CARLYLE'S ETHICS
I have sometimes wondered of late what would have been the reception accorded to an autobiographical sketch by St. John the Baptist. It would, one may suppose, have contained some remarks not very palatable to refined society. The scoffers indeed would have covered their delight in an opportunity for lowering a great reputation by a plausible veil of virtuous indignation. The Pharisees would have taken occasion to dwell upon the immoral contempt of the stern prophet for the maxims of humdrum respectability. The Sadducees would have aired their orthodoxy by lamenting his open denunciations of shams, which, in their opinion, were quite as serviceable as real beliefs. Both would have agreed that nothing but a mean personal motive could have prompted such an outrageous utterance of discontent. And the good, kindly, well-meaning people—for, doubtless, there were some such even at the court of Herod—would have been sincerely shocked at the discovery that the vehement denunciations to which they had listened were in good truth the utterance of a tortured and unhappy nature, which took in all sincerity a gloomy view of the prospects of their society and the intrinsic value of its idols, instead of merely getting up indignation for purposes of pulpit oratory. They—complacent optimists, as kindly people are apt to be—have made up their minds that a genuine philosopher is always a benevolent, white-haired old gentleman, overflowing with philanthropic sentiment, convinced that all is for the best, and that even the 'miserable sinners' are excellent people at bottom; and are grievously shocked at the discovery that anybody can still believe in the existence of the devil as a potent agent in human affairs. If we have any difficulty in imagining such criticisms, we may easily realise them by reading certain criticisms upon the 'Reminiscences' of the last prophet—for we may call him a prophet whatever we think of the sources of his inspiration—who has passed from among us. The reflection which has most frequently occurred to me is one put with characteristic force by Carlyle himself in describing the sight of Charles X. going to see the portrait of 'the child of miracle.' 'How tragical are men once more; how merciless withal to one another! I had not the least pity for Charles Dix's pious pilgriming to such an object: the poor mother of it, and her immense hopes and pains, I did not even think of them.' And so, the average criticism of that most tragical and pathetic monologue—in reality a soliloquy to which we have somehow been admitted—that prolonged and painful moan of remorse and desolation coming from a proud and intensely affectionate nature in its direst agony—a record which will be read with keen sympathy and interest when ninety-nine of a hundred of the best contemporary books have been abandoned to the moths—has been such as would have been appropriate for the flippant assault of some living penny-a-liner upon the celebrities of to-day. The critics have had an eye for nothing but the harshness and the gloom, and have read without a tear, without even a touch of sympathy, a confession more moving, more vividly reflecting the struggles and the anguish of a great man, than almost anything in our literature.
Enough of this: though in speaking of Carlyle at this time it is impossible to pass it over in complete silence. I intend only to say something of Carlyle's teaching, which seems to be as much misunderstood by some critics as his character. It should require little impartiality or insight at the present day to do something like justice to a teacher who belonged essentially to a past generation. When Carlyle was still preaching upon questions of the day, my juvenile sympathies—such as they were—were always on the side of his opponents. But he and his opinions have passed into the domain of history, and we can, or at least we should, judge of them as calmly as we can of Burke and of Milton. In the year 1789 you might have sympathised with Mackintosh, or with Tom Paine, rather than with the great opponent of the Revolution; and you may even now hold that they were more in the right as to the immediate issues than Burke. But it would, indeed, be a narrow mind which could not now perceive that Burke, as a philosophic writer upon politics, towers like a giant amidst pigmies above the highest of his contemporaries; and that the value of his principles is scarcely affected by the particular application. Though Carlyle touched upon more recent events, we can already make the same distinction, and we must make it if we would judge fairly in his case.
The most obvious of all remarks about Carlyle is one expressed (I think) by Sir Henry Taylor in the phrase that he was 'a Calvinist who had lost his creed.' Rather we should say he was a Calvinist who had dropped the dogmas out of his creed. It is no doubt a serious question what remains of a creed when thus eviscerated; or, again, how long it is likely to survive such an operation. But for the present purpose it is enough to say that what remained for Carlyle was the characteristic temper of mind and the whole mode of regarding the universe. He often declared that the Hebrew Scriptures, though he did not adhere to the orthodox view of their authority, contained the most tenable theory of the world ever propounded to mankind. Without seeking to define what was the element which he had preserved, and what it was that he had abandoned, or attempting the perilous task of drawing a line between the essence and accidents of a creed, it is in any case clear that Carlyle was as Scottish in faith as in character; that he would have taken and imposed the Covenant with the most thoroughgoing and ex-animo assent and consent; and that the difference between him and his forefathers was one rather of particular beliefs than of essential sentiment. He had changed rather the data upon which his convictions were based than the convictions themselves. He revered what his fathers revered, but he revered the same principle in other manifestations, and to them this would naturally appear as a profanation, whilst from his point of view it was but a legitimate extension of their fundamental beliefs.
The more one reads Carlyle the further one traces the consequences of this belief. The Puritan creed, one may say, is not popular at the present day for reasons which might easily be assigned; and those who dislike it in any form are not conciliated by the omission of its external peculiarities. And, on the other hand, the omission naturally alienates many who would otherwise sympathise. When Carlyle speaks of 'the Eternities' and 'the Silences,' he is really using a convenient periphrasis for thoughts more naturally expressed by most people in the language peculiar to Cromwell—the translation is often given side by side with the original in the comments upon Cromwell's letters and speeches—and his mode of speech is dictated by the feeling that the old dogmatic forms are too narrow and too much associated with scholastic pedantry to be appropriate in presence of such awful mysteries. He is, as Teufelsdröckh would have said, dropping the old clothes of belief only that he may more fittingly express the living reality.
