
Indubitably, history of the highest kind may be written from the
evolutionist’s standpoint, but as yet works of the lower variety
predominate. Therefore, in a time when the development of institutions
chiefly commands attention, Carlyle, who magnifies individuals, will
naturally be neglected. But in reality, histories of both kinds are
needed to supplement each other. All institutions originate and exist
in the activities of individuals. The hero, the great man, makes
concrete and human what would otherwise be abstract. Environment does
not wholly explain him. It is easy to show wherein he resembles his
fellows; that difference from them which constitutes his peculiar,
original gift is the real mystery, which the study of resemblances
cannot solve. Men will cease to be men when personality shall lose its
power over them.
Accepting, therefore, the inherent antagonism in the two points of
view,--antagonism which implies parity and not the necessary extinction
of one by the other,--we can judge Carlyle fairly. Among historians he
excels in vividness. Perhaps more than any other who has attempted to
chronicle the past, he has visualized the past. The men he describes
are not lay figures, with wooden frames and sawdust vitals, to be
called Frenchmen or Germans or Englishmen according as a different
costume is draped upon them; but human beings, each swayed by his
own passions, striving and sinning, and incessantly alive. They are
actors in a real drama: such as they are, Carlyle has seen them; such
as he has seen, he depicts them. To go back to Carlyle from one of
the “scientific historians” is like passing from a museum of mummies
out into the throng of living men. If his portraits differ from
those of another artist, it does not follow that they are false. In
ordinary affairs, two witnesses may give a different report of the same
event, yet each may, from his angle of observation, have given exact
testimony. Absolute truth, who shall utter it? Since history of the
highest, architectonic kind is interpretation, its value must depend
on the character of the interpreter. Not to be greatly esteemed, we
suspect, are those grubbers among the rubbish heaps who imagine that
Carlyle’s interpretation of the French Revolution, or of Cromwell, or
of Frederick, may be ignored. Character, insight, and imagination went
to the production of works like these: they require kindred gifts to be
appreciated.
Neither of Carlyle’s portrait gallery, unparalleled in range, in
which from each picture an authentic human face looks out at us; nor
of his masterpieces of narration, long since laureled even by the
unwilling,--is there space here to speak. In portraiture he used
Rembrandt’s methods: seizing on structural and characteristic traits,
he displays them in strong, full light, and heightens the effect by
surrounding them with shadows. As a biographer he succeeded equally
well in telling the story of Schiller and that of John Sterling: the
latter a most difficult task, as it must always be to make intelligible
to strangers a beautiful character whose charm and force are felt by
his friends, but have no proportionate expression in his writings. As
an essayist he has left models in many branches: “Mirabeau,” “Johnson,”
“Goethe,” “Characteristics,” “Burns,” “History,” stand as foothills
before his more massive works. His is creative criticism, never
restricted, like the criticism of the schools, to purely literary,
academic considerations, but penetrating to the inmost heart of a book
or a man, to discover what deepest human significance may there be
found. A later generation has, as we have noted, adopted a different
treatment in all these fields: bending itself to trace the ancestry and
to map out the environment of men of genius; concentrating attention on
the chain rather than its links; necessarily belittling the individual
to aggrandize the mass. It behooves us, while we recognize the value of
this treatment as a new means to truth, not to forget that it is not
the only one. By and by--perhaps the time is already at hand--we shall
recognize that the other method, which deals with the individual as an
ultimate rather than in relation to a series, which is human rather
than abstract, cannot be neglected without injury to truth. Either
alone is partial; each corrects and enlightens the other.
Meanwhile we will indulge in no vain prophecies as to Carlyle’s
probable rank with posterity. That a man’s influence shall be permanent
depends first on his having grasped elemental facts in human nature,
and next on his having given them an enduring form. Systems struggle
into existence, mature, and pass away, but the needs of the individual
remain. Though we were to wake up to-morrow in Utopia, the next day
Utopia would have vanished, unless we ourselves had been miraculously
transformed. To teach the individual soul the way of purification;
to make it a worthy citizen of Eternity which laps it around; to
kindle its conscience; to fortify it with courage; to humanize it with
sympathy; to make it true,--this has been Carlyle’s mission, performed
with all the vigor of a spirit “in earnest with the universe,” and
with intellectual gifts most various, most powerful, most rare. It
will be strange if, in time to come, souls with these needs, which
are perpetual, lose contact with him. But, whatever befall in the
future, Carlyle’s past is secure. He has influenced the _élite_ of
two generations: men as different as Tyndall and Ruskin, as Mill and
Tennyson, as Browning and Arnold and Meredith, have felt the infusion
of his moral force. And to the new generation we would say: “Open your
‘Sartor;’ there you shall hear the deepest utterances of Britain in our
century on matters which concern you most; there, peradventure, you
shall discover yourselves.”