8 APRIL 1882, Page 10

PROPHETIC MISANTHROPY.

MR. FROUDE, as we have elsewhere shown, makes no sort of attempt to disguise, even if he does not give almost artificial emphasis to, the atrabiliousness of Carlyle's attitude towards human life. Indeed, Mr. Froude remarks with a sort of pride that probably Isaiah himself was not a very pleasant or accommodating companion, and intimates that in this respect prophets who denounce the shortcomings of their countrymen are apt to be very much alike. There is no comment on Carlyle to which his biographer refers oftener than his mother's, that Carlyle was " gey ill to live with,"—and this peculiarity ob- viously strikes Mr. Fronde as a most interesting personal fea- ture, of which an honest biographer can hardly make too much. But if the prophetic faculty is supposed to include the power of really spurring man on to higher life and work, we doubt very much whether it be consistent with a nature of such unmixed aggressiveness as Carlyle's. Whether Isaiah was " gey ill to live with" or not, we do not know. We do know that not one of his great denunciations of the hollowness and self-sufficiency of the Jews of his time was unaccompanied by passages of sublime and heart-stirring encouragement, in which the strength of the Almighty arm to reach and bless his people, and his unfailing promise to uphold and strengthen those of them who should cling to him, are poured out in speech that is less like mere words of any human tongue, than the breakers of the eternal love itself, as they touch and shatter themselves on "this bank and shoal of time." For ourselves, we had, we con- fess, always thought that this was part and parcel of the fans- tion of the prophet,—that scathe and burn away the evil in man as he might, he must always have the power, and prove the power, to renew the fountains of that life which is pure, at least as effectually as to apply the scorching fire to that life which is impure. Carlyle appears to have failed utterly in this. For though his misanthropy is closely allied with prophetic wrath, though it is not hatred of that which is good in man, but of that which is petty and poor in man, still it is hatred of what is petty and poor even more than of what is evil in man, and it is wholly unaccompanied with vivifying and restor- ing life. He could say, doubtless, with Isaiah, "Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth ; they are a trouble unto me ; I am weary to bear them." But Carlyle hardly ever goes on to say anything so humble as, "Cease to do evil, learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow." Still less does he ever pro- ceed from humble moral precepts to the renewal of the living spiritual forces. He never announces to those whom he scourges that "the people who walked in darkness had seen a great light, and that they that dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death, on them has the light shined." He had no name to proclaim, that was called "wonderful counsellor, the mighty God, the ever- lasting Father, the Prince of Peace," no "hiding-place from the tempest," no "shadow of a great rock in a weary land" to reveal to his hearers. His words are scorpions to what is poor and shallow in man, even more than to what is evil. He hates human pettiness and blindness, even more than he hates human selfishness and sin. He can dwell with a sort of satisfaction on any great human power like Mirabeau or Danton, or even Frederick, in spite of their infidelities to the highest light within them. But he cannot see the littleness and the superficiality of the world, its vanities and its follies, its weak devices for forgetting it- self, its conventional beliefs in formulas, its tricks of self-decep- tion, without a rage and fury which almost take him out of himself. And yet these qualities are by no means the evidence of what is worst in man,—they are, in fact, inseparable from his short sight and small store of feeling, are essential parts of that finite nature which religion is given us to deepen and strengthen, but by no means essential parts of that evil in us which conscience is given us to condemn, and to make us repent of in sackcloth and ashes. Carlyle's mis- anthropy seems to us to fall short of anything that can pro- perly be called prophetic misanthropy, doubly,—first, in not , being directed straight to the true evil, the moral unfaith- fulness at the root of what is most disheartening ; next, in not being combined with any of that genuine love for man, in spite of all his weakness, nay, in consequence of all his weakness, which alone has power to cast out that weak- ness, and to make him conscious of the mighty stores of strength to which, if he will, he may yet have access. Intellectually Carlyle despised Irving, but Irving knew the secret of sapping the vanities of man far better than Carlyle.

