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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I
+       Essay 2: Carlyle
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2007 [EBook #20878]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, VOL. I ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
+  CRITICAL
+  MISCELLANIES
+
+  BY
+
+  JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+  VOL. I.
+
+  ESSAY 2: CARLYLE
+
+
+  London
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+  1904
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's influence, and degree of its durability              135
+
+  His literary services                                              139
+
+  No label useful in characterising him                              142
+
+  The poetic and the scientific temperaments                         144
+
+  Rousseau and Mr. Carlyle                                           147
+
+  The poetic method of handling social questions                     149
+
+  Impotent unrest, and his way of treating it                        152
+
+  Founded on the purest individualism                                154
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's historic position in the European reaction           157
+
+  Coleridge                                                          159
+
+  Byron                                                              161
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's victory over Byronism                                163
+
+  Goethe                                                             164
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's intensely practical turn, though veiled              166
+
+  His identification of material with moral order                    169
+
+  And acceptance of the doctrine that the end justifies the means    170
+
+  Two sets of relations still regulated by pathological principle    172
+
+  Defect in Mr. Carlyle's discussion of them                         174
+
+  His reticences                                                     176
+
+  Equally hostile to metaphysics and to the extreme pretensions
+  of the physicist                                                   177
+
+  Natural Supernaturalism, and the measure of its truth              179
+
+  Two qualities flowing from his peculiar fatalism:--
+    (1) Contempt for excess of moral nicety                          182
+    (2) Defect of sympathy with masses of men                        186
+
+  Perils in his constant sense of the nothingness of life            188
+
+  Hero-worship, and its inadequateness                               189
+
+  Theories of the dissolution of the old European order              193
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's view of the French Revolution                        195
+
+  Of the Reformation and Protestantism                               197
+
+  Inability to understand the political point of view                199
+
+
+
+
+CARLYLE.
+
+
+The new library edition of Mr. Carlyle's works may be taken for the
+final presentation of all that the author has to say to his
+contemporaries, and to possess the settled form in which he wishes his
+words to go to those of posterity who may prove to have ears for them.
+The canon is definitely made up. The golden Gospel of Silence is
+effectively compressed in thirty fine volumes. After all has been said
+about self-indulgent mannerisms, moral perversities, phraseological
+outrages, and the rest, these volumes will remain the noble monument of
+the industry, originality, conscientiousness, and genius of a noble
+character, and of an intellectual career that has exercised on many
+sides the profoundest sort of influence upon English feeling. Men who
+have long since moved far away from these spiritual latitudes, like
+those who still find an adequate shelter in them, can hardly help
+feeling as they turn the pages of the now disused pieces which they were
+once wont to ponder daily, that whatever later teachers may have done in
+definitely shaping opinion, in giving specific form to sentiment, and in
+subjecting impulse to rational discipline, here was the friendly
+fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark, here the prophet
+who first smote the rock.
+
+That with this sense of obligation to the master, there mixes a less
+satisfactory reminiscence of youthful excess in imitative phrases, in
+unseasonably apostolic readiness towards exhortation and rebuke, in
+interest about the soul, a portion of which might more profitably have
+been converted into care for the head, is in most cases true. A hostile
+observer of bands of Carlylites at Oxford and elsewhere might have been
+justified in describing the imperative duty of work as the theme of many
+an hour of strenuous idleness, and the superiority of golden silence
+over silver speech as the text of endless bursts of jerky rapture, while
+a too constant invective against cant had its usual effect of developing
+cant with a difference. To the incorrigibly sentimental all this was
+sheer poison, which continues tenaciously in the system. Others of
+robuster character no sooner came into contact with the world and its
+fortifying exigencies, than they at once began to assimilate the
+wholesome part of what they had taken in, while the rest falls gradually
+and silently out. When criticism has done its just work on the
+disagreeable affectations of many of Mr. Carlyle's disciples, and on the
+nature of Mr. Carlyle's opinions and their worth as specific
+contributions, very few people will be found to deny that his influence
+in stimulating moral energy, in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy
+of enthusiasm, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand,
+and the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has
+not been surpassed by any teacher now living.
+
+One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty
+years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his
+own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in
+the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in
+progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and
+haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully
+visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become
+equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no
+countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with
+hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of
+institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of
+poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it
+could be regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has
+boldly and often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting
+the objects which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applying with
+energetic spirit to the task of preparing a sounder state for our
+successors. The relations between master and servant, between capitalist
+and labourer, between landlord and tenant, between governing race and
+subject race, between the feelings and intelligence of the legislature
+and the feelings and intelligence of the nation, between the spiritual
+power, literary and ecclesiastical, and those who are under it--the
+anarchy that prevails in all these, and the extreme danger of it, have
+been with Mr. Carlyle a never-ending theme. What seems to many of us the
+extreme inefficiency or worse of his solutions, still allows us to feel
+grateful for the vigour and perspicacity with which he has pressed on
+the world the urgency of the problem.
+
+The degree of durability which his influence is likely to possess with
+the next and following generations is another and rather sterile
+question, which we are not now concerned to discuss. The unrestrained
+eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong individuality has precipitated
+in his written style may, in spite of the poetic fineness of his
+imagination, which no historian or humorist has excelled, still be
+expected to deprive his work of that permanence which is only secured by
+classic form. The incorporation of so many phrases, allusions,
+nicknames, that belong only to the hour, inevitably makes the vitality
+of the composition conditional on the vitality of these transient and
+accidental elements which are so deeply imbedded in it. Another
+consideration is that no philosophic writer, however ardently his words
+may have been treasured and followed by the people of his own time, can
+well be cherished by succeeding generations, unless his name is
+associated through some definable and positive contribution with the
+central march of European thought and feeling. In other words, there is
+a difference between living in the history of literature or belief, and
+living in literature itself and in the minds of believers. Mr. Carlyle
+has been a most powerful solvent, but it is the tendency of solvents to
+become merely historic. The historian of the intellectual and moral
+movements of Great Britain during the present century, will fail
+egregiously in his task if he omits to give a large and conspicuous
+space to the author of _Sartor Resartus_. But it is one thing to study
+historically the ideas which have influenced our predecessors, and
+another thing to seek in them an influence fruitful for ourselves. It is
+to be hoped that one may doubt the permanent soundness of Mr. Carlyle's
+peculiar speculations, without either doubting or failing to share that
+warm affection and reverence which his personality has worthily inspired
+in many thousands of his readers. He has himself taught us to separate
+these two sides of a man, and we have learnt from him to love Samuel
+Johnson without reading much or a word that the old sage wrote.
+'Sterling and I walked westward,' he says once, 'arguing copiously, but
+_except_ in opinion not disagreeing.'
+
+It is none the less for what has just been said a weightier and a rarer
+privilege for a man to give a stirring impulse to the moral activity of
+a generation, than to write in classic style; and to have impressed the
+spirit of his own personality deeply upon the minds of multitudes of
+men, than to have composed most of those works which the world is said
+not willingly to let die. Nor, again, is to say that this higher renown
+belongs to Mr. Carlyle, to underrate the less resounding, but most
+substantial, services of a definite kind which he has rendered both to
+literature and history. This work may be in time superseded with the
+advance of knowledge, but the value of the first service will remain
+unimpaired. It was he, as has been said, 'who first taught England to
+appreciate Goethe;' and not only to appreciate Goethe, but to recognise
+and seek yet further knowledge of the genius and industry of Goethe's
+countrymen. His splendid drama of the French Revolution has done, and
+may be expected long to continue to do, more to bring before our
+slow-moving and unimaginative public the portentous meaning of that
+tremendous cataclysm, than all the other writings on the subject in the
+English language put together. His presentation of Puritanism and the
+Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most elevating period of
+the national history in any way really intelligible. The Life of
+Frederick the Second, whatever judgment we may pass upon its morality,
+or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a model of
+laborious and exhaustive narration of facts not before accessible to the
+reader of history. For all this, and for much other work eminently
+useful and meritorious even from the mechanical point of view, Mr.
+Carlyle deserves the warmest recognition. His genius gave him a right to
+mock at the ineffectiveness of Dryasdust, but his genius was also too
+true to prevent him from adding the always needful supplement of a
+painstaking industry that rivals Dryasdust's own most strenuous toil.
+Take out of the mind of the English reader of ordinary cultivation and
+the average journalist, usually a degree or two lower than this, their
+conceptions of the French Revolution and the English Rebellion, and
+their knowledge of German literature and history, as well as most of
+their acquaintance with the prominent men of the eighteenth century, and
+we shall see how much work Mr. Carlyle has done simply as schoolmaster.
+
+This, however, is emphatically a secondary aspect of his character, and
+of the function which he has fulfilled in relation to the more active
+tendencies of modern opinion and feeling. We must go on to other ground,
+if we would find the field in which he has laboured most ardently and
+with most acceptance. History and literature have been with him, what
+they will always be with wise and understanding minds of creative and
+even of the higher critical faculty--only embodiments, illustrations,
+experiments, for ideas about religion, conduct, society, history,
+government, and all the other great heads and departments of a complete
+social doctrine. From this point of view, the time has perhaps come when
+we may fairly attempt to discern some of the tendencies which Mr.
+Carlyle has initiated or accelerated and deepened, though assuredly many
+years must elapse before any adequate measure can be taken of their
+force and final direction.
+
+It would be a comparatively simple process to affix the regulation
+labels of philosophy; to say that Mr. Carlyle is a Pantheist in religion
+(or a Pot-theist, to use the alternative whose flippancy gave such
+offence to Sterling on one occasion[1]), a Transcendentalist or
+Intuitionist in ethics, an Absolutist in politics, and so forth, with
+the addition of a crowd of privative or negative epithets at discretion.
+But classifications of this sort are the worst enemies of true
+knowledge. Such names are by the vast majority even of persons who think
+themselves educated, imperfectly apprehended, ignorantly interpreted,
+and crudely and recklessly applied. It is not too much to say that nine
+out of ten people who think they have delivered themselves of a
+criticism when they call Mr. Carlyle a Pantheist, could neither explain
+with any precision what Pantheism is, nor have ever thought of
+determining the parts of his writings where this particular monster is
+believed to lurk. Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the
+trouble of thinking. As I once wrote elsewhere:
+
+[1] _Life of John Sterling_, p. 153.
+
+'The readiness to use general names in speaking of the greater subjects,
+and the fitness which qualifies a man to use them, commonly exist in
+inverse proportions. If we reflect on the conditions out of which
+ordinary opinion is generated, we may well be startled at the profuse
+liberality with which names of the widest and most complex and variable
+significance are bestowed on all hands. The majority of the ideas which
+constitute most men's intellectual stock-in-trade have accrued by
+processes quite distinct from fair reasoning and consequent conviction.
+This is so notorious, that it is amazing how so many people can go on
+freely and rapidly labelling thinkers or writers with names which they
+themselves are not competent to bestow, and which their hearers are not
+competent either to understand generally, or to test in the specific
+instance.'
+
+These labels are rather more worthless than usual in the present case,
+because Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical and defiantly
+inconsistent; and, therefore, the term which might correctly describe
+one side of his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a
+wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications
+necessary to make any one of the regular epithets fairly applicable
+would have to be so many, that the glosses would virtually overlay the
+text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by
+discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what
+pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine means, or
+what it is worth, but what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their
+character, their relations to one another, and what that is worth.
+
+With most men and women the master element in their opinions is
+obviously neither their own reason nor their own imagination,
+independently exercised, but only mere use and wont, chequered by
+fortuitous sensations, and modified in the better cases by the
+influence of a favourite teacher; while in the worse the teacher is the
+favourite who happens to chime in most harmoniously with prepossessions,
+or most effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among the superior
+minds the balance between reason and imagination is scarcely ever held
+exactly true, nor is either firmly kept within the precise bounds that
+are proper to it. It is a question of temperament which of the two
+mental attitudes becomes fixed and habitual, as it is a question of
+temperament how violently either of them straitens and distorts the
+normal faculties of vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head,
+which would usually be better described as a thin head, may and
+constantly does fall into a confirmed manner of judging character and
+circumstance, so narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to
+make common sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine
+name of reason. Excess on the other side leads people into emotional
+transports, in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth, the
+difficulty of discovering the truth, the narrowness of the way that
+leads thereto, the merits of intellectual precision and definiteness,
+and even the merits of moral precision and definiteness, are all
+effectually veiled by purple or fiery clouds of anger, sympathy, and
+sentimentalism, which imagination has hung over the intelligence.
+
+The familiar distinction between the poetic and the scientific temper is
+another way of stating the same difference. The one fuses or
+crystallises external objects and circumstances in the medium of human
+feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of
+objects and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the
+facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification
+of these relations. There is, too, a corresponding distinction between
+the aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects
+of nature are able to present, according as we scrutinise them with a
+view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which
+they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our
+tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other
+emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side
+for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet.
+The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in
+an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a
+Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world,
+the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those
+whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly
+monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed
+with one set of attributes by scientific intelligence, and with another
+by sentiment, fancy, and imaginative association.
+
+The contentiousness of rival schools of philosophy has obscured the
+application of the same distinction to the various orders of fact more
+nearly and immediately relating to man and the social union. One school
+has maintained the virtually unmeaning doctrine that the will is free,
+and therefore its followers never gave any quarter to the idea that man
+was as proper an object of scientific scrutiny morally and historically,
+as they could not deny him to be anatomically and physiologically. Their
+enemies have been more concerned to dislodge them from this position,
+than to fortify, organise, and cultivate their own. The consequences
+have not been without their danger. Poetic persons have rushed in where
+scientific persons ought not to have feared to tread. That human
+character and the order of events have their poetic aspect, and that
+their poetic treatment demands the rarest and most valuable qualities of
+mind, is a truth which none but narrow and superficial men of the world
+are rash enough to deny. But that there is a scientific aspect of these
+things, an order among them that can only be understood and criticised
+and effectually modified scientifically, by using all the caution and
+precision and infinite patience of the truly scientific spirit, is a
+truth that is constantly ignored even by men and women of the loftiest
+and most humane nature. In such cases misdirected and uncontrolled
+sensibility ends in mournful waste of their own energy, in the certain
+disappointment of their own aims, and where such sensibility is backed
+by genius, eloquence, and a peculiar set of public conditions, in
+prolonged and fatal disturbance of society.
+
+Rousseau was the great type of this triumphant and dangerous sophistry
+of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking
+nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning a
+man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded
+life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever lived.
+Community of method, like misery, makes men acquainted with strange
+bed-fellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral worth may
+notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the same method,
+and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of
+them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a
+retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and
+right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a
+factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly solved by
+external observation and history. In connection with each of them has
+been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimentalism, when
+circumstances draw away the mask. Not the least conspicuous of the
+disciples of Rousseau was Robespierre. His works lay on the table of the
+Committee of Public Safety. The theory of the Reign of Terror was
+invented, and mercilessly reduced to practice, by men whom the visions
+of Rousseau had fired, and who were not afraid nor ashamed to wade
+through oceans of blood to the promised land of humanity and fine
+feeling. We in our days have seen the same result of sentimental
+doctrine in the barbarous love of the battle-field, the retrograde
+passion for methods of repression, the contempt for human life, the
+impatience of orderly and peaceful solution. We begin with introspection
+and the eternities, and end in blood and iron. Again, Rousseau's first
+piece was an anathema upon the science and art of his time, and a
+denunciation of books and speech. Mr. Carlyle, in exactly the same
+spirit, has denounced logic mills, warned us all away from literature,
+and habitually subordinated discipline of the intelligence to the
+passionate assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks
+respectfully of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is
+using the term in a special sense of his own, and confounding it with
+'the exact summary of human _Worth_,' as in one place he defines it.
+Thus, instead of co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual
+energy, virtue with intelligence, right action of the will with
+scientific processes of the understanding, he has either placed one
+immeasurably below the other, or else has mischievously insisted on
+treating them as identical. The dictates of a kind heart are of superior
+force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory
+resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works
+easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse.
+All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes
+hard sentiment and sometimes soft sentiment, above reason and method.
+
+In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody
+else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right and an eager desire
+for social activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away from him
+the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that
+our social action is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting
+perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual
+self-possession, to have added another name to the illustrious catalogue
+of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his
+sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an
+imaginative and highly emotional manner. Depth of benevolent feeling is
+unhappily no proof of fitness for handling complex problems, and a fine
+sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing
+effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the
+composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any
+reason for supposing that the author would have made a competent
+Commissioner of Works.
+
+Why should society, with its long and deep-hidden processes of growth,
+its innumerable intricacies and far-off historic complexities, be as an
+open book to any reader of its pages who brings acuteness and passion,
+but no patience nor calm accuracy of meditation? Objects of thought and
+observation far simpler, more free from all blinding and distorting
+elements, more accessible to direct and ocular inspection, are by
+rational consent reserved for the calmest and most austere moods and
+methods of human intelligence. Nor is denunciation of the conditions of
+a problem the quickest step towards solving it. Vituperation of the fact
+that supply and demand practically regulate certain kinds of bargain, is
+no contribution to systematic efforts to discover some more moral
+regulator. Take all the invective that Mr. Carlyle has poured out
+against political economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according to
+M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire inadequateness of political
+economy to sum up the laws and conditions of a healthy social state--and
+no one more than the present writer deplores the mischief which the
+application of the maxims of political economy by ignorant and selfish
+spirits has effected in confirming the worst tendencies of the
+commercial character--yet is it not a first condition of our being able
+to substitute better machinery for the ordinary rules of self-interest,
+that we know scientifically how those rules do and must operate? Again,
+in another field, it is well to cry out: 'Caitiff, we hate thee,' with a
+'hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the
+scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and
+disappearance from the scene of things.'[2] But this is slightly vague.
+It is not scientific. There are caitiffs and caitiffs. There is a more
+and a less of scoundrelism, as there is a more and a less of black
+annihilation, and we must have systematic jurisprudence, with its
+classification of caitiffs and its graduated blasting. Has Mr. Carlyle's
+passion, or have the sedulous and scientific labours of that Bentham,
+whose name with him is a symbol of evil, done most in what he calls the
+Scoundrel-province of Reform within the last half-century? Sterling's
+criticism on Teufelsdröckh told a hard but wholesome truth to
+Teufelsdröckh's creator. 'Wanting peace himself,' said Sterling, 'his
+fierce dissatisfaction fixes on all that is weak, corrupt, and imperfect
+around him; and instead of a calm and steady co-operation with all those
+who are endeavouring to apply the highest ideas as remedies for the
+worst evils, he holds himself in savage isolation.'[3]
+
+[2] _Latter-Day Pamphlets._ II. Model Prisons, p. 92.
+
+[3] Letter to Mr. Carlyle, in the _Life_, Pt. ii. ch. ii.
+
+Mr. Carlyle assures us of Bonaparte that he had an instinct of nature
+better than his culture was, and illustrates it by the story that during
+the Egyptian expedition, when his scientific men were busy arguing that
+there could be no God, Bonaparte, looking up to the stars, confuted them
+decisively by saying: 'Very ingenious, Messieurs; but _who made_ all
+that?' Surely the most inconclusive answer since coxcombs vanquished
+Berkeley with a grin. It is, however, a type of Mr. Carlyle's faith in
+the instinct of nature, as superseding the necessity for patient logical
+method; a faith, in other words, in crude and uninterpreted sense.
+Insight, indeed, goes far, but it no more entitles its possessor to
+dispense with reasoned discipline and system in treating scientific
+subjects, than it relieves him from the necessity of conforming to the
+physical conditions of health. Why should society be the one field of
+thought in which a man of genius is at liberty to assume all his major
+premisses, and swear all his conclusions?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The deep unrest of unsatisfied souls meets its earliest solace in the
+effective and sympathetic expression of the same unrest from the lips of
+another. To look it in the face is the first approach to a sedative. To
+find our discontent with the actual, our yearning for an undefined
+ideal, our aspiration after impossible heights of being, shared and
+amplified in the emotional speech of a man of genius, is the beginning
+of consolation. Some of the most generous spirits a hundred years ago
+found this in the eloquence of Rousseau, and some of the most generous
+spirits of this time and place have found it in the writer of the
+_Sartor_. In ages not of faith, there will always be multitudinous
+troops of people crying for the moon. If such sorrowful pastime be ever
+permissible to men, it has been natural and lawful this long while in
+præ-revolutionary England, as it was natural and lawful a century since
+in præ-revolutionary France. A man born into a community where political
+forms, from the monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow
+shams disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is
+mainly official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself
+alike from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and the spirit
+of truth, and where literature does not as a rule permit itself to
+discuss serious subjects frankly and worthily[4]--a community, in
+short, where the great aim of all classes and orders with power is by
+dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern stopping
+of the ears, somehow to keep the social pyramid on its apex, with the
+fatal result of preserving for England its glorious fame as a paradise
+for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a hell for the
+poor--why, a man born into all this with a heart something softer than a
+flint, and with intellectual vision something more acute than that of a
+Troglodyte, may well be allowed to turn aside and cry for moons for a
+season.
+
+[4] Written in 1870.
+
+Impotent unrest, however, is followed in Mr. Carlyle by what is socially
+an impotent solution, just as it was with Rousseau. To bid a man do his
+duty in one page, and then in the next to warn him sternly away from
+utilitarianism, from political economy, from all 'theories of the moral
+sense,' and from any other definite means of ascertaining what duty may
+chance to be, is but a bald and naked counsel. Spiritual nullity and
+material confusion in a society are not to be repaired by a
+transformation of egotism, querulous, brooding, marvelling, into
+egotism, active, practical, objective, not uncomplacent. The moral
+movements to which the instinctive impulses of humanity fallen on evil
+times uniformly give birth, early Christianity, for instance, or the
+socialism of Rousseau, may destroy a society, but they cannot save it
+unless in conjunction with organising policy. A thorough appreciation
+of fiscal and economic truths was at least as indispensable for the life
+of the Roman Empire as the acceptance of a Messiah; and it was only in
+the hands of a great statesman like Gregory VII. that Christianity
+became at last an instrument powerful enough to save civilisation. What
+the moral renovation of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now
+Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the doctrine of Mr.
+Carlyle, which, while in name a renunciation of self, has all its
+foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, notwithstanding the
+method of _Emile_, treats man as a part of a collective whole,
+contracting manifold relations and owing manifold duties; and he always
+appeals to the love and sympathy which an imaginary God of nature has
+implanted in the heart. His aim is unity. Mr. Carlyle, following the
+same method of obedience to his own personal emotions, unfortified by
+patient reasoning, lands at the other extremity, and lays all his stress
+on the separatist instincts. The individual stands alone confronted by
+the eternities; between these and his own soul exists the one central
+relation. This has all the fundamental egotism of the doctrine of
+personal salvation, emancipated from fable, and varnished with an
+emotional phrase. The doctrine has been very widely interpreted, and
+without any forcing, as a religious expression for the conditions of
+commercial success.
+
+If we look among our own countrymen, we find that the apostle of
+self-renunciation is nowhere so beloved as by the best of those whom
+steady self-reliance and thrifty self-securing and a firm eye to the
+main chance have got successfully on in the world. A Carlylean
+anthology, or volume of the master's sentences, might easily be
+composed, that should contain the highest form of private liturgy
+accepted by the best of the industrial classes, masters or men. They
+forgive or overlook the writer's denunciations of Beaver Industrialisms,
+which they attribute to his caprice or spleen. This is the worst of an
+emotional teacher, that people take only so much as they please from
+him, while with a reasoner they must either refute by reason, or else
+they must accept by reason, and not at simple choice. When trade is
+brisk, and England is successfully competing in the foreign markets, the
+books that enjoin silence and self-annihilation have a wonderful
+popularity in the manufacturing districts. This circumstance is
+honourable both to them and to him, as far as it goes, but it furnishes
+some reason for suspecting that our most vigorous moral reformer, so far
+from propelling us in new grooves, has in truth only given new firmness
+and coherency to tendencies that were strongly marked enough in the
+national character before. He has increased the fervour of the country,
+but without materially changing its objects; there is all the less
+disguise among us as a result of his teaching, but no radical
+modification of the sentiments which people are sincere in. The most
+stirring general appeal to the emotions, to be effective for more than
+negative purposes, must lead up to definite maxims and specific
+precepts. As a negative renovation Mr. Carlyle's doctrine was perfect.
+It effectually put an end to the mood of Byronism. May we say that with
+the neutralisation of Byron, his most decisive and special work came to
+an end? May we not say further, that the true renovation of England, if
+such a process be ever feasible, will lie in a quite other method than
+this of emotion? It will lie not in more moral earnestness only, but in
+a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work
+and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The
+poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not
+intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but
+all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is
+this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble
+situation. We need light more than heat; intellectual alertness, faith
+in the reasoning faculty, accessibility to new ideas. To refuse to use
+the intellect patiently and with system, to decline to seek scientific
+truth, to prefer effusive indulgence of emotion to the laborious and
+disciplined and candid exploration of new ideas, is not this, too, a
+torpid unveracity? And has not Mr. Carlyle, by the impatience of his
+method, done somewhat to deepen it?
+
+It is very well to invite us to moral reform, to bring ourselves to be
+of heroic mind, as the surest way to 'the blessed Aristocracy of the
+Wisest.' But how shall we know the wisest when we see them, and how
+shall a nation know, if not by keen respect and watchfulness for
+intellectual truth and the teachers of it? Much as we may admire Mr.
+Carlyle's many gifts, and highly as we may revere his character, it is
+yet very doubtful whether anybody has as yet learnt from him the
+precious lesson of scrupulosity and conscientiousness in actively and
+constantly using the intelligence. This would have been the solid
+foundation of the true hero-worship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let thus much have been said on the head of temperament. The historic
+position also of every writer is an indispensable key to many things in
+his teaching.[5] We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's case, that he was
+born in the memorable year when the French Revolution, in its narrower
+sense, was closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the great century
+of emancipation and illumination was ending darkly in battles and
+confusion. During his youth the reaction was in full flow, and the lamp
+had been handed to runners who not only reversed the ideas and methods,
+but even turned aside from the goal of their precursors. Hopefulness and
+enthusiastic confidence in humanity when freed from the fetters of
+spiritual superstition and secular tyranny, marked all the most
+characteristic and influential speculations of the two generations
+before '89. The appalling failure which attended the splendid attempt to
+realise these hopes in a renewed and perfected social structure, had no
+more than its natural effect in turning men's minds back, not to the
+past of Rousseau's imagination, but to the past of recorded history. The
+single epoch in the annals of Europe since the rise of Christianity, for
+which no good word could be found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The
+hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries was
+passed lightly over by men who had only eyes for the moral obliquity of
+the church of the Encyclopædia. The brilliant but profoundly inadequate
+essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the outcome in Mr. Carlyle of the
+same reactionary spirit. Nobody now, we may suppose, who is competent to
+judge, thinks that that estimate of 'the net product, of the tumultuous
+Atheism' of Diderot and his fellow-workers, is a satisfactory account of
+the influence and significance of the Encyclopædia; nor that to sum up
+Voltaire, with his burning passion for justice, his indefatigable
+humanity, his splendid energy in intellectual production, his righteous
+hatred of superstition, as merely a supreme master of _persiflage_, can
+be a process partaking of finality. The fact that to the eighteenth
+century belong the subjects of more than half of these thirty volumes,
+is a proof of the fascination of the period for an author who has never
+ceased to vilipend it. The saying is perhaps as true in these matters as
+of private relations, that hatred is not so far removed from love as
+indifference is. Be that as it may, the Carlylean view of the eighteenth
+century as a time of mere scepticism and unbelief, is now clearly
+untenable to men who remember the fervour of Jean Jacques, and the more
+rational, but not any less fervid faith of the disciples of
+Perfectibility. But this was not so clear fifty years since, when the
+crash and dust of demolition had not so subsided as to let men see how
+much had risen up behind. The fire of the new school had been taken from
+the very conflagration which they execrated, but they were not held back
+from denouncing the eighteenth century by the reflection that, at any
+rate, its thought and action had made ready the way for much of what is
+best in the nineteenth.
+
+[5] The dates of Mr. Carlyle's principal compositions are these:--_Life
+of Schiller_, 1825; _Sartor Resartus_, 1831; _French Revolution_, 1837;
+_Chartism_, 1839; _Hero-Worship_, 1840; _Past and Present_, 1843;
+_Cromwell_, 1845; _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 1850; _Friedrich the Second_,
+1858-1865; _Shooting Niagara_, 1867.
+
+Mr. Carlyle himself has told us about Coleridge, and the movement of
+which Coleridge was the leader. That movement has led men in widely
+different ways. In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps
+of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous ephemera still suck a
+little spiritual moisture. In another it led to the sacramental and
+sacerdotal developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among men with
+strong practical energy, to the benevolent bluster of a sort of
+Christianity which is called muscular because it is not intellectual. It
+would be an error to suppose that these and the other streams that have
+sprung from the same source, did not in the days of their fulness
+fertilise and gladden many lands. The wordy pietism of one school, the
+mimetic rites of another, the romping heroics of the third, are
+degenerate forms. How long they are likely to endure, it would be rash
+to predict among a nation whose established teachers and official
+preachers are prevented by an inveterate timidity from trusting
+themselves to that disciplined intelligence, in which the superior minds
+of the last century had such courageous faith.
+
+Mr. Carlyle drank in some sort at the same fountain. Coleridgean ideas
+were in the air. It was there probably that he acquired that sympathy
+with the past, or with certain portions of the past, that feeling of the
+unity of history, and that conviction of the necessity of binding our
+theory of history fast with our theory of other things, in all of which
+he so strikingly resembles the great Anglican leaders of a generation
+ago, and in gaining some of which so strenuous an effort must have been
+needed to modify the prepossessions of a Scotch Puritan education. No
+one has contributed more powerfully to that movement which, drawing
+force from many and various sides, has brought out the difference
+between the historian and the gazetteer or antiquary. One half of _Past
+and Present_ might have been written by one of the Oxford chiefs in the
+days of the Tracts. Vehement native force was too strong for such a man
+to remain in the luminous haze which made the Coleridgean atmosphere. A
+well-known chapter in the _Life of Sterling_, which some, indeed, have
+found too ungracious, shows how little hold he felt Coleridge's ideas
+to be capable of retaining, and how little permanent satisfaction
+resided in them. Coleridge, in fact, was not only a poet but a thinker
+as well; he had science of a sort as well as imagination, but it was not
+science for headlong and impatient souls. Mr. Carlyle has probably never
+been able to endure a subdivision all his life, and the infinite
+ramifications of the central division between object and subject might
+well be with him an unprofitable weariness to the flesh.
