of work; the duty imposed on every human being, be he rich or be he
poor, to find a life-purpose and to follow it out strenuously and
honestly. 'All true work,' he said, 'is religion'; and the essence of
every sound religion is, 'Know thy work and do it.' In his conception
of life all true dignity and nobility grows out of the honest
discharge of practical duty. He had always a strong sympathy with the
feudal system which annexed indissolubly the idea of public function
with the possession of property. The great landlord who is wisely
governing large districts and using all his influence to diffuse
order, comfort, education, and civilisation among his tenantry; the
captain of industry who is faithfully and honestly organising the
labour of thousands, and regarding his task as a moral duty; the rich
man who, with all the means of enjoyment at his feet, devotes his
energies 'to make some nook of God's creation a little fruitfuller,
better, more worthy of God--to make some human hearts a little wiser,
manfuller, happier, more blessed,' always received his admiration and
applause. No one, on the other hand, spoke with more contempt of a
governing class which had ceased to govern; of titles which had lost
their original meaning, and no longer implied or expressed duties
performed; of wealth that was employed solely or mainly in selfish
enjoyment or in idle show. It was Carlyle's deep conviction that the
best test of the moral worth of every nation, class, and individual,
is to be found in their standard of work and in their dislike to a
useless and idle life. As is well known, he had no sympathy with the
prevailing political ideas. He believed that men were not only not
equal, but were profoundly unequal; that it was the first interest of
society that the wisest men should be selected as its leaders, and
that the popular methods of finding the wisest were by no means those
which were most likely to succeed. 'No British man,' he complained,
'can attain to be a statesman or chief of workers till he has first
proved himself a chief of talkers.' 'The two greatest nations in the
world, the English and American, are all going to wind and tongue.' He
believed much more than his contemporaries did that there was need and
room in our modern English life for strong Government organisation,
guidance, discipline, reverence, obedience, and control. 'Wise
command, wise obedience,' he wrote in one of his 'Latter-day
Pamphlets,' 'the capability of these two is the best measure of
culture and human virtue in every man.'
There is another class of workers to which he himself belonged--the
men who are the teachers of mankind. He taught them by his example as
well as by his precepts. Whatever else may be said about Carlyle, no
one can question that he took his literary vocation most seriously. He
was for a long time a very poor man, but he never sought wealth by
advocating popular opinions, by pandering to common prejudices, or by
veiling most unpalatable beliefs. In the vast mass of literature which
he has bequeathed to us there is no scamped work, and every competent
judge has recognised the untiring and conscientious accuracy with
which he verified and sifted the minutest fact. His standard of
truthfulness was extremely high, and one of his great quarrels with
his age was that it was an age of half-beliefs and insincere
professions. He maintained that religious beliefs which had once been
living realities had too often degenerated into mere formulas, untruly
professed or mechanically repeated with the lips only, and without any
genuine or heartfelt conviction. He often repeated a saying of
Coleridge: 'They do not believe--they only believe that they believe.'
He used to speak of men who 'played false with their intellects'; or,
in other words, turned away their minds from unwelcome truths and by
allowing their wishes or interests to sway their judgments, persuaded
or half-persuaded themselves to believe whatever they wished. A firm
grasp of facts, he maintained, was the first characteristic of an
honest mind; the main element in all honest, intellectual work. His
own special talent was the gift of insight, the power of looking into
the heart of things, piercing to essential facts, discerning the real
characters of men, their true measure of genuine, solid worth. Creeds,
professions, opinions, circumstances, all these are the externals or
clothes of men. It is necessary to look behind them and beyond them if
we would reach the genuine human heart. One of the reasons why he
detested what he called stump oratory was because he believed it to be
a great school of insincerity. Its end was not truth, but
plausibility. It was the effort of interested men to throw opinions
into such forms as might most captivate uninstructed men; to keep back
every unpopular side; to magnify everything in them that was
seductive. He once said to me that two great curses seemed to him
eating away the heart and worth of the English people. One was drink.
The other was stump oratory, which accustomed men to say without
shame what they did not in their hearts believe to be true, and
accustomed their hearers to accept such a proceeding as perfectly
natural. And the same strong passion for veracity he carried into his
judgment of other forms of work. Rightly or wrongly, he believed that
the standard of conscientious work had been lowered in England through
the feverish competition of modern times, and under the system of what
he called 'cheap and nasty'; that English work had lost something of
its old solidity and worth, and was now made rather to captivate than
to wear. Carlyle saw in this much more than an industrial change. He
maintained that the love and pride of thorough work had long been a
pre-eminently English quality, that it was the very tap-root of the
moral worth of the English character, and that anything that tended to
weaken it was a grave moral evil.
