Dr. Samuel Johnson, during a long life, cherished an aversion, Platonic rather than militant, for Scotland and the Scotch. Had any one told him that out of the land where oats were fed to men there should issue, soon after his death, a master of romance, an incomparable singer, and a historian without rival, we can well imagine the emphasis with which he would have said, “Tut! tut! sir, that is impossible!” Nevertheless, for the best part of a century Scotland has shed her influence through the world in the genius of Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Thomas Carlyle; and she has taken sweet vengeance on the burly Doctor himself by creating in James Boswell not only the best of British biographers, but one so far the best that no other can be named worthy to stand second to him. We now celebrate the centenary of the last of these great Scotchmen,—Thomas Carlyle,—and it is fitting that we should survey his life and work.[4]
[4]First printed inThe Forum, New York, December, 1895.
[4]First printed inThe Forum, New York, December, 1895.
In a time like our own, when literature oneither side of the Atlantic lacks original energy; when the best minds are busy with criticism rather than with creation; when ephemeral story-tellers and spineless disciples of culture pass for masters, and sincere but uninspired scholars have our respect but move us not,—we shall do well to contemplate anew the man who by his personality and his books has nobly swayed two generations of the English-speaking race, and who, as the years recede, looms more and more certainly as the foremost modern British man of letters. Men may look distorted to their contemporaries, like the figures in a Chinese picture; but Time, the wisest of painters, sets them in their true perspective, gives them their just proportions, and reveals their permanent features in light and shade. And sufficient time has now elapsed for us to perceive that Carlyle belongs to that thrice-winnowed class of literary primates whom posterity crowns. He holds in the nineteenth century a position similar to Johnson’s in the eighteenth, and to Milton’s in the seventeenth,—each masterful, but in a different way; each typifying his age without losing his individuality; all brothers in preëminence.
When, for convenience’ sake, we classify Carlyle among men of letters, we fail to describe him adequately. The phrase suggests too little. Charles Lamb, the lovable, is the true type ofmen of letters, who illuminate, sweeten, delight, and entertain us. Carlyle was far more: he was a mighty moral force, using many forms of literature—criticism, biography, history, pamphlets—as its organs of expression. He had, as the discerning Goethe said of him, “unborrowed principles of conviction,” by which he tested the world. He felt the compulsion of a great message intrusted to him. There rings through most of his utterances the uncompromising “Thus saith the Lord” of the Hebrew prophets,—a tone which, if it do not persuade us, we call arrogant, yet which speaks the voice of conscience to those who give it heed. What, then, was his message?—what those “unborrowed principles of conviction” by which he judged his time?
Born in the poor village of Ecclefechan on December 4, 1795, his childhood and youth were spent amid those stern conditions by which, rather than by affluence, brave, self-reliant, earnest characters are moulded. His parents were Calvinists, to whom religion was the chief concern, and who taught him by example the severe virtues of that grim sect. Next to religion, and its active manifestation in a pious life, they prized education, begrudging themselves no sacrifices by which their son might attend the University of Edinburgh. They wished him to be a minister, but when hecame to maturity he recognized his unfitness for that vocation and abandoned it. They acquiesced regretfully, little dreaming that he who refused to be confined in some Annandale pulpit should become the foremost preacher of his age.
Carlyle’s reluctance was rooted in conscientious scruples. He began by questioning the authority of his Church; he went on to sift the authority of the Bible. Little by little the whole wondrous fabric of supernatural Christianity crumbled before him. He could not but be honest with himself; he could not but see how Hebrew legend had overgrown the stern ethical code attributed to Moses; how the glosses of Paul and Augustine and a hundred later religionists had changed or perverted the simple teaching of Christ. Awestruck, he beheld the God of his youth vanish out of the world. He wandered in the wilderness of doubt; he wrestled daily and nightly with despair. And then slowly, painfully, after brooding through long years, he saw the outlines of a larger faith emerge from the gloom. He fortified himself by acknowledging that, since righteousness is eternal, it cannot perish when we reject whatever opinions some Council of Westminster, of Trent, or of Nice may have resolved about it.
Only earnest souls who have experienced the wrench which comes when we first break awayfrom the bondage of an artificial religion, and perceive that the moral law may be something very different from dogmas, know the pang it costs. The dread of losing the truth when errors are thrown over—nay, the apparent hopelessness of being able to decide what is truth—causes many to hesitate, and some to turn back. Carlyle was not, of course, the first in Britain to tread the desolate path from Superstition into Rationalism. In the eighteenth century—to go no farther back—two very eminent minds had preceded him; but in both Hume and Gibbon the intellectual predominated over the moral nature, and to temperaments like theirs the pangs of new birth are always less acute. It is because in Carlyle the moral nature preponderated—intense, fiery, and enduring—that he became the spokesman of myriads who since him have had a similar experience.