To Carlyle, for example, the later developments of Irvingism, the speaking with tongues, and so forth, appeared as simply contemptible, or, when sanctioned by the friend whose memory he cherished so pathetically, as inexpressibly pitiable. It was a hopeless attempt to cling to the worn-out rags, a dropping of the substance to grasp the shadow; ending, therefore, in a mere grotesque caricature of belief which made genuine belief all the more difficult of attainment. You are seeking for outward signs and wonders when you should be impressed by the profound and all-pervading mysteries of the universe; and therefore falling into the hands of mere charlatans, and taking the morbid hysterics of over-excited women for the revelation conveyed by all nature to those who have ears to hear. Has not the word 'spiritual,' till now expressive of the highest emotions possible to human beings, got itself somehow stained and debased by association with the loathsome tricks practised by impostors aided by the prurient curiosity of their dupes? The perversion of the highest instincts which leads a man in his very anxiety to find a true prophet and spiritual leader to put up with some miserable Cagliostro—a quack working 'miracles' by sleight of hand and phosphorus—appeared to Carlyle, and surely appeared to him most rightly, as the saddest of all conceivable aberrations of human nature; saddest because some men with a higher strain of character are amenable to such influences. But when Carlyle came to specify what was and what was not quackery of this kind, and included much that was still sacred to others, he naturally had to part company with many who would otherwise have sympathised. Miss Martineau, he tells us, was described as not only stripping herself naked, but stripping to the bone. Carlyle seems to some people to be performing this last operation, though to himself it appeared in the opposite light.
To Carlyle himself the liberation from the old clothes or external casing of belief constituted what he regarded as equivalent to the conversion of the 'old Christian people.' He emerged, he tells us, into a higher atmosphere, and gained a 'constant inward happiness that was quite royal and supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant:' a happiness, he adds, which he never quite lost, though in later years it suffered more frequent eclipse. For this he held himself to be 'endlessly indebted' to Goethe; for Goethe had in his own fashion trod the same path and achieved the same victory. Conversion, as meaning the conscious abandonment of beliefs which have once formed an integral and important part of a man's life, is a process which indeed must be very exceptional with all men of real force of character. Carlyle, it is plain, was so far from undergoing such a process, that he retained much which would have been little in harmony with the teaching of his master. For, whilst everybody can see that Goethe reached a region of philosophic serenity, we must take Carlyle's 'royal and supreme happiness' a little on trust. If his earlier writings have some gleams of the happier mood, we are certainly much more frequently in the region of murky gloom, shrouded by the Tartarean and 'fuliginous' vapours of the lower earth. If his studies of Goethe and German literature opened a door of escape from the narrow prejudices which made the air of Edinburgh oppressive to him, they certainly did not help him to shake off the old Puritan sentiments which were bred in the bone, and no mere external trapping.
Critics have spoken as though Carlyle had become a disciple of some school of German metaphysics. It is, doubtless, true enough that he valued the great German thinkers as representing to his mind a victorious reaction against the scepticism of Hume, or the materialism of Hume's French successors. But he sympathised with the general tendency without caring to bewilder himself in any of the elaborate systems evolved by Kant or his followers. The reader, he says in the earlier essay on Novalis, 'would err widely who supposed that this transcendental system of metaphysics was a mere intellectual card-castle, or logical hocus-pocus ... without any bearing on the practical interests of men. On the contrary ... it is the most serious in its purport of all philosophies propounded in these latter ages;' and he proceeds to indicate their purport, and to hint, as one writing for uncongenial readers, his respect for German 'mysticism.' He thought, that is, that these mystics, transcendentalists, and so forth, were vindicating faith against scepticism, idealism against materialism, a belief in the divine order against atheistic negations; and, moreover, that their fundamental creed was inexpugnable, resting on a basis of solid reason instead of outworn dogma. As for the superstructure, the systems of this or that wonderful professor to explain the universe in general, he probably held them to be 'card-castles'—mere cobwebs of the brain—at best arid, tentative gropings in the right direction. He had far too much of true Scottish shrewdness—even in the higher regions of thought—to trust body or soul to the truth of such flimsy materials. This comes out in his view of Coleridge, who so far sympathised with him as to have imbibed consolation from the same sources. No reader of the life of Sterling can forget the chapter—one of the most vivid portraits ever drawn even by Carlyle—devoted to Coleridge as the oracle of the 'innumerable brave souls' still engaged in the London turmoil—a portrait which suggests incidentally how much was left unspoken in the hastier touches of the 'Reminiscences.' We can see the oracle not answering your questions, nor decidedly setting out towards an answer, but accumulating 'formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear for setting out; ending by losing himself in the morass and in the mazes of theosophic philosophy,' where now and then 'glorious islets' would rise out of the haze, only to be lost again in the surrounding gloom. In his talk, as in him, 'a ray of heavenly inspiration struggled in a tragically ineffectual degree against the weakness of flesh and blood.' He had 'skirted the deserts of infidelity,' but 'had not had the courage, in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across such deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond.' Many disciples have of course seen more in Coleridge; but even his warmest admirers must admit the general truth of the picture, and confess that if Coleridge cast a leaven of much virtue into modern English speculation, he never succeeded in working out a downright answer to the philosophical perplexities of his day, or in promulgating a distinct rule of faith or life. To Carlyle this was enough to condemn Coleridge as a teacher. Coleridge, in his view, failed because he adhered to the 'old clothes;' tried desperately to breathe life into dead creeds; and, encumbered with such burdens, could not make the effort necessary to cross the 'desert.' He lingered fatally round the starting-point, and succeeded only in starting 'strange spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimeras which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner.'
The judgment is in many ways characteristic of Carlyle. To the genuine Puritan a creed is nothing which does not immediately embody itself in a war-cry. It must have a direct forcible application to life. It must divide light from darkness, distinguish friends from enemies—both external and internal—nerve your arms for the battle, and plant your feet on solid standing-ground. It must be no flickering ray in the midst of gloom, but a steady, unquenchable light—a permanent 'star to every wandering bark.' Coleridge would stimulate only to uncertain musings, instead of animating to strenuous endeavour. The same sentiment utters itself in Carlyle's favourite exaltation of silence above speech—a phrase paradoxical if literally taken, but in substance an emphatic assertion of the futility of the uncertain meanderings in the regions of abstract speculation which hinder a man from girding himself at once to deadly wrestle with the powers of darkness.
