Part 23

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.