Chapter 8

VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

The world of letters and of ethics has hardly yet settled whether much of the teaching of the Sage of Chelsea should be the subject of praise or blame.

In the advocacy of fine principles of conduct set forth for us in language of surpassing eloquence and earnest conviction in many a page of "Sartor Resartus," and scattered through innumerable pamphlets, Carlyle commands the fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good; while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force, however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with mendacity, are calculated as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the world as the austere Christian.

And this confusion in the estimate of Carlyle and of his teaching suffers an aggravation from the manifest malice of the biography of him perpetrated by his friend James Anthony Froude. A man who is entrusted with the task of writing the life of a great man who was also his friend need not adopt the language of continuous panegyric, but to throw a brilliant illumination upon the man's smaller domestic rugosities which even the weakest charity would conceal and the feeblest generosity would forget is a singularly spiteful betrayal.

When something was said to Carlyle about the likelihood of the Dean of Westminster recognising his fame as justifying his interment in the Abbey, the rugged old man exclaimed, "Deliver me from that body-snatcher." It would have been more to the purpose if he had been delivered from his intimate friend as his biographer!

That Carlyle detested vivisection, however, must ever remain a great tribute both to him and to our cause. Many circumstances of the man and his teaching might have led the world to anticipate that he would very likely be found indifferent on the subject. His earnest adhesion to our principles leaves those who politely call us old women of both sexes in a foolish case, for nothing could be more divertingly absurd than so to classify Carlyle.

I think Froude forgot to mention Carlyle's stern condemnation of vivisection in his biography, which is more remarkable inasmuch as Froude himself was a firm and outspoken supporter of our cause.

Whether we can faithfully take to heart and follow all the teaching of this "old Man eloquent" will long remain a subject of debate, but no one can rise from his works without recognising a moral grandeur in him that far out-tops the very human flaws that may even serve to make him more penetrative to our own imperfect hearts.

There seems to be a law that compels all the truly great men of letters, from Shakespeare and Johnson down to our own day, to abhor the torture of animals for our supposed benefit, and to that law Thomas Carlyle starkly adhered.