This is but a new version of the Puritan contempt for the vain speculations of human wisdom when he is himself conscious of an inner light guiding him infallibly through the labyrinths of the world. The Puritan contempt for æsthetic enjoyments springs from the same root, and is equally characteristic of Carlyle. He can never see much difference between fiction and lying. 'Fiction,' he says, 'or idle falsity of any kind was never tolerable, except in a world which did itself abound in practical lies and solid shams.... A serious soul, can it wish, even in hours of relaxation, that you should fiddle empty nonsense to it? A serious soul would desire to be entertained either with silence or with what was truth, and had fruit in it, and was made by the Maker of us all,'—a doctrine which will clearly not commend itself to an æsthetic world. 'Poetry, fiction in general, he (Carlyle the father) had universally seen treated as not only idle, but false and criminal,' and the son adhered to the opinion except so far as he came to admit that fiction might in a sense be truth. The ground-feeling is still that of some old Puritan, preaching, like Baxter, as 'a dying man to dying men,' and at most tolerant of anything not directly tending to edification. Carlyle, of course, belonged emphatically to the imaginative as distinguished from the speculative order of minds. He was a man of intuitions, not of discursive thought: who felt before he reasoned: to whom it was a mental necessity that a principle should clothe itself in concrete flesh and blood, and if possible in some definite historical hero, before he could fully believe in it. He wanted vivid images in place of abstract formulas. His indifference to the metaphysical was not simply that of the practical man who regards all such inquiries as leading to hopeless and bottomless quagmires of doubt and a paralysis of all active will; as an attempt, doomed to failure from the beginning, to get off your own shadow, and to twist and twirl till your pigtail hangs before you; though this, too, counts for much in his teaching; but it was also the antipathy of the imaginative mind to the passionless analyser who 'explains' the living organism by reducing it to a dead mechanism. It is, indeed, remarkable that Carlyle had a certain comparative respect even for the materialist and utilitarian whom he so harshly denounced. Such a man was at least better than the ineffectual dilettante or dealer in small shams and phantasms. Anything thoroughgoing, even a thoroughgoing rejection of the highest elements of life, so far deserved respect as at least affording some firm starting-point. But, for the most part, the scientific frame of mind, so far as it implies a tranquil dissecting of concrete phenomena into their dead elements, jarred upon every fibre of his nature. Political economy, which treats society as a complex piece of machinery, and the logic which resolves the universe itself into a mere heap of separable atoms, seemed to him hopelessly barren, and uninteresting to the higher mind. Mill's talk and books—which specially represented this mode of thought for him—were 'sawdustish;' for what is sawdust but the dead product of a living growth deprived of its organising principle and reduced to mere dry indigestible powder? To the poetic as to the religious nature of Carlyle, such a process was to make the whole world weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. Carlyle, therefore, must be judged as a poet, and not as a dealer in philosophic systems; as a seer or a prophet, not as a theorist or a man of calculations. And, therefore, if I were attempting any criticism of his literary merits, I should dwell upon his surpassing power in his peculiar province. Admitting that every line he wrote has the stamp of his idiosyncrasies, and consequently requires a certain congeniality of temperament in the reader, I should try to describe the strange spell which it exercises over the initiated. If you really hate the grotesque, the gloomy, the exaggerated, you are of course disqualified from enjoying Carlyle. You must take leave of what ordinarily passes even for common-sense, of all academical canons of taste, and of any weak regard for symmetry or simplicity before you enter the charmed circle. But if you can get rid of your prejudices for the nonce, you will certainly be rewarded by seeing visions such as are evoked by no other magician. The common-sense reappears in the new shape of strange vivid flashes of humour and insight casting undisputed gleams of light into many dark places; and dashing off graphic portraits with a single touch. And if you miss the serene atmosphere of calmer forms of art, it is something to feel at times as no one but Carlyle can make you feel, that each instant is the 'conflux of two eternities;' that our little lives, in his favourite Shakespearean phrase, are 'rounded with a sleep;' that history is like the short space lighted up by a flickering taper in the midst of infinite glooms and mysteries, and its greatest events brief scenes in a vast drama of conflicting forces, where the actors are passing in rapid succession—rising from and vanishing into the all-embracing darkness. And if there is something oppressive to the imagination when we stay long in this singular region, over which the same inspiration seems to be brooding which created the old Northern mythology with its grim gigantesque, semi-humorous figures, we are rewarded by the vividness of the pictures standing out against the surrounding emptiness; some little groups of human figures, who lived and moved like us in the long-past days; or of vignettes of scenery, like the Alpine sunrise in the 'Sartor Resartus,' or the sight of sleeping Haddington from the high moorland in the 'Reminiscences,' as bright and vivid for us as our own memories, and revealing unsuspected sensibilities in the writer. Though he scorned the word-painters and description-mongers, no one was a better landscape painter. It is perhaps idle to dwell upon characteristics which one either feels or cannot be persuaded into feeling. Those to whom he is on the whole repugnant may admit him to be occasionally a master of the picturesque; and sometimes endeavour to put him out of court on the strength of this formula. A mere dealer, many exclaim, in oddities and grotesques, who will sacrifice anything to produce a startling effect, whose portraits are caricatures, whose style is torn to pieces by excessive straining after emphasis, and who systematically banishes all those half-tones which are necessary to faithful portraiture in the search after incessant contrasts of light and shade.