+
+In England, the greatest literary organ of the Revolution was
+unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic
+lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over
+the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific
+work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with
+all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some
+gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly
+tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a
+revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had
+fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the
+many-eyed minuteness and sustained pulsing force of Byron, has still the
+full swell and tide and energy of genius: he is as lawless in his
+disrespect for some things established. He had the unspeakable advantage
+of being that which, though not in this sense, only his own favourite
+word of contempt describes, respectable; and, for another thing, of
+being ruggedly sincere. Carlylism is the male of Byronism. It is
+Byronism with thew and sinew, bass pipe and shaggy bosom. There is the
+same grievous complaint against the time and its men and its spirit,
+something even of the same contemptuous despair, the same sense of the
+puniness of man in the centre of a cruel and frowning universe; but
+there is in Carlylism a deliverance from it all, indeed the only
+deliverance possible. Its despair is a despair without misery. Labour in
+a high spirit, duty done, and right service performed in fortitudinous
+temper--here was, not indeed a way out, but a way of erect living
+within.
+
+Against Byronism the ordinary moralist and preacher could really do
+nothing, because Byronism was an appeal that lay in the regions of the
+mind only accessible by one with an eye and a large poetic feeling for
+the infinite whole of things. It was not the rebellion only in
+_Manfred_, nor the wit in _Don Juan_, nor the graceful melancholy of
+_Childe Harold_, which made their author an idol, and still make him one
+to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of
+it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of
+Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's
+work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a
+sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part
+showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the
+universal forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness of his
+achievement and endurance takes a complexion of greatness from the
+vague immensity that surrounds and impalpably mixes with it.
+
+Remember further, that while in Byron the outcome of this was rebellion,
+in Carlyle its outcome is reverence, a noble mood, which is one of the
+highest predispositions of the English character. The instincts of
+sanctification rooted in Teutonic races, and which in the corrupt and
+unctuous forms of a mechanical religious profession are so revolting,
+were mocked and outraged, where they were not superciliously ignored, in
+every line of the one, while in the other they were enthroned under the
+name of Worship, as the very key and centre of the right life. The
+prophet who never wearies of declaring that 'only in bowing down before
+the Higher does man feel himself exalted,' touched solemn organ notes,
+that awoke a response from dim religious depths, never reached by the
+stormy wailings of the Byronic lyre. The political side of the
+reverential sentiment is equally conciliated, and the prime business of
+individuals and communities pronounced to be the search after worthy
+objects of this divine quality of reverence. While kings' cloaks and
+church tippets are never spared, still less suffered to protect the
+dishonour of ignoble wearers of them, the inadequateness of aggression
+and demolition, the necessity of quiet order, the uncounted debt that we
+owe to rulers and to all sorts of holy and great men who have given this
+order to the world, all this brought repose and harmony into spirits
+that the hollow thunders of universal rebellion against tyrants and
+priests had worn into thinness and confusion. Again, at the bottom of
+the veriest _frondeur_ with English blood in his veins, in his most
+defiant moment there lies a conviction that after all something known as
+common sense is the measure of life, and that to work hard is a
+demonstrated precept of common sense. Carlylism exactly hits this and
+brings it forward. We cannot wonder that Byronism was routed from the
+field.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may have been in the transcendently firm and clear-eyed intelligence
+of Goethe that Mr. Carlyle first found a responsive encouragement to the
+profoundly positive impulses of his own spirit.[6] There is, indeed, a
+whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and bright composure of the
+one, and the vehemence, passion, masterful wrath, of the other; and the
+vast, incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing
+corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous contempt and
+indifference, sometimes express and sometimes only very significantly
+implied, for forms of intellectual activity that do not happen to be
+personally congenial. But each is a god, though the one sits ever on
+Olympus, while the other is as one from Tartarus. There is in each,
+besides all else, a certain remarkable directness of glance, an
+intrepid and penetrating quality of vision, which defies analysis.
+Occasional turgidity of phrase and unidiomatic handling of language do
+not conceal the simplicity of the process by which Mr. Carlyle pierces
+through obstruction down to the abstrusest depths. And the important
+fact is that this abstruseness is not verbal, any more than it is the
+abstruseness of fog and cloud. His epithet, or image, or trope, shoots
+like a sunbeam on to the matter, throwing a transfigurating light, even
+where it fails to pierce to its central core.
+
+[6] _Positive._ No English lexicon as yet seems to justify the use of
+this word in one of the senses of the French _positif_, as when a
+historian, for instance, speaks of the _esprit positif_ of Bonaparte. We
+have no word, I believe, that exactly corresponds, so perhaps _positive_
+with that significance will become acclimatised. A distinct and separate
+idea of this particular characteristic is indispensable.
+
+Eager for a firm foothold, yet wholly revolted by the too narrow and
+unelevated positivity of the eighteenth century; eager also for some
+recognition of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly unsatisfied
+by the transcendentalism of the English and Scotch philosophic
+reactions; he found in Goethe that truly free and adequate positivity
+which accepts all things as parts of a natural or historic order, and
+while insisting on the recognition of the actual conditions of this
+order as indispensable, and condemning attempted evasions of such
+recognition as futile and childish, yet opens an ample bosom for all
+forms of beauty in art, and for all nobleness in moral aspiration. That
+Mr. Carlyle has reached this high ground we do not say. Temperament has
+kept him down from it. But it is after this that he has striven. The
+tumid nothingness of pure transcendentalism he has always abhorred. Some
+of Mr. Carlyle's favourite phrases have disguised from his readers the
+intensely practical turn of his whole mind. His constant presentation
+of the Eternities, the Immensities, and the like, has veiled his almost
+narrow adherence to plain record without moral comment, and his often
+cynical respect for the dangerous, yet, when rightly qualified and
+guided, the solid formula that What is, is. The Eternities and
+Immensities are only a kind of awful background. The highest souls are
+held to be deeply conscious of these vast unspeakable presences, yet
+even with them they are only inspiring accessories; the true interest
+lies in the practical attitude of such men towards the actual and
+palpable circumstances that surround them. This spirituality, whose
+place in Mr. Carlyle's teaching has been so extremely mis-stated, sinks
+wholly out of sight in connection with such heroes as the coarse and
+materialist Bonaparte, of whom, however, the hero-worshipper in earlier
+pieces speaks with some laudable misgiving, and the not less coarse and
+materialist Frederick, about whom no misgiving is permitted to the loyal
+disciple. The admiration for military methods, on condition that they
+are successful, for Mr. Carlyle, like Providence, is always on the side
+of big and victorious battalions, is the last outcome of a devotion to
+vigorous action and practical effect, which no verbal garniture of a
+transcendental kind can hinder us from perceiving to be more purely
+materialist and unfeignedly brutal than anything which sprung from the
+reviled thought of the eighteenth century.
+
+It is instructive to remark that another of the most illustrious
+enemies of that century and all its works, Joseph de Maistre, had the
+same admiration for the effectiveness of war, and the same extreme
+interest and concern in the men and things of war. He, too, declares
+that 'the loftiest and most generous sentiments are probably to be found
+in the soldier;' and that war, if terrible, is divine and splendid and
+fascinating, the manifestation of a sublime law of the universe. We
+must, however, do De Maistre the justice to point out, first, that he
+gave a measure of his strange interest in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr.
+Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of the honours
+of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second
+place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a
+fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a
+divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely
+defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of
+Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will,
+tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this
+and the absolutism of the mystic.
+
+[7] _Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, 7ième entretien._
+
+'Nature,' he says in one place, 'keeps silently a most exact
+Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most evanescent item,
+Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks
+down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism;
+Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or
+one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in
+consequence of that--Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously
+as Fate (for this _is_ Fate that is writing); and at the end of the
+account you will have it all to pay, my friend.'[8]
+
+[8] _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, No. V. p. 247.
+
+That is to say, there is a law of recompense for communities of men, and
+as nations sow, even thus they reap. But what is Mr. Carlyle's account
+of the precise nature and operation of this law? What is the original
+distinction between an act of veracity and a blunder? Why was the blow
+struck by the Directory on the Eighteenth Fructidor a blunder, and that
+struck by Bonaparte on the Eighteenth Brumaire a veracity? What
+principle of registration is that which makes Nature debtor to Frederick
+the Second for the seizure of Silesia, and Bonaparte debtor to Nature
+for 'trampling on the world, holding it tyrannously down?' It is very
+well to tell us that 'Injustice pays itself with frightful compound
+interest,' but there are reasons for suspecting that Mr. Carlyle's
+definition of the just and the unjust are such as to reduce this and all
+his other sentences of like purport to the level of mere truism and
+repetition. If you secretly or openly hold that to be just and veracious
+which is successful, then it needs no further demonstration that
+penalties of ultimate failure are exacted for injustice, because it is
+precisely the failure that constitutes the injustice.
+
+This is the kernel of all that is most retrograde in Mr. Carlyle's
+teaching. He identifies the physical with the moral order, confounds
+faithful conformity to the material conditions of success, with loyal
+adherence to virtuous rule and principle, and then appeals to material
+triumph as the sanction of nature and the ratification of high heaven.
+Admiring with profoundest admiration the spectacle of an inflexible
+will, when armed with a long-headed insight into means and quantities
+and forces as its instrument, and yet deeply revering the abstract ideal
+of justice; dazzled by the methods and the products of iron resolution,
+yet imbued with traditional affection for virtue; he has seen no better
+way of conciliating both inclinations than by insisting that they point
+in the same direction, and that virtue and success, justice and victory,
+merit and triumph, are in the long run all one and the same thing. The
+most fatal of confusions. Compliance with material law and condition
+ensures material victory, and compliance with moral condition ensures
+moral triumph; but then moral triumph is as often as not physical
+martyrdom. Superior military virtues must unquestionably win the verdict
+of Fate, Nature, Fact, and Veracity, on the battle-field, but what then?
+Has Fate no other verdicts to record than these? and at the moment while
+she writes Nature down debtor to the conqueror, may she not also have
+written her down his implacable creditor for the moral cost of his
+conquest?
+
+The anarchy and confusion of Poland were an outrage upon political
+conditions, which brought her to dependence and ruin. The manner of the
+partition was an outrage on moral conditions, for which each of the
+nations that profited by it paid in the lawlessness of Bonaparte. The
+preliminaries of Léoben, again, and Campo-Formio were the key to
+Waterloo and St. Helena. But Mr. Carlyle stops short at the triumph of
+compliance with the conditions of material victory. He is content to
+know that Frederick made himself master of Silesia, without considering
+that the day of Jena loomed in front. It suffices to say that the whiff
+of grape-shot on the Thirteenth Vendémiaire brought Sans-culottism to
+order and an end, without measuring what permanent elements of disorder
+were ineradicably implanted by resort to the military arm. Only the
+failures are used to point the great historical moral, and if Bonaparte
+had died in the Tuileries in all honour and glory, he would have ranked
+with Frederick or Francia as a wholly true man. Mr. Carlyle would then
+no more have declared the execution of Palm 'a palpable, tyrannous,
+murderous injustice,' than he declares it of the execution of Katte or
+Schlubhut. The fall of the traitor to fact, of the French monarchy, of
+the windbags of the first Republic, of Charles I., is improved for our
+edification, but then the other lesson, the failure of heroes like
+Cromwell, remains isolated and incoherent, with no place in a morally
+regulated universe. If the strength of Prussia now proves that Frederick
+had a right to seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further
+whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist
+assume, from the fact of the restoration, and the consequent
+obliteration of Cromwell's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a
+phantasm captain?
+
+Apart from its irreconcilableness with many of his most emphatic
+judgments, Mr. Carlyle's doctrine about Nature's registration of the
+penalties of injustice is intrinsically an anachronism. It is worse than
+the Catholic reaction, because while De Maistre only wanted Europe to
+return to the system of the twelfth century, Mr. Carlyle's theory of
+history takes us back to times prehistoric, when might and right were
+the same thing. It is decidedly natural that man in a state of nature
+should take and keep as much as his skill and physical strength enable
+him to do. But society and its benefits are all so much ground won from
+nature and her state. The more natural a method of acquisition, the less
+likely is it to be social. The essence of morality is the subjugation of
+nature in obedience to social needs. To use Kant's admirable
+description, concert _pathologically_ extorted by the mere necessities
+of situation, is exalted into a _moral_ union. It is exactly in this
+progressive substitution of one for the other that advancement consists,
+that Progress of the Species at which, in certain of its forms, Mr.
+Carlyle has so many gibes.
+
+That, surely, is the true test of veracity and heroism in conduct. Does
+your hero's achievement go in the pathological or the moral direction?
+Does it tend to spread faith in that cunning, violence, force, which
+were once primitive and natural conditions of life, and which will still
+by natural law work to their own proper triumphs in so far as these
+conditions survive, and within such limits, and in such sense, as they
+permit; or, on the contrary, does it tend to heighten respect for civic
+law, for pledged word, for the habit of self-surrender to the public
+good, and for all those other ideas and sentiments and usages which have
+been painfully gained from the sterile sands of egotism and selfishness,
+and to which we are indebted for all the untold boons conferred by the
+social union on man?
+
+Viewed from this point, the manner of the achievement is as important as
+is its immediate product, a consideration which it is one of Mr.
+Carlyle's most marked peculiarities to take into small account.
+Detesting Jesuitism from the bottom of his soul, he has been too willing
+to accept its fundamental maxim, that the end justifies the means. He
+has taken the end for the ratification or proscription of the means, and
+stamped it as the verdict of Fate and Fact on the transaction and its
+doer. A safer position is this, that the means prepare the end, and the
+end is what the means have made it. Here is the limit of the true law of
+the relations between man and fate. Justice and injustice in the law,
+let us abstain from inquiring after.
+
+There are two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some
+degree by the primitive and pathological principle of repression and
+main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal
+and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are constantly
+straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in
+the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the
+predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and
+unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as
+the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be
+ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occupied the same
+moral and social level as the best of their generation. We are amply
+justified in employing towards them, wherever their offences endanger
+order, the same methods of coercion which originally made society
+possible. No tenable theory about free will or necessity, no theory of
+praise and blame that will bear positive tests, lays us under any
+obligation to spare either the comfort or the life of a man who indulges
+in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr. Carlyle has done much to
+wear this just and austere view into the minds of his generation, and in
+so far he has performed an excellent service.
+
+The second set of relations in which the pathological element still so
+largely predominates are those between nations. Separate and independent
+communities are still in a state of nature. The tie between them is only
+the imperfect, loose, and non-moral tie of self-interest and material
+power. Many publicists and sentimental politicians are ever striving to
+conceal this displeasing fact from themselves and others, and evading
+the lesson of the outbreaks that now and again convulse the civilised
+world. Mr. Carlyle's history of the rise and progress of the power of
+the Prussian monarchy is the great illustration of the hold which he has
+got of the conception of the international state as a state of nature;
+and here again, in so far as he has helped to teach us to study the past
+by historic methods, he has undoubtedly done laudable work.
+
+Yet have we not to confess that there is another side to this kind of
+truth, in both these fields? We may finally pronounce on a given way of
+thinking, only after we have discerned its goal. Not knowing this, we
+cannot accurately know its true tendency and direction. Now, every
+recognition of the pathological necessity should imply a progress and
+effort towards its conversion into moral relationship. The difference
+between a reactionary and a truly progressive thinker or group of ideas
+is not that the one assumes virtuousness and morality as having been the
+conscious condition of international dealings, while the other asserts
+that such dealings were the lawful consequence of self-interest and the
+contest of material forces; nor is it that the one insists on viewing
+international transactions from the same moral point which would be the
+right one, if independent communities actually formed one stable and
+settled family, while the other declines to view their morality at all.
+The vital difference is, that while the reactionary writer rigorously
+confines his faith within the region of facts accomplished, the other
+anticipates a time when the endeavour of the best minds in the civilised
+world, co-operating with every favouring external circumstance that
+arises, shall have in the international circle raised moral
+considerations to an ever higher and higher pre-eminence, and in
+internal conditions shall have left in the chances and training of the
+individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to
+anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or
+other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at
+the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to
+close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure
+that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of the
+present.
+
+Mr. Carlyle's influence, however, was at its height before this idolatry
+of the soldier became a paramount article in his creed; and it is
+devoutly to be hoped that not many of those whom he first taught to
+seize before all things fact and reality, will follow him into this
+torrid air, where only forces and never principles are facts, and where
+nothing is reality but the violent triumph of arbitrarily imposed will.
+There was once a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek and
+cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste energy and hope in
+seeking lights which it is not given to man ever to find, with a solemn
+assurance added that in frank and untrembling recognition of
+circumstance the spirit of man may find a priceless, ever-fruitful
+contentment. The prolonged and thousand-times repeated glorification of
+Unconsciousness, Silence, Renunciation, all comes to this: We are to
+leave the region of things unknowable, and hold fast to the duty that
+lies nearest. Here is the Everlasting Yea. In action only can we have
+certainty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The reticences of men are often only less full of meaning than their
+most pregnant speech; and Mr. Carlyle's unbroken silence upon the modern
+validity and truth of religious creeds says much. The fact that he
+should have taken no distinct side in the great debate as to revelation,
+salvation, inspiration, and the other theological issues that agitate
+and divide a community where theology is now mostly verbal, has been the
+subject of some comment, and has had the effect of adding one rather
+peculiar side to the many varieties of his influence. Many in the
+dogmatic stage have been content to think that as he was not avowedly
+against them, he might be with them, and sacred persons have been known
+to draw their most strenuous inspirations from the chief denouncer of
+phantasms and exploded formulas. Only once, when speaking of Sterling's
+undertaking the clerical burden, does he burst out into unmistakable
+description of the old Jew stars that have now gone out, and wrath
+against those who would persuade us that these stars are still aflame
+and the only ones. That this reserve has been wise in its day, and has
+most usefully widened the tide and scope of the teacher's popularity,
+one need not dispute. There are conditions when indirect solvents are
+most powerful, as there are others, which these have done much to
+prepare, when no lover of truth will stoop to declarations other than
+direct. Mr. Carlyle has assailed the dogmatic temper in religion, and
+this is work that goes deeper than to assail dogmas.
+
+Not even Comte himself has harder words for metaphysics than Mr.
+Carlyle. 'The disease of Metaphysics' is perennial. Questions of Death
+and Immortality, Origin of Evil, Freedom and Necessity, are ever
+appearing and attempting to shape something of the universe. 'And ever
+unsuccessfully: for what theorem of the Infinite can the Finite render
+complete?... Metaphysical Speculation as it begins in No or Nothingness,
+so it must needs end in nothingness; circulates and must circulate in
+endless vortices; creating, swallowing--itself.'[9] Again, on the other
+side, he sets his face just as firmly against the excessive pretensions
+and unwarranted certitudes of the physicist. '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 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
+to 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 Æons of Æons.'[10] The inalterable relativity of
+human knowledge has never been more forcibly illustrated; and the two
+passages together fix the limits of that knowledge with a sagacity truly
+philosophic. Between the vagaries of mystics and the vagaries of
+physicists lies the narrow land of rational certainty, relative,
+conditional, experimental, from which we view the vast realm that
+stretches out unknown before us, and perhaps for ever unknowable;
+inspiring men with an elevated awe, and environing the interests and
+duties of their little lives with a strange sublimity. 'We emerge from
+the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge
+again into the Inane.... But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not;
+Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery.'[11]
+
+[9] 'Characteristics,' _Misc. Ess._, iii. pp. 356-358. Rousseau in the
+same way makes the Savoyard Vicar declare that '_jamais le jargon de la
+métaphysique n'a fait découvrir une seule vérité, et il a rempli la
+philosophie d'absurdités dont on a honte, sitôt qu'on les dépouille de
+leurs grands mots_.'--_Emile_, liv. iv.
+
+[10] _Sartor Resartus_, bk. iii. ch. viii. p. 249.
+
+[11] _Ib._ p. 257.
+
+Natural Supernaturalism, the title of one of the cardinal chapters in
+Mr. Carlyle's cardinal book, is perhaps as good a name as another for
+this two-faced yet integral philosophy, which teaches us to behold with
+cheerful serenity the great gulf which is fixed round our faculty and
+existence on every side, while it fills us with that supreme sense of
+countless unseen possibilities, and of the hidden, undefined movements
+of shadow and light over the spirit, without which the soul of man falls
+into hard and desolate sterility. In youth, perhaps, it is the latter
+aspect of Mr. Carlyle's teaching which first touches people, because
+youth is the time of indefinite aspiration; and it is easier, besides,
+to surrender ourselves passively to these vague emotional impressions,
+than to apply actively and contentedly to the duty that lies nearest,
+and to the securing of 'that infinitesimallest product' on which the
+teacher is ever insisting. It is the Supernaturalism which stirs men
+first, until larger fulness of years and wider experience of life draw
+them to a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in Naturalism. This last
+is the mood which Mr. Carlyle never wearies of extolling and enjoining
+under the name of Belief; and the absence of it, the inability to enter
+into it, is that Unbelief which he so bitterly vituperates, or, in
+another phrase, that Discontent, which he charges with holding the soul
+in such desperate and paralysing bondage.
+
+Indeed, what is it that Mr. Carlyle urges upon us but the search for
+that Mental Freedom, which under one name or another has been the goal
+and ideal of all highest minds that have reflected on the true
+constitution of human happiness? His often enjoined Silence is the first
+condition of this supreme kind of liberty, for what is silence but the
+absence of a self-tormenting assertiveness, the freedom from excessive
+susceptibility under the speech of others, one's removal from the
+choking sandy wilderness of wasted words? Belief is the mood which
+emancipates us from the paralysing dubieties of distraught souls, and
+leaves us full possession of ourselves by furnishing an unshaken and
+inexpugnable base for action and thought, and subordinating passion to
+conviction. Labour, again, perhaps the cardinal article in the creed, is
+at once the price of moral independence, and the first condition of that
+fulness and accuracy of knowledge, without which we are not free, but
+the bounden slaves of prejudice, unreality, darkness, and error. Even
+Renunciation of self is in truth only the casting out of those
+disturbing and masterful qualities which oppress and hinder the free,
+natural play of the worthier parts of character. In renunciation we thus
+restore to self its own diviner mind.
+
+Yet we are never bidden either to strive or hope for a freedom that is
+unbounded. Circumstance has fixed limits that no effort can transcend.
+Novalis complained in bitter words, as we know, of the mechanical,
+prosaic, utilitarian, cold-hearted character of _Wilhelm Meister_,
+constituting it an embodiment of 'artistic Atheism,' while English
+critics as loudly found fault with its author for being a mystic.
+Exactly the same discrepancy is possible in respect of Mr. Carlyle's
+own writings. In one sense he may be called mystic and transcendental,
+in another baldly mechanical and even cold-hearted, just as Novalis
+found Goethe to be in _Meister_. The latter impression is inevitable in
+all who, like Goethe and like Mr. Carlyle, make a lofty acquiescence in
+the positive course of circumstance a prime condition at once of wise
+endeavour and of genuine happiness. The splendid fire and unmeasured
+vehemence of Mr. Carlyle's manner partially veil the depth of this
+acquiescence, which is really not so far removed from fatalism. The
+torrent of his eloquence, bright and rushing as it is, flows between
+rigid banks and over hard rocks. Devotion to the heroic does not prevent
+the assumption of a tone towards the great mass of the unheroic, which
+implies that they are no more than two-legged mill horses, ever treading
+a fixed and unalterable round. He practically denies other consolation
+to mortals than such as they may be able to get from the final and
+conclusive Kismet of the oriental. It is fate. Man is the creature of
+his destiny. As for our supposed claims on the heavenly powers: What
+right, he asks, hadst thou even to be? Fatalism of this stamp is the
+natural and unavoidable issue of a born positivity of spirit, uninformed
+by scientific meditation. It exists in its coarsest and most childish
+kind in adventurous freebooters of the type of Napoleon, and in a noble
+and not egotistic kind in Oliver Cromwell's pious interpretation of the
+order of events by the good will and providence of God.
+
+Two conspicuous qualities of Carlylean doctrine flow from this fatalism,
+or poetised utilitarianism, or illumined positivity. One of them is a
+tolerably constant contempt for excessive nicety in moral distinctions,
+and an aversion to the monotonous attitude of praise and blame. In a
+country overrun and corroded to the heart, as Great Britain is, with
+cant and a foul mechanical hypocrisy, this temper ought to have had its
+uses in giving a much-needed robustness to public judgment. One might
+suppose, from the tone of opinion among us, not only that the difference
+between right and wrong marks the most important aspect of conduct,
+which would be true; but that it marks the only aspect of it that
+exists, or that is worth considering, which is most profoundly false.
+Nowhere has Puritanism done us more harm than in thus leading us to take
+all breadth, and colour, and diversity, and fine discrimination, out of
+our judgments of men, reducing them to thin, narrow, and superficial
+pronouncements upon the letter of their morality, or the precise
+conformity of their opinions to accepted standards of truth, religious
+or other. Among other evils which it has inflicted, this inability to
+conceive of conduct except as either right or wrong, and,
+correspondingly in the intellectual order, of teaching except as either
+true or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit of _parti-pris_
+which has led to the rooting of so much injustice, disorder, immobility,
+and darkness in English intelligence. No excess of morality, we may be
+sure, has followed this excessive adoption of the exclusively moral
+standard. '_Quand il n'y a plus de principes dans le coeur_,' says De
+Senancourt, '_on est bien scrupuleux sur les apparences publiques et sur
+les devoirs d'opinion_.' We have simply got for our pains a most
+unlovely leanness of judgment, and ever since the days when this temper
+set in until now, when a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has steadily
+and powerfully tended to straiten character, to make action mechanical,
+and to impoverish art. As if there were nothing admirable in a man save
+unbroken obedience to the letter of the moral law, and that letter read
+in our own casual and local interpretation; and as if we had no
+faculties of sympathy, no sense for the beauty of character, no feeling
+for broad force and full-pulsing vitality.
+
+To study manners and conduct and men's moral nature in such a way, is as
+direct an error as it would be to overlook in the study of his body
+everything except its vertebral column and the bony framework. The body
+is more than mere anatomy. A character is much else besides being
+virtuous or vicious. In many of the characters in which some of the
+finest and most singular qualities of humanity would seem to have
+reached their furthest height, their morality was the side least worth
+discussing. The same may be said of the specific rightness or wrongness
+of opinion in the intellectual order. Let us condemn error or
+immorality, when the scope of our criticism calls for this particular
+function, but why rush to praise or blame, to eulogy or reprobation,
+when we should do better simply to explore and enjoy? Moral
+imperfection is ever a grievous curtailment of life, but many exquisite
+flowers of character, many gracious and potent things, may still thrive
+in the most disordered scene.
+
+The vast waste which this limitation of prospect entails is the most
+grievous rejection of moral treasure, if it be true that nothing
+enriches the nature like wide sympathy and many-coloured
+appreciativeness. To a man like Macaulay, for example, criticism was
+only a tribunal before which men were brought to be decisively tried by
+one or two inflexible tests, and then sent to join the sheep on the one
+hand, or the goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences
+passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness
+and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite
+of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack.
+Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding,
+with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr.
+Carlyle's essay on the same man. Mr. Carlyle knows as well as Macaulay
+how blind and stupid a creed was English Toryism a century ago, but he
+seizes and reproduces the character of his man, and this was much more
+than a matter of a creed. So with Burns. He was drunken and unchaste and
+thriftless, and Mr. Carlyle holds all these vices as deeply in
+reprobation as if he had written ten thousand sermons against them; but
+he leaves the fulmination to the hack moralist of the pulpit or the
+press, with whom words are cheap, easily gotten, and readily thrown
+forth. To him it seems better worth while, having made sure of some
+sterling sincerity and rare genuineness of vision and singular human
+quality, to dwell on, and do justice to that, than to accumulate
+commonplaces as to the viciousness of vice. Here we may perhaps find the
+explanation of the remarkable fact that though Mr. Carlyle has written
+about a large number of men of all varieties of opinion and temperament,
+and written with emphasis and point and strong feeling, yet there is
+hardly one of these judgments, however much we may dissent from it,
+which we could fairly put a finger upon as indecently absurd or futile.
+Of how many writers of thirty volumes can we say the same?
+
+That this broad and poetic temper of criticism has special dangers, and
+needs to have special safeguards, is but too true. Even, however, if we
+find that it has its excesses, we may forgive much to the merits of a
+reaction against a system which has raised monstrous floods of sour cant
+round about us, and hardened the hearts and parched the sympathies of
+men by blasts from theological deserts. There is a point of view so
+lofty and so peculiar that from it we are able to discern in men and
+women something more than, and apart from, creed and profession and
+formulated principle; which indeed directs and colours this creed and
+principle as decisively as it is in its turn acted on by them, and this
+is their character or humanity. The least important thing about Johnson
+is that he was a Tory; and about Burns, that he drank too much and was
+incontinent; and if we see in modern literature an increasing tendency
+to mount to this higher point of view, this humaner prospect, there is
+no living writer to whom we owe more for it than Mr. Carlyle. The same
+principle which revealed the valour and godliness of Puritanism, has
+proved its most efficacious solvent, for it places character on the
+pedestal where Puritanism places dogma.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second of the qualities which seem to flow from Mr. Carlyle's
+fatalism, and one much less useful among such a people as the English,
+is a deficiency of sympathy with masses of men. It would be easy enough
+to find places where he talks of the dumb millions in terms of fine and
+sincere humanity, and his feeling for the common pathos of the human
+lot, as he encounters it in individual lives, is as earnest and as
+simple, as it is invariably lovely and touching in its expression. But
+detached passages cannot counterbalance the effect of a whole compact
+body of teaching. The multitude stands between Destiny on the one side,
+and the Hero on the other; a sport to the first, and as potter's clay to
+the second. _'Dogs, would ye then live for ever?_' Frederick is truly or
+fabulously said to have cried to a troop who hesitated to attack a
+battery vomiting forth death and destruction. This is a measure of Mr.
