THE MELANCHOLY OF OUR MODERN CULTURE.

WITHIN the last few weeks the contempt, nay, the vivid dis- like and almost desperate dread, felt for the modern culture by the most eminent representative of it both in England and France, may probably have attracted the attention of some of our readers. An American periodical has published from the report of a blind interlocutor a conversation of Mr. Carlyle's in which he paints with his usual force and quaintness of style the portrait of his father, and deplores the one error that that sagacious man committed in giving his son what is now called a good education :—

" I think," said Carlyle, "of all the men I have ever known my father was quite the remarkablest. Quite a farmer sort of person, using vigilant thrift and careful husbandry ; abiding by veracity and faith, and with an extraordinary insight into the very heart of things and men. . . . He was an elder of the kirk ; and it was very pleasant to see him in his daily and weekly relations with the minister of the parish. They had been friends from their youth, and had grown up together in the service of their common Master. That parish minister was the first person that taught me Latin ; and I am not sure but that he laid a great curse upon me in so doing. All I sir, this learning of reading and writing !--what trouble and suffering it entails upon us poor human creatures ! He that increaseth in knowledge increaseth sorrow; and much study is a weariness to the flesh !—I am not sure but that we should all be the happier and better, too, without what is called the improve- ments of the modern ages ! For mine own part, I think it likely that I should have been a wiser man, and certainly a godlier, if I had followed in my father's steps, and left Latin and Greek to the fools that wanted them."

After giving this single instance of the imperfectness of his

lather's wisdom in esteeming too highly a learning of which lie was fortunately deprived himself, Mr. Carlyle went on to tell his blind guest that the last time he ever saw his lather was on his journey from Craigenputtock "to this modern Babylon, with a manuscript in my hand of which you may have heard, Sartor Resartus by name, bound to see if there were any chance to have it translated into print." "I -came here," he says bitterly, "upon this fool's errand," and "saw my father no more," hearing within a few days of his death, which moves him to speak thus of the old man's life and character :— " Ah ! sir, he was a man into the four corners of whose house there

had shined, through the years of his pilgrimage by day and by might, the light of the glory of God. Like Enoch of old he had walked with God, and at the last he was not, for God took him. If I could only see such men now as were my father and his minister—men of such fearless truth and simple faith—with such firmness in holding on to the things which they believe ; in saying and doing only what they thought was right ; in seeing and hating the thing they felt to be wrong—I should have far more hope for this British nation, and, indeed, for the world at large." Clearly Mr. Carlyle holds that the modern culture immolates its victims. Nor can we suppose that this doctrine was taught out of any com- 131aisance to his blind hearer's infirmity, to persuade him that eyesight is, on the whole, at least as regards literature, a source of weakness rather than of strength. For Mr. Carlyle has preached a similar doctrine in many forms. In his " Latter-day Pamphlets" he recommended as a good expedient that the whole of one _generation should have their tongues cut out in order to force them into wholesome silence,—a measure which might re.sult, he thought, in a new generation of deeper and less distracted thinkers. He is perpetually groaning over the frivolities of our too facile speech and thought, and constantly indulges the melancholy humour that if we were primed of a faculty or two, crippled -intellectually by having some of the avenues of knowledge fairly bricked up, we should throw a great deal more force and earnestness into those that remained. In the mean time, he does not disguise his preference for any state of life or society in which no access to -the modern culture is possible.

M. Renan, in his recent remarkable book, the" Vio de Je!sus," ex- presses, though, of course, in less eccentric fashion, the same „melancholy conviction that civilization and culture fritter away all the greater possibilities of life. His liege of the great prophets of the past is one long lamentation over the insignificance and dwarf- ish scale of the present. "Our reserve," he says in one place, 4‘ our respect for the opinion of one another, which is part of our impotence, could not affect them." He concludes his book in a -strain of profound melancholy :—" For us, eternal children, con- demned to impotence, we who work without harvesting, and shall never see the fruit of what we have sown, let us bow before these -demigods. They knew that of which we are ignorant, how to -create, to affirm, to act. Will that great originality be born _again, or will the world content itself in future with following the tracks opened by the hardy creative minds of the ancient time ? We know not." But M. Renan, at least, has no hope of it. He -demonstrates repeatedly in his book the causes of our comparative

"Nowadays," he says, "men risk little and gain little.