Let us first remark in regard to this that Carlyle himself peremptorily and emphatically denied that the distinction here assumed between the poet and the philosopher could be more than superficial. The philosopher only reaches his goal so far as his analysis leads to a synthesis, or as his abstract speculations can be embodied in definite concrete vision. And the poet is a mere idler, with no substantial or permanent value in him, unless he is uttering thoughts equally susceptible of philosophical exposition. 'The hero,' he says, 'can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The poet who could merely sit on a chair and compose stanzas could never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the heroic warrior, unless he himself were an heroic warrior too.' To this doctrine—though with various logical distinctions and qualifications which seem incongruous with Carlyle's vehement dogmatic utterances—I, for one, would willingly subscribe; and I hold further that in strenuously asserting and enforcing it Carlyle was really laying down the fundamental doctrine of all sound criticism, whether of art or literature or life. Any teaching, that is, which attempts to separate the poet from the man as though his excellence were to be measured by a radically different set of tests is, to my mind, either erroneous or trifling and superficial. The point at which one is inclined to part company with this teaching is different. I do not condemn Carlyle for judging the poet as he judges the hero, for the substantial worth of the man whom it reveals to us; but I admit that his ideal man has a certain stamp of Puritanical narrowness. So, for example, there is something characteristic in his judgments not only of Coleridge, but of Lamb or Scott. He judges Lamb as the spoilt child of Cockney circles, as the Baptist in his garment of camel's hair might have judged some favourite courtier cracking jokes for the amusement of Herodias' daughter. And of Scott, though he strives to do justice to the pride of all Scotchmen, and admits Scott's merit in breathing life into the past, his real judgment is based upon the maxim that literature must have higher aims 'than that of harmlessly amusing indolent languid men.' Scott was not one who had gone through spiritual convulsions, who had 'dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and throes,' but on the whole a prosperous easy-going gentleman, who found out the art of 'writing impromptu novels to buy farms with;' and who can therefore by no means claim the entire devotion of the rigorous ascetic prophet to whom happiness is inconceivable except as the reward of victorious conflicts with the deadly enemies of the soul. To me it seems that the error in such judgments is one of omission; but the omission is certainly considerable. For Carlyle's tacit assumption seems to be that the conscience should be not only the supreme but the single faculty of the soul; that morality is not only a necessary but the sole condition of all excellence; and, therefore, that an ethical judgment is not merely implied in every æsthetic judgment, but is the sole essence and meaning of it. Our minds, according to some of his Puritan teachers, should be so exclusively set upon working out our salvation that every kind of aim not consciously directed to this ultimate end is a trifling which is closely akin to actual sin. Carlyle, accepting or unconsciously imbibing the spirit of such teaching, reserves his whole reverence for rigid and lofty natures, deserving beyond all question of reverence, but wanting in elements essential to the full development of our natures, and therefore, in the long run, to a broad morality.
This leads us to his most emphatically asserted doctrines. No one could assert more forcibly, emphatically, and frequently than Carlyle that morality or justice is the one indispensable thing; that justice means the law of God; that the sole test of the merits of any human law is its conformity to the divine law; and that, as he puts it, all history is an 'inarticulate Bible, and in a dim intricate manner reveals the divine appearances in this lower world. For God did make this world, and does for ever govern it; the loud roaring loom of time, with all its French revolutions, Jewish revelations, "weaves the vesture thou seest Him by." There is no biography of a man, much less any history or biography of a nation, but wraps in it a message out of heaven, addressed to the hearing ear and the not-hearing.' It is needless to quote particular passages. This clearly is the special doctrine of Carlyle, embodied in all his works; preached in season and (often enough) out of season; which possesses him rather than is possessed by him; the sum and substance of the message which he had to deliver to the world, and spent his life and energy in delivering with emphasis. And yet we are constantly told that Carlyle was a cynic who believed in nothing but brute force. If such a criticism came only from those who had been repelled by his style from reading his books—or again, only from the shallow and Pharisaical, who mistake any attack upon the arrangements to which they owe their comfort for an attack upon the eternal laws of the universe—it might be dismissed with contempt. And this is, indeed, all that much of the average talk about Carlyle deserves. But there is a more solid ground in the objection, which brings us in face of Carlyle's most disputable teaching, and is worth considering.
We have, in fact, to consider the principle so often ascribed to him that Might makes Right; and this may be interpreted into the immoral doctrine that force is the one thing admirable, and success the sole test of merit. Cromwell was right because he cut off Charles's head, and Charles wrong because he lost his head. Frederick's political immorality is condoned because Frederick succeeded in making Prussia great; Napoleon was right so long as he was victorious, and was condemned because he ended in St. Helena. That, as some critics suppose, was Carlyle's meaning, and they very naturally denounce it as an offensive and cynical theory.
Now in one sense Carlyle's doctrine is the very reverse of this. His theory is the opposite one, that Right makes Might. He admires Cromwell, for example, and Cromwell is the hero after his own heart, expressly on the ground that Cromwell is the perfect embodiment of the Puritan principle, and that the essence of Puritanism was to 'see God's own law made good in this world.... Eternal justice; that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven; corollaries enough will flow from that, if that be there; if that be not there, no corollary good for much will flow.' How does a doctrine apparently at least implying an unqualified belief in the absolute supremacy of right, a conviction that nothing but the rule of right can give a satisfactory basis for any human arrangement, get itself transmuted into an appearance of the opposite, of being a kind of Hobbism, deducing all morality from sheer force? Such transmutations, or apparent meetings of opposite extremes, are not uncommon, and the process might perhaps be most forcibly illustrated by a history of the old Puritans themselves. But it will be quite enough for my purpose to indicate, as briefly as may be, Carlyle's own method, which is of course guided as well by his temper as by his primary assumptions. He is predisposed in every way to take the sternest view of morality. He means by virtue, by no means an indiscriminate extension of all-comprehending benevolence, of goodwill to rogues and scoundrels, or amiable desire that everybody should have as pleasant a time of it as possible. Justice, according to him, and the most stringent and unflinching justice, is the essential basis of all morality. Love, doubtless, is the fulfilling of the law; but along with that truth you must also recognise the awful and mysterious truth, that hell itself is one product of the divine love. Love itself implies the destruction of evil and of the evil-doers. From this assumption it is not surprising if much modern philanthropy appeared to him as mere sentimentalism, a weak sympathy even for the suffering which is the divinely appointed remedy for social diseases, the mere effeminate shrinking from the surgical knife. The cardinal virtue from which all others might be inferred is not benevolence, but veracity, respect for facts and hatred of shams. This was not with Carlyle, as with some of his teachers, an abstract theorem of metaphysics, but the expression of his whole character, of that Puritanic fervour which tested all doctrine by its immediate practical influence upon the will, and which forced even his poetical imagination to spend itself not in creating images, but in realising as vividly as possible the actual facts of history.