Carlyle once frankly admitted that there was "a dark humour" in him, over the working of which he had very little or no control, and which was totally distinct from the miseries of blue-devils or the fretfulness due to ill-health. We believe that it was true self-knowledge which compelled this declara- tion. We can imagine no other explanation of the painfully idle fury with which Carlyle raged against the pettinesses, the superficialities, and the fine mesh of necessities which govern human circumstance—nay, generally raged against them without touching any of those higher keys by which he might at least have stirred some deeper life for a season. He , could not have believed that he would make politics more fruit- ful by raving against constitutional rules, habits, and conven- tions, any more than he could have believed that he would make social converse richer by raving against empty fashion and xsthetic teas. But "the dark humour" never suffered him to remit his useless and savage diatribes against these formulas of "liberty," .against "fashion," against the unhappy con- viviality of custom, against shallow and false art, but acted upon him as a higher Spirit acted on St. Paul when he and his companions "essayed to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit suffered them not." Men attaching real importance to consti- tutional formulas, men prizing the liberty to do and talk foolishly, as if it were the most sacred of privileges ; men insisting on going wrong by prescription rather than on going right without rule, men whose enjoyments were superficial, whose life was flippant, whose impression of themselves was unreal, and perhaps affected,—such men did not fill Carlyle with the desire to save them, and redeem them from their mis- taken formalism and their silly affectations, but with a vehement passion for rooting them out of the earth. Carlyle seems to have hated mankind, himself included, because God had not made man more Godlike. His desire was to purge the earth of ' its weaklings,—aud he accounted amongst weaklings many who knew far better than himself what the proper and normal strength of the smaller and more habitual elements in our nature really is,—not to lift the weaklings into a life of comparative strength. Of course, Carlyle hated nothing that was really grand in man ; but then there is so little in man that can be called really grand, if you look carefully for the alloy, as he always did ; and he hated what was feeble, even though it were as much part of human nature as the free-will itself, and hated it all the more be- cause it is ineradicable ; indeed, he worked himself into a fever of fury at the very fibres of our nature itself, even though the golden threads which he most valued could only have been woven into it by the help of those commoner fibres which he so much disdained. It was in very great degree finite man himself, and not even the degradation of our petty limitations, that Carlyle felt himself I bound to rail at. For example, it is eminently human to think more even of an accustomed and long-sanctioned method than of the main object of that method, and yet nothing excited Carlyle's ire so frequently as this tendency in man. It is emi- nently human for men to be deceived by their accidental position in the world, and the respect paid by others to that position, into fancying that they have a divine right to that

position, and that they are intrinsically superior to those who are in what is called a "lower position ;" but Carlyle could never restrain his indignant scorn for that most human mis- apprehension. It is eminently human for men to suppose that if they can think and reason well enough to interest others, and attract their attention, they have a right to be rather proud of themselves, and to rank amongst the spiritual aristocracy of the race ; but no sort of vanity irritated Carlyle so pro- foundly. In a word, he raged against all the superficial follies of life and literature with an almost hypochondriac bitterness, which rendered his wrath wholly ineffective in dethroning the idols which he most abhoved. Carlyle, if he were a prophet at all, was a prophet sent only to smite, and not to strengthen ; a prophet of the purely destructive kind, whose function it was only \ to make us see through the conceits of modern civilisation, but whose voice failed the moment you asked him for something

' wherewith to replace these conceits, something breathing the

spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind. What Carlyle wanted was some true love for man—for man in his insignifi- cance, and yet his great capabilities. Of this he had hardly a grain. Flaming wrath for every sign of the smallness of the scale on which so much of man's nature is built, he had in abundance. And his "dark humour" must be said to have extended itself to the creative Power which had sanctioned and tolerated this smallness of scale, and had decreed that only in the power of conscience and love can frail human beings grow into something nobler, and more worthy of eternal life.