If we were to hazard a generalization which should sum up the nineteenth century, might we not affirm that the chief business of the century has been to establish a basis of conduct in harmony with what we actually know of the laws governing the universe? Hitherto, for ages together, men have not consciously done this, but they have accepted standards handed down to them by earlier men, who compounded these standards out of little knowledge, much ignorance, legend,and hearsay. Skeptics there have always been, but usually, like the skeptics who flourished in the last century, they have differed from the doubters in ours by the degree of their moral intensity. Whether we turn to Carlyle or to George Eliot, we find each tirelessly busy in substituting for the worn-out tenets of the past, springs of belief and conduct worthy to satisfy a more enlightened conscience.
Here, then, we have the corner-stone of Carlyle’s influence. Our world is a moral world; conscience and righteousness are eternal realities, independent of the vicissitudes of any church. If we seek for a definite statement of Carlyle’s creed, we shall be disappointed; he never formulated any. After breaking loose from one prison, he would have scoffed at the idea of voluntarily locking himself up in another. He held that to possess a moral sense is to possess its justification; that conscience is a fact transcending logic just as consciousness or life itself does. In the presence of this supreme fact he cared little for its genealogy. The immanence of God was to him an ever-present, awful verity.
Likewise, when we come to examine his philosophy, we discover that he constructed no formal system. He absorbed the doctrine of Kant and his followers, and may be classed, by those whoinsist that every man shall have a label, among the transcendentalists: but his main interest was the application of moral laws to life, the trial of men and institutions in the court of conscience, rather than the exercise of the intellect in metaphysical speculations. The mystery of evil may not be explained for some ages, if ever; while we argue about it, evil grows: the one indispensable duty for all of us, he would say, is to combat evil in ourselves and in society now and here. The stanch seaman, when his ship founders, does not waste time in meditating why it should be that water will sink a ship, but he lashes together a raft, if haply he may thereby come off safe.
In these respects we behold Carlyle a true representative of his time. Before the vast bulk of sin and sorrow and pain he did not cower; he would fight it manfully. But the smoke of battle darkened him. The spectacle of mankind, dwelling in Eternity, yet ignorant of their heritage, pursuing “desires whose purpose ends in Time;” of souls engaged from dawn to dusk of their swift-fleeting existence, not on soul’s business, but on body’s business, worshiping idols they know to be false, deceiving, persecuting, slaying each other,—confirmed a tendency to pessimism to which his early Calvinism had predisposed him. But Carlyle’s pessimism must not be confounded with Swift’smisanthropy, or with Leopardi’s blank despair, or with the despicable Schopenhauer’s cosmic negation of good. Carlyle was neither cynic nor misanthrope. He might exclaim with Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” but he would mean that the ways and works of man are vain in comparison with his possibilities, and with the incalculable worth of righteousness. “Man’s unhappiness, as I construe,” he says, “comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even theShadow of Ourselves.”
These being the elements of Carlyle’s moral nature, let us look for a moment at the world which he was to test by his “unborrowed principles of conviction.” He came on the scene during the decade of reaction which followed the battle of Waterloo. Official Europe, confounding the ambition of Napoleon with the causes underlying the Revolution, supposed that in crushing one it had destroyed the other. The motto of the Old Régime had beenPrivilege, of the New it wasMerit. The revived political fashions of the eighteenth century, though cut by such elegant tailors as Metternich, Castlereagh, and Polignac, chafed a generation which had grown used to afreer costume. At any time there yawns between the ideals and the practices of society a discrepancy which provokes the censure of the philosopher and the sarcasm of the cynic; but in a time like the Restoration, when some men consciously repudiated and none sincerely believed the system thrust upon them, the chasm between profession and performance must open wider still, revealing not only the noble failures born of earnest but baffled endeavor, but also all the hideous growths of hypocrisy, of deceptions, insincerities, and intellectual fraud. And in very truth the Old Régime resuscitated by Europe’s oligarchs was doubly condemned,—first, as being unfitted to the new age; and, secondly, as having marked in the eighteenth century, when it flourished, the logical conclusion of a political and social epoch. In 1820 the trunk and main branches of the tree of Feudalism were dead: he was not a wise man who imagined that the still surviving upper branches would long keep green.