In the heroic epochs of human activity men risk everything and ,gain everything ; the good and the bad, or at least those who believe themselves and are believed such, constitute opposite armies. By the scaffold they pass to apotheosis." "Our civilizations," he repeats in another place, "ruled by a minute police, could not give us any idea of what man was worth in epochs when the originality

.of each had a freer field of development. Let us suppose a solitary dweller in the neighbourhood of our capitals, issuing forth from time to time to present himself at the palaces of our sovereigns, setting the sentinel's challenge at defiance, and announcing to kings in an imperious tone the approach of the revolutions of which he had himself been the promoter! Such a notion makes us smile. Yet such was Elijah. Elijah the Tishbite of our day would never . get past the wicket of the Tuileries Free from our polished conventionalities, exempt from the uniform education which, refines but dwarfs so much our individuality, these complete spirits carried into action an astounding energy. They seem to us the giants of an heroic age which could not have been

reaL Profound error Those men were our brethren,—they were of our type, felt and thought like us. But the breath of God was

free with them ; with us it is fettered by the iron bonds of a society at once contemptible and condemned to irremediable mediocrity."

Thus wails the highest culture of the present day,—Mr. Carlyle complaining of the weakness caused by too much learning and too much freedom, proposing to lop off a few redundant sprouts of human capacity in order to increase the intensity of the remainder ; M. Renan complaining of the tyrannical restraints of modern civilization, the duresse of conventional usages, the universal pres- sure of laws and customs invented to protect the mediocrities of the world against the bold aggression of great personalities. In short, Mr. Carlyle complains that men cannot become great at all with so large a superficies of intellectual distractions ; M. Renan that even those who have in them the elements of greatness cannot exercise or develop it, confined as they are in this wire-cage of social decrees and legal vigilance. Perhaps, too,—nay, it is clear in both cases,—one secret of their melancholy is this,—that they think modern culture and civilization hamper the one root of the highest practical greatness—faith, and prevent it from striking firm and deep into the heart: Mr. Carlyle conceives that he could have believed more heartily—would have been "more godly,"—if he had not been cursed with Latin and Greek acquirements; M. Renan feels a shrewd conviction that legality of mind, studious respect for the sphere of others' liberty, and scientific accuracy of thought, leave faith little room for the exercise of the highest acts of self- abandonment, and hold us back moreover from imposing our belief on others on that grand scale which is needful to feed the majesty of any imperial type of belief.

To us the greater portion of these lamentations over the paralyzing power of either modern culture or modern civilization are ground- less. Thus much, indeed, may be admitted, that a high average culture, and a high average amount of individual privilege and freedom does, by greatly subdividing responsibilities, greatly increase the obstacles to individual ambition, and diminish the ex- traordinary demand upon the practical faculties of the greater men amongst us. Where very few are capable of taking any share in the government of life, those few have, of course, a wider and richer field of labour, and their mind is exercised by problems of mightier scope and therefere greater fascination. You cannot expect to raise up an Augustus or a Philip in a country which hedges in the power of the sovereign with checks elaborated a thousandfold ; you cannot look for a strong swimmer in a country where there is no pool of water which a few strokes will not traverse. Even in modern times we have seen how much Englishmen's audacity of imagination and achievement have been stimulated by transplanta- tion to India,—and why? Because only in India was there room for such plans as those of Clive or Hastings without coming into collision with a thousand granite wills that no Clive or Hastings could conquer. The subdivision of responsibilities is only another name for closely circumscribing the elbow-room of the bigger minds amongst us, and, of course, therefore, instead of the great earls who were virtually county sovereigns, and often greater than the real sovereign, we have now only members of Parliament, or, perhaps, even private gentlemen, who don't care to exercise the privilege of advising where they cannot rule.

No doubt it is also true that a general level of education makes the task of imposing your convictions on others more diffi- cult, as well as that of imposing your will. You have no longer merely to fascinate others, you have to overcome the force of any objections their reason may have learned to oppose. A hundred superficial difficulties exist to the spread of any great principle, and especially to the dissemination of a great faith, where none of them would have been visible a few hundred years ago. But all this shows is, that the personal ascendancy, either practical, imagi- native, or intellectual, of great minds is necessarily restricted by the growing independence of small minds. So much may be granted at once, but it does not in any way justify the melancholy of such views as those of Mr. Carlyle and M. Renan. It does not in the least even tend to show that the modern culture or civiliza- tion tends to dwarf the minds of the present day, only that it tends to limit the spread of their personal influence, the splendour of their immediate train.