It is worth while trying to understand what truth underlay those parts
of his teaching which seem most repulsive. The worship of force, which
is so apparent in many of his writings, is a striking example. He was
often accused of teaching that might is right. He always answered that
he had not done so--that what he taught was that right is might; that
by the providential constitution of the Universe truth in the long run
is sure to be stronger than falsehood; that good will prevail over
evil, and that right and might, though they differ widely in short
periods of time, would in long spaces prove to be identical. Nothing,
he was accustomed to say, seemed weaker than the Christian religion
when the disciples assembled in the upper room; yet it was in truth
the strongest thing in the world, and it accordingly prevailed. It was
one of his favourite sayings 'that the soul of the Universe is just,'
and he believed therefore that the ultimate fate of nations, whether
it be good or bad, was very much what they deserved. It is curious to
observe the analogy between this teaching and the doctrine of the
survival of the fittest, which a very different teacher--Charles
Darwin--has made so conspicuous.
He scandalised--and I think with a good deal of reason--most of his
contemporaries by the ridicule which he threw upon the career of
Howard, and upon the great movement for prison reform which was so
actively pursued in his time. Much of what he wrote on this subject
is, to me at least, very repulsive; but you will generally find in the
most extravagant utterances of Carlyle that there is some true meaning
at bottom. He maintained that the passion for reforming and improving
prisons and prison-life had been carried in England to such a point
that the lot of a convicted criminal was often much better than that
of an honest and struggling artisan. He believed that a just and wise
distribution of compassion is a most important element of national
well-being, and that the English people are very apt to be indifferent
to great masses of unobtrusive, struggling, honourable, unsensational
poverty at their very doors, while they fall into paroxysms of emotion
about the actors in some sensational crime, about some seductive
murderess, about the wrongs of some far-off and often half-savage
race. 'In one of these Lancashire weavers dying with hunger there is
more thought and heart, a greater arithmetical amount of misery and
desperation, than in whole gangs of Quashees.' He maintained, too,
that a strain of sentiment about criminals was very prevalent in his
day, which tended seriously to obliterate or diminish the real
difference between right and wrong. He hated with an intense hatred
that whole system of philosophy which denied that there was a deep,
essential, fundamental difference between right and wrong, and turned
the whole matter into a mere calculation of interests. He was
accustomed to say that one of the chief merits of Christianity was
that it taught that right and wrong were as far apart as Heaven and
Hell, and that no greater calamity can befall a nation than a
weakening of the righteous hatred of evil.
The parts of Carlyle's teaching on which I have dwelt to-day will be
chiefly found in his 'Past and Present,' his 'Heroes and Hero
Worship,' his 'Latter-day Pamphlets,' his 'Chartism,' and in the two
admirable essays called 'Signs of the Times' and 'Characteristics.' In
my own opinion, though Carlyle teaches much, his writings are most
valuable as a moral force. Very few great writers have maintained more
steadily that the moral element is the deepest and most important part
of our being, deeper and stronger than all intellectual
considerations. In his writings, amid much that has imperishable
value, there is, I think, much that is exaggerated, much that is
one-sided, much that is unwise. But no one can be imbued with his
teaching without finding it a great moral tonic, and deriving from it
a nobler, braver, and more unworldly conception of human life.
ISRAEL AMONG THE NATIONS[8]
Among the strange and unforeseen developments that have characterised
the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, few are likely to be
regarded by the future historian with a deeper or more melancholy
interest than the anti-Semite movement, which has swept with such a
portentous rapidity over a great part of Europe. It has produced in
Russia by far the most serious religious persecution of the century.
It has raged fiercely in Roumania, the other great centre of the
Oriental Jews. In enlightened Germany it has become a considerable
parliamentary force. In Austria it counts among its adherents men of
the highest social station. Even France, which from the days of the
Revolution has been specially distinguished for its liberality to the
Jews, has not escaped the contagion. General Boulanger found the
anti-Jewish sentiment sufficiently powerful to make an appeal to it
one of the articles of his programme, and the extraordinary popularity
of the writings of Drumont shows that Boulanger had not altogether
miscalculated its force.
It is this movement which has been the occasion of the very valuable
work of M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu on 'Israel among the Nations.' The
author, who is universally recognised as one of the greatest of living
political writers, has special qualifications for his task. With an
exceedingly wide knowledge of the literature relating to his subject
he combines much personal knowledge of the Jews in Palestine and in
many other countries, and especially in those countries where the
persecution has most furiously raged.
