Part 22

It would be tempting here to draw the obvious parallel between Mill and Carlyle, which must just now be in everyone's mind; for certainly whatever may be said of the 'Reminiscences' just published, they contain one of the most remarkable self-revelations ever given to the world, and the relations of the two men to vigorous fathers and passionately adored wives have singular points of contrast and resemblance. But I must be content to close this ramble through some famous autobiographies by touching upon one which often seems to me to be the most delightful of its class. I know, as everybody knows, what may be said against Gibbon: against his want of high enthusiasm, his deficient sympathy with the great causes and their heroes, the provoking self-sufficiency and apparent cold-bloodedness of the fat composed little man. And yet, when reading his autobiography and contrasting it with some of those we have considered, I find myself constantly led to a conclusion not quite in accordance with the proper rules of morality. After all, one cannot help asking, did not Gibbon succeed in solving the problem of life more satisfactorily than almost anybody one knows? Other autobiographies are for the most part records of hard struggles with fate, plaintive lamentations over the inability to obtain any solid satisfaction out of life, appeals of disappointed vanity to the judgment of an indifferent posterity, vain-glorious braggings over successes which should rather have been the cause of shame, weak regrets for the vanishing pleasures of youth and hopeless attempts to make the might-have-been pass muster with the actual achievement. The more a man prides himself upon his successes, the more we feel how good a case a rival's advocate could make on the other side: and when he laments over his failures, the more we are inclined to say that after all it served him right. But when in imagination we take that famous turn with Gibbon upon that terrace at Lausanne beneath the covered walk of acacias, gaze upon the serene moon and the silent lake, and hear him soliloquise upon the conclusion of the 'Decline and Fall,' we feel that we are in presence of a man who has a right to his complacency. He has not aimed, perhaps, at the highest mark, but he has hit the bull's-eye. Given his conception of life, he has done his task to perfection. With singular felicity, he has come at the exact moment and found the exact task to give full play to his powers. Nobody had yet laid the keystone in the great arch of history; and he laid it so well that his work can never be superseded. Somebody defines a life to be _une pensée de jeunesse exécutée par l'âge mûr_. It was Gibbon's singular good fortune to illustrate that saying as few men have done. Though his plan ripened slowly and with all deliberation, he acted as if he had foreseen the end from the beginning. If he had been told in his boyhood, You shall live so long a life, with such and such means at your disposal, he could hardly have laid out his life differently. To mistake neither one's powers nor one's opportunities is a felicity which happens to few; and Gibbon had the additional good fortune that even his distractions seem to have been useful. The interruption to his Oxford education made him a cosmopolitan; his service with the volunteers helped him to be a military historian; and even his parliamentary career, which threatened to absorb him, only gave to the student the tone of a practical politician. It seems as though everything had been expressly combined to make the best of him.

What more could be desired by a man of Gibbon's temperament? Undoubtedly to be a man of Gibbon's temperament is to have a moderate capacity for certain forms of happiness. In the lives of most great men the history of a conversion is a record of heart-rending struggle, ending in hard-won peace. Gibbon merely changed his religion as he changed his opinion upon some antiquarian controversy; it is a question as to the weight of historical evidence, like the question about the sixth Æneid, or a dispute about the genealogy of the house of Brunswick. Whatever pangs and raptures may require religious susceptibility were clearly not within his range of feeling. And in another great department of feeling we need not inquire into the character of the author of the inimitable sentence, 'I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.' One is tempted to put it beside a remark which he makes on another occasion, 'I yielded to the authority of a parent, and complied, like a pious son, with the wish of my own heart.' Perhaps the heart which sanctioned his filial obedience in the latter case was not so opposed to it in the other as he would have us believe. It is better worth noting, however, that, in spite of the very tepid disposition illustrated by these familiar passages, Gibbon has affections as warm as are compatible with thorough comfort. He was not a passionate lover; and we cannot say, for he was not tried, that his friendship was of an heroic strain; but he had a very good supply of such affections as are wanted for the ordinary wear and tear of life—to provide a man with enough interests and sympathies to make society pleasant, and his family life agreeable. Nay, he seems to have been really generous and considerate beyond the ordinary pitch, and to have been a faithful friend, and excellent in some very delicate relationships. For a statesman, a religious teacher, or a poet, much stronger equipment in this direction might be desirable. But Gibbon had warmth enough to keep up a pleasant fireside, if not enough to fire the hearts of a nation. He clearly had enough passion for his historical vocation. A more passionate and imaginative person would hardly have written it at all. It requires a certain moderation of character to be satisfied with a history instead of a wife, and Gibbon was so great an historian because he could accept such a substitute. No one capable of being a partisan could have preserved that stately march and equable development of the vast drama of human affairs which gives a monumental dignity to his great book. Even if you do not want to write another 'Decline and Fall,' is not such a disposition the most enviable of gifts? If such a life has less vivid passages, is there not something fascinating about that calm, harmonious existence, disturbed by no spasmodic storms, and yet devoted to one achievement grand enough to extort admiration even from the least sympathetic? Surely it is a happy mean; enough genius to be in the front rank, if not in the highest class, and yet that kind of genius which has no affinity to madness or disease, and virtue enough to keep up to the respectable level which justifies a comfortable self-complacency without suggesting any awkward deviations in the direction of martyrdom. That is surely the kind of composition which a man might desire if he were to calculate what character would give him the best chance of extracting the greatest possible amount of enjoyment out of life. Luckily for the world, if not for its heroes, men's characters cannot be fixed by such calculations; and a certain number of perverse people are even glad to possess vehement emotions and restless intellects, however conscious that the fiery soul will wear out the pigmy body. We try to persuade ourselves that they are not only choosing the noblest part, but acting most wisely for their own interests. It may be so; for the problem is a complex one. But it has not yet been proved that a man can always make the best of both worlds, and that the sacrifices imposed by virtue are always repaid in this life. Certainly it seems doubtful, when we have studied the self-written records of remarkable men, whether experience will confirm that pleasant theory; whether it is not more probable that for simple employment it is not best to have one's nature pitched in a key below the highest. Most of us would make a very fair compromise if we should abandon our loftier claims on condition of being no worse than Gibbon.

_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.