Carlyle's application of these principles brings out a remarkable result. 'Puritanism,' he says, 'was a genuine thing, for Nature has adopted it, and it has grown and grows. I say sometimes, that everything goes by wager of battle in this world; that strength, well understood, is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed it is a right thing.' This is one form of Carlyle's essential principle, and is it not also the essential principle of Mr. Darwin's famous theory? It is an explicit assertion of the doctrine of the struggle for existence, though applied here to Knox and the Puritans instead of to the origin of species. And yet, as we may note in passing, the evolutionists are, as a fact, the most ready to condemn Carlyle's immorality, whilst Carlyle could never find words adequate to express his contempt for them. In that thorough carrying out of this principle, Carlyle is approaching that profound problem which in one shape or other haunts all philosophies: What kind of victory may we expect for right in this world? If Might and Right were strictly identical, it would seem here that we might start indifferently from either basis. 'This succeeds; therefore it is right,' would be as tenable an argument as—'This is right; therefore it will succeed.' Yet one doctrine has an edifying sound, and the other seems to be the very reverse of edifying. Moralists vie with each other in proclaiming their belief in the ultimate success of good causes, and yet indignantly deny that the goodness of a cause should be inferred from its success. We agree to applaud the prophecy, cited with applause by Carlyle himself, that Napoleon's empire would fail because founded upon injustice; but we are startled by an inference from the failure to the injustice. But why should there be so vast a difference in what seem to be equivalent modes of reasoning? Carlyle's answer would follow from the words just cited. You must, he says, 'give a thing time.' Nobody can deny the temporary prosperity of the wicked, and certainly Carlyle could not deny that injustice may flourish long before it produces the inevitable crash. 'The mills of God grind slowly, though they grind exceeding small.' And, therefore, it may make all the difference whether we make the success the premiss or the conclusion. For though, in the long run, the good causes may be trusted to succeed in time, and we may see in history the proof that they have succeeded, yet at any moment the test of success may be precarious whilst that of justice is infallible. We may distinguish the wheat from the tares before the reaper has cast one aside and preserved the other. At the moment the injustice of Napoleon's empire was manifest, though the cracks and fissures which were to cause its crumbling were still hidden from any observer.
By what signs, then, other than the ultimate test of success, can we discern the just from the unjust? That, of course, is the vital point which must decide upon the character of Carlyle's morality; and it is one which, in my opinion, he cannot be said to have answered distinctly. He gives, indeed, a test satisfactory to himself, and he enforces and applies it with superabundant energy and variety of phrase. That is right, one may say briefly, which will 'work.' The sham is hollow, and must be crushed in the tug and wrestle of the warring world. The reality survives and gathers strength. Veracity in equivalent phrase is the condition of vitality. Truth endures; the lie perishes. But in applying this or his vast vocabulary of similar phrases, we come to a difficulty. 'The largest veracity ever done in Parliament' was, he says, Sir Robert Peel's abolition of the Corn Laws. But how can you do a veracity? What is a lie?—a question, as he observes, worth asking by the 'practical English mind;' and to which he accordingly proceeds to give an answer. He insists, that is, very eloquently and vehemently, upon the inevitable results of all lying, and of all legislative and other action which proceeds upon the assumption of a falsity or an error which passes itself off for a truth. In all which I, for one, admit that there is not only truth, but truth nobly expressed and applied to the confutation of some most pestilent errors; and yet, as one must also admit, there is still an ambiguity. May it not, in fact, cover that exaltation of mere success which is so often objected to him? Some tyrannical institution—slavery, for example—lives and flourishes through long ages. Is it thereby justified? Is it not a fact, and if fact and truth are the same things, is it not a truth sanctioned by the eternal veracities and so forth, and therefore entitled to our respect? This is one more form of that fundamental problem which really perplexes Carlyle's moral teaching, and which he has at least the merit of bringing into prominence, though not of answering. In fact, we may recognise in it an ancient philosophical controversy not yet set at rest; for, since the beginning of ethical theorising, thinkers of various schools have tried in one way or other to deduce virtue from truth, and to identify all vice with error. But the reference is enough to show the difference of Carlyle's method. He might respect the metaphysician who held a doctrine so far analogous to his own; but the metaphysical method appeared to him as a mere formal logic-chopping where the essence of the teaching escaped amidst barren demonstrations of verbal identities.
The real answer is here again a new version of the old Puritan answer. The Puritan fell back upon the will of God revealed through the Bible, whose authority was manifest by the inner light. If the wicked were allowed to triumph for a time, there was no danger of being misled by their success, for they were condemned in advance by the plain fact of their renunciation of the inspired guide. For Carlyle, the 'hero' takes the place of, or rather is put side by side with, the older organs of inspiration. Every hero conveys in fact a new revelation to mankind; he conveys a divine message, not, it is true, with infallible precision, or without an admixture of human error, but still the very kernel and essence of his teaching. He may come as prophet, king, poet, or philosopher, and you may reject or accept his message at your peril. You may recognise it, as the Puritan recognised the authority of his Bible, by the spontaneous witness of your higher nature, and you will recognise it so long as you have not given yourself up to believe a lie. And if you demand some external proofs you must be referred, not to some particular signs and wonders, but to what you may, if you please, call the 'success' of the message; the fact, that is, that the hero has contributed some permanent element to the thoughts and lives of mankind, that he has revealed some enduring truth, created some permanent symbol of our highest feelings, or wrought some organic change in the very structure of society. There is a danger undoubtedly of confounding some temporary crystal palace or dazzling edifice of mere glass with an edifice founded on the rock and solid as the pyramids. The hero may be confounded with the sham, as unfortunately shams and realities are most frequently confounded in this world. But they differ for all that, and the true man recognises the difference, as the religious man knows the hypocrite from the saint. The test is indifferently the truth or the soundness of the work; they must coincide; but the test can only be applied by one who really loves the truth.
It is easy to point out the dangers of this position. It rests, after all, you may say upon the individual conviction, and lends itself too easily to that kind of dogmatism in which Carlyle indulged so freely, and which consists in asserting that any doctrine or system which he dislikes is an incarnate lie, and pronouncing that it is therefore doomed to failure. And, on the other hand, it may be equally perverted in the opposite direction by claiming a sacred character for every 'lie' not yet exploded. Carlyle, beyond all question, was a man of intense prejudices, and the claim to inspiration, even to the inspiration of our teachers, very easily passes into a deification of our own prejudices. No one was more liable to that error; but it is better worth our while to look at some other aspect of his teaching.