That persecution, he justly says, unites in different degrees three of
the most powerful elements that can move mankind--the spirit of
religious intolerance; the spirit of exclusive nationality; and the
jealousy which springs from trade or mercantile competition. Of these
elements M. Leroy-Beaulieu considers the first to be on the whole the
weakest. In that hideous Russian Persecution which 'the New Exodus' of
Frederic has made familiar to the English reader, the religious
element certainly occupies a very leading place. Pobedonosteff, who
shared with his master the chief guilt and infamy of this atrocious
crime, belonged to the same type as the Torquemadas of the past, and
the spirit that animated him has entered largely into the anti-Semite
movement in other lands. The 'Gloria' of Galdos, perhaps the most
powerful religious novel of our time, describes the conflict in modern
Spain of the fanaticism of Catholicism with the fanaticism of Judaism.
Even the old calumny that the Jews are accustomed at Easter to murder
Christian children in order to mix their blood with the passover
bread, is still living in many parts of Europe. M. Leroy-Beaulieu has
collected much curious evidence on the subject. It is a calumny which
appears first to have become popular about 1100 A.D. It is
embodied in a well-known tale of Chaucer. It is the subject of one of
the great frescoes that were painted around the Cathedral of Toledo to
commemorate the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Two Popes of the
thirteenth century, to their great honour, declared its falsehood,
and by the order of Benedict XIV. Ganganelli wrote a full memoir
examining and refuting it. But in spite of all condemnations, in spite
of many exposures in the law courts, it is still a popular belief in
Russia, Poland, Roumania, Hungary, and Bohemia, and even within the
last ten years it has been the direct cause of many outrages against
the Jews.
Another element to which M. Leroy-Beaulieu attaches considerable
importance is the Kultur Kampf in Germany. When the German Government
was engaged in its fierce struggle with the Catholics, these
endeavoured to effect a diversion and to avenge themselves on papers,
which were largely in the hands of Jews, by raising a new cry. They
declared that a Kultur Kampf was indeed needed, but that it should be
directed against the alien people who were undermining the moral
foundations of Christian societies; who were the implacable enemies of
the Christian creed and of Christian ideals. The cry was soon taken up
by a large body of Evangelical Protestants. The 'Germania' and the
'Civiltà Cattolica,' which were the chief organs of Ultramontanism in
Germany and Italy, and the 'Kreuz Zeitung,' which represented the
strictest forms of German Protestantism, agreed in fomenting it.
Still more powerful, in the opinion of our author, has been the spirit
of intense and exclusive nationality which has in the present
generation arisen in so many countries and which seeks to expel all
alien or heterogeneous elements, and to mould the whole national being
into a single definite type. The movement has been still further
strengthened by the greater keenness of trade competition. In the
midst of many idle, drunken, and ignorant populations the shrewd,
thrifty, and sober Jew stands conspicuous as the most successful
trader. His rare power of judging, influencing, and managing men, his
fertility of resource, his indomitable perseverance and industry,
continually force him into the foremost rank, and he is prominent in
occupations which excite much animosity. The tax-gatherer, the agent,
the middleman, and the moneylender are very commonly of Jewish race,
and great Jewish capitalists largely control the money markets of
Europe at a time when capital is the special object of socialistic
attacks.
The most valuable portion of this work is, I think, that examining the
part which the Jewish race is now playing in the world, and tracing
the action of historical causes on the formation of their character.
On the old problem of the continued existence of the race through so
many ages M. Leroy-Beaulieu has much to say. He reminds us that in the
East the idea of nationality is habitually absorbed in the idea of
religion, and that there are many examples of the long survival of
peoples or tribes which have lost their political individuality. He
instances the Copts of Egypt, the Maronites and Druses of Lebanon, the
Parsees of India, the Armenians and Greeks of Asia as displaying,
though in a less degree, the same phenomenon as the Jews. He
attributes the long continuance of the Jews as a separate people
mainly to two causes. One of them is Christian hatred, which compelled
the Jews for many centuries to remain a separate people, unmixed with
surrounding nations; living in a separate quarter; marrying among
themselves; strengthened and disciplined in the struggle of life by
enormous difficulties and by the constant elimination through
persecution of the weaker elements. The other is the very elaborate
Jewish ritual extending to all departments of life, which has stamped
upon them an intensely distinctive character.