Not alone in the political constitution of society were momentous changes operating. They but represented the attempt of man to work out, in his civic and social relations, ideas which had already penetrated his religion and his philosophy. Distil those ideas to their inmost essence, its name isLiberty. The old Church, whether Roman or Protestant, lay rotting at anchor in the land-lockedbayou of Authority; and the pioneers of the new convictions, abandoning her and her cargo of antiquated dogmas, had pushed on across intervening morasses to the shore of the illimitable sea; yea, they were launching thereon their skiffs of modern pattern, and resolutely, hopefully steering whither their consciences pointed. Better the storms of the living ocean than the miasma of that stagnant, scum-breeding pool! But a church is of all institutions that to which men cling most stubbornly, paying it lip-service long after its doctrines have ceased to shape their conduct or to lift their aspirations; trying to believe, in spite of their unbelief, that it will continue to be to them a source of strength as it once was to their fathers; preserving forms, but veneering them with contradictory meanings; coming at last to declare that an institution must be kept, if for no other reason than because it once fulfilled the purposes for which it is now inadequate. The aroma of association has for some minds the potency of original inspiration. Who can ponder on life without perceiving that whereas in their business, their possessions, their love, and their hate, men resent dictation; in matters beyond the scope of experience, and consequently beyond proof,—as the conditions of a future life,—men credulously accept the guidance of others quite as ignorant as themselves, fromwhom in their business or their passions they would submit to no interference?
Needless to say the revived Old Régime intrenched itself behind whatever church it found standing,—in Prussia the Lutheran, in England the Anglican, in Scotland the Calvinist, in the Latin countries the Roman. The ecclesiastical institution might not humanize the masses, but at least it held them in check; it might not spiritualize the classes, but it taught them that in rallying to its support they were best guarding their own privileges. Metternich, whom we call the representative of the Restoration, did not scruple to announce that, as the dangers which threatened Church and State were identical, the Church could be saved only by upholding the State. Not for the first time in history was the priest a policeman in disguise.
Into this world of transition Thomas Carlyle strode with his store of unborrowed principles. Right or wrong, his convictions were his own; therefore they were realities that need not fear a conflict with ghosts of dead convictions and insincerities.
Naturally, one of the first facts that amazed him was the monstrous unreality in that transitional society. By the census the people of Great Britain were rated as Christians; by their actsthey seemed little better than barbarians. What availed the Established Church, in which livings were assigned at the pleasure of some dissolute noble, fox-hunting parsons were given the cure of souls, and worldlings or unbelievers rose to be bishops? Could the loudest protestations explain the existence of great, gaunt, brutalized masses, beyond the pale of human charity; everyhorsesleek, well lodged, and well fed, but innumerablemendying of hunger or lodged in the almshouse? Can that be true civilization in which the various constituents recognize no interdependence, and only a few usurp benefits which are pernicious unless they be free to all? Respectability, and not virtue,—that, Carlyle declared, was John Bull’s ideal, and he opened fire upon its chief allies, Sham and Cant. He spared no prejudices, he respected no institutions. With sarcasm until then unknown in English, he unmasked one artificiality after another, disclosing the cruelty or the hypocrisy which lurked behind it, and setting over against it the true nature of the thing it pretended to be. To interpret such conditions by the criterion of conscience was to condemn them.
But Carlyle’s mission was not merely to destroy: he shattered error in order that the clogged fountain of truth might once more gush forth. Before eyes long dimmed with gazing on insincerity, hewould hold up shining patterns of sincerity; souls groping for guidance, he would stay and comfort by precedents of strength; hearts pursuing false idols, he would chasten by examples of truth. Men talked—and nowhere more pragmatically than in the churches—as if God, after having imparted his behests to a few Hebrews ages ago, had retired into some remote empyrean, and busied himself no more with the affairs of men. But to Carlyle the immanence of God was an ever-present reality, manifesting itself throughout all history and in every individual conscience, but nowise more clearly than in the careers of great men.
Thus he made it his business to set before his contemporaries models worthy of veneration, for he recognized that worship is a primary moral need. “Great men,” he says, “are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divineBook of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some namedHistory.” In this spirit he introduced Goethe, the latest of the heroes, to English readers, as the man who, from amid chaos similar to that which bewildered them, had climbed to a position where life could be lived nobly, rationally, well. “Close your Byron, open your Goethe,” was his advice to those in whom Byron’s mingled defiance and sentimentality found an echo. He showed in Cromwellhow religious zeal is something very different from a phantom faith. He laid bare the truth in Mahomet. He made Luther live again. And all to the end that he might convince his dazed contemporaries that in no age, if we look deeply, shall we look in vain for concrete, living examples of those qualities which are indispensable to right action; that salvation—the purging of the character—is won by exercising virtues, and not by conforming to a stereotyped routine; that the authority of conscience is a present fact, not a mere mechanism which God wound up and gave to the Hebrews, and has been transmitted in poor repair by them to us. As an antidote to sterilizing doubt, Carlyle prescribed the simple remedy which sums up the wisdom of all the sages: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.” In this fashion did Carlyle discharge his mission as a moral regenerator. We live as individuals, and to the individual conscience he made his appeal, caring little for the organization of principles into institutions. Rather, like every individualist, did he incline to deprecate the numbing effect of institutions. Let each unit be righteous, in order that whatever the collective units shall establish may be righteous too.