+Carlyle's own valuation of the store we ought to set on the lives of the
+most. We know in what coarse outcome such an estimate of the dignity of
+other life than the life heroic has practically issued; in what
+barbarous vindication of barbarous law-breaking in Jamaica, in what
+inhuman softness for slavery, in what contemptuous and angry words for
+'Beales and his 50,000 roughs,' contrasted with gentle words for our
+precious aristocracy, with 'the politest and gracefullest kind of woman'
+to wife. Here is the end of the Eternal Verities, when one lets them
+bulk so big in his eyes as to shut out that perishable speck, the human
+race.
+
+'They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen,' he says in one
+place, 'what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, that this world
+is after all but a show--a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All
+deep souls see into that.'[12] Yes; but deep souls dealing with the
+practical questions of society, do well to thrust the vision as far from
+them as they can, and to suppose that this world is no show, and
+happiness and misery not mere appearances, but the keenest realities
+that we can know. The difference between virtue and vice, between wisdom
+and folly, is only phenomenal, yet there is difference enough. 'What
+_shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!_' Burke cried in the
+presence of an affecting incident. Yet the consciousness of this made
+him none the less careful, minute, patient, systematic, in examining a
+policy, or criticising a tax. Mr. Carlyle, on the contrary, falls back
+on the same reflection for comfort in the face of political confusions
+and difficulties and details, which he has not the moral patience to
+encounter scientifically. Unable to dream of swift renovation and wisdom
+among men, he ponders on the unreality of life, and hardens his heart
+against generations that will not know the things that pertain unto
+their peace. He answers to one lifting up some moderate voice of protest
+in favour of the masses of mankind, as his Prussian hero did: '_Ah, you
+do not know that damned race!_'[13]
+
+[12] _Hero-Worship_, p. 43.
+
+[13] Carlyle's _Frederick_, vi. 363.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is no passage which Mr. Carlyle so often quotes as the sublime--
+
+                  We are such stuff
+  As dreams are made on; and our little life
+  Is rounded with a sleep.
+
+If the ever present impression of this awful, most moving, yet most
+soothing thought, be a law of spiritual breadth and height, there is
+still a peril in it. Such an impression may inform the soul with a
+devout mingled sense of grandeur and nothingness, or it may blacken into
+cynicism and antinomian living for self and the day. It may be a solemn
+and holy refrain, sounding far off but clear in the dusty course of work
+and duty; or it may be the comforting chorus of a diabolic drama of
+selfishness and violence. As a reaction against religious theories which
+make humanity over-abound in self-consequence, and fill individuals with
+the strutting importance of creatures with private souls to save or
+lose, even such cynicism as Byron's was wholesome and nearly
+forgivable. Nevertheless, the most important question that we can ask of
+any great teacher, as of the walk and conversation of any commonest
+person, remains this--how far has he strengthened and raised the
+conscious and harmonious dignity of humanity; how stirred in men and
+women, many or few, deeper and more active sense of the worth and
+obligation and innumerable possibilities, not of their own little lives,
+one or another, but of life collectively; how heightened the
+self-respect of the race? There is no need to plant oneself in a fool's
+paradise, with no eye for the weakness of men, the futility of their
+hopes, the irony of their fate, the dominion of the satyr and the tiger
+in their hearts. Laughter has a fore-place in life. All this we may see
+and show that we see, and yet so throw it behind the weightier facts of
+nobleness and sacrifice, of the boundless gifts which fraternal union
+has given, and has the power of giving, as to kindle in every breast,
+not callous to exalted impressions, the glow of sympathetic endeavour,
+and of serene exultation in the bond that makes 'precious the soul of
+man to man.'
+
+This renewal of moral energy by spiritual contact with the mass of men,
+and by meditation on the destinies of mankind, is the very reverse of
+Mr. Carlyle's method. With him, it is good to leave the mass, and fall
+down before the individual, and be saved by him. The victorious hero is
+the true Paraclete. 'Nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
+imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.' And this
+is really the kernel of the Carlylean doctrine. The whole human race
+toils and moils, straining and energising, doing and suffering things
+multitudinous and unspeakable under the sun, in order that like the
+aloe-tree it may once in a hundred years produce a flower. It is this
+hero that age offers to age, and the wisest worship him. Time and nature
+once and again distil from out of the lees and froth of common humanity
+some wondrous character, of a potent and reviving property hardly short
+of miraculous. This the man who knows his own good cherishes in his
+inmost soul as a sacred thing, an elixir of moral life. The Great Man is
+'the light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the
+world; a flowing light fountain, in whose radiance all souls feel that
+it is well with them.' This is only another form of the anthropomorphic
+conceptions of deity. The divinity of the ordinary hierophant is clothed
+in the minds of the worshippers with the highest human qualities they
+happen to be capable of conceiving, and this is the self-acting
+machinery by which worship refreshes and recruits what is best in man.
+Mr. Carlyle has another way. He carries the process a step further,
+giving back to the great man what had been taken for beings greater than
+any man, and summoning us to trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of
+heroic chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many mansions, the
+boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond polytheism. But each altar is
+individual and apart, and the reaction of this isolation upon the
+egotistic instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident. It is
+good for us to build temples to great names which recall special
+transfigurations of humanity; but it is better still, it gives a firmer
+nerve to purpose and adds a finer holiness to the ethical sense, to
+carry ever with us the unmarked, yet living tradition of the voiceless
+unconscious effort of unnumbered millions of souls, flitting lightly
+away like showers of thin leaves, yet ever augmenting the elements of
+perfectness in man, and exalting the eternal contest.
+
+Mr. Carlyle has indeed written that generation stands indissolubly woven
+with generation; 'how we inherit, not Life only, but all the garniture
+and form of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel, as our
+fathers and primeval grandfathers from the beginning have given it to
+us;' how 'mankind is a living, indivisible whole.'[14] Even this,
+however, with the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in
+connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not incorporated with
+the body of the writer's doctrine. It does not neutralise the general
+lack of faith in the cultivable virtue of masses of men, nor the
+universal tone of humoristic cynicism with which all but a little band,
+the supposed salt of the earth, are treated. Man is for Mr. Carlyle, as
+for the Calvinistic theologian, a fallen and depraved being, without
+much hope, except for a few of the elect. The best thing that can happen
+to the poor creature is that he should be thoroughly well drilled. In
+other words, society does not really progress in its bulk; and the
+methods which were conditions of the original formation and growth of
+the social union, remain indispensable until the sound of the last
+trump. Was there not a profound and far-reaching truth wrapped up in
+Goethe's simple yet really inexhaustible monition, that if we would
+improve a man, it were well to let him believe that we already think him
+that which we would have him to be. The law that _noblesse oblige_ has
+unwritten bearings in dealing with all men; all masses of men are
+susceptible of an appeal from that point: for this Mr. Carlyle seems to
+make no allowance.
+
+[14] 'Organic Filaments' in the _Sartor_, bk. iii. ch. vii.
+
+Every modification of society is one of the slow growths of time, and to
+hurry impatiently after them by swift ways of military discipline and
+peremptory law-making, is only to clasp the near and superficial good.
+It is easy to make a solitude and call it peace, to plant an iron heel
+and call it order. But read Mr. Carlyle's essay on Dr. Francia, and then
+ponder the history of Paraguay for these later years and the accounts of
+its condition in the newspapers of to-day. 'Nay, it may be,' we learn
+from that remarkable piece, 'that the benefit of him is not even yet
+exhausted, even yet entirely become visible. Who knows but, in unborn
+centuries, Paragueno men will look back to their lean iron Francia, as
+men do in such cases to the one veracious person, and institute
+considerations?'[15] Who knows, indeed, if only it prove that their
+lean iron Francia, in his passion for order and authority, did not stamp
+out the very life of the nation? Where organic growths are concerned,
+patience is the sovereign law; and where the organism is a society of
+men, the vital principle is a sense in one shape or another of the
+dignity of humanity. The recognition of this tests the distinction
+between the truly heroic ruler of the stamp of Cromwell, and the
+arbitrary enthusiast for external order like Frederick. Yet in more than
+one place Mr. Carlyle accepts the fundamental principle of democracy.
+'It is curious to consider now,' he says once, 'with what fierce,
+deep-breathed doggedness the poor English Nation, drawn by their
+instincts, held fast upon it [the Spanish War of Walpole's time, in
+Jenkins' Ear Question], and would take no denial of it, as if they had
+surmised and seen. For the instincts of simple, guileless persons
+(liable to be counted stupid by the unwary) are sometimes of prophetic
+nature, and spring from the deep places of this universe!'[16] If the
+writer of this had only thought it out to the end, and applied the
+conclusions thereof to history and politics, what a difference it would
+have made.
+
+[15] _Misc. Ess._ vi. 124.
+
+[16] _Frederick_, iv. 390.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No criticism upon either Mr. Carlyle or any other modern historian,
+possessed of speculative quality, would be in any sense complete which
+should leave out of sight his view of the manner and significance of the
+break-up of the old European structure. The historian is pretty sure to
+be guided in his estimate of the forces which have contributed to
+dissolution in the past, by the kind of anticipation which he entertains
+of the probable course of reconstruction. Like Comte, in his ideas of
+temporal reconstruction, Mr. Carlyle goes back to something like the
+forms of feudalism for the model of the industrial organisation of the
+future; but in the spiritual order he is as far removed as possible from
+any semblance of that revival of the old ecclesiastical forms without
+the old theological ideas, which is the corner-stone of Comte's edifice.
+To the question whether mankind gained or lost by the French Revolution,
+Mr. Carlyle nowhere gives a clear answer; indeed, on this subject more
+even than any other, he clings closely to his favourite method of simple
+presentation, streaked with dramatic irony. No writer shows himself more
+alive to the enormous moment to all Europe of that transaction; but we
+hear no word from him on the question whether we have more reason to
+bless or curse an event that interrupted, either subsequently to retard
+or to accelerate, the transformation of the West from a state of war, of
+many degrees of social subordination, of religious privilege, of
+aristocratic administration, into a state of peaceful industry, of equal
+international rights, of social equality, of free and equal tolerance of
+creeds. That this process was going on prior to 1789 is undeniable. Are
+we really nearer to the permanent establishment of the new order, for
+what was done between 1789 and 1793? or were men thrown off the right
+track of improvement by a movement which turned exclusively on abstract
+rights, which dealt with men's ideas and habits as if they were
+instantaneously pliable before the aspirations of any government, and
+which by its violent and inconsiderate methods drove all these who
+should only have been friends of order into being the enemies of
+progress as well? There are many able and honest and republican men who
+in their hearts suspect that the latter of the two alternatives is the
+more correct description of what has happened. Mr. Carlyle is as one who
+does not hear the question. He draws its general moral lesson from the
+French Revolution, and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns,
+from king to churl, that imposture must come to an end. But for the
+precise amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for
+the political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its
+dramatic significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject,
+nor even evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.
+
+The truth is that with Mr. Carlyle the Revolution begins not in 1789 but
+in 1741; not with the Fall of the Bastile but with the Battle of
+Mollwitz. This earliest of Frederick's victories was the first sign
+'that indeed a new hour had struck on the Time Horologe, that a new
+Epoch had arisen. Slumberous Europe, rotting amid its blind pedantries,
+its lazy hypocrisies, conscious and unconscious: this man is capable of
+shaking it a little out of its stupid refuges of lies and ignominious
+wrappages, and of intimating to it afar off that there is still a
+Veracity in Things, and a Mendacity in Sham Things,' and so forth, in
+the well-known strain.[17] It is impossible to overrate the truly
+supreme importance of the violent break-up of Europe which followed the
+death of the Emperor Charles VI., and in many respects 1740 is as
+important a date in the history of Western societies as 1789. Most of us
+would probably find the importance of this epoch in its destructive
+contribution, rather than in that constructive and moral quality which
+lay under the movement of '89. The Empire was thoroughly shattered.
+France was left weak, impoverished, humiliated. Spain was finally thrust
+from among the efficient elements in the European State-system. Most
+important of all, their too slight sanctity had utterly left the old
+conceptions of public law and international right. The whole polity of
+Europe was left in such a condition of disruption as had not been
+equalled since the death of Charles the Great. The Partition of Poland
+was the most startling evidence of the completeness of this disruption,
+and if one statesman was more to be praised or blamed for shaking over
+the fabric than another, that statesman was Frederick the Second of
+Prussia. But then, in Mr. Carlyle's belief, there was equally a
+constructive and highly moral side to all this. The old fell to pieces
+because it was internally rotten. The gospel of the new was that the
+government of men and kingdoms is a business beyond all others demanding
+an open-eyed accessibility to all facts and realities; that here more
+than anywhere else you need to give the tools to him who can handle
+them; that government does by no means go on of itself, but more than
+anything else in this world demands skill, patience, energy, long and
+tenacious grip, and the constant presence of that most indispensable,
+yet most rare, of all practical convictions, that the effect is the
+inevitable consequent of the cause. Here was a revolution, we cannot
+doubt. The French Revolution was in a manner a complement to it, as Mr.
+Carlyle himself says in a place where he talks of believing both in the
+French Revolution and in Frederick; 'that is to say both that Real
+Kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction of
+Sham Kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally so.'[18] It is
+curious that an observer who could see the positive side of Frederick's
+disruption of Europe in 1740, did not also see that there was a positive
+side to the disruption of the French monarchy fifty years afterwards,
+and that not only was a blow dealt to sham kingship, but a decisive
+impulse was given to those ideas of morality and justice in government,
+upon which only real kingship in whatever form is able to rest.
+
+[17] _History of Frederick the Great_, iv. 328. See also vol. i., Proem.
+
+[18] _Frederick the Great_, i. 9.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the other great factor in the dissolution of the old state, the
+decay of ancient spiritual forms, Mr. Carlyle gives no uncertain sound.
+Of the Reformation, as of the French Revolution, philosophers have
+doubted how far it really contributed to the stable progress of European
+civilisation. Would it have been better, if it had been possible, for
+the old belief gradually as by process of nature to fall to pieces, new
+doctrine as gradually and as normally emerging from the ground of
+disorganised and decayed convictions, without any of that frightful
+violence which stirred men's deepest passions, and gave them a sinister
+interest in holding one or other of the rival creeds in its most
+extreme, exclusive, and intolerant form? This question Mr. Carlyle does
+not see, or, if he does see it, he rides roughshod over it. Every reader
+remembers the notable passage in which he declares that the question of
+Protestant or not Protestant meant everywhere, 'Is there anything of
+nobleness in you, O Nation, or is there nothing?' and that afterwards it
+fared with nations as they did, or did not, accept this sixteenth
+century form of Truth when it came.[19]
+
+[19] _Frederick_, i. bk. iii. ch. viii. 269-274.
+
+France, for example, is the conspicuous proof of what overtook the
+deniers. 'France saw good to massacre Protestantism, and end it, in the
+night of St. Bartholomew, 1572. The celestial apparitor of heaven's
+chancery, so we may speak, the genius of Fact and Veracity, had left his
+writ of summons; writ was read and replied to in this manner.' But let
+us look at this more definitely. A complex series of historic facts do
+not usually fit so neatly into the moral formula. The truth surely is
+that while the anxieties and dangers of the Catholic party in France
+increased after St. Bartholomew, whose dramatic horror has made its
+historic importance to be vastly exaggerated, the Protestant cause
+remained full of vitality, and the number of its adherents went on
+increasing until the Edict of Nantes. It is eminently unreasonable to
+talk of France seeing good to end Protestantism in a night, when we
+reflect that twenty-six years after, the provisions of the Edict of
+Nantes were what they were. 'By that Edict,' the historian tells us,
+'the French Protestants, who numbered perhaps a tenth of the total
+population, 2,000,000 out of 20,000,000, obtained absolute liberty of
+conscience; performance of public worship in 3500 castles, as well as in
+certain specified houses in each province; a State endowment equal to
+£20,000 a year; civil rights equal in every respect to those of the
+Catholics; admission to the public colleges, hospitals, etc.; finally,
+eligibility to all offices of State.' It was this, and not the Massacre,
+which was France's reply to the Genius of Fact and Veracity. Again, on
+the other side, England accepted Protestantism, and yet Mr. Carlyle of
+all men can hardly pretend, after his memorable deliverances in the
+_Niagara_, that he thinks she has fared particularly well in
+consequence.
+
+The famous diatribe against Jesuitism in the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_,[20]
+one of the most unfeignedly coarse and virulent bits of invective in the
+language, points plumb in the same direction. It is grossly unjust,
+because it takes for granted that Loyola and all Jesuits were
+deliberately conscious of imposture and falsehood, knowingly embraced
+the cause of Beelzebub, and resolutely propagated it. It is one thing to
+judge a system in its corruption, and a quite other thing to measure the
+worth and true design of its first founders; one thing to estimate the
+intention and sincerity of a movement, when it first stirred the hearts
+of men, and another thing to pass sentence upon it in the days of its
+degradation. The vileness into which Jesuitism eventually sank is a poor
+reason why we should malign and curse those who, centuries before, found
+in the rules and discipline and aims of that system an acceptable
+expression for their own disinterested social aspirations. It is
+childish to say that the subsequent vileness is a proof of the existence
+of an inherent corrupt principle from the beginning; because hitherto
+certainly, and probably it will be so for ever, even the most salutary
+movements and most effective social conceptions have been provisional.
+In other words, the ultimate certainty of dissolution does not nullify
+the beauty and strength of physical life, and the putrescence of Jesuit
+methods and ideas is no more a reproach to those who first found succour
+in them, than the cant and formalism of any other degenerate form of
+active faith, say monachism or Calvinism, prove Calvin or Benedict or
+Bernard to have been hypocritical and hollow. To be able, however, to
+take this reasonable view, one must be unable to believe that men can
+be drawn for generation after generation by such a mere hollow lie and
+villainy and 'light of hell' as Jesuitism has always been, according to
+Mr. Carlyle's rendering. Human nature is not led for so long by lies;
+and if it seems to be otherwise, let us be sure that ideas which do lead
+and attract successive generations of men to self-sacrifice and care for
+social interests, must contain something which is not wholly a lie.
+
+[20] No. VIII. pp. 353-371.
+
+Perhaps it is pertinent to remember that Mr. Carlyle, in fact, is a
+prophet with a faith, and he holds the opposition kind of religionist in
+a peculiarly theological execration. In spite of his passion for order,
+he cannot understand the political point of view. The attempts of good
+men in epochs of disorder to remake the past, to bring back an old
+spiritual system and method, because that did once at any rate give
+shelter to mankind, and peradventure may give it to them again until
+better times come, are phenomena into which he cannot look with calm or
+patience. The great reactionist is a type that is wholly dark to him.
+That a reactionist can be great, can be a lover of virtue and truth, can
+in any sort contribute to the welfare of men, these are possibilities to
+which he will lend no ear. In a word, he is a prophet and not a
+philosopher, and it is fruitless to go to him for help in the solution
+of philosophic problems. This is not to say that he may not render us
+much help in those far more momentous problems which affect the guidance
+of our own lives.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I
+       Essay 2: Carlyle
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2007 [EBook #20878]
+
+Language: English
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, VOL. I ***
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+
+
+  <h1>CRITICAL<br /><br />
+  MISCELLANIES</h1>
+
+  <h4>BY</h4>
+
+  <h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+
+  <h3>VOL. I.</h3>
+
+  <h3>ESSAY 2: CARLYLE</h3>
+
+<p class="center">London<br />
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+
+1904
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CARLYLE" id="CARLYLE"></a>CARLYLE.</h2>
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Mr. Carlyle's influence, and degree of its durability</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_135'><b>135</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>His literary services</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_139'><b>139</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>No label useful in characterising him</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_142'><b>142</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>The poetic and the scientific temperaments</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_144'><b>144</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Rousseau and Mr. Carlyle</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_147'><b>147</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>The poetic method of handling social questions</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_149'><b>149</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Impotent unrest, and his way of treating it</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_152'><b>152</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Founded on the purest individualism</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_154'><b>154</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Mr. Carlyle's historic position in the European reaction</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_157'><b>157</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Coleridge</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_159'><b>159</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Byron</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_161'><b>161</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Mr. Carlyle's victory over Byronism</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_163'><b>163</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Goethe</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_164'><b>164</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Mr. Carlyle's intensely practical turn, though veiled</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_166'><b>166</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>His identification of material with moral order</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_169'><b>169</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>And acceptance of the doctrine that the end justifies the means</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_170'><b>170</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Two sets of relations still regulated by pathological principle</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_172'><b>172</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Defect in Mr. Carlyle's discussion of them</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_174'><b>174</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>His reticences</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_176'><b>176</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Equally hostile to metaphysics and to the extreme pretensions of the physicist</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_177'><b>177</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Natural Supernaturalism, and the measure of its truth</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_179'><b>179</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Two qualities flowing from his peculiar fatalism:&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;">(1) Contempt for excess of moral nicety</span></td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_182'><b>182</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;">(2) Defect of sympathy with masses of men</span></td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_186'><b>186</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Perils in his constant sense of the nothingness of life</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_188'><b>188</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Hero-worship, and its inadequateness</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_189'><b>189</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Theories of the dissolution of the old European order</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_193'><b>193</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Mr. Carlyle's view of the French Revolution</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_195'><b>195</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Of the Reformation and Protestantism</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_197'><b>197</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Inability to understand the political point of view</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_199'><b>199</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CARLYLE.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The new library edition of Mr. Carlyle's works may be taken for the
+final presentation of all that the author has to say to his
+contemporaries, and to possess the settled form in which he wishes his
+words to go to those of posterity who may prove to have ears for them.
+The canon is definitely made up. The golden Gospel of Silence is
+effectively compressed in thirty fine volumes. After all has been said
+about self-indulgent mannerisms, moral perversities, phraseological
+outrages, and the rest, these volumes will remain the noble monument of
+the industry, originality, conscientiousness, and genius of a noble
+character, and of an intellectual career that has exercised on many
+sides the profoundest sort of influence upon English feeling. Men who
+have long since moved far away from these spiritual latitudes, like
+those who still find an adequate shelter in them, can hardly help
+feeling as they turn the pages of the now disused pieces which they were
+once wont to ponder daily, that whatever later teachers may have done in
+definitely shaping opinion, in giving specific form to sentiment, and in
+subjecting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> impulse to rational discipline, here was the friendly
+fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark, here the prophet
+who first smote the rock.</p>
+
+<p>That with this sense of obligation to the master, there mixes a less
+satisfactory reminiscence of youthful excess in imitative phrases, in
+unseasonably apostolic readiness towards exhortation and rebuke, in
+interest about the soul, a portion of which might more profitably have
+been converted into care for the head, is in most cases true. A hostile
+observer of bands of Carlylites at Oxford and elsewhere might have been
+justified in describing the imperative duty of work as the theme of many
+an hour of strenuous idleness, and the superiority of golden silence
+over silver speech as the text of endless bursts of jerky rapture, while
+a too constant invective against cant had its usual effect of developing
+cant with a difference. To the incorrigibly sentimental all this was
+sheer poison, which continues tenaciously in the system. Others of
+robuster character no sooner came into contact with the world and its
+fortifying exigencies, than they at once began to assimilate the
+wholesome part of what they had taken in, while the rest falls gradually
+and silently out. When criticism has done its just work on the
+disagreeable affectations of many of Mr. Carlyle's disciples, and on the
+nature of Mr. Carlyle's opinions and their worth as specific
+contributions, very few people will be found to deny that his influence
+in stimulating moral energy, in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy
+of enthusiasm,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand,
+and the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has
+not been surpassed by any teacher now living.</p>
+
+<p>One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty
+years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his
+own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in
+the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in
+progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and
+haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully
+visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become
+equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no
+countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with
+hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of
+institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of
+poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it
+could be regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has
+boldly and often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting
+the objects which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applying with
+energetic spirit to the task of preparing a sounder state for our
+successors. The relations between master and servant, between capitalist
+and labourer, between landlord and tenant, between governing race and
+subject race, between the feelings and intelligence of the legislature
+and the feelings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> and intelligence of the nation, between the spiritual
+power, literary and ecclesiastical, and those who are under it&mdash;the
+anarchy that prevails in all these, and the extreme danger of it, have
+been with Mr. Carlyle a never-ending theme. What seems to many of us the
+extreme inefficiency or worse of his solutions, still allows us to feel
+grateful for the vigour and perspicacity with which he has pressed on
+the world the urgency of the problem.</p>
+
+<p>The degree of durability which his influence is likely to possess with
+the next and following generations is another and rather sterile
+question, which we are not now concerned to discuss. The unrestrained
+eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong individuality has precipitated
+in his written style may, in spite of the poetic fineness of his
+imagination, which no historian or humorist has excelled, still be
+expected to deprive his work of that permanence which is only secured by
+classic form. The incorporation of so many phrases, allusions,
+nicknames, that belong only to the hour, inevitably makes the vitality
+of the composition conditional on the vitality of these transient and
+accidental elements which are so deeply imbedded in it. Another
+consideration is that no philosophic writer, however ardently his words
+may have been treasured and followed by the people of his own time, can
+well be cherished by succeeding generations, unless his name is
+associated through some definable and positive contribution with the
+central march of European thought and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> feeling. In other words, there is
+a difference between living in the history of literature or belief, and
+living in literature itself and in the minds of believers. Mr. Carlyle
+has been a most powerful solvent, but it is the tendency of solvents to
+become merely historic. The historian of the intellectual and moral
+movements of Great Britain during the present century, will fail
+egregiously in his task if he omits to give a large and conspicuous
+space to the author of <i>Sartor Resartus</i>. But it is one thing to study
+historically the ideas which have influenced our predecessors, and
+another thing to seek in them an influence fruitful for ourselves. It is
+to be hoped that one may doubt the permanent soundness of Mr. Carlyle's
+peculiar speculations, without either doubting or failing to share that
+warm affection and reverence which his personality has worthily inspired
+in many thousands of his readers. He has himself taught us to separate
+these two sides of a man, and we have learnt from him to love Samuel
+Johnson without reading much or a word that the old sage wrote.
+'Sterling and I walked westward,' he says once, 'arguing copiously, but
+<i>except</i> in opinion not disagreeing.'</p>
+
+<p>It is none the less for what has just been said a weightier and a rarer
+privilege for a man to give a stirring impulse to the moral activity of
+a generation, than to write in classic style; and to have impressed the
+spirit of his own personality deeply upon the minds of multitudes of
+men, than to have composed most of those works which the world is said
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> willingly to let die. Nor, again, is to say that this higher renown
+belongs to Mr. Carlyle, to underrate the less resounding, but most
+substantial, services of a definite kind which he has rendered both to
+literature and history. This work may be in time superseded with the
+advance of knowledge, but the value of the first service will remain
+unimpaired. It was he, as has been said, 'who first taught England to
+appreciate Goethe;' and not only to appreciate Goethe, but to recognise
+and seek yet further knowledge of the genius and industry of Goethe's
+countrymen. His splendid drama of the French Revolution has done, and
+may be expected long to continue to do, more to bring before our
+slow-moving and unimaginative public the portentous meaning of that
+tremendous cataclysm, than all the other writings on the subject in the
+English language put together. His presentation of Puritanism and the
+Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most elevating period of
+the national history in any way really intelligible. The Life of
+Frederick the Second, whatever judgment we may pass upon its morality,
+or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a model of
+laborious and exhaustive narration of facts not before accessible to the
+reader of history. For all this, and for much other work eminently
+useful and meritorious even from the mechanical point of view, Mr.
+Carlyle deserves the warmest recognition. His genius gave him a right to
+mock at the ineffectiveness of Dryasdust, but his genius was also<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> too
+true to prevent him from adding the always needful supplement of a
+painstaking industry that rivals Dryasdust's own most strenuous toil.
+Take out of the mind of the English reader of ordinary cultivation and
+the average journalist, usually a degree or two lower than this, their
+conceptions of the French Revolution and the English Rebellion, and
+their knowledge of German literature and history, as well as most of
+their acquaintance with the prominent men of the eighteenth century, and
+we shall see how much work Mr. Carlyle has done simply as schoolmaster.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is emphatically a secondary aspect of his character, and
+of the function which he has fulfilled in relation to the more active
+tendencies of modern opinion and feeling. We must go on to other ground,
+if we would find the field in which he has laboured most ardently and
+with most acceptance. History and literature have been with him, what
+they will always be with wise and understanding minds of creative and
+even of the higher critical faculty&mdash;only embodiments, illustrations,
+experiments, for ideas about religion, conduct, society, history,
+government, and all the other great heads and departments of a complete
+social doctrine. From this point of view, the time has perhaps come when
+we may fairly attempt to discern some of the tendencies which Mr.
+Carlyle has initiated or accelerated and deepened, though assuredly many
+years must elapse before any adequate measure can be taken of their
+force and final direction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It would be a comparatively simple process to affix the regulation
+labels of philosophy; to say that Mr. Carlyle is a Pantheist in religion
+(or a Pot-theist, to use the alternative whose flippancy gave such
+offence to Sterling on one occasion<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>), a Transcendentalist or
+Intuitionist in ethics, an Absolutist in politics, and so forth, with
+the addition of a crowd of privative or negative epithets at discretion.