The force of these causes is undoubted, but they are not, I think, the
only elements to be considered. M. Leroy-Beaulieu appears to me to
have somewhat underrated the physiological force and tenacity of the
Jewish race-type. Following the line of reasoning of a remarkable
essay of Renan, he shows very clearly that the modern Jews are far
from being pure Semites. He proves from Josephus and from other
sources that there was a considerable period, both before and after
the Christian era, when great numbers of Greeks, Latins, and Egyptians
adopted the Jewish faith; that much alien blood afterward poured into
the race through conversions among the barbarians and through the
circumcision of the slaves of Jewish masters, and that there is even
reason to believe that, in some periods of history, marriages with
Christians were not infrequent. It is probable, however, that most
alien elements that were introduced into the race sooner or later
mingled with the old stock, and no fact is more clearly shown than the
extraordinary power of the Jewish type to survive and dominate in a
mixed race. A single instance of a marriage with a Jewess will be
sufficient to perpetuate it in a family for many generations. In this
fact the Jews possess an element of stability which is wholly
independent of all considerations of creed and ritual. Few things are
more curious than the effect of persecution on the Jewish element in
Spain and Portugal. Tens of thousands of Jews in those countries were
burned at the stake or driven into exile, but great numbers also
conformed. They mixed in a few generations with the old Christian
population, and Spain and Portugal, M. Leroy-Beaulieu truly says, are
now among the countries in which the Jewish blood is most evidently
and most widely diffused.
Another consideration, which M. Leroy-Beaulieu has omitted to mention,
but which appears to me to have much weight, is the condemnation of
lending money at interest by the Church. This condemnation, which
lasted many centuries, had two important consequences. One of them was
that the Jews became almost the only moneylenders in Europe. The trade
was deemed sinful for a Christian, but it was found to be a very
necessary one; and the Jews (as some Catholic theologians observed)
being already damned, were allowed to practise it. The other
consequence was that on account of the stigma which the Church
attached to moneylending, the amount of money to be lent was greatly
diminished, or in other words, the rate of interest was enormously and
artificially raised. At a time, therefore, when Catholic intolerance
made it impossible for the Jews to mingle with and be absorbed in
surrounding nations they acquired one of the greatest elements of
power and stability that a race can possess--a monopoly of the most
lucrative trade in the world.
The physical characteristics of the race are very remarkable and they
are especially displayed among the Eastern Jews, who still maintain
scrupulously amid poverty and persecution the religious observances of
their ancestors. It is now clearly shown that the Levitical code was
in a high degree hygienic, and even anticipates some of the
discoveries of modern physiology. Prescriptions about forbidden kinds
of food and about the mode of cooking food, which only excited the
ridicule of Voltaire, have a real hygienic value in the eyes of Claude
Bernard and of Pasteur. The Jews have never adopted the Catholic
notions about the sanctity of celibacy and virginity, but they lay
great stress on the purity of marriage. Although they live chiefly in
towns, illegitimate births are proportionately rarer among them than
among either Protestants or Catholics. They have been as a rule
singularly free from the kinds of vice that do most to enfeeble and
corrode a race. They are distinguished for their domestic virtues,
especially for care of their children, and they are nearly everywhere
less addicted than Christian nations to intoxicating drinks. These
things help to explain the curious fact that in nearly all countries
the average duration of life is considerably longer among Jews than
among Christians. This superiority is general, but, as M.
Leroy-Beaulieu observes, it tends to diminish in Western countries
where Jews, being freed from disabilities, are more assimilated to the
surrounding populations. They now usually marry later than Christians;
they have on the whole fewer children, but a proportionately larger
number of Jewish than of Christian infants attain adult age. M.
Leroy-Beaulieu mentions two curious facts which are less easy to
explain. Still-born births are very rare among Jews, and there is
among them a wholly abnormal preponderance of male births over female
ones.
It might be supposed from these facts that the Jews were a robust
race, but no one who has come much in contact with them will share
this delusion. Nothing is more conspicuous among them than their
unhealthy colouring, their frail, bent, and feeble bodies. They
develop early, but they have very little of the spring and buoyancy of
youth and they have everywhere a low average of physical strength.
Malformations and deformities are common among them; their nervous
organisation is extremely sensitive, and though they are as a race
distinguished for their sound, clear, and practical judgment, they are
very liable to insanity and to other nervous and brain disorders.
Physical beauty as well as physical strength is much rarer among them
than among Christians.
The causes of this inferiority may be easily explained. Life pursued
during many generations in the crowded Ghetto; the sordid habits that
grow out of extreme poverty and out of the assumption of the
appearance of poverty, which is natural in a persecuted and plundered
race, go far to explain it; but there is another and, I think, a more
important cause which M. Leroy-Beaulieu has rather strangely
neglected. Physical strength and beauty can be maintained at a high
level in crowded town populations only by a constant influx from the
country. The pure air and the healthy labour of the fields are their
main source. This great school of health the Jews have never known.
For many centuries it would have been impossible for them to have
lived in peace as farmers or agricultural labourers among a Christian
peasantry, and if they ever possessed any aptitude or taste for
agricultural pursuits they have long since wholly lost it.