THOMAS CARLYLE.
FOR many years before his death last Saturday, Mr. Carlyle had been to England what his great hero, Goethe, long was to Germany,—the aged seer whose personal judgments on men and things wore everywhere sought after, and eagerly chronicled and retailed. Yet it was hardly for the same reason. In Goothe's old age, the ripeness of his critical judgment, and the catholicity, not to say even the facility, of his literary taste, induced a sort of confidence that he would judge calmly and judge genially anything, whether in life or literature, that was not extravagant. Mr. Carlyle was resorted to for a very different reason. The Chelsea shrine, as was well known, gave out only one sort of oracles, and that sort was graphic and humorous denunciation of all conventional falsehoods and pretentiousness, or what was presumed to be conventional falsehood and pretentiousness ;—and consequently recourse was had to that shrine only when some trenchant saying was wanted that might help in the sweeping-away of some new formula of the senti- mentalists or of the panegyrists of worn-out symbols, His almost extravagant admiration for Goethe notwithstanding, Carlyle in his greatness was ever more disposed to sympathise with the great organs of destructive, than with those of constructive force. He sympathised with Cromwell for what he destroyed, with Frederick in great measure for what he destroyed, with Mirabeau and Danton for what they destroyed, and even with Goethe in large degree for the negative tendencies of his thought and criticism. With the constructive tendencies of the past he could often deeply sympathise,—as he showed in "Past and Present,"—but with those of the present, hardly ever. If we were asked what his genius did for English thought and literature, wo should say that it did chiefly the work of a sort of spiritual volcano,—showed us the perennial fire subversive of worn-out creeds which lies concealed in vast stores beneath the surface of society, and the thinness of the crust which alone separates us from that pit of Tophet, as he would himself have called it. And yet, in spite of himself, be always strove to sympathise with positive work. His teaching was incessant that the reconstruction of society was a far greater work than the destruction of the worn-out shell which usually preceded it,—only, unfortunately, in his own time, there was hardly any species of reconstructive effort which could gain his acquiescence, much less his approval. He despised all the more positive political and philanthropic tendencies of his time ; felt little interest in scientific discoveries ; con- cerned himself not at all about its art ; scorned its economical teaching ; and rejected the modern religious instructors with even more emphatic contumely than the " dreary professors of a dismal science." To Carlyle, the world was out of joint, and his only receipt for setting it right,—the restoration of "the beneficent whip" for its idlers, rogues, and vagabonds,—was never seriously listened to by thinking men. Consequently, all that he achieved was achieved in the world of thought and imagination. He did succeed in making men realise, as they never realised before, into what a fermenting chaos of passion human society is constantly in danger of dissolving, when either injustice or insincerity,—what Mr. Carlyle called a "sham,"—is in the ascendant, and rules by virtue of mere convention or habit. He did succeed in making men realise the wonderful paradox of all social order and discipline, in depict- ing to us the weakness and the hysterical character of much that is called patriotic and humane impulse, in making us see that justice and strength and a certain heroism of courage are all necessary for the original organisation of a stable society ; and that much sensibility in the body corporate, so far from making this organisation easier, is apt to make it both more difficult and more unstable. Carlyle's greatest power was the wonderful imaginative genius which enabled him to lift the veil from the strange mixture of con- vention, passion, need, want, capacity, and incompetence called human society, and make us understand by what a thread order
often hangs, and how rare is the sort of genius to restore it when once it goes to pieces. No one ever performed this great service for the world as Carlyle has performed it in almost all his works,—notably in " The French Revolution " and " Sartor Resartus," and this alone is enough to entitle him to a very high place among the Immortals of literature.
And he had all the gifts for this great task,—especially that marvellous insight into the social power of symbols which made him always maintain that fantasy was the organ of divinity.
He has often been called a prophet, and though we have too little sympathy with his personal conception of good and evil so to class him,—though religious seer as he was, ho was in no sense Christ-like,—he certainly had to the full the prophet's in- sight into the power of parable and type, and the prophet's eye for the forces which move society, and inspire multitudes with contagiOus enthusiasm, whether for good or ill. He fell short of a prophet in this, that his main interest, after all, was rather in the graphic and picturesque interpretation of social phenomena, than in any overwhelming desire to change them for the bettor, warmly as that desire was often expressed, and sin- cerely, no doubt, as it was entertained. Still, Carlyle's main literary motive-power was not a moral passion, but a humorous wonder. He was always taking to pieces, in his own mind's eye, the marvellous structure of human society, and bewildering himself with the problem of how it could be put together again. Even in studying personal character,
what he cared for principally was this. For men who could
not sway the great spiritual tides of human loyalty and trust, he had—with the curious exception of Goethe—no very real reverence. His true heroes were all men who could make multi- tudes follow them as the moon makes the sea follow her,—either by spiritual magnetism, or by trust, or by genuine practical capacity. To him, imagination was the true organ of divinity, because, as he saw at a glance, it was by the imagination that men are most easily both governed and beguiled. His story of the French Revolution is a series of studies in the way men are beguiled and governed by their imagination, and no more wonderful book of its kind has ever been written in this world, though we should be sorry to have to estimate accurately how much of his picture is true vision, and how much the misleading guesswork of a highly-imaginative dreamer.