+But classifications of this sort are the worst enemies of true
+knowledge. Such names are by the vast majority even of persons who think
+themselves educated, imperfectly apprehended, ignorantly interpreted,
+and crudely and recklessly applied. It is not too much to say that nine
+out of ten people who think they have delivered themselves of a
+criticism when they call Mr. Carlyle a Pantheist, could neither explain
+with any precision what Pantheism is, nor have ever thought of
+determining the parts of his writings where this particular monster is
+believed to lurk. Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the
+trouble of thinking. As I once wrote elsewhere:</p>
+
+<p>'The readiness to use general names in speaking of the greater subjects,
+and the fitness which qualifies a man to use them, commonly exist in
+inverse proportions. If we reflect on the conditions out of which
+ordinary opinion is generated, we may well be startled at the profuse
+liberality with which names of the widest and most complex and variable
+significance are bestowed on all hands. The majority of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> the ideas which
+constitute most men's intellectual stock-in-trade have accrued by
+processes quite distinct from fair reasoning and consequent conviction.
+This is so notorious, that it is amazing how so many people can go on
+freely and rapidly labelling thinkers or writers with names which they
+themselves are not competent to bestow, and which their hearers are not
+competent either to understand generally, or to test in the specific
+instance.'</p>
+
+<p>These labels are rather more worthless than usual in the present case,
+because Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical and defiantly
+inconsistent; and, therefore, the term which might correctly describe
+one side of his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a
+wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications
+necessary to make any one of the regular epithets fairly applicable
+would have to be so many, that the glosses would virtually overlay the
+text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by
+discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what
+pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine means, or
+what it is worth, but what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their
+character, their relations to one another, and what that is worth.</p>
+
+<p>With most men and women the master element in their opinions is
+obviously neither their own reason nor their own imagination,
+independently exercised, but only mere use and wont, chequered by
+fortuitous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> sensations, and modified in the better cases by the
+influence of a favourite teacher; while in the worse the teacher is the
+favourite who happens to chime in most harmoniously with prepossessions,
+or most effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among the superior
+minds the balance between reason and imagination is scarcely ever held
+exactly true, nor is either firmly kept within the precise bounds that
+are proper to it. It is a question of temperament which of the two
+mental attitudes becomes fixed and habitual, as it is a question of
+temperament how violently either of them straitens and distorts the
+normal faculties of vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head,
+which would usually be better described as a thin head, may and
+constantly does fall into a confirmed manner of judging character and
+circumstance, so narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to
+make common sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine
+name of reason. Excess on the other side leads people into emotional
+transports, in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth, the
+difficulty of discovering the truth, the narrowness of the way that
+leads thereto, the merits of intellectual precision and definiteness,
+and even the merits of moral precision and definiteness, are all
+effectually veiled by purple or fiery clouds of anger, sympathy, and
+sentimentalism, which imagination has hung over the intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>The familiar distinction between the poetic and the scientific temper is
+another way of stating the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> difference. The one fuses or
+crystallises external objects and circumstances in the medium of human
+feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of
+objects and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the
+facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification
+of these relations. There is, too, a corresponding distinction between
+the aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects
+of nature are able to present, according as we scrutinise them with a
+view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which
+they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our
+tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other
+emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side
+for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet.
+The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in
+an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a
+Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world,
+the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those
+whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly
+monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed
+with one set of attributes by scientific intelligence, and with another
+by sentiment, fancy, and imaginative association.</p>
+
+<p>The contentiousness of rival schools of philosophy has obscured the
+application of the same distinction to the various orders of fact more
+nearly and immedi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>ately relating to man and the social union. One school
+has maintained the virtually unmeaning doctrine that the will is free,
+and therefore its followers never gave any quarter to the idea that man
+was as proper an object of scientific scrutiny morally and historically,
+as they could not deny him to be anatomically and physiologically. Their
+enemies have been more concerned to dislodge them from this position,
+than to fortify, organise, and cultivate their own. The consequences
+have not been without their danger. Poetic persons have rushed in where
+scientific persons ought not to have feared to tread. That human
+character and the order of events have their poetic aspect, and that
+their poetic treatment demands the rarest and most valuable qualities of
+mind, is a truth which none but narrow and superficial men of the world
+are rash enough to deny. But that there is a scientific aspect of these
+things, an order among them that can only be understood and criticised
+and effectually modified scientifically, by using all the caution and
+precision and infinite patience of the truly scientific spirit, is a
+truth that is constantly ignored even by men and women of the loftiest
+and most humane nature. In such cases misdirected and uncontrolled
+sensibility ends in mournful waste of their own energy, in the certain
+disappointment of their own aims, and where such sensibility is backed
+by genius, eloquence, and a peculiar set of public conditions, in
+prolonged and fatal disturbance of society.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau was the great type of this triumphant and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> dangerous sophistry
+of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking
+nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning a
+man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded
+life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever lived.
+Community of method, like misery, makes men acquainted with strange
+bed-fellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral worth may
+notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the same method,
+and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of
+them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a
+retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and
+right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a
+factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly solved by
+external observation and history. In connection with each of them has
+been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimentalism, when
+circumstances draw away the mask. Not the least conspicuous of the
+disciples of Rousseau was Robespierre. His works lay on the table of the
+Committee of Public Safety. The theory of the Reign of Terror was
+invented, and mercilessly reduced to practice, by men whom the visions
+of Rousseau had fired, and who were not afraid nor ashamed to wade
+through oceans of blood to the promised land of humanity and fine
+feeling. We in our days have seen the same result of sentimental
+doctrine in the barbarous love of the battle-field, the retrograde<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+passion for methods of repression, the contempt for human life, the
+impatience of orderly and peaceful solution. We begin with introspection
+and the eternities, and end in blood and iron. Again, Rousseau's first
+piece was an anathema upon the science and art of his time, and a
+denunciation of books and speech. Mr. Carlyle, in exactly the same
+spirit, has denounced logic mills, warned us all away from literature,
+and habitually subordinated discipline of the intelligence to the
+passionate assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks
+respectfully of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is
+using the term in a special sense of his own, and confounding it with
+'the exact summary of human <i>Worth</i>,' as in one place he defines it.
+Thus, instead of co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual
+energy, virtue with intelligence, right action of the will with
+scientific processes of the understanding, he has either placed one
+immeasurably below the other, or else has mischievously insisted on
+treating them as identical. The dictates of a kind heart are of superior
+force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory
+resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works
+easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse.
+All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes
+hard sentiment and sometimes soft sentiment, above reason and method.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody
+else to fire men's hearts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> with a feeling for right and an eager desire
+for social activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away from him
+the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that
+our social action is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting
+perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual
+self-possession, to have added another name to the illustrious catalogue
+of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his
+sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an
+imaginative and highly emotional manner. Depth of benevolent feeling is
+unhappily no proof of fitness for handling complex problems, and a fine
+sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing
+effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the
+composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any
+reason for supposing that the author would have made a competent
+Commissioner of Works.</p>
+
+<p>Why should society, with its long and deep-hidden processes of growth,
+its innumerable intricacies and far-off historic complexities, be as an
+open book to any reader of its pages who brings acuteness and passion,
+but no patience nor calm accuracy of meditation? Objects of thought and
+observation far simpler, more free from all blinding and distorting
+elements, more accessible to direct and ocular inspection, are by
+rational consent reserved for the calmest and most austere moods and
+methods of human intelligence. Nor is denunciation of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> conditions of
+a problem the quickest step towards solving it. Vituperation of the fact
+that supply and demand practically regulate certain kinds of bargain, is
+no contribution to systematic efforts to discover some more moral
+regulator. Take all the invective that Mr. Carlyle has poured out
+against political economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according to
+M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire inadequateness of political
+economy to sum up the laws and conditions of a healthy social state&mdash;and
+no one more than the present writer deplores the mischief which the
+application of the maxims of political economy by ignorant and selfish
+spirits has effected in confirming the worst tendencies of the
+commercial character&mdash;yet is it not a first condition of our being able
+to substitute better machinery for the ordinary rules of self-interest,
+that we know scientifically how those rules do and must operate? Again,
+in another field, it is well to cry out: 'Caitiff, we hate thee,' with a
+'hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the
+scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and
+disappearance from the scene of things.'<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> But this is slightly vague.
+It is not scientific. There are caitiffs and caitiffs. There is a more
+and a less of scoundrelism, as there is a more and a less of black
+annihilation, and we must have systematic jurisprudence, with its
+classification of caitiffs and its graduated blasting. Has Mr. Carlyle's
+passion, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> have the sedulous and scientific labours of that Bentham,
+whose name with him is a symbol of evil, done most in what he calls the
+Scoundrel-province of Reform within the last half-century? Sterling's
+criticism on Teufelsdr&ouml;ckh told a hard but wholesome truth to
+Teufelsdr&ouml;ckh's creator. 'Wanting peace himself,' said Sterling, 'his
+fierce dissatisfaction fixes on all that is weak, corrupt, and imperfect
+around him; and instead of a calm and steady co-operation with all those
+who are endeavouring to apply the highest ideas as remedies for the
+worst evils, he holds himself in savage isolation.'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Carlyle assures us of Bonaparte that he had an instinct of nature
+better than his culture was, and illustrates it by the story that during
+the Egyptian expedition, when his scientific men were busy arguing that
+there could be no God, Bonaparte, looking up to the stars, confuted them
+decisively by saying: 'Very ingenious, Messieurs; but <i>who made</i> all
+that?' Surely the most inconclusive answer since coxcombs vanquished
+Berkeley with a grin. It is, however, a type of Mr. Carlyle's faith in
+the instinct of nature, as superseding the necessity for patient logical
+method; a faith, in other words, in crude and uninterpreted sense.
+Insight, indeed, goes far, but it no more entitles its possessor to
+dispense with reasoned discipline and system in treating scientific
+subjects, than it relieves him from the necessity of conforming to the
+physical conditions of health. Why should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> society be the one field of
+thought in which a man of genius is at liberty to assume all his major
+premisses, and swear all his conclusions?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The deep unrest of unsatisfied souls meets its earliest solace in the
+effective and sympathetic expression of the same unrest from the lips of
+another. To look it in the face is the first approach to a sedative. To
+find our discontent with the actual, our yearning for an undefined
+ideal, our aspiration after impossible heights of being, shared and
+amplified in the emotional speech of a man of genius, is the beginning
+of consolation. Some of the most generous spirits a hundred years ago
+found this in the eloquence of Rousseau, and some of the most generous
+spirits of this time and place have found it in the writer of the
+<i>Sartor</i>. In ages not of faith, there will always be multitudinous
+troops of people crying for the moon. If such sorrowful pastime be ever
+permissible to men, it has been natural and lawful this long while in
+pr&aelig;-revolutionary England, as it was natural and lawful a century since
+in pr&aelig;-revolutionary France. A man born into a community where political
+forms, from the monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow
+shams disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is
+mainly official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself
+alike from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and the spirit
+of truth, and where literature does not as a rule permit itself to
+discuss serious subjects frankly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> and worthily<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>&mdash;a community, in
+short, where the great aim of all classes and orders with power is by
+dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern stopping
+of the ears, somehow to keep the social pyramid on its apex, with the
+fatal result of preserving for England its glorious fame as a paradise
+for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a hell for the
+poor&mdash;why, a man born into all this with a heart something softer than a
+flint, and with intellectual vision something more acute than that of a
+Troglodyte, may well be allowed to turn aside and cry for moons for a
+season.</p>
+
+
+<p>Impotent unrest, however, is followed in Mr. Carlyle by what is socially
+an impotent solution, just as it was with Rousseau. To bid a man do his
+duty in one page, and then in the next to warn him sternly away from
+utilitarianism, from political economy, from all 'theories of the moral
+sense,' and from any other definite means of ascertaining what duty may
+chance to be, is but a bald and naked counsel. Spiritual nullity and
+material confusion in a society are not to be repaired by a
+transformation of egotism, querulous, brooding, marvelling, into
+egotism, active, practical, objective, not uncomplacent. The moral
+movements to which the instinctive impulses of humanity fallen on evil
+times uniformly give birth, early Christianity, for instance, or the
+socialism of Rousseau, may destroy a society, but they cannot save it
+unless in conjunction with organising policy. A thorough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> appreciation
+of fiscal and economic truths was at least as indispensable for the life
+of the Roman Empire as the acceptance of a Messiah; and it was only in
+the hands of a great statesman like Gregory VII. that Christianity
+became at last an instrument powerful enough to save civilisation. What
+the moral renovation of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now
+Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the doctrine of Mr.
+Carlyle, which, while in name a renunciation of self, has all its
+foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, notwithstanding the
+method of <i>Emile</i>, treats man as a part of a collective whole,
+contracting manifold relations and owing manifold duties; and he always
+appeals to the love and sympathy which an imaginary God of nature has
+implanted in the heart. His aim is unity. Mr. Carlyle, following the
+same method of obedience to his own personal emotions, unfortified by
+patient reasoning, lands at the other extremity, and lays all his stress
+on the separatist instincts. The individual stands alone confronted by
+the eternities; between these and his own soul exists the one central
+relation. This has all the fundamental egotism of the doctrine of
+personal salvation, emancipated from fable, and varnished with an
+emotional phrase. The doctrine has been very widely interpreted, and
+without any forcing, as a religious expression for the conditions of
+commercial success.</p>
+
+<p>If we look among our own countrymen, we find that the apostle of
+self-renunciation is nowhere so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> beloved as by the best of those whom
+steady self-reliance and thrifty self-securing and a firm eye to the
+main chance have got successfully on in the world. A Carlylean
+anthology, or volume of the master's sentences, might easily be
+composed, that should contain the highest form of private liturgy
+accepted by the best of the industrial classes, masters or men. They
+forgive or overlook the writer's denunciations of Beaver Industrialisms,
+which they attribute to his caprice or spleen. This is the worst of an
+emotional teacher, that people take only so much as they please from
+him, while with a reasoner they must either refute by reason, or else
+they must accept by reason, and not at simple choice. When trade is
+brisk, and England is successfully competing in the foreign markets, the
+books that enjoin silence and self-annihilation have a wonderful
+popularity in the manufacturing districts. This circumstance is
+honourable both to them and to him, as far as it goes, but it furnishes
+some reason for suspecting that our most vigorous moral reformer, so far
+from propelling us in new grooves, has in truth only given new firmness
+and coherency to tendencies that were strongly marked enough in the
+national character before. He has increased the fervour of the country,
+but without materially changing its objects; there is all the less
+disguise among us as a result of his teaching, but no radical
+modification of the sentiments which people are sincere in. The most
+stirring general appeal to the emotions, to be effective for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> more than
+negative purposes, must lead up to definite maxims and specific
+precepts. As a negative renovation Mr. Carlyle's doctrine was perfect.
+It effectually put an end to the mood of Byronism. May we say that with
+the neutralisation of Byron, his most decisive and special work came to
+an end? May we not say further, that the true renovation of England, if
+such a process be ever feasible, will lie in a quite other method than
+this of emotion? It will lie not in more moral earnestness only, but in
+a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work
+and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The
+poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not
+intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but
+all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is
+this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble
+situation. We need light more than heat; intellectual alertness, faith
+in the reasoning faculty, accessibility to new ideas. To refuse to use
+the intellect patiently and with system, to decline to seek scientific
+truth, to prefer effusive indulgence of emotion to the laborious and
+disciplined and candid exploration of new ideas, is not this, too, a
+torpid unveracity? And has not Mr. Carlyle, by the impatience of his
+method, done somewhat to deepen it?</p>
+
+<p>It is very well to invite us to moral reform, to bring ourselves to be
+of heroic mind, as the surest way to 'the blessed Aristocracy of the
+Wisest.' But how shall we know the wisest when we see them, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> how
+shall a nation know, if not by keen respect and watchfulness for
+intellectual truth and the teachers of it? Much as we may admire Mr.
+Carlyle's many gifts, and highly as we may revere his character, it is
+yet very doubtful whether anybody has as yet learnt from him the
+precious lesson of scrupulosity and conscientiousness in actively and
+constantly using the intelligence. This would have been the solid
+foundation of the true hero-worship.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Let thus much have been said on the head of temperament. The historic
+position also of every writer is an indispensable key to many things in
+his teaching.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's case, that he was
+born in the memorable year when the French Revolution, in its narrower
+sense, was closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the great century
+of emancipation and illumination was ending darkly in battles and
+confusion. During his youth the reaction was in full flow, and the lamp
+had been handed to runners who not only reversed the ideas and methods,
+but even turned aside from the goal of their precursors. Hopefulness and
+enthusiastic confidence in humanity when freed from the fetters of
+spiritual superstition and secular tyranny, marked all the most
+characteristic and influential speculations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> of the two generations
+before '89. The appalling failure which attended the splendid attempt to
+realise these hopes in a renewed and perfected social structure, had no
+more than its natural effect in turning men's minds back, not to the
+past of Rousseau's imagination, but to the past of recorded history. The
+single epoch in the annals of Europe since the rise of Christianity, for
+which no good word could be found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The
+hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries was
+passed lightly over by men who had only eyes for the moral obliquity of
+the church of the Encyclop&aelig;dia. The brilliant but profoundly inadequate
+essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the outcome in Mr. Carlyle of the
+same reactionary spirit. Nobody now, we may suppose, who is competent to
+judge, thinks that that estimate of 'the net product, of the tumultuous
+Atheism' of Diderot and his fellow-workers, is a satisfactory account of
+the influence and significance of the Encyclop&aelig;dia; nor that to sum up
+Voltaire, with his burning passion for justice, his indefatigable
+humanity, his splendid energy in intellectual production, his righteous
+hatred of superstition, as merely a supreme master of <i>persiflage</i>, can
+be a process partaking of finality. The fact that to the eighteenth
+century belong the subjects of more than half of these thirty volumes,
+is a proof of the fascination of the period for an author who has never
+ceased to vilipend it. The saying is perhaps as true in these matters as
+of private relations, that hatred is not so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> far removed from love as
+indifference is. Be that as it may, the Carlylean view of the eighteenth
+century as a time of mere scepticism and unbelief, is now clearly
+untenable to men who remember the fervour of Jean Jacques, and the more
+rational, but not any less fervid faith of the disciples of
+Perfectibility. But this was not so clear fifty years since, when the
+crash and dust of demolition had not so subsided as to let men see how
+much had risen up behind. The fire of the new school had been taken from
+the very conflagration which they execrated, but they were not held back
+from denouncing the eighteenth century by the reflection that, at any
+rate, its thought and action had made ready the way for much of what is
+best in the nineteenth.</p>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Carlyle himself has told us about Coleridge, and the movement of
+which Coleridge was the leader. That movement has led men in widely
+different ways. In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps
+of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous ephemera still suck a
+little spiritual moisture. In another it led to the sacramental and
+sacerdotal developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among men with
+strong practical energy, to the benevolent bluster of a sort of
+Christianity which is called muscular because it is not intellectual. It
+would be an error to suppose that these and the other streams that have
+sprung from the same source, did not in the days of their fulness
+fertilise and gladden many lands. The wordy pietism of one school, the
+mimetic rites of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> another, the romping heroics of the third, are
+degenerate forms. How long they are likely to endure, it would be rash
+to predict among a nation whose established teachers and official
+preachers are prevented by an inveterate timidity from trusting
+themselves to that disciplined intelligence, in which the superior minds
+of the last century had such courageous faith.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Carlyle drank in some sort at the same fountain. Coleridgean ideas
+were in the air. It was there probably that he acquired that sympathy
+with the past, or with certain portions of the past, that feeling of the
+unity of history, and that conviction of the necessity of binding our
+theory of history fast with our theory of other things, in all of which
+he so strikingly resembles the great Anglican leaders of a generation
+ago, and in gaining some of which so strenuous an effort must have been
+needed to modify the prepossessions of a Scotch Puritan education. No
+one has contributed more powerfully to that movement which, drawing
+force from many and various sides, has brought out the difference
+between the historian and the gazetteer or antiquary. One half of <i>Past
+and Present</i> might have been written by one of the Oxford chiefs in the
+days of the Tracts. Vehement native force was too strong for such a man
+to remain in the luminous haze which made the Coleridgean atmosphere. A
+well-known chapter in the <i>Life of Sterling</i>, which some, indeed, have
+found too ungracious, shows how little hold he felt Coleridge's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> ideas
+to be capable of retaining, and how little permanent satisfaction
+resided in them. Coleridge, in fact, was not only a poet but a thinker
+as well; he had science of a sort as well as imagination, but it was not
+science for headlong and impatient souls. Mr. Carlyle has probably never
+been able to endure a subdivision all his life, and the infinite
+ramifications of the central division between object and subject might
+well be with him an unprofitable weariness to the flesh.</p>
+
+<p>In England, the greatest literary organ of the Revolution was
+unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic
+lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over
+the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific
+work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with
+all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some
+gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly
+tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a
+revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had
+fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the
+many-eyed minuteness and sustained pulsing force of Byron, has still the
+full swell and tide and energy of genius: he is as lawless in his
+disrespect for some things established. He had the unspeakable advantage
+of being that which, though not in this sense, only his own favourite
+word of contempt describes, respectable; and, for another thing,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> of
+being ruggedly sincere. Carlylism is the male of Byronism. It is
+Byronism with thew and sinew, bass pipe and shaggy bosom. There is the
+same grievous complaint against the time and its men and its spirit,
+something even of the same contemptuous despair, the same sense of the
+puniness of man in the centre of a cruel and frowning universe; but
+there is in Carlylism a deliverance from it all, indeed the only
+deliverance possible. Its despair is a despair without misery. Labour in
+a high spirit, duty done, and right service performed in fortitudinous
+temper&mdash;here was, not indeed a way out, but a way of erect living
+within.</p>
+
+<p>Against Byronism the ordinary moralist and preacher could really do
+nothing, because Byronism was an appeal that lay in the regions of the
+mind only accessible by one with an eye and a large poetic feeling for
+the infinite whole of things. It was not the rebellion only in
+<i>Manfred</i>, nor the wit in <i>Don Juan</i>, nor the graceful melancholy of
+<i>Childe Harold</i>, which made their author an idol, and still make him one
+to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of
+it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of
+Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's
+work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a
+sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part
+showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the
+universal forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness of his
+achievement and endurance takes a complexion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> of greatness from the
+vague immensity that surrounds and impalpably mixes with it.</p>
+
+<p>Remember further, that while in Byron the outcome of this was rebellion,
+in Carlyle its outcome is reverence, a noble mood, which is one of the
+highest predispositions of the English character. The instincts of
+sanctification rooted in Teutonic races, and which in the corrupt and
+unctuous forms of a mechanical religious profession are so revolting,
+were mocked and outraged, where they were not superciliously ignored, in
+every line of the one, while in the other they were enthroned under the
+name of Worship, as the very key and centre of the right life. The
+prophet who never wearies of declaring that 'only in bowing down before
+the Higher does man feel himself exalted,' touched solemn organ notes,
+that awoke a response from dim religious depths, never reached by the
+stormy wailings of the Byronic lyre. The political side of the
+reverential sentiment is equally conciliated, and the prime business of
+individuals and communities pronounced to be the search after worthy
+objects of this divine quality of reverence. While kings' cloaks and
+church tippets are never spared, still less suffered to protect the
+dishonour of ignoble wearers of them, the inadequateness of aggression
+and demolition, the necessity of quiet order, the uncounted debt that we
+owe to rulers and to all sorts of holy and great men who have given this
+order to the world, all this brought repose and harmony into spirits
+that the hollow thunders of universal rebellion against tyrants and
+priests had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> worn into thinness and confusion. Again, at the bottom of
+the veriest <i>frondeur</i> with English blood in his veins, in his most
+defiant moment there lies a conviction that after all something known as
+common sense is the measure of life, and that to work hard is a
+demonstrated precept of common sense. Carlylism exactly hits this and
+brings it forward. We cannot wonder that Byronism was routed from the
+field.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It may have been in the transcendently firm and clear-eyed intelligence
+of Goethe that Mr. Carlyle first found a responsive encouragement to the
+profoundly positive impulses of his own spirit.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> There is, indeed, a
+whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and bright composure of the
+one, and the vehemence, passion, masterful wrath, of the other; and the
+vast, incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing
+corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous contempt and
+indifference, sometimes express and sometimes only very significantly
+implied, for forms of intellectual activity that do not happen to be
+personally congenial. But each is a god, though the one sits ever on
+Olympus, while the other is as one from Tartarus. There is in each,
+besides all else, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> certain remarkable directness of glance, an
+intrepid and penetrating quality of vision, which defies analysis.
+Occasional turgidity of phrase and unidiomatic handling of language do
+not conceal the simplicity of the process by which Mr. Carlyle pierces
+through obstruction down to the abstrusest depths. And the important
+fact is that this abstruseness is not verbal, any more than it is the
+abstruseness of fog and cloud. His epithet, or image, or trope, shoots
+like a sunbeam on to the matter, throwing a transfigurating light, even
+where it fails to pierce to its central core.</p>
+
+
+<p>Eager for a firm foothold, yet wholly revolted by the too narrow and
+unelevated positivity of the eighteenth century; eager also for some
+recognition of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly unsatisfied
+by the transcendentalism of the English and Scotch philosophic
+reactions; he found in Goethe that truly free and adequate positivity
+which accepts all things as parts of a natural or historic order, and
+while insisting on the recognition of the actual conditions of this
+order as indispensable, and condemning attempted evasions of such
+recognition as futile and childish, yet opens an ample bosom for all
+forms of beauty in art, and for all nobleness in moral aspiration. That
+Mr. Carlyle has reached this high ground we do not say. Temperament has
+kept him down from it. But it is after this that he has striven. The
+tumid nothingness of pure transcendentalism he has always abhorred. Some
+of Mr. Carlyle's favourite phrases have disguised from his readers the
+intensely practical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> turn of his whole mind. His constant presentation
+of the Eternities, the Immensities, and the like, has veiled his almost
+narrow adherence to plain record without moral comment, and his often
+cynical respect for the dangerous, yet, when rightly qualified and
+guided, the solid formula that What is, is. The Eternities and
+Immensities are only a kind of awful background. The highest souls are
+held to be deeply conscious of these vast unspeakable presences, yet
+even with them they are only inspiring accessories; the true interest
+lies in the practical attitude of such men towards the actual and
+palpable circumstances that surround them. This spirituality, whose
+place in Mr. Carlyle's teaching has been so extremely mis-stated, sinks
+wholly out of sight in connection with such heroes as the coarse and
+materialist Bonaparte, of whom, however, the hero-worshipper in earlier
+pieces speaks with some laudable misgiving, and the not less coarse and
+materialist Frederick, about whom no misgiving is permitted to the loyal
+disciple. The admiration for military methods, on condition that they
+are successful, for Mr. Carlyle, like Providence, is always on the side
+of big and victorious battalions, is the last outcome of a devotion to
+vigorous action and practical effect, which no verbal garniture of a
+transcendental kind can hinder us from perceiving to be more purely
+materialist and unfeignedly brutal than anything which sprung from the
+reviled thought of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>It is instructive to remark that another of the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> illustrious
+enemies of that century and all its works, Joseph de Maistre, had the
+same admiration for the effectiveness of war, and the same extreme
+interest and concern in the men and things of war. He, too, declares
+that 'the loftiest and most generous sentiments are probably to be found
+in the soldier;' and that war, if terrible, is divine and splendid and
+fascinating, the manifestation of a sublime law of the universe. We
+must, however, do De Maistre the justice to point out, first, that he
+gave a measure of his strange interest in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr.
+Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of the honours
+of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second
+place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a
+fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a
+divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely
+defying all the speculations of human reason.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> The biographer of
+Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will,
+tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this
+and the absolutism of the mystic.</p>
+
+<p>'Nature,' he says in one place, 'keeps silently a most exact
+Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most evanescent item,
+Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks
+down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism;
+Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> twenty-seven million strong or
+one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in
+consequence of that&mdash;Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously
+as Fate (for this <i>is</i> Fate that is writing); and at the end of the
+account you will have it all to pay, my friend.'<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>That is to say, there is a law of recompense for communities of men, and
+as nations sow, even thus they reap. But what is Mr. Carlyle's account
+of the precise nature and operation of this law? What is the original
+distinction between an act of veracity and a blunder? Why was the blow
+struck by the Directory on the Eighteenth Fructidor a blunder, and that
+struck by Bonaparte on the Eighteenth Brumaire a veracity? What
+principle of registration is that which makes Nature debtor to Frederick
+the Second for the seizure of Silesia, and Bonaparte debtor to Nature
+for 'trampling on the world, holding it tyrannously down?' It is very
+well to tell us that 'Injustice pays itself with frightful compound
+interest,' but there are reasons for suspecting that Mr. Carlyle's
+definition of the just and the unjust are such as to reduce this and all
+his other sentences of like purport to the level of mere truism and
+repetition. If you secretly or openly hold that to be just and veracious
+which is successful, then it needs no further demonstration that
+penalties of ultimate failure are exacted for injustice, because it is
+precisely the failure that constitutes the injustice.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This is the kernel of all that is most retrograde in Mr. Carlyle's
+teaching. He identifies the physical with the moral order, confounds
+faithful conformity to the material conditions of success, with loyal
+adherence to virtuous rule and principle, and then appeals to material
+triumph as the sanction of nature and the ratification of high heaven.
+Admiring with profoundest admiration the spectacle of an inflexible
+will, when armed with a long-headed insight into means and quantities
+and forces as its instrument, and yet deeply revering the abstract ideal
+of justice; dazzled by the methods and the products of iron resolution,
+yet imbued with traditional affection for virtue; he has seen no better
+way of conciliating both inclinations than by insisting that they point
+in the same direction, and that virtue and success, justice and victory,
+merit and triumph, are in the long run all one and the same thing. The
+most fatal of confusions. Compliance with material law and condition
+ensures material victory, and compliance with moral condition ensures
+moral triumph; but then moral triumph is as often as not physical
+martyrdom. Superior military virtues must unquestionably win the verdict
+of Fate, Nature, Fact, and Veracity, on the battle-field, but what then?
