G. K. Chesterton

“ The truly impartial historian is he who is enthusiastic for both sides. He holds in his heart a hundred fanaticisms. The truly philosophical historian does not patronise Cromwell and pat the King on the head, as Hallam does; the true philosophical historian could ride after Cromwell like an Ironside and adore the King like a Cavalier. ”

“ Rationalism is, of course, that power which makes people invent sewing machines, understand Euclid, reform vestries, pull out teeth, and number the fixed stars. Irrationalism is that other force, if possible more essential, which makes men look at sunsets, laugh at jokes, go on crusades, write poems, enter monasteries, and jump over hay-cocks. Rationalism is the beneficent attempt to make our institutions and theories fit the world we live in, as clothes fit the wearer. Irrationalism is the beneficent reminder that, at the best, [Pg 2] they do not fit. ”

“ It may be said that there is a certain inconsistency between these two justifications of Carlyle’s hero-worship: that we cannot at the same time respect a man because he is above us in a definite spiritual order, and because he is in what is popularly called a hole; that we cannot at once reverence Mirabeau because he was strong and because he was weak. This kind of inconsistency does exist in Carlyle; it is, I may say with all reverence and with all certainty, the eternal and inevitable inconsistency which characterises those who receive divine revelations. ”

“ It would be equally ridiculous to say that, if the Home Secretary conceived it necessary to shoot them, from a sense of responsibility, that his action, even if wrong, was really as wrong as the conduct of a Tolstoian who should shoot them without any reason at all. In this sense, therefore, there is really a different test, and a perfectly fair one, for men of action and for men of abstract theories and remote hopes. ”

“ The only history that is worth knowing, or worth striving to know, is the history of the human head and the human heart, and of what great loves it has been enamoured: truth in the sense of the absolute justice is a thing for which fools look in history and wise men in the Day of Judgment. ”

“ Carlyle did realise the fact that every man carries about with him his own life and atmosphere, he did not realise that other truth, that every man carries about with him his own theory of the world. Each one of us is living in a separate Cosmos. ”

“ This is the only genuine truth that Carlyle brought from his study of strong men. If ever he said that we must blindly obey the strong man, he was merely angry and personal, and untrue to his essentially generous and humane spirit. When he said that we must reverence the strong man he sometimes expressed himself with a certain heated confusion, and left it doubtful whether he meant that we should reverence the strong man as we respect Christ, or merely as we respect Sandow. ”

“ Moreover, the real practical truth that underlay Carlyle’s gospel of the hero has in other ways been misunderstood. The general idea is that Carlyle thought that, if a man were only able, everything was to be excused to him. If Carlyle, even at any moment, thought this, it can only be said that for that moment Carlyle was a fool, as many able men may happen to be. But, as a matter of fact, what Carlyle meant was something much sounder. To say that any man may tyrannise so long as he is able, is as ridiculous as saying that any man may knock people down so long as he is six feet high. ”

“ Whistler, in the Glasgow Corporation Art Galleries, has distinctly succeeded in making the face of Carlyle interesting. He has avoided anything like exaggeration. He has not tried to make capital out of the rugged mass of the hair, or to give a wild-man-of-the-woods look to the face by laying stress on its deep lines and stern contours. The head is noble, quiet, and sad. The artist has tried to paint a serious portrait rather than to give a ‘view,’ and he has succeeded.”—David Hannay in the Magazine of Art. ”

“ It is remarkable that we always call a rival civilisation savage: the Chinese call us barbarians, and we call them barbarians. The Middle Ages were a rival civilisation, based upon moral science, to ours based upon physical science. Most modern historians have abused this great civilisation for being barbarous: Carlyle had made one great stride beyond them in so far that he [Pg 35] admired it for being barbarous. ”

“ The French Revolution was a sudden starting from slumber of that terrible spirit of man which sleeps through the greater number of the centuries; and Carlyle appreciates this, and describes it more powerfully and fearfully than any human historian, because this idea of the spirit of man breaking through formulae and building again on fundamentals was a part of his own philosophical theory, and therefore he understood it. ”

“ Irrationalism exists to point out that that eccentric old gentleman, “The World,” is such a curiously shaped old gentleman that the most perfect coats and waistcoats have an extraordinary way of leaving parts of him out, sometimes whole legs and arms, the existence of which the tailor had not suspected. ”

“ A man is almost always wrong when he sets about to prove the unreality and uselessness of anything: he is almost invariably right when he sets about to prove the reality and value of anything. I have a quite different and much more genuine right to say that bull’s-eyes are nice than I have to say liquorice is nasty: I have found out the meaning of the first and not of the second. And if a man goes on a tearing hunt after shams, as Carlyle did, it is probable that he will find little [Pg 36] or nothing real. ”

“ Carlyle too often forget a simpler truth at the back of the Carlyle gospel. It is that, while in one sense the same moral test is to be applied to all men, there does remain in ordinary charitable practice a very great difference between the people who consider it necessary to see some definite thing done before they die, and the people who cheerfully admit that two hundred years will scarcely bring what they require, and that meanwhile they desire to do nothing. ”

“ A man like Charles I. died triumphantly; he did not indeed die as a martyr, but he died [Pg 17] as something which is much more awful and exceptional—a consistent man. He was worse than a tyrant, he was a logician. But a man like Cromwell is in a much harder case, for he does not wish to die and be a spectacle, but to live and be a force. He has to break altogether with the splendid logic of martyrdom. He has to eat his own words for breakfast, dinner, and supper. He has to outlive a hundred incarnations, and always reject the last ”

