Carlism

“ The parts of Carlyle's teaching on which I have dwelt to-day will be chiefly found in his 'Past and Present,' his 'Heroes and Hero Worship,' his 'Latter-day Pamphlets,' his 'Chartism,' and in the two admirable essays called 'Signs of the Times' and 'Characteristics.' In my own opinion, though Carlyle teaches much, his writings are most valuable as a moral force. Very few great writers have maintained more steadily that the moral element is the deepest and most important part of our being, deeper and stronger than all intellectual considerations. ”

“ It is not by teaching this or that dogma, political, philosophical, or religious, that Mr Carlyle is doing his work, and exerting an influence, by no means despicable, on his generation. It is by producing a certain moral tone of thought, of a stern, manly, energetic, self-denying character, that his best influence consists. Accordingly we are accustomed to view his works, even when they especially regard communities of men, and take the name of histories, as, in effect, appeals to the individual heart, and to the moral will of the reader. ”

“ If Carlyle was wrong, his diatribes would give his true measure, and this measure would be a low one, for Carlyle was not likely to be more sincere or more sound in one thought than in another. The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself. Demolition of one’s idols is painful, and Carlyle had been an idol. ”

“ Thus we see how Carlyle approached the great questions of life invariably as a moralist. Mere erudition, which too often tends away from the human, did not attract him. Science, which he beheld still unspiritualized, he undervalued: what boots it to know the “mileage and tonnage” of the universe, when our foremost need is to build up character? In politics, in philosophy, in religion, likewise, he set this consideration above all others: before its august presence outward reforms dwindled into insignificance. ”

“ And there was hardly less laxity in the employment of the word 'philosophy' as applied to the teachings of Carlyle, a writer who was alike ignorant of philosophical systems, and contemptuous of philosophical method, dismissing the former as 'word-spinning,' and the latter as 'logic chopping,' and whose own metaphysic was a mere tissue of poetic rhapsodies, as his ethic was a mere series of intuitional and unreasoned dogmas. ”

“ You must stand in the shadow of that mountain of shams, to know how hard it is to cast light across it.
"Honour to Carlyle! Hoch! Although, in the wine with which we drink this health, I, for one, must mingle the despised 'rose-water.'
"And now, having to your eye shown the defects of my own mind, in the sketch of another, I will pass on more lowly,—more willing to be imperfect, since Fate permits such noble creatures, after all, to be only this or that. It is much if one is not only a crow or magpie;—Carlyle is only a lion. Some time we may, all in full, be intelligent and humanely fair." ”

“ The echo of their outcries of disenchantment had to die away before a hearing could be obtained for the truth that Carlyle is neither political prophet nor ethical doctor, but simply a great master of literature who lives for posterity by the art which he despised.
Neither prophet nor doctor: no, nor yet philosopher either. The word 'philosophy' and its derivatives are among the hardest-worked vocables in the language. The substantive has been applied to everything, from a theory of the universe to the minutest researches in a single branch of physical science ”

“ When criticism has done its just work on the disagreeable affectations of many of Mr. Carlyle's disciples, and on the nature of Mr. Carlyle's opinions and their worth as specific contributions, very few people will be found to deny that his influence in stimulating moral energy, in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy of enthusiasm, [Pg 137] and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand, and the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. ”

“ The scholar shall read and write, the farmer and mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget the book when they resume their labour.
Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers, a believer in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people, and the remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work of genius, its great value is in telling such simple truths. As we recall the topics, we are struck with force given to the plain truths ”

“ Carlyle must write thus or nohow, like a drunken man who can run, but cannot walk. What a man's book is that! no prudences, no compromises, but a thorough independence. A masterly criticism on the times. Fault perhaps the excess of importance given to the circumstance of today. The poet is here for this, to dwarf and destroy all merely temporary circumstance, and to glorify the perpetual circumstance of men, e.g. dwarf British Debt and raise Nature and social life. ”

“ He might very comfortably preach philosophy he having nothing to do with the practice of it—no-cares, no troubles, no nothing upon his mind, and really he had nothing to engross his time but to roll an old tub about and write moral sentences and philosophy. I tell you what, Richard Carlile, I will make this agreement with you, that if you will consent to my going into the country and taking up my abode in some sequestered spot, far from the busy haunts of men, I will become all you wish me to be, quite a philosopher in petticoats ”

“ In fine, turn which way you will, to philosophy, to politics, to religion, you find Mr Carlyle objecting, denouncing, scoffing, rending all to pieces in his bold, reckless, ironical, manner—but teaching nothing. The most docile pupil, when he opens his tablets to put down the precious sum of wisdom he has learned, pauses—finds his pencil motionless, and leaves his tablet still a blank. ”