+Has Fate no other verdicts to record than these? and at the moment while
+she writes Nature down debtor to the conqueror, may she not also have
+written her down his implacable creditor for the moral cost of his
+conquest?</p>
+
+<p>The anarchy and confusion of Poland were an out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>rage upon political
+conditions, which brought her to dependence and ruin. The manner of the
+partition was an outrage on moral conditions, for which each of the
+nations that profited by it paid in the lawlessness of Bonaparte. The
+preliminaries of L&eacute;oben, again, and Campo-Formio were the key to
+Waterloo and St. Helena. But Mr. Carlyle stops short at the triumph of
+compliance with the conditions of material victory. He is content to
+know that Frederick made himself master of Silesia, without considering
+that the day of Jena loomed in front. It suffices to say that the whiff
+of grape-shot on the Thirteenth Vend&eacute;miaire brought Sans-culottism to
+order and an end, without measuring what permanent elements of disorder
+were ineradicably implanted by resort to the military arm. Only the
+failures are used to point the great historical moral, and if Bonaparte
+had died in the Tuileries in all honour and glory, he would have ranked
+with Frederick or Francia as a wholly true man. Mr. Carlyle would then
+no more have declared the execution of Palm 'a palpable, tyrannous,
+murderous injustice,' than he declares it of the execution of Katte or
+Schlubhut. The fall of the traitor to fact, of the French monarchy, of
+the windbags of the first Republic, of Charles I., is improved for our
+edification, but then the other lesson, the failure of heroes like
+Cromwell, remains isolated and incoherent, with no place in a morally
+regulated universe. If the strength of Prussia now proves that Frederick
+had a right to seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist
+assume, from the fact of the restoration, and the consequent
+obliteration of Cromwell's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a
+phantasm captain?</p>
+
+<p>Apart from its irreconcilableness with many of his most emphatic
+judgments, Mr. Carlyle's doctrine about Nature's registration of the
+penalties of injustice is intrinsically an anachronism. It is worse than
+the Catholic reaction, because while De Maistre only wanted Europe to
+return to the system of the twelfth century, Mr. Carlyle's theory of
+history takes us back to times prehistoric, when might and right were
+the same thing. It is decidedly natural that man in a state of nature
+should take and keep as much as his skill and physical strength enable
+him to do. But society and its benefits are all so much ground won from
+nature and her state. The more natural a method of acquisition, the less
+likely is it to be social. The essence of morality is the subjugation of
+nature in obedience to social needs. To use Kant's admirable
+description, concert <i>pathologically</i> extorted by the mere necessities
+of situation, is exalted into a <i>moral</i> union. It is exactly in this
+progressive substitution of one for the other that advancement consists,
+that Progress of the Species at which, in certain of its forms, Mr.
+Carlyle has so many gibes.</p>
+
+<p>That, surely, is the true test of veracity and heroism in conduct. Does
+your hero's achievement go in the pathological or the moral direction?
+Does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> it tend to spread faith in that cunning, violence, force, which
+were once primitive and natural conditions of life, and which will still
+by natural law work to their own proper triumphs in so far as these
+conditions survive, and within such limits, and in such sense, as they
+permit; or, on the contrary, does it tend to heighten respect for civic
+law, for pledged word, for the habit of self-surrender to the public
+good, and for all those other ideas and sentiments and usages which have
+been painfully gained from the sterile sands of egotism and selfishness,
+and to which we are indebted for all the untold boons conferred by the
+social union on man?</p>
+
+<p>Viewed from this point, the manner of the achievement is as important as
+is its immediate product, a consideration which it is one of Mr.
+Carlyle's most marked peculiarities to take into small account.
+Detesting Jesuitism from the bottom of his soul, he has been too willing
+to accept its fundamental maxim, that the end justifies the means. He
+has taken the end for the ratification or proscription of the means, and
+stamped it as the verdict of Fate and Fact on the transaction and its
+doer. A safer position is this, that the means prepare the end, and the
+end is what the means have made it. Here is the limit of the true law of
+the relations between man and fate. Justice and injustice in the law,
+let us abstain from inquiring after.</p>
+
+<p>There are two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some
+degree by the primitive and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> pathological principle of repression and
+main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal
+and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are constantly
+straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in
+the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the
+predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and
+unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as
+the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be
+ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occupied the same
+moral and social level as the best of their generation. We are amply
+justified in employing towards them, wherever their offences endanger
+order, the same methods of coercion which originally made society
+possible. No tenable theory about free will or necessity, no theory of
+praise and blame that will bear positive tests, lays us under any
+obligation to spare either the comfort or the life of a man who indulges
+in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr. Carlyle has done much to
+wear this just and austere view into the minds of his generation, and in
+so far he has performed an excellent service.</p>
+
+<p>The second set of relations in which the pathological element still so
+largely predominates are those between nations. Separate and independent
+communities are still in a state of nature. The tie between them is only
+the imperfect, loose, and non-moral tie of self-interest and material
+power. Many publicists and sentimental politicians are ever striving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> to
+conceal this displeasing fact from themselves and others, and evading
+the lesson of the outbreaks that now and again convulse the civilised
+world. Mr. Carlyle's history of the rise and progress of the power of
+the Prussian monarchy is the great illustration of the hold which he has
+got of the conception of the international state as a state of nature;
+and here again, in so far as he has helped to teach us to study the past
+by historic methods, he has undoubtedly done laudable work.</p>
+
+<p>Yet have we not to confess that there is another side to this kind of
+truth, in both these fields? We may finally pronounce on a given way of
+thinking, only after we have discerned its goal. Not knowing this, we
+cannot accurately know its true tendency and direction. Now, every
+recognition of the pathological necessity should imply a progress and
+effort towards its conversion into moral relationship. The difference
+between a reactionary and a truly progressive thinker or group of ideas
+is not that the one assumes virtuousness and morality as having been the
+conscious condition of international dealings, while the other asserts
+that such dealings were the lawful consequence of self-interest and the
+contest of material forces; nor is it that the one insists on viewing
+international transactions from the same moral point which would be the
+right one, if independent communities actually formed one stable and
+settled family, while the other declines to view their morality at all.
+The vital difference is, that while the reactionary writer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> rigorously
+confines his faith within the region of facts accomplished, the other
+anticipates a time when the endeavour of the best minds in the civilised
+world, co-operating with every favouring external circumstance that
+arises, shall have in the international circle raised moral
+considerations to an ever higher and higher pre-eminence, and in
+internal conditions shall have left in the chances and training of the
+individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to
+anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or
+other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at
+the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to
+close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure
+that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of the
+present.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Carlyle's influence, however, was at its height before this idolatry
+of the soldier became a paramount article in his creed; and it is
+devoutly to be hoped that not many of those whom he first taught to
+seize before all things fact and reality, will follow him into this
+torrid air, where only forces and never principles are facts, and where
+nothing is reality but the violent triumph of arbitrarily imposed will.
+There was once a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek and
+cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste energy and hope in
+seeking lights which it is not given to man ever to find, with a solemn
+assurance added that in frank and untrembling recognition of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+circumstance the spirit of man may find a priceless, ever-fruitful
+contentment. The prolonged and thousand-times repeated glorification of
+Unconsciousness, Silence, Renunciation, all comes to this: We are to
+leave the region of things unknowable, and hold fast to the duty that
+lies nearest. Here is the Everlasting Yea. In action only can we have
+certainty.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The reticences of men are often only less full of meaning than their
+most pregnant speech; and Mr. Carlyle's unbroken silence upon the modern
+validity and truth of religious creeds says much. The fact that he
+should have taken no distinct side in the great debate as to revelation,
+salvation, inspiration, and the other theological issues that agitate
+and divide a community where theology is now mostly verbal, has been the
+subject of some comment, and has had the effect of adding one rather
+peculiar side to the many varieties of his influence. Many in the
+dogmatic stage have been content to think that as he was not avowedly
+against them, he might be with them, and sacred persons have been known
+to draw their most strenuous inspirations from the chief denouncer of
+phantasms and exploded formulas. Only once, when speaking of Sterling's
+undertaking the clerical burden, does he burst out into unmistakable
+description of the old Jew stars that have now gone out, and wrath
+against those who would persuade us that these stars are still aflame
+and the only ones. That this reserve has been wise in its day, and has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+most usefully widened the tide and scope of the teacher's popularity,
+one need not dispute. There are conditions when indirect solvents are
+most powerful, as there are others, which these have done much to
+prepare, when no lover of truth will stoop to declarations other than
+direct. Mr. Carlyle has assailed the dogmatic temper in religion, and
+this is work that goes deeper than to assail dogmas.</p>
+
+<p>Not even Comte himself has harder words for metaphysics than Mr.
+Carlyle. 'The disease of Metaphysics' is perennial. Questions of Death
+and Immortality, Origin of Evil, Freedom and Necessity, are ever
+appearing and attempting to shape something of the universe. 'And ever
+unsuccessfully: for what theorem of the Infinite can the Finite render
+complete?... Metaphysical Speculation as it begins in No or Nothingness,
+so it must needs end in nothingness; circulates and must circulate in
+endless vortices; creating, swallowing&mdash;itself.'<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Again, on the other
+side, he sets his face just as firmly against the excessive pretensions
+and unwarranted certitudes of the physicist. '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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> and pebble, and quality and accident 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
+to time (<i>un</i>-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 &AElig;ons of &AElig;ons.'<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> The inalterable relativity of
+human knowledge has never been more forcibly illustrated; and the two
+passages together fix the limits of that knowledge with a sagacity truly
+philosophic. Between the vagaries of mystics and the vagaries of
+physicists lies the narrow land of rational certainty, relative,
+conditional, experimental, from which we view the vast realm that
+stretches out unknown before us, and perhaps for ever unknowable;
+inspiring men with an elevated awe, and environing the interests and
+duties of their little lives with a strange sublimity. 'We emerge from
+the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge
+again into the Inane.... But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not;
+Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery.'<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<p>Natural Supernaturalism, the title of one of the cardinal chapters in
+Mr. Carlyle's cardinal book, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> perhaps as good a name as another for
+this two-faced yet integral philosophy, which teaches us to behold with
+cheerful serenity the great gulf which is fixed round our faculty and
+existence on every side, while it fills us with that supreme sense of
+countless unseen possibilities, and of the hidden, undefined movements
+of shadow and light over the spirit, without which the soul of man falls
+into hard and desolate sterility. In youth, perhaps, it is the latter
+aspect of Mr. Carlyle's teaching which first touches people, because
+youth is the time of indefinite aspiration; and it is easier, besides,
+to surrender ourselves passively to these vague emotional impressions,
+than to apply actively and contentedly to the duty that lies nearest,
+and to the securing of 'that infinitesimallest product' on which the
+teacher is ever insisting. It is the Supernaturalism which stirs men
+first, until larger fulness of years and wider experience of life draw
+them to a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in Naturalism. This last
+is the mood which Mr. Carlyle never wearies of extolling and enjoining
+under the name of Belief; and the absence of it, the inability to enter
+into it, is that Unbelief which he so bitterly vituperates, or, in
+another phrase, that Discontent, which he charges with holding the soul
+in such desperate and paralysing bondage.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, what is it that Mr. Carlyle urges upon us but the search for
+that Mental Freedom, which under one name or another has been the goal
+and ideal of all highest minds that have reflected on the true<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+constitution of human happiness? His often enjoined Silence is the first
+condition of this supreme kind of liberty, for what is silence but the
+absence of a self-tormenting assertiveness, the freedom from excessive
+susceptibility under the speech of others, one's removal from the
+choking sandy wilderness of wasted words? Belief is the mood which
+emancipates us from the paralysing dubieties of distraught souls, and
+leaves us full possession of ourselves by furnishing an unshaken and
+inexpugnable base for action and thought, and subordinating passion to
+conviction. Labour, again, perhaps the cardinal article in the creed, is
+at once the price of moral independence, and the first condition of that
+fulness and accuracy of knowledge, without which we are not free, but
+the bounden slaves of prejudice, unreality, darkness, and error. Even
+Renunciation of self is in truth only the casting out of those
+disturbing and masterful qualities which oppress and hinder the free,
+natural play of the worthier parts of character. In renunciation we thus
+restore to self its own diviner mind.</p>
+
+<p>Yet we are never bidden either to strive or hope for a freedom that is
+unbounded. Circumstance has fixed limits that no effort can transcend.
+Novalis complained in bitter words, as we know, of the mechanical,
+prosaic, utilitarian, cold-hearted character of <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>,
+constituting it an embodiment of 'artistic Atheism,' while English
+critics as loudly found fault with its author for being a mystic.
+Exactly the same discrepancy is possible in respect of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> Mr. Carlyle's
+own writings. In one sense he may be called mystic and transcendental,
+in another baldly mechanical and even cold-hearted, just as Novalis
+found Goethe to be in <i>Meister</i>. The latter impression is inevitable in
+all who, like Goethe and like Mr. Carlyle, make a lofty acquiescence in
+the positive course of circumstance a prime condition at once of wise
+endeavour and of genuine happiness. The splendid fire and unmeasured
+vehemence of Mr. Carlyle's manner partially veil the depth of this
+acquiescence, which is really not so far removed from fatalism. The
+torrent of his eloquence, bright and rushing as it is, flows between
+rigid banks and over hard rocks. Devotion to the heroic does not prevent
+the assumption of a tone towards the great mass of the unheroic, which
+implies that they are no more than two-legged mill horses, ever treading
+a fixed and unalterable round. He practically denies other consolation
+to mortals than such as they may be able to get from the final and
+conclusive Kismet of the oriental. It is fate. Man is the creature of
+his destiny. As for our supposed claims on the heavenly powers: What
+right, he asks, hadst thou even to be? Fatalism of this stamp is the
+natural and unavoidable issue of a born positivity of spirit, uninformed
+by scientific meditation. It exists in its coarsest and most childish
+kind in adventurous freebooters of the type of Napoleon, and in a noble
+and not egotistic kind in Oliver Cromwell's pious interpretation of the
+order of events by the good will and providence of God.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Two conspicuous qualities of Carlylean doctrine flow from this fatalism,
+or poetised utilitarianism, or illumined positivity. One of them is a
+tolerably constant contempt for excessive nicety in moral distinctions,
+and an aversion to the monotonous attitude of praise and blame. In a
+country overrun and corroded to the heart, as Great Britain is, with
+cant and a foul mechanical hypocrisy, this temper ought to have had its
+uses in giving a much-needed robustness to public judgment. One might
+suppose, from the tone of opinion among us, not only that the difference
+between right and wrong marks the most important aspect of conduct,
+which would be true; but that it marks the only aspect of it that
+exists, or that is worth considering, which is most profoundly false.
+Nowhere has Puritanism done us more harm than in thus leading us to take
+all breadth, and colour, and diversity, and fine discrimination, out of
+our judgments of men, reducing them to thin, narrow, and superficial
+pronouncements upon the letter of their morality, or the precise
+conformity of their opinions to accepted standards of truth, religious
+or other. Among other evils which it has inflicted, this inability to
+conceive of conduct except as either right or wrong, and,
+correspondingly in the intellectual order, of teaching except as either
+true or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit of <i>parti-pris</i>
+which has led to the rooting of so much injustice, disorder, immobility,
+and darkness in English intelligence. No excess of morality, we may be
+sure, has followed this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> excessive adoption of the exclusively moral
+standard. '<i>Quand il n'y a plus de principes dans le c&oelig;ur</i>,' says De
+Senancourt, '<i>on est bien scrupuleux sur les apparences publiques et sur
+les devoirs d'opinion</i>.' We have simply got for our pains a most
+unlovely leanness of judgment, and ever since the days when this temper
+set in until now, when a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has steadily
+and powerfully tended to straiten character, to make action mechanical,
+and to impoverish art. As if there were nothing admirable in a man save
+unbroken obedience to the letter of the moral law, and that letter read
+in our own casual and local interpretation; and as if we had no
+faculties of sympathy, no sense for the beauty of character, no feeling
+for broad force and full-pulsing vitality.</p>
+
+<p>To study manners and conduct and men's moral nature in such a way, is as
+direct an error as it would be to overlook in the study of his body
+everything except its vertebral column and the bony framework. The body
+is more than mere anatomy. A character is much else besides being
+virtuous or vicious. In many of the characters in which some of the
+finest and most singular qualities of humanity would seem to have
+reached their furthest height, their morality was the side least worth
+discussing. The same may be said of the specific rightness or wrongness
+of opinion in the intellectual order. Let us condemn error or
+immorality, when the scope of our criticism calls for this particular
+function, but why rush to praise or blame, to eulogy or reprobation,
+when we should do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> better simply to explore and enjoy? Moral
+imperfection is ever a grievous curtailment of life, but many exquisite
+flowers of character, many gracious and potent things, may still thrive
+in the most disordered scene.</p>
+
+<p>The vast waste which this limitation of prospect entails is the most
+grievous rejection of moral treasure, if it be true that nothing
+enriches the nature like wide sympathy and many-coloured
+appreciativeness. To a man like Macaulay, for example, criticism was
+only a tribunal before which men were brought to be decisively tried by
+one or two inflexible tests, and then sent to join the sheep on the one
+hand, or the goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences
+passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness
+and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite
+of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack.
+Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding,
+with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr.
+Carlyle's essay on the same man. Mr. Carlyle knows as well as Macaulay
+how blind and stupid a creed was English Toryism a century ago, but he
+seizes and reproduces the character of his man, and this was much more
+than a matter of a creed. So with Burns. He was drunken and unchaste and
+thriftless, and Mr. Carlyle holds all these vices as deeply in
+reprobation as if he had written ten thousand sermons against them; but
+he leaves the fulmination to the hack moralist of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> pulpit or the
+press, with whom words are cheap, easily gotten, and readily thrown
+forth. To him it seems better worth while, having made sure of some
+sterling sincerity and rare genuineness of vision and singular human
+quality, to dwell on, and do justice to that, than to accumulate
+commonplaces as to the viciousness of vice. Here we may perhaps find the
+explanation of the remarkable fact that though Mr. Carlyle has written
+about a large number of men of all varieties of opinion and temperament,
+and written with emphasis and point and strong feeling, yet there is
+hardly one of these judgments, however much we may dissent from it,
+which we could fairly put a finger upon as indecently absurd or futile.
+Of how many writers of thirty volumes can we say the same?</p>
+
+<p>That this broad and poetic temper of criticism has special dangers, and
+needs to have special safeguards, is but too true. Even, however, if we
+find that it has its excesses, we may forgive much to the merits of a
+reaction against a system which has raised monstrous floods of sour cant
+round about us, and hardened the hearts and parched the sympathies of
+men by blasts from theological deserts. There is a point of view so
+lofty and so peculiar that from it we are able to discern in men and
+women something more than, and apart from, creed and profession and
+formulated principle; which indeed directs and colours this creed and
+principle as decisively as it is in its turn acted on by them, and this
+is their character or humanity. The least important thing about Johnson<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+is that he was a Tory; and about Burns, that he drank too much and was
+incontinent; and if we see in modern literature an increasing tendency
+to mount to this higher point of view, this humaner prospect, there is
+no living writer to whom we owe more for it than Mr. Carlyle. The same
+principle which revealed the valour and godliness of Puritanism, has
+proved its most efficacious solvent, for it places character on the
+pedestal where Puritanism places dogma.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The second of the qualities which seem to flow from Mr. Carlyle's
+fatalism, and one much less useful among such a people as the English,
+is a deficiency of sympathy with masses of men. It would be easy enough
+to find places where he talks of the dumb millions in terms of fine and
+sincere humanity, and his feeling for the common pathos of the human
+lot, as he encounters it in individual lives, is as earnest and as
+simple, as it is invariably lovely and touching in its expression. But
+detached passages cannot counterbalance the effect of a whole compact
+body of teaching. The multitude stands between Destiny on the one side,
+and the Hero on the other; a sport to the first, and as potter's clay to
+the second. <i>'Dogs, would ye then live for ever?</i>' Frederick is truly or
+fabulously said to have cried to a troop who hesitated to attack a
+battery vomiting forth death and destruction. This is a measure of Mr.
+Carlyle's own valuation of the store we ought to set on the lives of the
+most. We know in what coarse outcome<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> such an estimate of the dignity of
+other life than the life heroic has practically issued; in what
+barbarous vindication of barbarous law-breaking in Jamaica, in what
+inhuman softness for slavery, in what contemptuous and angry words for
+'Beales and his 50,000 roughs,' contrasted with gentle words for our
+precious aristocracy, with 'the politest and gracefullest kind of woman'
+to wife. Here is the end of the Eternal Verities, when one lets them
+bulk so big in his eyes as to shut out that perishable speck, the human
+race.</p>
+
+<p>'They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen,' he says in one
+place, 'what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, that this world
+is after all but a show&mdash;a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All
+deep souls see into that.'<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> Yes; but deep souls dealing with the
+practical questions of society, do well to thrust the vision as far from
+them as they can, and to suppose that this world is no show, and
+happiness and misery not mere appearances, but the keenest realities
+that we can know. The difference between virtue and vice, between wisdom
+and folly, is only phenomenal, yet there is difference enough. 'What
+<i>shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!</i>' Burke cried in the
+presence of an affecting incident. Yet the consciousness of this made
+him none the less careful, minute, patient, systematic, in examining a
+policy, or criticising a tax. Mr. Carlyle, on the contrary, falls back
+on the same reflection for comfort in the face of political confusions
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> difficulties and details, which he has not the moral patience to
+encounter scientifically. Unable to dream of swift renovation and wisdom
+among men, he ponders on the unreality of life, and hardens his heart
+against generations that will not know the things that pertain unto
+their peace. He answers to one lifting up some moderate voice of protest
+in favour of the masses of mankind, as his Prussian hero did: '<i>Ah, you
+do not know that damned race!</i>'<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There is no passage which Mr. Carlyle so often quotes as the sublime&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">We are such stuff</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As dreams are made on; and our little life</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is rounded with a sleep.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>If the ever present impression of this awful, most moving, yet most
+soothing thought, be a law of spiritual breadth and height, there is
+still a peril in it. Such an impression may inform the soul with a
+devout mingled sense of grandeur and nothingness, or it may blacken into
+cynicism and antinomian living for self and the day. It may be a solemn
+and holy refrain, sounding far off but clear in the dusty course of work
+and duty; or it may be the comforting chorus of a diabolic drama of
+selfishness and violence. As a reaction against religious theories which
+make humanity over-abound in self-consequence, and fill individuals with
+the strutting importance of creatures with private souls to save or
+lose, even such cynicism<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> as Byron's was wholesome and nearly
+forgivable. Nevertheless, the most important question that we can ask of
+any great teacher, as of the walk and conversation of any commonest
+person, remains this&mdash;how far has he strengthened and raised the
+conscious and harmonious dignity of humanity; how stirred in men and
+women, many or few, deeper and more active sense of the worth and
+obligation and innumerable possibilities, not of their own little lives,
+one or another, but of life collectively; how heightened the
+self-respect of the race? There is no need to plant oneself in a fool's
+paradise, with no eye for the weakness of men, the futility of their
+hopes, the irony of their fate, the dominion of the satyr and the tiger
+in their hearts. Laughter has a fore-place in life. All this we may see
+and show that we see, and yet so throw it behind the weightier facts of
+nobleness and sacrifice, of the boundless gifts which fraternal union
+has given, and has the power of giving, as to kindle in every breast,
+not callous to exalted impressions, the glow of sympathetic endeavour,
+and of serene exultation in the bond that makes 'precious the soul of
+man to man.'</p>
+
+<p>This renewal of moral energy by spiritual contact with the mass of men,
+and by meditation on the destinies of mankind, is the very reverse of
+Mr. Carlyle's method. With him, it is good to leave the mass, and fall
+down before the individual, and be saved by him. The victorious hero is
+the true Paraclete. 'Nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
+imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> admiration.' And this
+is really the kernel of the Carlylean doctrine. The whole human race
+toils and moils, straining and energising, doing and suffering things
+multitudinous and unspeakable under the sun, in order that like the
+aloe-tree it may once in a hundred years produce a flower. It is this
+hero that age offers to age, and the wisest worship him. Time and nature
+once and again distil from out of the lees and froth of common humanity
+some wondrous character, of a potent and reviving property hardly short
+of miraculous. This the man who knows his own good cherishes in his
+inmost soul as a sacred thing, an elixir of moral life. The Great Man is
+'the light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the
+world; a flowing light fountain, in whose radiance all souls feel that
+it is well with them.' This is only another form of the anthropomorphic
+conceptions of deity. The divinity of the ordinary hierophant is clothed
+in the minds of the worshippers with the highest human qualities they
+happen to be capable of conceiving, and this is the self-acting
+machinery by which worship refreshes and recruits what is best in man.
+Mr. Carlyle has another way. He carries the process a step further,
+giving back to the great man what had been taken for beings greater than
+any man, and summoning us to trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of
+heroic chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many mansions, the
+boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond polytheism. But each altar is
+individual and apart,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> and the reaction of this isolation upon the
+egotistic instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident. It is
+good for us to build temples to great names which recall special
+transfigurations of humanity; but it is better still, it gives a firmer
+nerve to purpose and adds a finer holiness to the ethical sense, to
+carry ever with us the unmarked, yet living tradition of the voiceless
+unconscious effort of unnumbered millions of souls, flitting lightly
+away like showers of thin leaves, yet ever augmenting the elements of
+perfectness in man, and exalting the eternal contest.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Carlyle has indeed written that generation stands indissolubly woven
+with generation; 'how we inherit, not Life only, but all the garniture
+and form of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel, as our
+fathers and primeval grandfathers from the beginning have given it to
+us;' how 'mankind is a living, indivisible whole.'<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> Even this,
+however, with the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in
+connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not incorporated with
+the body of the writer's doctrine. It does not neutralise the general
+lack of faith in the cultivable virtue of masses of men, nor the
+universal tone of humoristic cynicism with which all but a little band,
+the supposed salt of the earth, are treated. Man is for Mr. Carlyle, as
+for the Calvinistic theologian, a fallen and depraved being, without
+much hope, except for a few of the elect. The best thing that can happen
+to the poor creature is that he should be thoroughly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> well drilled. In
+other words, society does not really progress in its bulk; and the
+methods which were conditions of the original formation and growth of
+the social union, remain indispensable until the sound of the last
+trump. Was there not a profound and far-reaching truth wrapped up in
+Goethe's simple yet really inexhaustible monition, that if we would
+improve a man, it were well to let him believe that we already think him
+that which we would have him to be. The law that <i>noblesse oblige</i> has
+unwritten bearings in dealing with all men; all masses of men are
+susceptible of an appeal from that point: for this Mr. Carlyle seems to
+make no allowance.</p>
+
+<p>Every modification of society is one of the slow growths of time, and to
+hurry impatiently after them by swift ways of military discipline and
+peremptory law-making, is only to clasp the near and superficial good.
+It is easy to make a solitude and call it peace, to plant an iron heel
+and call it order. But read Mr. Carlyle's essay on Dr. Francia, and then
+ponder the history of Paraguay for these later years and the accounts of
+its condition in the newspapers of to-day. 'Nay, it may be,' we learn
+from that remarkable piece, 'that the benefit of him is not even yet
+exhausted, even yet entirely become visible. Who knows but, in unborn
+centuries, Paragueno men will look back to their lean iron Francia, as
+men do in such cases to the one veracious person, and institute
+considerations?'<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> Who knows, indeed, if only it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> prove that their
+lean iron Francia, in his passion for order and authority, did not stamp
+out the very life of the nation? Where organic growths are concerned,
+patience is the sovereign law; and where the organism is a society of
+men, the vital principle is a sense in one shape or another of the
+dignity of humanity. The recognition of this tests the distinction
+between the truly heroic ruler of the stamp of Cromwell, and the
+arbitrary enthusiast for external order like Frederick. Yet in more than
+one place Mr. Carlyle accepts the fundamental principle of democracy.
+'It is curious to consider now,' he says once, 'with what fierce,
+deep-breathed doggedness the poor English Nation, drawn by their
+instincts, held fast upon it [the Spanish War of Walpole's time, in
+Jenkins' Ear Question], and would take no denial of it, as if they had
+surmised and seen. For the instincts of simple, guileless persons
+(liable to be counted stupid by the unwary) are sometimes of prophetic
+nature, and spring from the deep places of this universe!'<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> If the
+writer of this had only thought it out to the end, and applied the
+conclusions thereof to history and politics, what a difference it would
+have made.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>No criticism upon either Mr. Carlyle or any other modern historian,
+possessed of speculative quality, would be in any sense complete which
+should leave out of sight his view of the manner and significance of the
+break-up of the old European structure. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> historian is pretty sure to
+be guided in his estimate of the forces which have contributed to
+dissolution in the past, by the kind of anticipation which he entertains
+of the probable course of reconstruction. Like Comte, in his ideas of
+temporal reconstruction, Mr. Carlyle goes back to something like the
+forms of feudalism for the model of the industrial organisation of the
+future; but in the spiritual order he is as far removed as possible from
+any semblance of that revival of the old ecclesiastical forms without
+the old theological ideas, which is the corner-stone of Comte's edifice.
+To the question whether mankind gained or lost by the French Revolution,
+Mr. Carlyle nowhere gives a clear answer; indeed, on this subject more
+even than any other, he clings closely to his favourite method of simple
+presentation, streaked with dramatic irony. No writer shows himself more
+alive to the enormous moment to all Europe of that transaction; but we
+hear no word from him on the question whether we have more reason to
+bless or curse an event that interrupted, either subsequently to retard
+or to accelerate, the transformation of the West from a state of war, of
+many degrees of social subordination, of religious privilege, of
+aristocratic administration, into a state of peaceful industry, of equal
+international rights, of social equality, of free and equal tolerance of
+creeds. That this process was going on prior to 1789 is undeniable. Are
+we really nearer to the permanent establishment of the new order, for
+what was done between 1789 and 1793? or were men thrown off<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> the right
+track of improvement by a movement which turned exclusively on abstract
+rights, which dealt with men's ideas and habits as if they were
+instantaneously pliable before the aspirations of any government, and
+which by its violent and inconsiderate methods drove all these who
+should only have been friends of order into being the enemies of
+progress as well? There are many able and honest and republican men who
+in their hearts suspect that the latter of the two alternatives is the
+more correct description of what has happened. Mr. Carlyle is as one who
+does not hear the question. He draws its general moral lesson from the
+French Revolution, and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns,
+from king to churl, that imposture must come to an end. But for the
+precise amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for
+the political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its
+dramatic significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject,
+nor even evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that with Mr. Carlyle the Revolution begins not in 1789 but
+in 1741; not with the Fall of the Bastile but with the Battle of
+Mollwitz. This earliest of Frederick's victories was the first sign
+'that indeed a new hour had struck on the Time Horologe, that a new
+Epoch had arisen. Slumberous Europe, rotting amid its blind pedantries,
+its lazy hypocrisies, conscious and unconscious: this man is capable of
+shaking it a little out of its stupid refuges<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> of lies and ignominious
+wrappages, and of intimating to it afar off that there is still a
+Veracity in Things, and a Mendacity in Sham Things,' and so forth, in
+the well-known strain.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> It is impossible to overrate the truly
+supreme importance of the violent break-up of Europe which followed the
+death of the Emperor Charles VI., and in many respects 1740 is as
+important a date in the history of Western societies as 1789. Most of us
+would probably find the importance of this epoch in its destructive
+contribution, rather than in that constructive and moral quality which
+lay under the movement of '89. The Empire was thoroughly shattered.