For we may surely accept without hesitation one application of the doctrine, which is of the first importance with Carlyle, and which he has taught so incessantly and impressively, that to him more than to any other man may be attributed the general recognition of its truth. The success of any system of thought—the permanent influence, that is, of any great man or of any great institution—must be due to the truth which it contained, or to its real value to mankind. This doctrine has become so much of a commonplace, and harmonises so fully with all modern historical methods, that we are apt to overlook the service done by Carlyle in its explicit assertion and rigorous application to facts. When he was delivering his lectures upon hero-worship, intelligent people were still in the attitude of mind represented, for example, by Gibbon's famous explanation of the success of Christianity, as due, amongst other things, to the zeal of the early believers, as if the zeal required no explanation; when, on the other side, it was thought proper to explain Mahometanism, not by the admixture of genuine truth which it contained, but as a simple imposture. Carlyle still speaks like a man advancing a disputed theory when he urges in this latter case that to explain the power of Mahomet's sword, you must explain the force which wielded the sword; and that the ingenious hypothesis of a downright cheat will by no means serve the turn. This doctrine is now generally accepted, unless by a few clever people who still cherish the wire-pulling heresy which makes history a puppet-show manipulated by ingenious scoundrels, instead of a vast co-operation of organic forces. Carlyle, however, has done more than any writer to make such barren and degrading explanations impossible for all serious thinkers. His 'Cromwell' has at least exploded once for all the simple-minded 'hypocrisy' theory, as the essay upon Johnson destroyed the ingenious doctrine that a man could write a good book simply because he was a fool. Whether his portraits are accurate or not, they are at least set before us as conceivable and consistent human beings. The prosaic historian and biographer takes the average verdict of commonplace observers: if he is a partisan, he is content with the contemporary caricatures of the party to which he belongs; if he wishes to be impartial, he strikes a rough average between opposite errors; and if he wishes to be dazzling, he calmly combines incompatible judgments. Macaulay's works, with all their merits, are a perfect gallery of such portraits—rhetorically excellent, but hopelessly flimsy in substance: of angelic Whigs and fiendish Tories, and of strange monsters like his Bacon and his Boswell, made by quietly heaping together meanness and wisdom, sense and folly, and inviting you to accept a string of paradoxes as a sober statement of fact. The truly imaginative writer has to go deeper than this. He begins where the rhetorician ends. A great work, as he instinctively sees, implies a great force. A man can only leave his mark upon history so far as he is animated, and therefore worthy to be animated, by a great idea. The secret of his nature is to be discovered by a sympathetic imagination acting by a kind of poetical induction. Gathering together all his recorded acts and utterances, the masses of recorded facts, preserved, often in hopeless confusion and misrepresentation, by his contemporaries, you must brood over them till at last you gain a clear vision of the underlying unity of character which manifests itself in these various ways. Then, at last, you may recognise the true hero, and discover unsuspected unity of purpose and strength of conviction, where the hasty judgments passed by contemporaries and those who set them upon isolated fragments of his career, make a bewildering chaos of inconsistency. The process is admirably illustrated in the study of Cromwell, and the result has the merit of being at least a possible, if not a correct, theory of a great man.
This, again, is connected with another aspect of Carlyle's teaching—as valuable, though perhaps its value is not even now as generally recognised. For the tendency of his mind is always to substitute what is sometimes called the dynamical for the merely mechanical view of history. It is a necessity for his imagination to penetrate as much to the centre instead of remaining at the circumference; to unveil the actual forces which govern the working of the superficial phenomena, instead of losing himself in the external phenomena themselves. The true condition for understanding history is to gain a clear perception of the genuine beliefs, the wants and passions which actually sway men's souls, instead of working simply at the complicated wheels and pulleys of the political machinery, or accepting the masses of idle verbiage which conceal our true thoughts from ourselves and from each other. An implicit faith in the potency of the machinery, and an equal neglect of the real driving force, was, in his view, the original sin of political theory. The constitution-mongers of the Delolme or Siéyès type, the men who fancied that government (as one of them said) was like 'a dance where everything depended on the disposition of the figures,' and nothing, therefore, on the nature of the dancers, have pretty well passed away. Carlyle saw the same vital fallacies in such nostrums as the ballot or the scheme so enthusiastically advocated by Hare and Mill. 'If of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation, how in the name of wonder will you get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of those ten men? Never by any conceivable ballot-box, nor by all the machinery in Bromwicham or out of it, will you attain such a result.' Whether Carlyle was right or wrong in the particular application I do not presume to say. Such a change as the ballot may perhaps imply more than a mere change of machinery. But I certainly cannot doubt that he is right in the essence of his contention: that a perception of the difference between the merely mechanical details and the vital forces of a society is essential to any sound political theorising; and that half our pet schemes of reform fail just from this cause, that they expect to change the essence by modifying the surface, and are therefore equivalent to plans for obtaining mechanical results without expending energy.