“ Carlyle is the champion of morals, ethics, law—call it what you like—of that which says we must not always do a thing because it is pleasant. There are two great ethical parties in the world, and, in the main, but two. One of them asserts the claims of the senses. Its doctrine is seductive because it is so right. It is necessary that we should in a measure believe it, in order that life may be sweet. But nature has heavily weighted the scale in its favour ”

“ Carlyle, a man of genius to whom we have all at one time or other been indebted for refreshment and stimulus, says we should give rule to the aristocracy, mainly because of its dignity and politeness, surely culture is useful in reminding us, that in our idea of perfection the characters of beauty and intelligence are both of them present, and sweetness and light, the two noblest of things, are united. ”

“ So displeasing, however, were the personal peculiarities of Carlyle that the man can never be popular. This hyperborean literary giant, speaking a Babylonian dialect, smiting remorselessly all pretenders and quacks, and even honest fools, was himself personally a bundle of contradictions, fierce and sad by turns. He was a compound of Diogenes, Jeremiah, and Dr. Johnson: like the Grecian cynic in his contempt and scorn, like the Jewish prophet in his melancholy lamentations, like the English moralist in his grim humor and overbearing dogmatism.
It is unfortunate that we know so much of the man. ”

“ 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 of290 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. ”

“ In such Dynamics it is that Mr Carlyle deals. To speak in our own plain common-place diction, it is to the elements of all religious feeling, to the broad unalterable principles of morality, that he addresses himself; stirring up in the minds of his readers those sentiments of reverence to the Highest, and of justice to all, even to the lowest, which can never utterly die out in any man, but which slumber in the greater number of us. It is by no means necessary to teach any peculiar or positive doctrine in order to exert an influence on society. ”

“ It is much to be regretted that a certain theory, a certain irresistible tendency to arrange facts so as to prove preconceived notions, a tendency more dangerous and unhistorical even than direct suppression of the truth or invention of what is not true, should have ruined Carlyle’s biography. ”

“ Of late, matters coming more and more to crisis, the liberty men seeing their way, as they think, more and more broad and bright before them, and still this too legible and steady old sign-post saying, That it is not the way, lovely as it looks, the outcry against it becomes deafening. Now, I tell you once for all, Carlyle is the only living writer who has spoken the absolute and perpetual truth about yourselves and your business; and exactly in proportion to the inherent weakness of brain in your lying guides, will be their animosity against Carlyle. ”

“ Continues,—but with growing protest, and growing ground for it. For, to speak the truth, by your kind permission, without reserve, you are beginning to suffer from yourself. You are threatening to perish of too much Thomas Carlyle, I venture to caution you against that tremendous individual. He is subduing your genius to his own special humors; he is alloying your mental activity, to a fearful degree, with dogmatic prepossession; he is making you an intellectual routinier, causing thereby an infiltration of that impurity of which all routine at last dies. ”

“ I approached him with more reverence after a little experience of England and Scotland had taught me to appreciate the strength and height of that wall of shams and conventions which he more than any man, or thousand men,—indeed, he almost alone,—has begun to throw down. Wherever there was fresh thought, generous hope, the thought of Carlyle has begun the work. He has torn off the veils from hideous facts; he has burnt away foolish illusions; he has awakened thousands to know what it is to be a man,—that we must live, and not merely pretend to others that we live. ”

“ Carlyle's faith in the instinct of nature, as superseding the necessity for patient logical method; a faith, in other words, in crude and uninterpreted sense. Insight, indeed, goes far, but it no more entitles its possessor to dispense with reasoned discipline and system in treating scientific subjects, than it relieves him from the necessity of conforming to the physical conditions of health. Why should [Pg 152] society be the one field of thought in which a man of genius is at liberty to assume all his major premisses, and swear all his conclusions? ”

“ In Carlyle we see the human spirit in its supreme strength jarred and put out of tune by the suffering incident to preternaturally keen sensibilities and an unalterably gloomy temperament.
In this strange record, too, we find ourselves once more face to face with what is perhaps the most fascinating of the fascinating problems surrounding the subject of intellectual greatness, that of its relation to mental health. Carlyle compels the attentive reader to propound to himself anew the long-standing puzzle, "Is genius something wholly normal and sane?" ”

“ It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit, to look upon this earth as "one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books. Carlyle was a true and pure "man of letters," looking at things and speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed paper. ”

“ Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments, but assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. ”

“ In the same month of February, in the year 1881, there died an author and philosopher of another type—Thomas Carlyle, one of the most striking figures in English literature, and one of those whose reputation was world-wide. "When the devil's advocate has said his worst against Carlyle, he leaves a figure still of unblemished integrity, purity, loftiness of purpose, and inflexible resolution to do the right, as of a man living consciously under his Maker's eye, and with his thoughts fixed on the account which he would have to render of his talents." ”

“ Like Carlyle, with whom he had certain points of affinity, he protests, though rather by implication than direct denunciation, against the utilitarian or materialistic view of life, and finds the divine element in the instincts which guide and animate every noble character. ”