+France was left weak, impoverished, humiliated. Spain was finally thrust
+from among the efficient elements in the European State-system. Most
+important of all, their too slight sanctity had utterly left the old
+conceptions of public law and international right. The whole polity of
+Europe was left in such a condition of disruption as had not been
+equalled since the death of Charles the Great. The Partition of Poland
+was the most startling evidence of the completeness of this disruption,
+and if one statesman was more to be praised or blamed for shaking over
+the fabric than another, that statesman was Frederick the Second of
+Prussia. But then, in Mr. Carlyle's belief, there was equally a
+constructive and highly moral side to all this. The old fell to pieces
+because it was internally rotten. The gospel of the new was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> that the
+government of men and kingdoms is a business beyond all others demanding
+an open-eyed accessibility to all facts and realities; that here more
+than anywhere else you need to give the tools to him who can handle
+them; that government does by no means go on of itself, but more than
+anything else in this world demands skill, patience, energy, long and
+tenacious grip, and the constant presence of that most indispensable,
+yet most rare, of all practical convictions, that the effect is the
+inevitable consequent of the cause. Here was a revolution, we cannot
+doubt. The French Revolution was in a manner a complement to it, as Mr.
+Carlyle himself says in a place where he talks of believing both in the
+French Revolution and in Frederick; 'that is to say both that Real
+Kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction of
+Sham Kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally so.'<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> It is
+curious that an observer who could see the positive side of Frederick's
+disruption of Europe in 1740, did not also see that there was a positive
+side to the disruption of the French monarchy fifty years afterwards,
+and that not only was a blow dealt to sham kingship, but a decisive
+impulse was given to those ideas of morality and justice in government,
+upon which only real kingship in whatever form is able to rest.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>As to the other great factor in the dissolution of the old state, the
+decay of ancient spiritual forms, Mr. Carlyle gives no uncertain sound.
+Of the Refor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>mation, as of the French Revolution, philosophers have
+doubted how far it really contributed to the stable progress of European
+civilisation. Would it have been better, if it had been possible, for
+the old belief gradually as by process of nature to fall to pieces, new
+doctrine as gradually and as normally emerging from the ground of
+disorganised and decayed convictions, without any of that frightful
+violence which stirred men's deepest passions, and gave them a sinister
+interest in holding one or other of the rival creeds in its most
+extreme, exclusive, and intolerant form? This question Mr. Carlyle does
+not see, or, if he does see it, he rides roughshod over it. Every reader
+remembers the notable passage in which he declares that the question of
+Protestant or not Protestant meant everywhere, 'Is there anything of
+nobleness in you, O Nation, or is there nothing?' and that afterwards it
+fared with nations as they did, or did not, accept this sixteenth
+century form of Truth when it came.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p>France, for example, is the conspicuous proof of what overtook the
+deniers. 'France saw good to massacre Protestantism, and end it, in the
+night of St. Bartholomew, 1572. The celestial apparitor of heaven's
+chancery, so we may speak, the genius of Fact and Veracity, had left his
+writ of summons; writ was read and replied to in this manner.' But let
+us look at this more definitely. A complex series of historic facts do
+not usually fit so neatly into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> moral formula. The truth surely is
+that while the anxieties and dangers of the Catholic party in France
+increased after St. Bartholomew, whose dramatic horror has made its
+historic importance to be vastly exaggerated, the Protestant cause
+remained full of vitality, and the number of its adherents went on
+increasing until the Edict of Nantes. It is eminently unreasonable to
+talk of France seeing good to end Protestantism in a night, when we
+reflect that twenty-six years after, the provisions of the Edict of
+Nantes were what they were. 'By that Edict,' the historian tells us,
+'the French Protestants, who numbered perhaps a tenth of the total
+population, 2,000,000 out of 20,000,000, obtained absolute liberty of
+conscience; performance of public worship in 3500 castles, as well as in
+certain specified houses in each province; a State endowment equal to
+&pound;20,000 a year; civil rights equal in every respect to those of the
+Catholics; admission to the public colleges, hospitals, etc.; finally,
+eligibility to all offices of State.' It was this, and not the Massacre,
+which was France's reply to the Genius of Fact and Veracity. Again, on
+the other side, England accepted Protestantism, and yet Mr. Carlyle of
+all men can hardly pretend, after his memorable deliverances in the
+<i>Niagara</i>, that he thinks she has fared particularly well in
+consequence.</p>
+
+<p>The famous diatribe against Jesuitism in the <i>Latter-Day Pamphlets</i>,<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
+one of the most unfeignedly coarse and virulent bits of invective in the
+language,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> points plumb in the same direction. It is grossly unjust,
+because it takes for granted that Loyola and all Jesuits were
+deliberately conscious of imposture and falsehood, knowingly embraced
+the cause of Beelzebub, and resolutely propagated it. It is one thing to
+judge a system in its corruption, and a quite other thing to measure the
+worth and true design of its first founders; one thing to estimate the
+intention and sincerity of a movement, when it first stirred the hearts
+of men, and another thing to pass sentence upon it in the days of its
+degradation. The vileness into which Jesuitism eventually sank is a poor
+reason why we should malign and curse those who, centuries before, found
+in the rules and discipline and aims of that system an acceptable
+expression for their own disinterested social aspirations. It is
+childish to say that the subsequent vileness is a proof of the existence
+of an inherent corrupt principle from the beginning; because hitherto
+certainly, and probably it will be so for ever, even the most salutary
+movements and most effective social conceptions have been provisional.
+In other words, the ultimate certainty of dissolution does not nullify
+the beauty and strength of physical life, and the putrescence of Jesuit
+methods and ideas is no more a reproach to those who first found succour
+in them, than the cant and formalism of any other degenerate form of
+active faith, say monachism or Calvinism, prove Calvin or Benedict or
+Bernard to have been hypocritical and hollow. To be able, however, to
+take this reasonable view, one must be unable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> to believe that men can
+be drawn for generation after generation by such a mere hollow lie and
+villainy and 'light of hell' as Jesuitism has always been, according to
+Mr. Carlyle's rendering. Human nature is not led for so long by lies;
+and if it seems to be otherwise, let us be sure that ideas which do lead
+and attract successive generations of men to self-sacrifice and care for
+social interests, must contain something which is not wholly a lie.</p>
+
+
+<p>Perhaps it is pertinent to remember that Mr. Carlyle, in fact, is a
+prophet with a faith, and he holds the opposition kind of religionist in
+a peculiarly theological execration. In spite of his passion for order,
+he cannot understand the political point of view. The attempts of good
+men in epochs of disorder to remake the past, to bring back an old
+spiritual system and method, because that did once at any rate give
+shelter to mankind, and peradventure may give it to them again until
+better times come, are phenomena into which he cannot look with calm or
+patience. The great reactionist is a type that is wholly dark to him.
+That a reactionist can be great, can be a lover of virtue and truth, can
+in any sort contribute to the welfare of men, these are possibilities to
+which he will lend no ear. In a word, he is a prophet and not a
+philosopher, and it is fruitless to go to him for help in the solution
+of philosophic problems. This is not to say that he may not render us
+much help in those far more momentous problems which affect the guidance
+of our own lives.<br /><br /></p>
+
+<div class='footnotes'>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Life of John Sterling</i>, p. 153.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Latter-Day Pamphlets.</i> II. Model Prisons, p. 92.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Letter to Mr. Carlyle, in the <i>Life</i>, Pt. ii. ch. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Written in 1870.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> The dates of Mr. Carlyle's principal compositions are
+these:&mdash;<i>Life of Schiller</i>, 1825; <i>Sartor Resartus</i>, 1831; <i>French
+Revolution</i>, 1837; <i>Chartism</i>, 1839; <i>Hero-Worship</i>, 1840; <i>Past and
+Present</i>, 1843; <i>Cromwell</i>, 1845; <i>Latter-Day Pamphlets</i>, 1850;
+<i>Friedrich the Second</i>, 1858-1865; <i>Shooting Niagara</i>, 1867.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Positive.</i> No English lexicon as yet seems to justify the
+use of this word in one of the senses of the French <i>positif</i>, as when a
+historian, for instance, speaks of the <i>esprit positif</i> of Bonaparte. We
+have no word, I believe, that exactly corresponds, so perhaps <i>positive</i>
+with that significance will become acclimatised. A distinct and separate
+idea of this particular characteristic is indispensable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Soir&eacute;es de Saint P&eacute;tersbourg, 7i&egrave;me entretien.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>Latter-Day Pamphlets</i>, No. V. p. 247.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'Characteristics,' <i>Misc. Ess.</i>, iii. pp. 356-358. Rousseau
+in the same way makes the Savoyard Vicar declare that '<i>jamais le jargon
+de la m&eacute;taphysique n'a fait d&eacute;couvrir une seule v&eacute;rit&eacute;, et il a rempli
+la philosophie d'absurdit&eacute;s dont on a honte, sit&ocirc;t qu'on les d&eacute;pouille
+de leurs grands mots</i>.'&mdash;<i>Emile</i>, liv. iv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Sartor Resartus</i>, bk. iii. ch. viii. p. 249.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> p. 257.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Hero-Worship</i>, p. 43.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Carlyle's <i>Frederick</i>, vi. 363.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'Organic Filaments' in the <i>Sartor</i>, bk. iii. ch. vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>Misc. Ess.</i> vi. 124.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Frederick</i>, iv. 390.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>History of Frederick the Great</i>, iv. 328. See also vol.
+i., Proem.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Frederick the Great</i>, i. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>Frederick</i>, i. bk. iii. ch. viii. 269-274.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> No. VIII. pp. 353-371.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,2095 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I
+       Essay 2: Carlyle
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2007 [EBook #20878]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, VOL. I ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  CRITICAL
+  MISCELLANIES
+
+  BY
+
+  JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+  VOL. I.
+
+  ESSAY 2: CARLYLE
+
+
+  London
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+  1904
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's influence, and degree of its durability              135
+
+  His literary services                                              139
+
+  No label useful in characterising him                              142
+
+  The poetic and the scientific temperaments                         144
+
+  Rousseau and Mr. Carlyle                                           147
+
+  The poetic method of handling social questions                     149
+
+  Impotent unrest, and his way of treating it                        152
+
+  Founded on the purest individualism                                154
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's historic position in the European reaction           157
+
+  Coleridge                                                          159
+
+  Byron                                                              161
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's victory over Byronism                                163
+
+  Goethe                                                             164
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's intensely practical turn, though veiled              166
+
+  His identification of material with moral order                    169
+
+  And acceptance of the doctrine that the end justifies the means    170
+
+  Two sets of relations still regulated by pathological principle    172
+
+  Defect in Mr. Carlyle's discussion of them                         174
+
+  His reticences                                                     176
+
+  Equally hostile to metaphysics and to the extreme pretensions
+  of the physicist                                                   177
+
+  Natural Supernaturalism, and the measure of its truth              179
+
+  Two qualities flowing from his peculiar fatalism:--
+    (1) Contempt for excess of moral nicety                          182
+    (2) Defect of sympathy with masses of men                        186
+
+  Perils in his constant sense of the nothingness of life            188
+
+  Hero-worship, and its inadequateness                               189
+
+  Theories of the dissolution of the old European order              193
+
+  Mr. Carlyle's view of the French Revolution                        195
+
+  Of the Reformation and Protestantism                               197
+
+  Inability to understand the political point of view                199
+
+
+
+
+CARLYLE.
+
+
+The new library edition of Mr. Carlyle's works may be taken for the
+final presentation of all that the author has to say to his
+contemporaries, and to possess the settled form in which he wishes his
+words to go to those of posterity who may prove to have ears for them.
+The canon is definitely made up. The golden Gospel of Silence is
+effectively compressed in thirty fine volumes. After all has been said
+about self-indulgent mannerisms, moral perversities, phraseological
+outrages, and the rest, these volumes will remain the noble monument of
+the industry, originality, conscientiousness, and genius of a noble
+character, and of an intellectual career that has exercised on many
+sides the profoundest sort of influence upon English feeling. Men who
+have long since moved far away from these spiritual latitudes, like
+those who still find an adequate shelter in them, can hardly help
+feeling as they turn the pages of the now disused pieces which they were
+once wont to ponder daily, that whatever later teachers may have done in
+definitely shaping opinion, in giving specific form to sentiment, and in
+subjecting impulse to rational discipline, here was the friendly
+fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark, here the prophet
+who first smote the rock.
+
+That with this sense of obligation to the master, there mixes a less
+satisfactory reminiscence of youthful excess in imitative phrases, in
+unseasonably apostolic readiness towards exhortation and rebuke, in
+interest about the soul, a portion of which might more profitably have
+been converted into care for the head, is in most cases true. A hostile
+observer of bands of Carlylites at Oxford and elsewhere might have been
+justified in describing the imperative duty of work as the theme of many
+an hour of strenuous idleness, and the superiority of golden silence
+over silver speech as the text of endless bursts of jerky rapture, while
+a too constant invective against cant had its usual effect of developing
+cant with a difference. To the incorrigibly sentimental all this was
+sheer poison, which continues tenaciously in the system. Others of
+robuster character no sooner came into contact with the world and its
+fortifying exigencies, than they at once began to assimilate the
+wholesome part of what they had taken in, while the rest falls gradually
+and silently out. When criticism has done its just work on the
+disagreeable affectations of many of Mr. Carlyle's disciples, and on the
+nature of Mr. Carlyle's opinions and their worth as specific
+contributions, very few people will be found to deny that his influence
+in stimulating moral energy, in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy
+of enthusiasm, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand,
+and the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has
+not been surpassed by any teacher now living.
+
+One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty
+years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his
+own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in
+the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in
+progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and
+haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully
+visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become
+equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no
+countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with
+hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of
+institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of
+poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it
+could be regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has
+boldly and often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting
+the objects which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applying with
+energetic spirit to the task of preparing a sounder state for our
+successors. The relations between master and servant, between capitalist
+and labourer, between landlord and tenant, between governing race and
+subject race, between the feelings and intelligence of the legislature
+and the feelings and intelligence of the nation, between the spiritual
+power, literary and ecclesiastical, and those who are under it--the
+anarchy that prevails in all these, and the extreme danger of it, have
+been with Mr. Carlyle a never-ending theme. What seems to many of us the
+extreme inefficiency or worse of his solutions, still allows us to feel
+grateful for the vigour and perspicacity with which he has pressed on
+the world the urgency of the problem.
+
+The degree of durability which his influence is likely to possess with
+the next and following generations is another and rather sterile
+question, which we are not now concerned to discuss. The unrestrained
+eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong individuality has precipitated
+in his written style may, in spite of the poetic fineness of his
+imagination, which no historian or humorist has excelled, still be
+expected to deprive his work of that permanence which is only secured by
+classic form. The incorporation of so many phrases, allusions,
+nicknames, that belong only to the hour, inevitably makes the vitality
+of the composition conditional on the vitality of these transient and
+accidental elements which are so deeply imbedded in it. Another
+consideration is that no philosophic writer, however ardently his words
+may have been treasured and followed by the people of his own time, can
+well be cherished by succeeding generations, unless his name is
+associated through some definable and positive contribution with the
+central march of European thought and feeling. In other words, there is
+a difference between living in the history of literature or belief, and
+living in literature itself and in the minds of believers. Mr. Carlyle
+has been a most powerful solvent, but it is the tendency of solvents to
+become merely historic. The historian of the intellectual and moral
+movements of Great Britain during the present century, will fail
+egregiously in his task if he omits to give a large and conspicuous
+space to the author of _Sartor Resartus_. But it is one thing to study
+historically the ideas which have influenced our predecessors, and
+another thing to seek in them an influence fruitful for ourselves. It is
+to be hoped that one may doubt the permanent soundness of Mr. Carlyle's
+peculiar speculations, without either doubting or failing to share that
+warm affection and reverence which his personality has worthily inspired
+in many thousands of his readers. He has himself taught us to separate
+these two sides of a man, and we have learnt from him to love Samuel
+Johnson without reading much or a word that the old sage wrote.
+'Sterling and I walked westward,' he says once, 'arguing copiously, but
+_except_ in opinion not disagreeing.'
+
+It is none the less for what has just been said a weightier and a rarer
+privilege for a man to give a stirring impulse to the moral activity of
+a generation, than to write in classic style; and to have impressed the
+spirit of his own personality deeply upon the minds of multitudes of
+men, than to have composed most of those works which the world is said
+not willingly to let die. Nor, again, is to say that this higher renown
+belongs to Mr. Carlyle, to underrate the less resounding, but most
+substantial, services of a definite kind which he has rendered both to
+literature and history. This work may be in time superseded with the
+advance of knowledge, but the value of the first service will remain
+unimpaired. It was he, as has been said, 'who first taught England to
+appreciate Goethe;' and not only to appreciate Goethe, but to recognise
+and seek yet further knowledge of the genius and industry of Goethe's
+countrymen. His splendid drama of the French Revolution has done, and
+may be expected long to continue to do, more to bring before our
+slow-moving and unimaginative public the portentous meaning of that
+tremendous cataclysm, than all the other writings on the subject in the
+English language put together. His presentation of Puritanism and the
+Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most elevating period of
+the national history in any way really intelligible. The Life of
+Frederick the Second, whatever judgment we may pass upon its morality,
+or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a model of
+laborious and exhaustive narration of facts not before accessible to the
+reader of history. For all this, and for much other work eminently
+useful and meritorious even from the mechanical point of view, Mr.
+Carlyle deserves the warmest recognition. His genius gave him a right to
+mock at the ineffectiveness of Dryasdust, but his genius was also too
+true to prevent him from adding the always needful supplement of a
+painstaking industry that rivals Dryasdust's own most strenuous toil.
+Take out of the mind of the English reader of ordinary cultivation and
+the average journalist, usually a degree or two lower than this, their
+conceptions of the French Revolution and the English Rebellion, and
+their knowledge of German literature and history, as well as most of
+their acquaintance with the prominent men of the eighteenth century, and
+we shall see how much work Mr. Carlyle has done simply as schoolmaster.
+
+This, however, is emphatically a secondary aspect of his character, and
+of the function which he has fulfilled in relation to the more active
+tendencies of modern opinion and feeling. We must go on to other ground,
+if we would find the field in which he has laboured most ardently and
+with most acceptance. History and literature have been with him, what
+they will always be with wise and understanding minds of creative and
+even of the higher critical faculty--only embodiments, illustrations,
+experiments, for ideas about religion, conduct, society, history,
+government, and all the other great heads and departments of a complete
+social doctrine. From this point of view, the time has perhaps come when
+we may fairly attempt to discern some of the tendencies which Mr.
+Carlyle has initiated or accelerated and deepened, though assuredly many
+years must elapse before any adequate measure can be taken of their
+force and final direction.
+
+It would be a comparatively simple process to affix the regulation
+labels of philosophy; to say that Mr. Carlyle is a Pantheist in religion
+(or a Pot-theist, to use the alternative whose flippancy gave such
+offence to Sterling on one occasion[1]), a Transcendentalist or
+Intuitionist in ethics, an Absolutist in politics, and so forth, with
+the addition of a crowd of privative or negative epithets at discretion.
+But classifications of this sort are the worst enemies of true
+knowledge. Such names are by the vast majority even of persons who think
+themselves educated, imperfectly apprehended, ignorantly interpreted,
+and crudely and recklessly applied. It is not too much to say that nine
+out of ten people who think they have delivered themselves of a
+criticism when they call Mr. Carlyle a Pantheist, could neither explain
+with any precision what Pantheism is, nor have ever thought of
+determining the parts of his writings where this particular monster is
+believed to lurk. Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the
+trouble of thinking. As I once wrote elsewhere:
+
+[1] _Life of John Sterling_, p. 153.
+
+'The readiness to use general names in speaking of the greater subjects,
+and the fitness which qualifies a man to use them, commonly exist in
+inverse proportions. If we reflect on the conditions out of which
+ordinary opinion is generated, we may well be startled at the profuse
+liberality with which names of the widest and most complex and variable
+significance are bestowed on all hands. The majority of the ideas which
+constitute most men's intellectual stock-in-trade have accrued by
+processes quite distinct from fair reasoning and consequent conviction.
+This is so notorious, that it is amazing how so many people can go on
+freely and rapidly labelling thinkers or writers with names which they
+themselves are not competent to bestow, and which their hearers are not
+competent either to understand generally, or to test in the specific
+instance.'
+
+These labels are rather more worthless than usual in the present case,
+because Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical and defiantly
+inconsistent; and, therefore, the term which might correctly describe
+one side of his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a
+wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications
+necessary to make any one of the regular epithets fairly applicable
+would have to be so many, that the glosses would virtually overlay the
+text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by
+discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what
+pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine means, or
+what it is worth, but what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their
+character, their relations to one another, and what that is worth.
+
+With most men and women the master element in their opinions is
+obviously neither their own reason nor their own imagination,
+independently exercised, but only mere use and wont, chequered by
+fortuitous sensations, and modified in the better cases by the
+influence of a favourite teacher; while in the worse the teacher is the
+favourite who happens to chime in most harmoniously with prepossessions,
+or most effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among the superior
+minds the balance between reason and imagination is scarcely ever held
+exactly true, nor is either firmly kept within the precise bounds that
+are proper to it. It is a question of temperament which of the two
+mental attitudes becomes fixed and habitual, as it is a question of
+temperament how violently either of them straitens and distorts the
+normal faculties of vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head,
+which would usually be better described as a thin head, may and
+constantly does fall into a confirmed manner of judging character and
+circumstance, so narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to
+make common sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine
+name of reason. Excess on the other side leads people into emotional
+transports, in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth, the
+difficulty of discovering the truth, the narrowness of the way that
+leads thereto, the merits of intellectual precision and definiteness,
+and even the merits of moral precision and definiteness, are all
+effectually veiled by purple or fiery clouds of anger, sympathy, and
+sentimentalism, which imagination has hung over the intelligence.
+
+The familiar distinction between the poetic and the scientific temper is
+another way of stating the same difference. The one fuses or
+crystallises external objects and circumstances in the medium of human
+feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of
+objects and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the
+facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification
+of these relations. There is, too, a corresponding distinction between
+the aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects
+of nature are able to present, according as we scrutinise them with a
+view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which
+they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our
+tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other
+emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side
+for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet.
+The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in
+an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a
+Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world,
+the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those
+whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly
+monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed
+with one set of attributes by scientific intelligence, and with another
+by sentiment, fancy, and imaginative association.
+
+The contentiousness of rival schools of philosophy has obscured the
+application of the same distinction to the various orders of fact more
+nearly and immediately relating to man and the social union. One school
+has maintained the virtually unmeaning doctrine that the will is free,
+and therefore its followers never gave any quarter to the idea that man
+was as proper an object of scientific scrutiny morally and historically,
+as they could not deny him to be anatomically and physiologically. Their
+enemies have been more concerned to dislodge them from this position,
+than to fortify, organise, and cultivate their own. The consequences
+have not been without their danger. Poetic persons have rushed in where
+scientific persons ought not to have feared to tread. That human
+character and the order of events have their poetic aspect, and that
+their poetic treatment demands the rarest and most valuable qualities of
+mind, is a truth which none but narrow and superficial men of the world
+are rash enough to deny. But that there is a scientific aspect of these
+things, an order among them that can only be understood and criticised
+and effectually modified scientifically, by using all the caution and
+precision and infinite patience of the truly scientific spirit, is a
+truth that is constantly ignored even by men and women of the loftiest
+and most humane nature. In such cases misdirected and uncontrolled
+sensibility ends in mournful waste of their own energy, in the certain
+disappointment of their own aims, and where such sensibility is backed
+by genius, eloquence, and a peculiar set of public conditions, in
+prolonged and fatal disturbance of society.
+
+Rousseau was the great type of this triumphant and dangerous sophistry
+of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking
+nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning a
+man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded
+life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever lived.
+Community of method, like misery, makes men acquainted with strange
+bed-fellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral worth may
+notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the same method,
+and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of
+them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a
+retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and
+right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a
+factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly solved by
+external observation and history. In connection with each of them has
+been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimentalism, when
+circumstances draw away the mask. Not the least conspicuous of the
+disciples of Rousseau was Robespierre. His works lay on the table of the
+Committee of Public Safety. The theory of the Reign of Terror was
+invented, and mercilessly reduced to practice, by men whom the visions
+of Rousseau had fired, and who were not afraid nor ashamed to wade
+through oceans of blood to the promised land of humanity and fine
+feeling. We in our days have seen the same result of sentimental
+doctrine in the barbarous love of the battle-field, the retrograde
+passion for methods of repression, the contempt for human life, the
+impatience of orderly and peaceful solution. We begin with introspection
+and the eternities, and end in blood and iron. Again, Rousseau's first
+piece was an anathema upon the science and art of his time, and a
+denunciation of books and speech. Mr. Carlyle, in exactly the same
+spirit, has denounced logic mills, warned us all away from literature,
+and habitually subordinated discipline of the intelligence to the
+passionate assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks
+respectfully of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is
+using the term in a special sense of his own, and confounding it with
+'the exact summary of human _Worth_,' as in one place he defines it.
+Thus, instead of co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual
+energy, virtue with intelligence, right action of the will with
+scientific processes of the understanding, he has either placed one
+immeasurably below the other, or else has mischievously insisted on
+treating them as identical. The dictates of a kind heart are of superior
+force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory
+resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works
+easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse.
+All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes
+hard sentiment and sometimes soft sentiment, above reason and method.
+
+In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody
+else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right and an eager desire
+for social activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away from him
+the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that
+our social action is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting
+perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual
+self-possession, to have added another name to the illustrious catalogue
+of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his
+sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an
+imaginative and highly emotional manner. Depth of benevolent feeling is
+unhappily no proof of fitness for handling complex problems, and a fine
+sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing
+effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the
+composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any
+reason for supposing that the author would have made a competent
+Commissioner of Works.
+
+Why should society, with its long and deep-hidden processes of growth,
+its innumerable intricacies and far-off historic complexities, be as an
+open book to any reader of its pages who brings acuteness and passion,
+but no patience nor calm accuracy of meditation? Objects of thought and
+observation far simpler, more free from all blinding and distorting
+elements, more accessible to direct and ocular inspection, are by
+rational consent reserved for the calmest and most austere moods and
+methods of human intelligence. Nor is denunciation of the conditions of
+a problem the quickest step towards solving it. Vituperation of the fact
+that supply and demand practically regulate certain kinds of bargain, is
+no contribution to systematic efforts to discover some more moral
+regulator. Take all the invective that Mr. Carlyle has poured out
+against political economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according to
+M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire inadequateness of political
+economy to sum up the laws and conditions of a healthy social state--and
+no one more than the present writer deplores the mischief which the
+application of the maxims of political economy by ignorant and selfish
+spirits has effected in confirming the worst tendencies of the
+commercial character--yet is it not a first condition of our being able
+to substitute better machinery for the ordinary rules of self-interest,
+that we know scientifically how those rules do and must operate? Again,
+in another field, it is well to cry out: 'Caitiff, we hate thee,' with a
+'hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the
+scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and
+disappearance from the scene of things.'[2] But this is slightly vague.
+It is not scientific. There are caitiffs and caitiffs. There is a more
+and a less of scoundrelism, as there is a more and a less of black
+annihilation, and we must have systematic jurisprudence, with its
+classification of caitiffs and its graduated blasting. Has Mr. Carlyle's
+passion, or have the sedulous and scientific labours of that Bentham,
+whose name with him is a symbol of evil, done most in what he calls the
+Scoundrel-province of Reform within the last half-century? Sterling's
+criticism on Teufelsdroeckh told a hard but wholesome truth to
+Teufelsdroeckh's creator. 'Wanting peace himself,' said Sterling, 'his
+fierce dissatisfaction fixes on all that is weak, corrupt, and imperfect
+around him; and instead of a calm and steady co-operation with all those
+who are endeavouring to apply the highest ideas as remedies for the
+worst evils, he holds himself in savage isolation.'[3]
+
+[2] _Latter-Day Pamphlets._ II. Model Prisons, p. 92.
+
+[3] Letter to Mr. Carlyle, in the _Life_, Pt. ii. ch. ii.
+
+Mr. Carlyle assures us of Bonaparte that he had an instinct of nature
+better than his culture was, and illustrates it by the story that during
+the Egyptian expedition, when his scientific men were busy arguing that
+there could be no God, Bonaparte, looking up to the stars, confuted them
+decisively by saying: 'Very ingenious, Messieurs; but _who made_ all
+that?' Surely the most inconclusive answer since coxcombs vanquished
+Berkeley with a grin. It is, however, a type of Mr. Carlyle's faith in
+the instinct of nature, as superseding the necessity for patient logical
+method; a faith, in other words, in crude and uninterpreted sense.