To have asserted these principles so emphatically is one of Carlyle's greatest merits; and if he obtained emphasis at the cost of exaggeration, overstatement, grotesque straining of language and imagery, and much substantial error as to facts, I can only say that the service remains, and is inestimable. But there is a less pleasing qualification to be made. The objection to the ballot as a purely mechanical arrangement is combined, as we have just seen, with the objection founded upon the prevalence of fools. That stinging phrase, 'mostly fools,' has stuck in our throats. The prophet who tells us that we are wicked may be popular—perhaps, because our consciences are on his side; but the prophet who calls us fools is likely to provoke our wrath. I, at least, never met a man who relished that imputation, even if he admitted it to contain a grain of truth. But, palatable or not, it is clearly fundamental with Carlyle. The world is formed of 'dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led;' the great men are the 'guides of the dull host, who follow them as by an irrevocable decree.' They are the heroes to whom alone are granted real powers of vision and command; realities amongst shams, and knowers amongst vague feelers after knowledge. We need not ask how this theory was reached; whether it is the spontaneous sentiment of a proud and melancholy character, or really a fair estimate of the facts; or, again, a deduction from the 'hero' doctrine. With that doctrine, at any rate, it naturally coincides. To exalt the stature of your hero, you must depress his fellows. If Gulliver is to be a giant, he must go to Lilliput. There is, however, a gap in the argument which is characteristically neglected by Carlyle. He would never have fairly accepted the doctrine—whose was it?—that, though a man may be wiser than anybody there is something wiser than he—namely, everybody. The omission is critical, and has many consequences. For one may fully admit Carlyle's estimate: one may hold the difference between a Shakespeare and an average contributor to the poet's corner of a newspaper, or between a born leader of men, a Cromwell and a Chatham, and the enormous majority of his followers, as something hardly expressible in words: one may admit that the history of thought or society reveals the more clearly, the more closely it is studied, the height to which the chosen few tower above the average; one may even diminish the percentage of the wise from a tenth to a hundredth or a thousandth: and yet one may hold to the superior wisdom of the mass. No ballot-box, it is true, will make the folly of the nine equal to the wisdom of the one. Or it can tend that way only if the foolish majority have some sense of the need of superior guidance. But the ignorance and folly of mankind, their incapacity for forming any trustworthy judgment on any given point, may also be consistent with a capacity for groping after truth, and they have the advantage of trying experiments on a large scale. The fact that a creed commends itself to the instincts of many men in many ages is a better proof—Carlyle himself being the judge—that it contains some truth than the isolated judgment of the most clearsighted philosopher. The fact that an institution actually makes men happy and calls forth their loyalty is a more forcible argument in its favour than the opinion of the most experienced statesman. And, therefore, the fact that any society is chiefly made up of fools is quite consistent with the belief that it is collectively the organ through which truth gradually manifests itself and wins a wider recognition. Securus judicat orbis may be a true maxim if we interpret it to mean that the world decides—not as the experimenter but as the experiment. Carlyle systematically overlooks this blind semi-conscious process of co-operation upon which the 'hero' is really as dependent as the dull flock which he leads. History, as he is fond of saying, is the essence of innumerable biographies. To find the essence of the biographies, again, he goes to the essential biographies; that is, to the biographies of the men who give the impulse, not of those who passively submit to the impulse. This apotheosis of the individual is dictated by his imaginative idiosyncrasy, as much as by his theory of history. He must have the picturesque concrete fact; the living hero to be the incarnation of the idea; and, accordingly, history in his page is like a gigantic panorama in which the painter sacrifices everything to obtain the strongest contrasts, and makes his lights stand out against vast breadths of unspeakable gloom. The hero is thus made to sum up the whole effectual force, and all that is done by the Greeks is attributed to the arm of Achilles. Some awkward results follow. Frederick is a hero who has obvious moral defects, and readers are startled by Carlyle's worship of such an idol. Yet it follows from the assumptions. For Frederick, in Carlyle's theory, means the development of the German nation. That the growth of the German influence in Europe was a phenomenon which naturally and rightfully excited Carlyle's strongest enthusiasm requires no demonstration. If the credit of that, as of every other great achievement, must be given to some solitary hero, Frederick doubtless has the best claim to the honour. We may no doubt say that Frederick, in spite of this, was selfish and cynical, and may confine our praises to allowing his possession of perspicacity enough to see the capabilities of his position. A great man may do an involuntary service to mankind, because his genius inclines him to range himself on the side of the strongest forces, and therefore of what we vaguely call progress. But the hero-worshipper naturally regards him as not merely an instrument, but the conscious and efficient cause of the progress itself.
Hence, too, the apparent immorality which some people discern in Carlyle's denunciations of 'red tape' formulas, and the ordinary conventions of society. Undoubtedly, such fetters must snap like packthread when opposed to the deeper forces which govern the growth of nations. No set of engagements on paper will keep a nation on its legs if it is rotten at the core, or maintain a balance of power between forces which are daily growing unequal. It is idle to suppose that any contract could bind, or otherwise can preserve, the vitality of effete institutions. And hence arise a good many puzzling questions for political casuistry. It is hard to say at what precise point it becomes necessary to snap the bonds, and when the necessity of change makes revolution, with all its mischiefs, preferable to stagnation. The hero-worshipper who regards his idol as the supreme moving force, has to make him also the infallible judge in such matter. He stands above—not the ultimate rules of morality, but—the whole system of regulations and compromises by which men must govern themselves in normal times—and decides when they must be suspended in the name of the higher law. The only appeal from his decision is the appeal to facts. If the apparent hero be really self-seeking and vulgarly ambitious, he and his empire will be crushed like Napoleon's. If, on the whole, his decision be right, as inspired from above, he will lay the foundations of a new order on an unshakable basis. And, therefore, Carlyle is naturally attracted to the revolutionary periods, when the underlying forces come to the surface; when the foundations of the great deep are broken up, all conventions summarily swept aside, and the direct as well as the ultimate attention is to the great principles of its social life. Therefore he sympathises with Mirabeau, who had 'swallowed all formulas,' and still more with Cromwell, whose purpose, in his view, was to make the laws of England a direct application of the laws of God. Puritan and Jacobin are equally impatient for the instantaneous advent of the millennium, and so far attract equally the man who shares their hatred of compromise and temporising with the world.
Here we come to the final problem. Cromwell's Parliament, he says, failed in their attempt to realise their 'noble, and surely necessary, attempt.' Nay, they 'could not but fail;' they had 'the sluggishness, the slavish half-and-halfness, the greediness, the cowardice, and general fatuity and falsity of some ten million men against it—alas! the whole world and what we call the Devil and all his angels against it!' This is the true revolutionary doctrine. The fact that a reform would only succeed fully if men were angels is with the ordinary Conservative a reason for not reforming at all; and with your genuine fanatic a reason not for declining the impracticable, but for denouncing the facts. We have, however, to ask how it fits in with any such theory of progress as was possible for Carlyle. For some such theory must be held by anyone who makes the victory of truth and justice over shams and falsehoods a corner-stone of his system. It has been asked, in fact, whether there is not a gross inconsistency here. If Cromwell's success proved him to be a hero, did not the Restoration upset the proof? The answer, frequently and emphatically given by Carlyle, as in the lecture on the hero as king, is an obvious one. Cromwell represents an intermediate stage between Luther and the French Revolution. Luther told the Pope that he was a 'chimera;' and the French gave the same piece of information to other 'chimeras.' The whole process is a revolt against certain gigantic shams, and the success very inadequately measured by any special incident in the struggle. The French Revolution, with all its horrors, was a 'return to truth,' though, as it were, to a truth 'clad in hellfire:' and its advent should be hailed as 'shipwrecked mariners might hail the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless seas and waves.' And throughout this vast revolutionary process, our hope rests upon the 'certainty of heroes being sent us;' and that certainty 'shines like a polestar, through murk dustclouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.'