So far as greatness depends, as M. Renan seems to think it does, on the opportunity of governing other persons, either practically or intellectually, and casting the 'feebleness of respect for the opinions of others' to the winds, no doubt the openings to greatness are much fewer than they were. But, on the other hand, how much of this aggregation of dependent characters about ruling wills is really but a spurious sort of greatness, which affects the eye, indeed, and the imagination of the spectator, but really only ossifies the character of the governing mind instead of really enlarging or strengthening it. Though the smaller end presented to the imagination by the yearning for truth alone, fails to produce the same magnitude of intellectual effort which the sense of a wide public responsibility gives, it also does not risk that stereotyped narrowness of thought and growing aridity of dogma which in the end sap the faith and wither the strength of so many reforming and even revolutionary leaders. The largeness and steady continuance of mental growth which belong to constantly open intellects, is far more ours in these modern days, than could be possible were we either leaders or led. But this does not satisfy M. Renan. He longs for the grand effect of world-wide dictatorships, practical or spiritual. Yet that quality of a dictatorial intellect which enables it to acquire the most specific personal influence is, we suspect, much more of the nature of weakness and narrowness than of true greatness. Mohammed has inflicted himself upon mil- lions by virtue of a sharply-cut creed, which, founded on a rock as it is in part, shows its weakness only in its excessive narrowness. Yet, without that narrowness, he could never have dominated the Oriental mind as he has done. Why has not Christ prevailed in the East as He has prevailed in the West, except that He never evinced a trace of this dominating intellectual tendency which the weaker East required to impress them, and which Mahommed possessed? He desired His Gospel to win its way like an atmosphere by the per- vading fascination of its own truth, and even warned His own immediate disciples that they could never know that truth fully till His personal humanity was withdrawn from their sight, and ceased to wield an overweening influence over their imaginations. So far from giving us an example of the dictatorial style of spiritual greatness, M. Renan should have recognized even in his own human Jesus the type of that greatest greatness which never attempts to conquer a supremacy anywhere, but quietly flows on till it fills the world. And that kind of greatness which seeks to overturn nothing directly, but simply to put in motion new forces every-where, is as possible for modern minds, rooted on the same rock, to wield, as for ancient. The limits of modern civilization, against which M. Renan chafes himself so much are limits to personal ascendancy, but by no means to the most wide-spread impersonal influence. If there be greatness enough in a man's mind not to covet the picturesque greatness of an intellectual rule, his thoughts may exercise an infinitely wider influence than at any previous era, and the knowledge that this is so, may far more than make up in purity and depth for the strain of an acknowledged responsibility. If we have apparently a smaller proportion of intellectual heroes than the ancient world, it is not, at least, the limitations of civilization which stunt and dwarf their growth, but rather the far larger and more complex field of thought with which they have to grapple. Plato and Aristotle would not have seemed what they do seem if they had had the vast range of modern studies to include within their field of view. Alexander would scarcely have conquered the East if he had had ambassadors from Russia and the Western Powers remonstrating, menacing, and negotiating to restrain him. It is not that men are smaller than they were, but the universe that is infinitely wider. In poetry, on the other hand, where the field of view has not extended in like proportion, the old world cannot compare in richness, though it may in grandeur, with the modern.

And this is exactly the drift of Mr. Carlyle's objection to the modern culture. It is too wide, he thinks, for the powers of the mind which is subjected to it. He would cut off much of it in order to give greater vitality to what remains. Yet we suspect that there are but very few cases in which a mind of great native power is weakened by culture, unless health is overstrained. There may be a few,—a very few,—cases in which if you carefully shut up a vagrant mind with a few subjects you would give it an intensity that it would not have had the resolution to gain for itself,—but this is only the case with minds of some inherent weakness. Usually men of strong onesided power will feel their own strength, and either voluntarily retire into their stronghold, or extract from miscellaneous studies that, and only that, which feeds and strengthens that strength. When a man is really weakened by too wide a culture he must be a man of small calibre ; and for one such, we suspect, there are thousands -who, in the old world, or without careful culture, would never have risen above insignificance, and whose only opportunity for their moderate greatness has arisen from the culture they have received. These are the cases which affect Mr. Carlyle's imagination. He sees multi- tudes far inferior to his father in natural force of mind, and fancies that if they could be shut up with one or two subjects, as his father was, they might have been equal to him. Probably the reverse is true, and they would have been still more inferior than they are. The faintness of mind which so often marks persons of some literary repute misleads him into thinking that they would have been stronger had their one faculty been suppressed. The truth is that culture makes a thousand small minds notable in one way or other where they would without it have been lost in "the dim common- populations,"—but that it very rarely indeed buries a really strong mind, which has almost always the sagacity to reject what is useless and confusing and to concentrate itself on its own proper work. And even as to faith itself, if there are a thousand new difficulties, there are a thousand new avenues to it. And where this is so, the difficulties only add fuel to the central fire, just as obstacles quicken the genius made to overcome them. We suspect that if the greatest minds of the ancient world were transplanted to the modern, they would seem much less con- spicuous and solitary in this far more complicated universe,—would shine out in leas lonely brilliance, but would yet grow into far greater inward width and strength under our modern culture than they could have done under the ancient.