+Insight, indeed, goes far, but it no more entitles its possessor to
+dispense with reasoned discipline and system in treating scientific
+subjects, than it relieves him from the necessity of conforming to the
+physical conditions of health. Why should society be the one field of
+thought in which a man of genius is at liberty to assume all his major
+premisses, and swear all his conclusions?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The deep unrest of unsatisfied souls meets its earliest solace in the
+effective and sympathetic expression of the same unrest from the lips of
+another. To look it in the face is the first approach to a sedative. To
+find our discontent with the actual, our yearning for an undefined
+ideal, our aspiration after impossible heights of being, shared and
+amplified in the emotional speech of a man of genius, is the beginning
+of consolation. Some of the most generous spirits a hundred years ago
+found this in the eloquence of Rousseau, and some of the most generous
+spirits of this time and place have found it in the writer of the
+_Sartor_. In ages not of faith, there will always be multitudinous
+troops of people crying for the moon. If such sorrowful pastime be ever
+permissible to men, it has been natural and lawful this long while in
+prae-revolutionary England, as it was natural and lawful a century since
+in prae-revolutionary France. A man born into a community where political
+forms, from the monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow
+shams disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is
+mainly official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself
+alike from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and the spirit
+of truth, and where literature does not as a rule permit itself to
+discuss serious subjects frankly and worthily[4]--a community, in
+short, where the great aim of all classes and orders with power is by
+dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern stopping
+of the ears, somehow to keep the social pyramid on its apex, with the
+fatal result of preserving for England its glorious fame as a paradise
+for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a hell for the
+poor--why, a man born into all this with a heart something softer than a
+flint, and with intellectual vision something more acute than that of a
+Troglodyte, may well be allowed to turn aside and cry for moons for a
+season.
+
+[4] Written in 1870.
+
+Impotent unrest, however, is followed in Mr. Carlyle by what is socially
+an impotent solution, just as it was with Rousseau. To bid a man do his
+duty in one page, and then in the next to warn him sternly away from
+utilitarianism, from political economy, from all 'theories of the moral
+sense,' and from any other definite means of ascertaining what duty may
+chance to be, is but a bald and naked counsel. Spiritual nullity and
+material confusion in a society are not to be repaired by a
+transformation of egotism, querulous, brooding, marvelling, into
+egotism, active, practical, objective, not uncomplacent. The moral
+movements to which the instinctive impulses of humanity fallen on evil
+times uniformly give birth, early Christianity, for instance, or the
+socialism of Rousseau, may destroy a society, but they cannot save it
+unless in conjunction with organising policy. A thorough appreciation
+of fiscal and economic truths was at least as indispensable for the life
+of the Roman Empire as the acceptance of a Messiah; and it was only in
+the hands of a great statesman like Gregory VII. that Christianity
+became at last an instrument powerful enough to save civilisation. What
+the moral renovation of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now
+Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the doctrine of Mr.
+Carlyle, which, while in name a renunciation of self, has all its
+foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, notwithstanding the
+method of _Emile_, treats man as a part of a collective whole,
+contracting manifold relations and owing manifold duties; and he always
+appeals to the love and sympathy which an imaginary God of nature has
+implanted in the heart. His aim is unity. Mr. Carlyle, following the
+same method of obedience to his own personal emotions, unfortified by
+patient reasoning, lands at the other extremity, and lays all his stress
+on the separatist instincts. The individual stands alone confronted by
+the eternities; between these and his own soul exists the one central
+relation. This has all the fundamental egotism of the doctrine of
+personal salvation, emancipated from fable, and varnished with an
+emotional phrase. The doctrine has been very widely interpreted, and
+without any forcing, as a religious expression for the conditions of
+commercial success.
+
+If we look among our own countrymen, we find that the apostle of
+self-renunciation is nowhere so beloved as by the best of those whom
+steady self-reliance and thrifty self-securing and a firm eye to the
+main chance have got successfully on in the world. A Carlylean
+anthology, or volume of the master's sentences, might easily be
+composed, that should contain the highest form of private liturgy
+accepted by the best of the industrial classes, masters or men. They
+forgive or overlook the writer's denunciations of Beaver Industrialisms,
+which they attribute to his caprice or spleen. This is the worst of an
+emotional teacher, that people take only so much as they please from
+him, while with a reasoner they must either refute by reason, or else
+they must accept by reason, and not at simple choice. When trade is
+brisk, and England is successfully competing in the foreign markets, the
+books that enjoin silence and self-annihilation have a wonderful
+popularity in the manufacturing districts. This circumstance is
+honourable both to them and to him, as far as it goes, but it furnishes
+some reason for suspecting that our most vigorous moral reformer, so far
+from propelling us in new grooves, has in truth only given new firmness
+and coherency to tendencies that were strongly marked enough in the
+national character before. He has increased the fervour of the country,
+but without materially changing its objects; there is all the less
+disguise among us as a result of his teaching, but no radical
+modification of the sentiments which people are sincere in. The most
+stirring general appeal to the emotions, to be effective for more than
+negative purposes, must lead up to definite maxims and specific
+precepts. As a negative renovation Mr. Carlyle's doctrine was perfect.
+It effectually put an end to the mood of Byronism. May we say that with
+the neutralisation of Byron, his most decisive and special work came to
+an end? May we not say further, that the true renovation of England, if
+such a process be ever feasible, will lie in a quite other method than
+this of emotion? It will lie not in more moral earnestness only, but in
+a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work
+and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The
+poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not
+intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but
+all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is
+this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble
+situation. We need light more than heat; intellectual alertness, faith
+in the reasoning faculty, accessibility to new ideas. To refuse to use
+the intellect patiently and with system, to decline to seek scientific
+truth, to prefer effusive indulgence of emotion to the laborious and
+disciplined and candid exploration of new ideas, is not this, too, a
+torpid unveracity? And has not Mr. Carlyle, by the impatience of his
+method, done somewhat to deepen it?
+
+It is very well to invite us to moral reform, to bring ourselves to be
+of heroic mind, as the surest way to 'the blessed Aristocracy of the
+Wisest.' But how shall we know the wisest when we see them, and how
+shall a nation know, if not by keen respect and watchfulness for
+intellectual truth and the teachers of it? Much as we may admire Mr.
+Carlyle's many gifts, and highly as we may revere his character, it is
+yet very doubtful whether anybody has as yet learnt from him the
+precious lesson of scrupulosity and conscientiousness in actively and
+constantly using the intelligence. This would have been the solid
+foundation of the true hero-worship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let thus much have been said on the head of temperament. The historic
+position also of every writer is an indispensable key to many things in
+his teaching.[5] We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's case, that he was
+born in the memorable year when the French Revolution, in its narrower
+sense, was closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the great century
+of emancipation and illumination was ending darkly in battles and
+confusion. During his youth the reaction was in full flow, and the lamp
+had been handed to runners who not only reversed the ideas and methods,
+but even turned aside from the goal of their precursors. Hopefulness and
+enthusiastic confidence in humanity when freed from the fetters of
+spiritual superstition and secular tyranny, marked all the most
+characteristic and influential speculations of the two generations
+before '89. The appalling failure which attended the splendid attempt to
+realise these hopes in a renewed and perfected social structure, had no
+more than its natural effect in turning men's minds back, not to the
+past of Rousseau's imagination, but to the past of recorded history. The
+single epoch in the annals of Europe since the rise of Christianity, for
+which no good word could be found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The
+hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries was
+passed lightly over by men who had only eyes for the moral obliquity of
+the church of the Encyclopaedia. The brilliant but profoundly inadequate
+essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the outcome in Mr. Carlyle of the
+same reactionary spirit. Nobody now, we may suppose, who is competent to
+judge, thinks that that estimate of 'the net product, of the tumultuous
+Atheism' of Diderot and his fellow-workers, is a satisfactory account of
+the influence and significance of the Encyclopaedia; nor that to sum up
+Voltaire, with his burning passion for justice, his indefatigable
+humanity, his splendid energy in intellectual production, his righteous
+hatred of superstition, as merely a supreme master of _persiflage_, can
+be a process partaking of finality. The fact that to the eighteenth
+century belong the subjects of more than half of these thirty volumes,
+is a proof of the fascination of the period for an author who has never
+ceased to vilipend it. The saying is perhaps as true in these matters as
+of private relations, that hatred is not so far removed from love as
+indifference is. Be that as it may, the Carlylean view of the eighteenth
+century as a time of mere scepticism and unbelief, is now clearly
+untenable to men who remember the fervour of Jean Jacques, and the more
+rational, but not any less fervid faith of the disciples of
+Perfectibility. But this was not so clear fifty years since, when the
+crash and dust of demolition had not so subsided as to let men see how
+much had risen up behind. The fire of the new school had been taken from
+the very conflagration which they execrated, but they were not held back
+from denouncing the eighteenth century by the reflection that, at any
+rate, its thought and action had made ready the way for much of what is
+best in the nineteenth.
+
+[5] The dates of Mr. Carlyle's principal compositions are these:--_Life
+of Schiller_, 1825; _Sartor Resartus_, 1831; _French Revolution_, 1837;
+_Chartism_, 1839; _Hero-Worship_, 1840; _Past and Present_, 1843;
+_Cromwell_, 1845; _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 1850; _Friedrich the Second_,
+1858-1865; _Shooting Niagara_, 1867.
+
+Mr. Carlyle himself has told us about Coleridge, and the movement of
+which Coleridge was the leader. That movement has led men in widely
+different ways. In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps
+of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous ephemera still suck a
+little spiritual moisture. In another it led to the sacramental and
+sacerdotal developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among men with
+strong practical energy, to the benevolent bluster of a sort of
+Christianity which is called muscular because it is not intellectual. It
+would be an error to suppose that these and the other streams that have
+sprung from the same source, did not in the days of their fulness
+fertilise and gladden many lands. The wordy pietism of one school, the
+mimetic rites of another, the romping heroics of the third, are
+degenerate forms. How long they are likely to endure, it would be rash
+to predict among a nation whose established teachers and official
+preachers are prevented by an inveterate timidity from trusting
+themselves to that disciplined intelligence, in which the superior minds
+of the last century had such courageous faith.
+
+Mr. Carlyle drank in some sort at the same fountain. Coleridgean ideas
+were in the air. It was there probably that he acquired that sympathy
+with the past, or with certain portions of the past, that feeling of the
+unity of history, and that conviction of the necessity of binding our
+theory of history fast with our theory of other things, in all of which
+he so strikingly resembles the great Anglican leaders of a generation
+ago, and in gaining some of which so strenuous an effort must have been
+needed to modify the prepossessions of a Scotch Puritan education. No
+one has contributed more powerfully to that movement which, drawing
+force from many and various sides, has brought out the difference
+between the historian and the gazetteer or antiquary. One half of _Past
+and Present_ might have been written by one of the Oxford chiefs in the
+days of the Tracts. Vehement native force was too strong for such a man
+to remain in the luminous haze which made the Coleridgean atmosphere. A
+well-known chapter in the _Life of Sterling_, which some, indeed, have
+found too ungracious, shows how little hold he felt Coleridge's ideas
+to be capable of retaining, and how little permanent satisfaction
+resided in them. Coleridge, in fact, was not only a poet but a thinker
+as well; he had science of a sort as well as imagination, but it was not
+science for headlong and impatient souls. Mr. Carlyle has probably never
+been able to endure a subdivision all his life, and the infinite
+ramifications of the central division between object and subject might
+well be with him an unprofitable weariness to the flesh.
+
+In England, the greatest literary organ of the Revolution was
+unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic
+lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over
+the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific
+work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with
+all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some
+gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly
+tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a
+revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had
+fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the
+many-eyed minuteness and sustained pulsing force of Byron, has still the
+full swell and tide and energy of genius: he is as lawless in his
+disrespect for some things established. He had the unspeakable advantage
+of being that which, though not in this sense, only his own favourite
+word of contempt describes, respectable; and, for another thing, of
+being ruggedly sincere. Carlylism is the male of Byronism. It is
+Byronism with thew and sinew, bass pipe and shaggy bosom. There is the
+same grievous complaint against the time and its men and its spirit,
+something even of the same contemptuous despair, the same sense of the
+puniness of man in the centre of a cruel and frowning universe; but
+there is in Carlylism a deliverance from it all, indeed the only
+deliverance possible. Its despair is a despair without misery. Labour in
+a high spirit, duty done, and right service performed in fortitudinous
+temper--here was, not indeed a way out, but a way of erect living
+within.
+
+Against Byronism the ordinary moralist and preacher could really do
+nothing, because Byronism was an appeal that lay in the regions of the
+mind only accessible by one with an eye and a large poetic feeling for
+the infinite whole of things. It was not the rebellion only in
+_Manfred_, nor the wit in _Don Juan_, nor the graceful melancholy of
+_Childe Harold_, which made their author an idol, and still make him one
+to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of
+it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of
+Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's
+work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a
+sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part
+showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the
+universal forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness of his
+achievement and endurance takes a complexion of greatness from the
+vague immensity that surrounds and impalpably mixes with it.
+
+Remember further, that while in Byron the outcome of this was rebellion,
+in Carlyle its outcome is reverence, a noble mood, which is one of the
+highest predispositions of the English character. The instincts of
+sanctification rooted in Teutonic races, and which in the corrupt and
+unctuous forms of a mechanical religious profession are so revolting,
+were mocked and outraged, where they were not superciliously ignored, in
+every line of the one, while in the other they were enthroned under the
+name of Worship, as the very key and centre of the right life. The
+prophet who never wearies of declaring that 'only in bowing down before
+the Higher does man feel himself exalted,' touched solemn organ notes,
+that awoke a response from dim religious depths, never reached by the
+stormy wailings of the Byronic lyre. The political side of the
+reverential sentiment is equally conciliated, and the prime business of
+individuals and communities pronounced to be the search after worthy
+objects of this divine quality of reverence. While kings' cloaks and
+church tippets are never spared, still less suffered to protect the
+dishonour of ignoble wearers of them, the inadequateness of aggression
+and demolition, the necessity of quiet order, the uncounted debt that we
+owe to rulers and to all sorts of holy and great men who have given this
+order to the world, all this brought repose and harmony into spirits
+that the hollow thunders of universal rebellion against tyrants and
+priests had worn into thinness and confusion. Again, at the bottom of
+the veriest _frondeur_ with English blood in his veins, in his most
+defiant moment there lies a conviction that after all something known as
+common sense is the measure of life, and that to work hard is a
+demonstrated precept of common sense. Carlylism exactly hits this and
+brings it forward. We cannot wonder that Byronism was routed from the
+field.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may have been in the transcendently firm and clear-eyed intelligence
+of Goethe that Mr. Carlyle first found a responsive encouragement to the
+profoundly positive impulses of his own spirit.[6] There is, indeed, a
+whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and bright composure of the
+one, and the vehemence, passion, masterful wrath, of the other; and the
+vast, incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing
+corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous contempt and
+indifference, sometimes express and sometimes only very significantly
+implied, for forms of intellectual activity that do not happen to be
+personally congenial. But each is a god, though the one sits ever on
+Olympus, while the other is as one from Tartarus. There is in each,
+besides all else, a certain remarkable directness of glance, an
+intrepid and penetrating quality of vision, which defies analysis.
+Occasional turgidity of phrase and unidiomatic handling of language do
+not conceal the simplicity of the process by which Mr. Carlyle pierces
+through obstruction down to the abstrusest depths. And the important
+fact is that this abstruseness is not verbal, any more than it is the
+abstruseness of fog and cloud. His epithet, or image, or trope, shoots
+like a sunbeam on to the matter, throwing a transfigurating light, even
+where it fails to pierce to its central core.
+
+[6] _Positive._ No English lexicon as yet seems to justify the use of
+this word in one of the senses of the French _positif_, as when a
+historian, for instance, speaks of the _esprit positif_ of Bonaparte. We
+have no word, I believe, that exactly corresponds, so perhaps _positive_
+with that significance will become acclimatised. A distinct and separate
+idea of this particular characteristic is indispensable.
+
+Eager for a firm foothold, yet wholly revolted by the too narrow and
+unelevated positivity of the eighteenth century; eager also for some
+recognition of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly unsatisfied
+by the transcendentalism of the English and Scotch philosophic
+reactions; he found in Goethe that truly free and adequate positivity
+which accepts all things as parts of a natural or historic order, and
+while insisting on the recognition of the actual conditions of this
+order as indispensable, and condemning attempted evasions of such
+recognition as futile and childish, yet opens an ample bosom for all
+forms of beauty in art, and for all nobleness in moral aspiration. That
+Mr. Carlyle has reached this high ground we do not say. Temperament has
+kept him down from it. But it is after this that he has striven. The
+tumid nothingness of pure transcendentalism he has always abhorred. Some
+of Mr. Carlyle's favourite phrases have disguised from his readers the
+intensely practical turn of his whole mind. His constant presentation
+of the Eternities, the Immensities, and the like, has veiled his almost
+narrow adherence to plain record without moral comment, and his often
+cynical respect for the dangerous, yet, when rightly qualified and
+guided, the solid formula that What is, is. The Eternities and
+Immensities are only a kind of awful background. The highest souls are
+held to be deeply conscious of these vast unspeakable presences, yet
+even with them they are only inspiring accessories; the true interest
+lies in the practical attitude of such men towards the actual and
+palpable circumstances that surround them. This spirituality, whose
+place in Mr. Carlyle's teaching has been so extremely mis-stated, sinks
+wholly out of sight in connection with such heroes as the coarse and
+materialist Bonaparte, of whom, however, the hero-worshipper in earlier
+pieces speaks with some laudable misgiving, and the not less coarse and
+materialist Frederick, about whom no misgiving is permitted to the loyal
+disciple. The admiration for military methods, on condition that they
+are successful, for Mr. Carlyle, like Providence, is always on the side
+of big and victorious battalions, is the last outcome of a devotion to
+vigorous action and practical effect, which no verbal garniture of a
+transcendental kind can hinder us from perceiving to be more purely
+materialist and unfeignedly brutal than anything which sprung from the
+reviled thought of the eighteenth century.
+
+It is instructive to remark that another of the most illustrious
+enemies of that century and all its works, Joseph de Maistre, had the
+same admiration for the effectiveness of war, and the same extreme
+interest and concern in the men and things of war. He, too, declares
+that 'the loftiest and most generous sentiments are probably to be found
+in the soldier;' and that war, if terrible, is divine and splendid and
+fascinating, the manifestation of a sublime law of the universe. We
+must, however, do De Maistre the justice to point out, first, that he
+gave a measure of his strange interest in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr.
+Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of the honours
+of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second
+place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a
+fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a
+divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely
+defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of
+Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will,
+tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this
+and the absolutism of the mystic.
+
+[7] _Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, 7ieme entretien._
+
+'Nature,' he says in one place, 'keeps silently a most exact
+Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most evanescent item,
+Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks
+down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism;
+Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or
+one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in
+consequence of that--Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously
+as Fate (for this _is_ Fate that is writing); and at the end of the
+account you will have it all to pay, my friend.'[8]
+
+[8] _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, No. V. p. 247.
+
+That is to say, there is a law of recompense for communities of men, and
+as nations sow, even thus they reap. But what is Mr. Carlyle's account
+of the precise nature and operation of this law? What is the original
+distinction between an act of veracity and a blunder? Why was the blow
+struck by the Directory on the Eighteenth Fructidor a blunder, and that
+struck by Bonaparte on the Eighteenth Brumaire a veracity? What
+principle of registration is that which makes Nature debtor to Frederick
+the Second for the seizure of Silesia, and Bonaparte debtor to Nature
+for 'trampling on the world, holding it tyrannously down?' It is very
+well to tell us that 'Injustice pays itself with frightful compound
+interest,' but there are reasons for suspecting that Mr. Carlyle's
+definition of the just and the unjust are such as to reduce this and all
+his other sentences of like purport to the level of mere truism and
+repetition. If you secretly or openly hold that to be just and veracious
+which is successful, then it needs no further demonstration that
+penalties of ultimate failure are exacted for injustice, because it is
+precisely the failure that constitutes the injustice.
+
+This is the kernel of all that is most retrograde in Mr. Carlyle's
+teaching. He identifies the physical with the moral order, confounds
+faithful conformity to the material conditions of success, with loyal
+adherence to virtuous rule and principle, and then appeals to material
+triumph as the sanction of nature and the ratification of high heaven.
+Admiring with profoundest admiration the spectacle of an inflexible
+will, when armed with a long-headed insight into means and quantities
+and forces as its instrument, and yet deeply revering the abstract ideal
+of justice; dazzled by the methods and the products of iron resolution,
+yet imbued with traditional affection for virtue; he has seen no better
+way of conciliating both inclinations than by insisting that they point
+in the same direction, and that virtue and success, justice and victory,
+merit and triumph, are in the long run all one and the same thing. The
+most fatal of confusions. Compliance with material law and condition
+ensures material victory, and compliance with moral condition ensures
+moral triumph; but then moral triumph is as often as not physical
+martyrdom. Superior military virtues must unquestionably win the verdict
+of Fate, Nature, Fact, and Veracity, on the battle-field, but what then?
+Has Fate no other verdicts to record than these? and at the moment while
+she writes Nature down debtor to the conqueror, may she not also have
+written her down his implacable creditor for the moral cost of his
+conquest?
+
+The anarchy and confusion of Poland were an outrage upon political
+conditions, which brought her to dependence and ruin. The manner of the
+partition was an outrage on moral conditions, for which each of the
+nations that profited by it paid in the lawlessness of Bonaparte. The
+preliminaries of Leoben, again, and Campo-Formio were the key to
+Waterloo and St. Helena. But Mr. Carlyle stops short at the triumph of
+compliance with the conditions of material victory. He is content to
+know that Frederick made himself master of Silesia, without considering
+that the day of Jena loomed in front. It suffices to say that the whiff
+of grape-shot on the Thirteenth Vendemiaire brought Sans-culottism to
+order and an end, without measuring what permanent elements of disorder
+were ineradicably implanted by resort to the military arm. Only the
+failures are used to point the great historical moral, and if Bonaparte
+had died in the Tuileries in all honour and glory, he would have ranked
+with Frederick or Francia as a wholly true man. Mr. Carlyle would then
+no more have declared the execution of Palm 'a palpable, tyrannous,
+murderous injustice,' than he declares it of the execution of Katte or
+Schlubhut. The fall of the traitor to fact, of the French monarchy, of
+the windbags of the first Republic, of Charles I., is improved for our
+edification, but then the other lesson, the failure of heroes like
+Cromwell, remains isolated and incoherent, with no place in a morally
+regulated universe. If the strength of Prussia now proves that Frederick
+had a right to seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further
+whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist
+assume, from the fact of the restoration, and the consequent
+obliteration of Cromwell's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a
+phantasm captain?
+
+Apart from its irreconcilableness with many of his most emphatic
+judgments, Mr. Carlyle's doctrine about Nature's registration of the
+penalties of injustice is intrinsically an anachronism. It is worse than
+the Catholic reaction, because while De Maistre only wanted Europe to
+return to the system of the twelfth century, Mr. Carlyle's theory of
+history takes us back to times prehistoric, when might and right were
+the same thing. It is decidedly natural that man in a state of nature
+should take and keep as much as his skill and physical strength enable
+him to do. But society and its benefits are all so much ground won from
+nature and her state. The more natural a method of acquisition, the less
+likely is it to be social. The essence of morality is the subjugation of
+nature in obedience to social needs. To use Kant's admirable
+description, concert _pathologically_ extorted by the mere necessities
+of situation, is exalted into a _moral_ union. It is exactly in this
+progressive substitution of one for the other that advancement consists,
+that Progress of the Species at which, in certain of its forms, Mr.
+Carlyle has so many gibes.
+
+That, surely, is the true test of veracity and heroism in conduct. Does
+your hero's achievement go in the pathological or the moral direction?
+Does it tend to spread faith in that cunning, violence, force, which
+were once primitive and natural conditions of life, and which will still
+by natural law work to their own proper triumphs in so far as these
+conditions survive, and within such limits, and in such sense, as they
+permit; or, on the contrary, does it tend to heighten respect for civic
+law, for pledged word, for the habit of self-surrender to the public
+good, and for all those other ideas and sentiments and usages which have
+been painfully gained from the sterile sands of egotism and selfishness,
+and to which we are indebted for all the untold boons conferred by the
+social union on man?
+
+Viewed from this point, the manner of the achievement is as important as
+is its immediate product, a consideration which it is one of Mr.
+Carlyle's most marked peculiarities to take into small account.
+Detesting Jesuitism from the bottom of his soul, he has been too willing
+to accept its fundamental maxim, that the end justifies the means. He
+has taken the end for the ratification or proscription of the means, and
+stamped it as the verdict of Fate and Fact on the transaction and its
+doer. A safer position is this, that the means prepare the end, and the
+end is what the means have made it. Here is the limit of the true law of
+the relations between man and fate. Justice and injustice in the law,
+let us abstain from inquiring after.
+
+There are two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some
+degree by the primitive and pathological principle of repression and
+main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal
+and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are constantly
+straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in
+the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the
+predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and
+unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as
+the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be
+ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occupied the same
+moral and social level as the best of their generation. We are amply
+justified in employing towards them, wherever their offences endanger
+order, the same methods of coercion which originally made society
+possible. No tenable theory about free will or necessity, no theory of
+praise and blame that will bear positive tests, lays us under any
+obligation to spare either the comfort or the life of a man who indulges
+in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr. Carlyle has done much to
+wear this just and austere view into the minds of his generation, and in
+so far he has performed an excellent service.
+
+The second set of relations in which the pathological element still so
+largely predominates are those between nations. Separate and independent
+communities are still in a state of nature. The tie between them is only
+the imperfect, loose, and non-moral tie of self-interest and material
+power. Many publicists and sentimental politicians are ever striving to
+conceal this displeasing fact from themselves and others, and evading
+the lesson of the outbreaks that now and again convulse the civilised
+world. Mr. Carlyle's history of the rise and progress of the power of
+the Prussian monarchy is the great illustration of the hold which he has
+got of the conception of the international state as a state of nature;
+and here again, in so far as he has helped to teach us to study the past
+by historic methods, he has undoubtedly done laudable work.
+
+Yet have we not to confess that there is another side to this kind of
+truth, in both these fields? We may finally pronounce on a given way of
+thinking, only after we have discerned its goal. Not knowing this, we
+cannot accurately know its true tendency and direction. Now, every
+recognition of the pathological necessity should imply a progress and
+effort towards its conversion into moral relationship. The difference
+between a reactionary and a truly progressive thinker or group of ideas
+is not that the one assumes virtuousness and morality as having been the
+conscious condition of international dealings, while the other asserts
+that such dealings were the lawful consequence of self-interest and the
+contest of material forces; nor is it that the one insists on viewing
+international transactions from the same moral point which would be the
+right one, if independent communities actually formed one stable and
+settled family, while the other declines to view their morality at all.
+The vital difference is, that while the reactionary writer rigorously
+confines his faith within the region of facts accomplished, the other
+anticipates a time when the endeavour of the best minds in the civilised
+world, co-operating with every favouring external circumstance that
+arises, shall have in the international circle raised moral
+considerations to an ever higher and higher pre-eminence, and in
+internal conditions shall have left in the chances and training of the
+individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to
+anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or
+other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at
+the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to
+close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure
+that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of the
+present.
+
+Mr. Carlyle's influence, however, was at its height before this idolatry
+of the soldier became a paramount article in his creed; and it is
+devoutly to be hoped that not many of those whom he first taught to
+seize before all things fact and reality, will follow him into this
+torrid air, where only forces and never principles are facts, and where
+nothing is reality but the violent triumph of arbitrarily imposed will.
+There was once a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek and
+cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste energy and hope in
+seeking lights which it is not given to man ever to find, with a solemn
+assurance added that in frank and untrembling recognition of
+circumstance the spirit of man may find a priceless, ever-fruitful
+contentment. The prolonged and thousand-times repeated glorification of
+Unconsciousness, Silence, Renunciation, all comes to this: We are to
+leave the region of things unknowable, and hold fast to the duty that
+lies nearest. Here is the Everlasting Yea. In action only can we have
+certainty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The reticences of men are often only less full of meaning than their
+most pregnant speech; and Mr. Carlyle's unbroken silence upon the modern
+validity and truth of religious creeds says much. The fact that he
+should have taken no distinct side in the great debate as to revelation,
+salvation, inspiration, and the other theological issues that agitate
+and divide a community where theology is now mostly verbal, has been the
+subject of some comment, and has had the effect of adding one rather
+peculiar side to the many varieties of his influence. Many in the
+dogmatic stage have been content to think that as he was not avowedly
+against them, he might be with them, and sacred persons have been known
+to draw their most strenuous inspirations from the chief denouncer of
+phantasms and exploded formulas. Only once, when speaking of Sterling's
+undertaking the clerical burden, does he burst out into unmistakable
+description of the old Jew stars that have now gone out, and wrath
+against those who would persuade us that these stars are still aflame
+and the only ones. That this reserve has been wise in its day, and has
+most usefully widened the tide and scope of the teacher's popularity,
+one need not dispute. There are conditions when indirect solvents are
+most powerful, as there are others, which these have done much to
+prepare, when no lover of truth will stoop to declarations other than
+direct. Mr. Carlyle has assailed the dogmatic temper in religion, and
+this is work that goes deeper than to assail dogmas.
+
+Not even Comte himself has harder words for metaphysics than Mr.