It is well that we have a 'certainty' of the coming hero; for the essay seems to show the weakness of all excessive reliance upon individuals. Cromwell's life, as he tells us emphatically, was the life of the Commonwealth, and Cromwell's life was at the mercy of a 'stray bullet.' Where then is a certainty of progress in a world thus dependent upon solitary heroes, in a wilderness of fools, liable to be snuffed out at a moment's notice? So far as certainty means a scientific conviction resting on the observation of facts, we, of course, cannot have it. It is a certainty which follows from our belief in the overruling power which will send heroes when there is work for heroes to do. And Carlyle can at times, especially in his earlier writings, declare his faith in such a progress with full conviction. 'The English Whig,' says Herr Teufelsdröckh, 'has, in the second generation, become an English Radical, who, in the third, it is to be hoped, will become an English rebuilder. Find mankind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower; the phœnix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling earth with her music; or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral swansong immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer.' And the phrase, as I think, gives the theory which in fact is more or less explicitly contained in all Carlyle's writings.
It is plain, however, that progress, so understood, is a progress consistent with long periods of the reverse of progress. It implies an alternation of periods of reconstruction and vital energy with others of decay and degeneration. And in this I do not know that Carlyle differs from other philosophers. Few people are sanguine enough to hold that every generation improves upon the preceding. But the modern believer in progress undoubtedly believes that this actual generation is better than the last, and that the next will be better still; and is very apt to impute bad motives to anyone who differs from him. Here, of course, he must come into flat opposition to Carlyle. For Carlyle, to put it briefly, regarded the present state of things as analogous to that of the Lower Empire; a time of dissolution of old bonds and of a general ferment which was destroying the very tissues of society. So far he agrees, of course, with many Conservatives; but he differs from them in regarding the process as necessary, and even ultimately beneficial. The disease is one which must run its course; the best hope is that it may run it quickly; the attempt to suppress the symptoms and to regain health by making time run backwards is simply chimerical. Thus he was in the painful position of one who sees a destructive process going on of which he recognises the necessity whilst all the immediate results are bad.
To the ardent believer in progress such a state of mind is, of course, repulsive. It implies misanthropy, cynicism, and disbelief in mankind. Nor can anybody deny that Carlyle's gloomy and dyspeptic constitution palpably biassed his view of his contemporaries as well as of their theories. The 'mostly fools' expresses a deeply-rooted feeling, and we might add 'mostly bores,' and to a great extent humbugs. And this, of course, implies a very low estimate of the powers of unheroic mankind, and therefore of their rights. If most men are fools, their right to do as they please is a right to knock their heads against stone walls. Carlyle perhaps overlooked the fact that even that process may be useful training for fools. But even here he asserted a doctrine wrongly applied rather than false in principle. It shocks one to find an open advocacy of slavery for black Quashee. But we must admit, and admit for the reasons given by Carlyle, that even slavery may be better than sheer anarchy and barbarism; that, historically speaking, the system of slavery represents a necessary stage in civilisation; and therefore that the simple abolition of slavery—a recognition of unconditional 'right' without reference to the possession of the instincts necessary for higher kinds of society—might be disguised cruelty. The error was in the hasty assumption that his Quashee was, in fact, in this degraded state; and the haste to accept this disheartening belief was but too characteristic. That liberty might mean barbarism was true; that it actually did mean it in certain given cases was a rash assumption too much in harmony with his ordinary aversion to the theorists of his time.
This applies to all Carlyle's preachings about contemporary politics; the weakest of his writings are those in which his rash dogmatism, coloured by his gloomy temperament, was employed upon unfamiliar topics. But the pith and essence of them all is the intense conviction that the one critical point for modern statesmen is the creation of a healthy substratum to the social structure. That the lives of the great masses are squalid, miserable, and vicious, and must be elevated by the spread of honesty, justice, and the unflinching extirpation of corrupt elements, the substitution of rigorous rulers for idle professors of official pedantry, busy about everything but the essential—that is the sum and substance of the teaching. That he attributes too much to the legislative power, and has too little belief in the capacities of the average man, may be true enough. But this one thing must be said in conclusion. The bitterness, the gloom, even the apparent brutality, is a proof of the strength of his sympathies. He is savage with the physician because he is appalled at the virulence of the disease and the inadequacy of the remedy. He may shriek 'quack' too hastily, and be too ready to give over the patient as desperate. And yet I am frequently struck by a contrast. I meet a good friend who holds up his hands at Carlyle's ferocity. We talk, and I find that he holds that in politics we are all going to sheer destruction or 'shooting Niagara'; that the miserable Radicals are sapping all public spirit; that faith is being undermined by malcontents and atheists; that the merchant has become a gambler, and the tradesman a common cheat; that the 'British workman' is a phrase which may be used with the certainty of provoking a sneer; and, briefly, that there is not a class in the country which is not on the highroad to decay, or an institution beyond the reach of corruption. And yet my friend sits quietly down and enjoys his dinner as heartily as if he were expecting the millennium. What shall I say? That he does not believe what he says, or that his digestive apparatus was in most enviable order? I know not; but certainly Carlyle was not capable of this. He took things too terribly in earnest. When workmen scamped the alterations in his house, or the railway puffed its smoke into his face, he saw visible symbols of modern degeneracy, and thought painfully of the old honest wholesome life in Annandale—of steady God-fearing farmers and self-respecting workmen. All that swept away by progress and 'prosperity beyond example'! That was his reflection; perhaps it was very weak, as certainly it was very unpleasant to worry himself about what he could not help, and sprang, let us say, all from a defective digestion. And yet, though I cannot think without pity of the man of genius who felt so keenly and thought so gloomily of the evils around us, I feel infinitely more respect for his frame of mind than for that of the man who, sharing, verbally at least, this opinion, can let it calmly lie in his mind without the least danger to his personal comfort.