“ If men are all really the images of God, to talk about their differences has its significance, but only about the same significance which may be found in talking about the respective heights of twenty men, all of whom have received the Victoria Cross, or the respective length of the moustaches of twenty men, all of whom have died to save their fellow-creatures. ”

“ Now Carlyle held, rightly or wrongly, that the worship of man, of the great man, was also a human function, and therefore gave pleasure to the performer of it. It all depends upon whether we do take an egalitarian or an aristocratic view of the spiritual world. If the spiritual world is based upon equality, then, no doubt, to keep a man in an inferior position must spiritually depress and degrade him ”

“ And as surely as there arises a consistent theory of life which seems to give a whole plan of it, there will appear within a score or two of years a great Irrationalist to tell the world of strange seas and forests which are nowhere down on the map. The great movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which rose to its height in the French Revolution and the Positivist philosophy, was the last great Rationalistic synthesis. The inevitable Irrationalist who followed it was Thomas Carlyle. This is the first and most essential view of his position. ”

“ THOMAS CARLYLE
(Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Chapman and Hall)
Now, it must definitely be set to the credit of men like Cromwell and Mirabeau, that they were undoubtedly opposed to and embarrassed by men whose projects, even in their own eyes, were scarcely a part of practical politics. These men exist in every country and in every age. They are wilfully and eternally in opposition. They do not agree sufficiently with the active powers even to argue with them with any profit. ”

“ Every line and every picture it contains is of peculiar interest to the great and ever-increasing public that delights in books. “THE BOOKMAN” is the periodical for those who want to keep in touch with the books most worth reading and with the authors most worth knowing. ”

“ The larger world, which our systems attempt to explain and chiefly succeed in hiding, must, when it breaks through upon us, take forms which appear to be conflicting. The spiritual world is so rich that it is varied ”

“ It is not just that we should judge in the same way the man who is simply anxious to erect a parish pump, and [Pg 16] the opponent of the pump, who looks forward to a day when there shall not only be no pump, but no parish. The man of action, then, really has in this sane and limited sense a claim to a peculiar kind of allowance, in that it is of vital necessity to him that a certain limited grievance should be removed. ”

“ It never occurred to him sufficiently clearly to ask what place Shelley [Pg 29] occupied in Shelley’s Cosmos, or Robespierre in Robespierre’s Cosmos. Not feeling the need of this, he never studied, he never really listened to, Shelley’s philosophy or Robespierre’s philosophy. Here, after a somewhat long circuit, we have arrived at the one serious deficiency in Carlyle’s histories, a neglect to realise the importance of theory and of alternative theories in human affairs. ”

“ A Tolstoian anarchist who thinks that men should be morally persuaded for the next two or three centuries to give up every kind of physical compulsion may, it is quite conceivable, be more right than the English Home Secretary who finds himself responsible for the suppression of a riot in Manchester ”

“ They count it a pleasant and natural thing to live and die in revolt. They are ready to be critics, they are ready to be martyrs, they are emphatically not ready to be rulers. In this way Cromwell, considering how he might make some English polity out of a chaos of English parties, had to argue for hours together with Fifth Monarchy men, to whom the vital question was whether the children of malignants should not be slain, and whether a man who was caught swearing should not be stoned to death. ”

“ After a week’s wearisome house-hunting in London under the guidance of Leigh Hunt, Carlyle sent a long description of the proposed new residence to his wife, of which the following is an extract:—“We are called ‘Cheyne Row’ proper (pronounced Chainie Row) and are a ‘genteel neighbourhood,’ two old ladies on the one side, unknown character on the other, but with ‘pianos’ as Hunt said. The street is flag-pathed, sunk-storied, iron-railed, all old-fashioned and tightly done up.... The house itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling, and has been all new painted and repaired.... ”

“ The dresser which stood there in 1834 remains against the south wall; the table still stands in the centre, and there is a sink in the corner beside the disconnected pump.
When Carlyle was resting at Dumfries, after the exhaustion of his triumphant Inaugural Address upon his installation as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, he received the announcement of his wife’s sudden death whilst driving in her carriage in Hyde Park on April 21st, 1866. The effect of the calamity upon him was terrible. “There is no spirit in me to write,” he said, “though I try it sometimes.” ”

“ It is easy enough to be the man who lives in a contented impotence; the man who luxuriates in an endless and satisfied defeat. He does not desire to be effective; he only desires to be right. He does not desire passionately that something should be done; he only desires that it should be triumphantly proved to be necessary.
From a photo by the London Stereoscopic Co.
THOMAS CARLYLE, ABOUT 1860
From a photo by Elliott & Fry
THOMAS CARLYLE, 1865
This is the real contribution of Carlyle to the philosophy of the man of action. ”

“ A Few Notices.
“Clever and humorous ... will interest anybody who can enjoy a paradox neatly put.”—Scotsman.
“Really one cannot help agreeing with such an engaging advocate.”—Morning Leader.
“We heartily commend Mr. Chesterton’s many novel points of view to the earnest consideration of our readers. ‘The Defendant’ is a book that will be read with both pleasure and profit.”—Aberdeen Journal. ”