+Carlyle. 'The disease of Metaphysics' is perennial. Questions of Death
+and Immortality, Origin of Evil, Freedom and Necessity, are ever
+appearing and attempting to shape something of the universe. 'And ever
+unsuccessfully: for what theorem of the Infinite can the Finite render
+complete?... Metaphysical Speculation as it begins in No or Nothingness,
+so it must needs end in nothingness; circulates and must circulate in
+endless vortices; creating, swallowing--itself.'[9] Again, on the other
+side, he sets his face just as firmly against the excessive pretensions
+and unwarranted certitudes of the physicist. '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 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
+to 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.'[10] The inalterable relativity of
+human knowledge has never been more forcibly illustrated; and the two
+passages together fix the limits of that knowledge with a sagacity truly
+philosophic. Between the vagaries of mystics and the vagaries of
+physicists lies the narrow land of rational certainty, relative,
+conditional, experimental, from which we view the vast realm that
+stretches out unknown before us, and perhaps for ever unknowable;
+inspiring men with an elevated awe, and environing the interests and
+duties of their little lives with a strange sublimity. 'We emerge from
+the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge
+again into the Inane.... But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not;
+Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery.'[11]
+
+[9] 'Characteristics,' _Misc. Ess._, iii. pp. 356-358. Rousseau in the
+same way makes the Savoyard Vicar declare that '_jamais le jargon de la
+metaphysique n'a fait decouvrir une seule verite, et il a rempli la
+philosophie d'absurdites dont on a honte, sitot qu'on les depouille de
+leurs grands mots_.'--_Emile_, liv. iv.
+
+[10] _Sartor Resartus_, bk. iii. ch. viii. p. 249.
+
+[11] _Ib._ p. 257.
+
+Natural Supernaturalism, the title of one of the cardinal chapters in
+Mr. Carlyle's cardinal book, is perhaps as good a name as another for
+this two-faced yet integral philosophy, which teaches us to behold with
+cheerful serenity the great gulf which is fixed round our faculty and
+existence on every side, while it fills us with that supreme sense of
+countless unseen possibilities, and of the hidden, undefined movements
+of shadow and light over the spirit, without which the soul of man falls
+into hard and desolate sterility. In youth, perhaps, it is the latter
+aspect of Mr. Carlyle's teaching which first touches people, because
+youth is the time of indefinite aspiration; and it is easier, besides,
+to surrender ourselves passively to these vague emotional impressions,
+than to apply actively and contentedly to the duty that lies nearest,
+and to the securing of 'that infinitesimallest product' on which the
+teacher is ever insisting. It is the Supernaturalism which stirs men
+first, until larger fulness of years and wider experience of life draw
+them to a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in Naturalism. This last
+is the mood which Mr. Carlyle never wearies of extolling and enjoining
+under the name of Belief; and the absence of it, the inability to enter
+into it, is that Unbelief which he so bitterly vituperates, or, in
+another phrase, that Discontent, which he charges with holding the soul
+in such desperate and paralysing bondage.
+
+Indeed, what is it that Mr. Carlyle urges upon us but the search for
+that Mental Freedom, which under one name or another has been the goal
+and ideal of all highest minds that have reflected on the true
+constitution of human happiness? His often enjoined Silence is the first
+condition of this supreme kind of liberty, for what is silence but the
+absence of a self-tormenting assertiveness, the freedom from excessive
+susceptibility under the speech of others, one's removal from the
+choking sandy wilderness of wasted words? Belief is the mood which
+emancipates us from the paralysing dubieties of distraught souls, and
+leaves us full possession of ourselves by furnishing an unshaken and
+inexpugnable base for action and thought, and subordinating passion to
+conviction. Labour, again, perhaps the cardinal article in the creed, is
+at once the price of moral independence, and the first condition of that
+fulness and accuracy of knowledge, without which we are not free, but
+the bounden slaves of prejudice, unreality, darkness, and error. Even
+Renunciation of self is in truth only the casting out of those
+disturbing and masterful qualities which oppress and hinder the free,
+natural play of the worthier parts of character. In renunciation we thus
+restore to self its own diviner mind.
+
+Yet we are never bidden either to strive or hope for a freedom that is
+unbounded. Circumstance has fixed limits that no effort can transcend.
+Novalis complained in bitter words, as we know, of the mechanical,
+prosaic, utilitarian, cold-hearted character of _Wilhelm Meister_,
+constituting it an embodiment of 'artistic Atheism,' while English
+critics as loudly found fault with its author for being a mystic.
+Exactly the same discrepancy is possible in respect of Mr. Carlyle's
+own writings. In one sense he may be called mystic and transcendental,
+in another baldly mechanical and even cold-hearted, just as Novalis
+found Goethe to be in _Meister_. The latter impression is inevitable in
+all who, like Goethe and like Mr. Carlyle, make a lofty acquiescence in
+the positive course of circumstance a prime condition at once of wise
+endeavour and of genuine happiness. The splendid fire and unmeasured
+vehemence of Mr. Carlyle's manner partially veil the depth of this
+acquiescence, which is really not so far removed from fatalism. The
+torrent of his eloquence, bright and rushing as it is, flows between
+rigid banks and over hard rocks. Devotion to the heroic does not prevent
+the assumption of a tone towards the great mass of the unheroic, which
+implies that they are no more than two-legged mill horses, ever treading
+a fixed and unalterable round. He practically denies other consolation
+to mortals than such as they may be able to get from the final and
+conclusive Kismet of the oriental. It is fate. Man is the creature of
+his destiny. As for our supposed claims on the heavenly powers: What
+right, he asks, hadst thou even to be? Fatalism of this stamp is the
+natural and unavoidable issue of a born positivity of spirit, uninformed
+by scientific meditation. It exists in its coarsest and most childish
+kind in adventurous freebooters of the type of Napoleon, and in a noble
+and not egotistic kind in Oliver Cromwell's pious interpretation of the
+order of events by the good will and providence of God.
+
+Two conspicuous qualities of Carlylean doctrine flow from this fatalism,
+or poetised utilitarianism, or illumined positivity. One of them is a
+tolerably constant contempt for excessive nicety in moral distinctions,
+and an aversion to the monotonous attitude of praise and blame. In a
+country overrun and corroded to the heart, as Great Britain is, with
+cant and a foul mechanical hypocrisy, this temper ought to have had its
+uses in giving a much-needed robustness to public judgment. One might
+suppose, from the tone of opinion among us, not only that the difference
+between right and wrong marks the most important aspect of conduct,
+which would be true; but that it marks the only aspect of it that
+exists, or that is worth considering, which is most profoundly false.
+Nowhere has Puritanism done us more harm than in thus leading us to take
+all breadth, and colour, and diversity, and fine discrimination, out of
+our judgments of men, reducing them to thin, narrow, and superficial
+pronouncements upon the letter of their morality, or the precise
+conformity of their opinions to accepted standards of truth, religious
+or other. Among other evils which it has inflicted, this inability to
+conceive of conduct except as either right or wrong, and,
+correspondingly in the intellectual order, of teaching except as either
+true or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit of _parti-pris_
+which has led to the rooting of so much injustice, disorder, immobility,
+and darkness in English intelligence. No excess of morality, we may be
+sure, has followed this excessive adoption of the exclusively moral
+standard. '_Quand il n'y a plus de principes dans le coeur_,' says De
+Senancourt, '_on est bien scrupuleux sur les apparences publiques et sur
+les devoirs d'opinion_.' We have simply got for our pains a most
+unlovely leanness of judgment, and ever since the days when this temper
+set in until now, when a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has steadily
+and powerfully tended to straiten character, to make action mechanical,
+and to impoverish art. As if there were nothing admirable in a man save
+unbroken obedience to the letter of the moral law, and that letter read
+in our own casual and local interpretation; and as if we had no
+faculties of sympathy, no sense for the beauty of character, no feeling
+for broad force and full-pulsing vitality.
+
+To study manners and conduct and men's moral nature in such a way, is as
+direct an error as it would be to overlook in the study of his body
+everything except its vertebral column and the bony framework. The body
+is more than mere anatomy. A character is much else besides being
+virtuous or vicious. In many of the characters in which some of the
+finest and most singular qualities of humanity would seem to have
+reached their furthest height, their morality was the side least worth
+discussing. The same may be said of the specific rightness or wrongness
+of opinion in the intellectual order. Let us condemn error or
+immorality, when the scope of our criticism calls for this particular
+function, but why rush to praise or blame, to eulogy or reprobation,
+when we should do better simply to explore and enjoy? Moral
+imperfection is ever a grievous curtailment of life, but many exquisite
+flowers of character, many gracious and potent things, may still thrive
+in the most disordered scene.
+
+The vast waste which this limitation of prospect entails is the most
+grievous rejection of moral treasure, if it be true that nothing
+enriches the nature like wide sympathy and many-coloured
+appreciativeness. To a man like Macaulay, for example, criticism was
+only a tribunal before which men were brought to be decisively tried by
+one or two inflexible tests, and then sent to join the sheep on the one
+hand, or the goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences
+passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness
+and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite
+of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack.
+Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding,
+with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr.
+Carlyle's essay on the same man. Mr. Carlyle knows as well as Macaulay
+how blind and stupid a creed was English Toryism a century ago, but he
+seizes and reproduces the character of his man, and this was much more
+than a matter of a creed. So with Burns. He was drunken and unchaste and
+thriftless, and Mr. Carlyle holds all these vices as deeply in
+reprobation as if he had written ten thousand sermons against them; but
+he leaves the fulmination to the hack moralist of the pulpit or the
+press, with whom words are cheap, easily gotten, and readily thrown
+forth. To him it seems better worth while, having made sure of some
+sterling sincerity and rare genuineness of vision and singular human
+quality, to dwell on, and do justice to that, than to accumulate
+commonplaces as to the viciousness of vice. Here we may perhaps find the
+explanation of the remarkable fact that though Mr. Carlyle has written
+about a large number of men of all varieties of opinion and temperament,
+and written with emphasis and point and strong feeling, yet there is
+hardly one of these judgments, however much we may dissent from it,
+which we could fairly put a finger upon as indecently absurd or futile.
+Of how many writers of thirty volumes can we say the same?
+
+That this broad and poetic temper of criticism has special dangers, and
+needs to have special safeguards, is but too true. Even, however, if we
+find that it has its excesses, we may forgive much to the merits of a
+reaction against a system which has raised monstrous floods of sour cant
+round about us, and hardened the hearts and parched the sympathies of
+men by blasts from theological deserts. There is a point of view so
+lofty and so peculiar that from it we are able to discern in men and
+women something more than, and apart from, creed and profession and
+formulated principle; which indeed directs and colours this creed and
+principle as decisively as it is in its turn acted on by them, and this
+is their character or humanity. The least important thing about Johnson
+is that he was a Tory; and about Burns, that he drank too much and was
+incontinent; and if we see in modern literature an increasing tendency
+to mount to this higher point of view, this humaner prospect, there is
+no living writer to whom we owe more for it than Mr. Carlyle. The same
+principle which revealed the valour and godliness of Puritanism, has
+proved its most efficacious solvent, for it places character on the
+pedestal where Puritanism places dogma.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second of the qualities which seem to flow from Mr. Carlyle's
+fatalism, and one much less useful among such a people as the English,
+is a deficiency of sympathy with masses of men. It would be easy enough
+to find places where he talks of the dumb millions in terms of fine and
+sincere humanity, and his feeling for the common pathos of the human
+lot, as he encounters it in individual lives, is as earnest and as
+simple, as it is invariably lovely and touching in its expression. But
+detached passages cannot counterbalance the effect of a whole compact
+body of teaching. The multitude stands between Destiny on the one side,
+and the Hero on the other; a sport to the first, and as potter's clay to
+the second. _'Dogs, would ye then live for ever?_' Frederick is truly or
+fabulously said to have cried to a troop who hesitated to attack a
+battery vomiting forth death and destruction. This is a measure of Mr.
+Carlyle's own valuation of the store we ought to set on the lives of the
+most. We know in what coarse outcome such an estimate of the dignity of
+other life than the life heroic has practically issued; in what
+barbarous vindication of barbarous law-breaking in Jamaica, in what
+inhuman softness for slavery, in what contemptuous and angry words for
+'Beales and his 50,000 roughs,' contrasted with gentle words for our
+precious aristocracy, with 'the politest and gracefullest kind of woman'
+to wife. Here is the end of the Eternal Verities, when one lets them
+bulk so big in his eyes as to shut out that perishable speck, the human
+race.
+
+'They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen,' he says in one
+place, 'what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, that this world
+is after all but a show--a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All
+deep souls see into that.'[12] Yes; but deep souls dealing with the
+practical questions of society, do well to thrust the vision as far from
+them as they can, and to suppose that this world is no show, and
+happiness and misery not mere appearances, but the keenest realities
+that we can know. The difference between virtue and vice, between wisdom
+and folly, is only phenomenal, yet there is difference enough. 'What
+_shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!_' Burke cried in the
+presence of an affecting incident. Yet the consciousness of this made
+him none the less careful, minute, patient, systematic, in examining a
+policy, or criticising a tax. Mr. Carlyle, on the contrary, falls back
+on the same reflection for comfort in the face of political confusions
+and difficulties and details, which he has not the moral patience to
+encounter scientifically. Unable to dream of swift renovation and wisdom
+among men, he ponders on the unreality of life, and hardens his heart
+against generations that will not know the things that pertain unto
+their peace. He answers to one lifting up some moderate voice of protest
+in favour of the masses of mankind, as his Prussian hero did: '_Ah, you
+do not know that damned race!_'[13]
+
+[12] _Hero-Worship_, p. 43.
+
+[13] Carlyle's _Frederick_, vi. 363.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is no passage which Mr. Carlyle so often quotes as the sublime--
+
+                  We are such stuff
+  As dreams are made on; and our little life
+  Is rounded with a sleep.
+
+If the ever present impression of this awful, most moving, yet most
+soothing thought, be a law of spiritual breadth and height, there is
+still a peril in it. Such an impression may inform the soul with a
+devout mingled sense of grandeur and nothingness, or it may blacken into
+cynicism and antinomian living for self and the day. It may be a solemn
+and holy refrain, sounding far off but clear in the dusty course of work
+and duty; or it may be the comforting chorus of a diabolic drama of
+selfishness and violence. As a reaction against religious theories which
+make humanity over-abound in self-consequence, and fill individuals with
+the strutting importance of creatures with private souls to save or
+lose, even such cynicism as Byron's was wholesome and nearly
+forgivable. Nevertheless, the most important question that we can ask of
+any great teacher, as of the walk and conversation of any commonest
+person, remains this--how far has he strengthened and raised the
+conscious and harmonious dignity of humanity; how stirred in men and
+women, many or few, deeper and more active sense of the worth and
+obligation and innumerable possibilities, not of their own little lives,
+one or another, but of life collectively; how heightened the
+self-respect of the race? There is no need to plant oneself in a fool's
+paradise, with no eye for the weakness of men, the futility of their
+hopes, the irony of their fate, the dominion of the satyr and the tiger
+in their hearts. Laughter has a fore-place in life. All this we may see
+and show that we see, and yet so throw it behind the weightier facts of
+nobleness and sacrifice, of the boundless gifts which fraternal union
+has given, and has the power of giving, as to kindle in every breast,
+not callous to exalted impressions, the glow of sympathetic endeavour,
+and of serene exultation in the bond that makes 'precious the soul of
+man to man.'
+
+This renewal of moral energy by spiritual contact with the mass of men,
+and by meditation on the destinies of mankind, is the very reverse of
+Mr. Carlyle's method. With him, it is good to leave the mass, and fall
+down before the individual, and be saved by him. The victorious hero is
+the true Paraclete. 'Nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
+imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.' And this
+is really the kernel of the Carlylean doctrine. The whole human race
+toils and moils, straining and energising, doing and suffering things
+multitudinous and unspeakable under the sun, in order that like the
+aloe-tree it may once in a hundred years produce a flower. It is this
+hero that age offers to age, and the wisest worship him. Time and nature
+once and again distil from out of the lees and froth of common humanity
+some wondrous character, of a potent and reviving property hardly short
+of miraculous. This the man who knows his own good cherishes in his
+inmost soul as a sacred thing, an elixir of moral life. The Great Man is
+'the light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the
+world; a flowing light fountain, in whose radiance all souls feel that
+it is well with them.' This is only another form of the anthropomorphic
+conceptions of deity. The divinity of the ordinary hierophant is clothed
+in the minds of the worshippers with the highest human qualities they
+happen to be capable of conceiving, and this is the self-acting
+machinery by which worship refreshes and recruits what is best in man.
+Mr. Carlyle has another way. He carries the process a step further,
+giving back to the great man what had been taken for beings greater than
+any man, and summoning us to trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of
+heroic chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many mansions, the
+boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond polytheism. But each altar is
+individual and apart, and the reaction of this isolation upon the
+egotistic instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident. It is
+good for us to build temples to great names which recall special
+transfigurations of humanity; but it is better still, it gives a firmer
+nerve to purpose and adds a finer holiness to the ethical sense, to
+carry ever with us the unmarked, yet living tradition of the voiceless
+unconscious effort of unnumbered millions of souls, flitting lightly
+away like showers of thin leaves, yet ever augmenting the elements of
+perfectness in man, and exalting the eternal contest.
+
+Mr. Carlyle has indeed written that generation stands indissolubly woven
+with generation; 'how we inherit, not Life only, but all the garniture
+and form of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel, as our
+fathers and primeval grandfathers from the beginning have given it to
+us;' how 'mankind is a living, indivisible whole.'[14] Even this,
+however, with the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in
+connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not incorporated with
+the body of the writer's doctrine. It does not neutralise the general
+lack of faith in the cultivable virtue of masses of men, nor the
+universal tone of humoristic cynicism with which all but a little band,
+the supposed salt of the earth, are treated. Man is for Mr. Carlyle, as
+for the Calvinistic theologian, a fallen and depraved being, without
+much hope, except for a few of the elect. The best thing that can happen
+to the poor creature is that he should be thoroughly well drilled. In
+other words, society does not really progress in its bulk; and the
+methods which were conditions of the original formation and growth of
+the social union, remain indispensable until the sound of the last
+trump. Was there not a profound and far-reaching truth wrapped up in
+Goethe's simple yet really inexhaustible monition, that if we would
+improve a man, it were well to let him believe that we already think him
+that which we would have him to be. The law that _noblesse oblige_ has
+unwritten bearings in dealing with all men; all masses of men are
+susceptible of an appeal from that point: for this Mr. Carlyle seems to
+make no allowance.
+
+[14] 'Organic Filaments' in the _Sartor_, bk. iii. ch. vii.
+
+Every modification of society is one of the slow growths of time, and to
+hurry impatiently after them by swift ways of military discipline and
+peremptory law-making, is only to clasp the near and superficial good.
+It is easy to make a solitude and call it peace, to plant an iron heel
+and call it order. But read Mr. Carlyle's essay on Dr. Francia, and then
+ponder the history of Paraguay for these later years and the accounts of
+its condition in the newspapers of to-day. 'Nay, it may be,' we learn
+from that remarkable piece, 'that the benefit of him is not even yet
+exhausted, even yet entirely become visible. Who knows but, in unborn
+centuries, Paragueno men will look back to their lean iron Francia, as
+men do in such cases to the one veracious person, and institute
+considerations?'[15] Who knows, indeed, if only it prove that their
+lean iron Francia, in his passion for order and authority, did not stamp
+out the very life of the nation? Where organic growths are concerned,
+patience is the sovereign law; and where the organism is a society of
+men, the vital principle is a sense in one shape or another of the
+dignity of humanity. The recognition of this tests the distinction
+between the truly heroic ruler of the stamp of Cromwell, and the
+arbitrary enthusiast for external order like Frederick. Yet in more than
+one place Mr. Carlyle accepts the fundamental principle of democracy.
+'It is curious to consider now,' he says once, 'with what fierce,
+deep-breathed doggedness the poor English Nation, drawn by their
+instincts, held fast upon it [the Spanish War of Walpole's time, in
+Jenkins' Ear Question], and would take no denial of it, as if they had
+surmised and seen. For the instincts of simple, guileless persons
+(liable to be counted stupid by the unwary) are sometimes of prophetic
+nature, and spring from the deep places of this universe!'[16] If the
+writer of this had only thought it out to the end, and applied the
+conclusions thereof to history and politics, what a difference it would
+have made.
+
+[15] _Misc. Ess._ vi. 124.
+
+[16] _Frederick_, iv. 390.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No criticism upon either Mr. Carlyle or any other modern historian,
+possessed of speculative quality, would be in any sense complete which
+should leave out of sight his view of the manner and significance of the
+break-up of the old European structure. The historian is pretty sure to
+be guided in his estimate of the forces which have contributed to
+dissolution in the past, by the kind of anticipation which he entertains
+of the probable course of reconstruction. Like Comte, in his ideas of
+temporal reconstruction, Mr. Carlyle goes back to something like the
+forms of feudalism for the model of the industrial organisation of the
+future; but in the spiritual order he is as far removed as possible from
+any semblance of that revival of the old ecclesiastical forms without
+the old theological ideas, which is the corner-stone of Comte's edifice.
+To the question whether mankind gained or lost by the French Revolution,
+Mr. Carlyle nowhere gives a clear answer; indeed, on this subject more
+even than any other, he clings closely to his favourite method of simple
+presentation, streaked with dramatic irony. No writer shows himself more
+alive to the enormous moment to all Europe of that transaction; but we
+hear no word from him on the question whether we have more reason to
+bless or curse an event that interrupted, either subsequently to retard
+or to accelerate, the transformation of the West from a state of war, of
+many degrees of social subordination, of religious privilege, of
+aristocratic administration, into a state of peaceful industry, of equal
+international rights, of social equality, of free and equal tolerance of
+creeds. That this process was going on prior to 1789 is undeniable. Are
+we really nearer to the permanent establishment of the new order, for
+what was done between 1789 and 1793? or were men thrown off the right
+track of improvement by a movement which turned exclusively on abstract
+rights, which dealt with men's ideas and habits as if they were
+instantaneously pliable before the aspirations of any government, and
+which by its violent and inconsiderate methods drove all these who
+should only have been friends of order into being the enemies of
+progress as well? There are many able and honest and republican men who
+in their hearts suspect that the latter of the two alternatives is the
+more correct description of what has happened. Mr. Carlyle is as one who
+does not hear the question. He draws its general moral lesson from the
+French Revolution, and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns,
+from king to churl, that imposture must come to an end. But for the
+precise amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for
+the political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its
+dramatic significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject,
+nor even evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.
+
+The truth is that with Mr. Carlyle the Revolution begins not in 1789 but
+in 1741; not with the Fall of the Bastile but with the Battle of
+Mollwitz. This earliest of Frederick's victories was the first sign
+'that indeed a new hour had struck on the Time Horologe, that a new
+Epoch had arisen. Slumberous Europe, rotting amid its blind pedantries,
+its lazy hypocrisies, conscious and unconscious: this man is capable of
+shaking it a little out of its stupid refuges of lies and ignominious
+wrappages, and of intimating to it afar off that there is still a
+Veracity in Things, and a Mendacity in Sham Things,' and so forth, in
+the well-known strain.[17] It is impossible to overrate the truly
+supreme importance of the violent break-up of Europe which followed the
+death of the Emperor Charles VI., and in many respects 1740 is as
+important a date in the history of Western societies as 1789. Most of us
+would probably find the importance of this epoch in its destructive
+contribution, rather than in that constructive and moral quality which
+lay under the movement of '89. The Empire was thoroughly shattered.
+France was left weak, impoverished, humiliated. Spain was finally thrust
+from among the efficient elements in the European State-system. Most
+important of all, their too slight sanctity had utterly left the old
+conceptions of public law and international right. The whole polity of
+Europe was left in such a condition of disruption as had not been
+equalled since the death of Charles the Great. The Partition of Poland
+was the most startling evidence of the completeness of this disruption,
+and if one statesman was more to be praised or blamed for shaking over
+the fabric than another, that statesman was Frederick the Second of
+Prussia. But then, in Mr. Carlyle's belief, there was equally a
+constructive and highly moral side to all this. The old fell to pieces
+because it was internally rotten. The gospel of the new was that the
+government of men and kingdoms is a business beyond all others demanding
+an open-eyed accessibility to all facts and realities; that here more
+than anywhere else you need to give the tools to him who can handle
+them; that government does by no means go on of itself, but more than
+anything else in this world demands skill, patience, energy, long and
+tenacious grip, and the constant presence of that most indispensable,
+yet most rare, of all practical convictions, that the effect is the
+inevitable consequent of the cause. Here was a revolution, we cannot
+doubt. The French Revolution was in a manner a complement to it, as Mr.
+Carlyle himself says in a place where he talks of believing both in the
+French Revolution and in Frederick; 'that is to say both that Real
+Kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction of
+Sham Kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally so.'[18] It is
+curious that an observer who could see the positive side of Frederick's
+disruption of Europe in 1740, did not also see that there was a positive
+side to the disruption of the French monarchy fifty years afterwards,
+and that not only was a blow dealt to sham kingship, but a decisive
+impulse was given to those ideas of morality and justice in government,
+upon which only real kingship in whatever form is able to rest.
+
+[17] _History of Frederick the Great_, iv. 328. See also vol. i., Proem.
+
+[18] _Frederick the Great_, i. 9.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the other great factor in the dissolution of the old state, the
+decay of ancient spiritual forms, Mr. Carlyle gives no uncertain sound.
+Of the Reformation, as of the French Revolution, philosophers have
+doubted how far it really contributed to the stable progress of European
+civilisation. Would it have been better, if it had been possible, for
+the old belief gradually as by process of nature to fall to pieces, new
+doctrine as gradually and as normally emerging from the ground of
+disorganised and decayed convictions, without any of that frightful
+violence which stirred men's deepest passions, and gave them a sinister
+interest in holding one or other of the rival creeds in its most
+extreme, exclusive, and intolerant form? This question Mr. Carlyle does
+not see, or, if he does see it, he rides roughshod over it. Every reader
+remembers the notable passage in which he declares that the question of
+Protestant or not Protestant meant everywhere, 'Is there anything of
+nobleness in you, O Nation, or is there nothing?' and that afterwards it
+fared with nations as they did, or did not, accept this sixteenth
+century form of Truth when it came.[19]
+
+[19] _Frederick_, i. bk. iii. ch. viii. 269-274.
+
+France, for example, is the conspicuous proof of what overtook the
+deniers. 'France saw good to massacre Protestantism, and end it, in the
+night of St. Bartholomew, 1572. The celestial apparitor of heaven's
+chancery, so we may speak, the genius of Fact and Veracity, had left his
+writ of summons; writ was read and replied to in this manner.' But let
+us look at this more definitely. A complex series of historic facts do
+not usually fit so neatly into the moral formula. The truth surely is
+that while the anxieties and dangers of the Catholic party in France
+increased after St. Bartholomew, whose dramatic horror has made its
+historic importance to be vastly exaggerated, the Protestant cause
+remained full of vitality, and the number of its adherents went on
+increasing until the Edict of Nantes. It is eminently unreasonable to
+talk of France seeing good to end Protestantism in a night, when we
+reflect that twenty-six years after, the provisions of the Edict of
+Nantes were what they were. 'By that Edict,' the historian tells us,
+'the French Protestants, who numbered perhaps a tenth of the total
+population, 2,000,000 out of 20,000,000, obtained absolute liberty of
+conscience; performance of public worship in 3500 castles, as well as in
+certain specified houses in each province; a State endowment equal to
+L20,000 a year; civil rights equal in every respect to those of the
+Catholics; admission to the public colleges, hospitals, etc.; finally,
+eligibility to all offices of State.' It was this, and not the Massacre,
+which was France's reply to the Genius of Fact and Veracity. Again, on
+the other side, England accepted Protestantism, and yet Mr. Carlyle of
+all men can hardly pretend, after his memorable deliverances in the
+_Niagara_, that he thinks she has fared particularly well in
+consequence.
+
+The famous diatribe against Jesuitism in the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_,[20]
+one of the most unfeignedly coarse and virulent bits of invective in the
+language, points plumb in the same direction. It is grossly unjust,
+because it takes for granted that Loyola and all Jesuits were
+deliberately conscious of imposture and falsehood, knowingly embraced
+the cause of Beelzebub, and resolutely propagated it. It is one thing to
+judge a system in its corruption, and a quite other thing to measure the
+worth and true design of its first founders; one thing to estimate the
+intention and sincerity of a movement, when it first stirred the hearts
+of men, and another thing to pass sentence upon it in the days of its
+degradation. The vileness into which Jesuitism eventually sank is a poor
+reason why we should malign and curse those who, centuries before, found
+in the rules and discipline and aims of that system an acceptable
+expression for their own disinterested social aspirations. It is
+childish to say that the subsequent vileness is a proof of the existence
+of an inherent corrupt principle from the beginning; because hitherto
+certainly, and probably it will be so for ever, even the most salutary
+movements and most effective social conceptions have been provisional.
+In other words, the ultimate certainty of dissolution does not nullify
+the beauty and strength of physical life, and the putrescence of Jesuit
+methods and ideas is no more a reproach to those who first found succour
+in them, than the cant and formalism of any other degenerate form of
+active faith, say monachism or Calvinism, prove Calvin or Benedict or
+Bernard to have been hypocritical and hollow. To be able, however, to
+take this reasonable view, one must be unable to believe that men can
+be drawn for generation after generation by such a mere hollow lie and
+villainy and 'light of hell' as Jesuitism has always been, according to
+Mr. Carlyle's rendering. Human nature is not led for so long by lies;
+and if it seems to be otherwise, let us be sure that ideas which do lead
+and attract successive generations of men to self-sacrifice and care for
+social interests, must contain something which is not wholly a lie.
+
+[20] No. VIII. pp. 353-371.
+
+Perhaps it is pertinent to remember that Mr. Carlyle, in fact, is a
+prophet with a faith, and he holds the opposition kind of religionist in
+a peculiarly theological execration. In spite of his passion for order,
+he cannot understand the political point of view. The attempts of good
+men in epochs of disorder to remake the past, to bring back an old
+spiritual system and method, because that did once at any rate give
+shelter to mankind, and peradventure may give it to them again until
+better times come, are phenomena into which he cannot look with calm or
+patience. The great reactionist is a type that is wholly dark to him.
+That a reactionist can be great, can be a lover of virtue and truth, can
+in any sort contribute to the welfare of men, these are possibilities to
+which he will lend no ear. In a word, he is a prophet and not a
+philosopher, and it is fruitless to go to him for help in the solution
+of philosophic problems. This is not to say that he may not render us
+much help in those far more momentous problems which affect the guidance
+of our own lives.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #20878 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20878)