It is in some respects curious that Carlyle has connected his name so effectually as he has done with the denunciation of Shams. For we are far from thinking that the passionate love of truth in its simplicity was at all his chief characteristic. In the first place, his style is too self-conscious for that of sheer, self-forgetting love of truth. No man of first-rate simplicity —and first-rate simplicity is, we imagine, one of the conditions of a first-rate love of truth,—would express common-place ideas in so roundabout a fashion as he ; would say, for instance, in recommending Emerson to the reading public, "The words of such a man,—what words he thinks fit to speak,—are worth attending to ;" or would describe a kind and gracious woman as " a gentle, excellent, female soul," as he does in his " Life of Sterling." There is a straining for effect in the details of Carlyle's style which is not the characteristic of an overpowering and per- fectly simple love of truth. Nor was that the ruling intellectual principle of Carlyle's mind. What he meant by hatred of shams, exposure of unveracities, defiance to the " Everlasting No," affirmation of the " Everlasting Yea," and the like, was not so much the love of truth, as the love of divine force,—the love
of that which had genuine strength and effective character in it, the denunciation of imbecilities, the scorn for the dwindled life of mere conventionality or precedent, the contempt for extinct fig- ments, not so much because they were figments, as because they were extinct and would no longer bear the strain put upon them by human passion. You can see this in the scorn which Car- lyle pours upon " thin" men,—his meagre reverence for " thin- lipped, constitutional Hampden," for instance, and his contempt for such men as the Edgeworth described in John Sterling's life, whom lie more than despises, not for the least grain of insincerity, but for deficiency in quantity of nature, and especially such nature as moves society. Greatly as Carlyle
despised " cant," he seems to have meant by cant not so much principles which a man does not personally accept, but repeats by i.ote ou the authority of others, as
principles which have ceased, in his estimation, to exert a living influence ou society, whether heartily accepted by the individual or not. Thus, in his life of Sterling, ho indulges in long pages of vituperation against Sterling for taking to the Church,—not that he believed Sterling to be insincere in doing so, but because what Carlyle called the "Hebrew old
clothes" were to his mind worn out, and he would not admit that any one of lucid mind could honestly fail to see that so it was.
Carlyle, in short, has been the interpreter to his country, not so much of the "veracities " or "verities " of life, as of the moral and social spells and symbols which, for evil or for good, have exer- cised a great imaginative influence over the social organism of large bodies of men, and either awed them into sober and ear- nest work, or stimulated them into delirious and anarchic excite- ment. He has been the greatest painter who ever lived, of the interior life of man, especially of such life as spreads to the multitude, not perhaps exactly as it really is, but rather as it represented itself to one who looked upon it as the symbol of some infinite mind, of which it embodied a temporary phase. We doubt if Carlyle ever really interpreted any human being's career,—Cromwell's, or Frederick's, or Coleridge's,—as justly and fully as many men of less genius might have inter- preted it. For this was not, after all, his chief interest. His interest seems to us always to have been in figuring the human mind as representing some flying colour or type of the Infinite Mind at work behind the Universe, and so presenting this idea as to make it palpable to his fellow-men. He told Sterling he did not mind whether he talked "pantheism or pottheism," —a mild joke which he so frequently repeated as to indicate that he rather overrated its excellence,—so long as it was true ; and he meant, we fancy, by being true, not so much corre- sponding to fact, as expressing adequately the constant effort of his own great imagination to see the finite in some graphic relation to the infinite. Perhaps the central thought of his life was in this passage from " Sartor Resartus,"— " What is man himself, but a symbol of God P Is not all that he does symbolical,—a revelation to sense of the mystic God- given power that is in him, a gospel of freedom, which he, the Messiaa of Nature,' preaches, as he can, by act and word ? Not a but he builds but is the visible embodiment of a thought, but leaves visible record of invisible things, but is, in the tran- scendental sense, symbolical as well as real." Carlyle was far the greatest interpreter our literature has ever had of the in- finite forces working through society, of that vast, dim back- ground of social beliefs, unbeliefs, enthusiasms, sentimentalities, superstitions, hopes, fears, and trusts, which go to make up either the strong cement, or the destructive lava-stream, of national life, and to image forth some of the genuine features of the retributive providence of history.
Previous page