Bearing this in mind, we shall understand Carlyle’sattitude toward the great social and intellectual movements of his time. The watchword which had inspired generous minds at the end of the last century wasLiberty, and after the thunders of the Napoleonic wars that had drowned it died away, it rang out its summons more clearly than before, never again to be quite deadened, despite all the efforts of the Old Régime. The application of the theory of Liberty to government resulted in setting up Democracy as the ideal political system. Since every citizen in the State bears, directly or indirectly, his fraction of the burden of taxation, and since he is affected by the laws, and interested, even to the point of laying down his life, in the preservation of his country, Democracy declares that he should have an equal part with every other citizen in determining what the taxes and policy of his State shall be; and it thrusts upon him the responsibility of choosing his own governors and representatives. To Carlyle this ideal seemed a chimera. Honest, just, and intelligent government is of all social contrivances the most difficult: by what miracle, therefore, shall the sum of the opinions of a million voters, severally ignorant, be intelligent? As well blow a million soap-bubbles, each thinner than gossamer, and expect that collectively they will be hard as steel! Or, admitting that the representativesDemos chooses be not so incompetent as itself, how shall they be kept disinterested? Their very numbers not only make them unmanageable, but so divide responsibility that any individual among them can shift from his own shoulders the blame for corrupt or harmful laws. Moreover, popular government means party government, and that means compromise. To Carlyle, principles were either right or wrong, and between right and wrong he saw no neutral ground for compromise. Party government cleaves to expediency, which at best is only a half-truth; but half-truth is also half-error, and any infinitesimal taint of error vitiates the truth to which it clings. Finally, Democracy substitutes a new, many-headed tyranny—more difficult to destroy because many-headed—for the tyranny it would abolish.
Such objections Carlyle urged with consummate vigor. He foresaw, too, many of the other evils which have accompanied the development of this system to impair its efficacy, such as the rise of a class of professional politicians, of political sophists, of corrupt “bosses,” expert in the art of wheedling the ignorant many, and thereby of frustrating the initial purpose of the system. His opposition did not spring from desire to see the masses down-trodden, but from conviction that they need guidance and enlightenment, and thatthey are therefore no more competent to choose their own law-makers than children are to choose their own teachers. In knowledge of public affairs Demos is still a child, innocent, well-intentioned, if you will; but ignorant, and by this system left to the mercy of the unscrupulous.
This brings us to consider the charge that Carlyle, in his exaltation of the Strong Man, worshiped crude force. Let us grant that on the surface the accusation seems plausible; but when we seek deeper, we shall discover that he exalts Cromwell and Frederick, not because they were despots, but because, in his judgment, they knew better than any other man, or group of men, in their respective countries, how to govern. Their ability was their justification; their force, but the symbol of their ability. “Weakness”—Carlyle was fond of quoting—“is the only misery.” What is ignorance but weakness (through lack of training) of the intellect? In the incessant battle of life,—and few men have been more constantly impressed than Carlyle by the battle-aspect of life,—weakness of whatever kind succumbs to strength. Evil perpetually marshals its forces against Good,—positive, aggressive forces, to be overcome neither by inertia, nor indifference, nor half-hearted compromise, but by hurling stronger forces of Good against them. Interpreting Carlyle’sviews thus, we perceive why he extolled the Strong Man and distrusted the aggregate ignorance of Democracy. Furthermore, we must not forget that he never considered politics the prime business of life: first, make the masses righteous, next, enlightened, and then they will naturally organize a righteous and enlightened government. When Carlyle rejoined to the zealots of Democracy or other panaceas, “Adopt your new system if you must, will not the same old human units operate it? Were it not wiser to perfect them first?”—he antagonized the spirit of the age: wisely or not, only time can show. Those of us who would reject his arguments would nevertheless admit that Democracy is still on trial.
With equal fearlessness he attacked the cheap optimism based on material prosperity, which brags of the enormous commercial expansion made possible by the invention of machinery; which boasts of the rapid increase in population—so many more million mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, and so much more food and raiment produced—from decade to decade. These facts, he insisted, are not of themselves evidences of progress. Your inventions procure greater comfort, a more exuberant luxury; but do comfort and luxury necessarily build up character?—do they not rather unbuild it? Are your newly bred millions of bodiesmore than bodies? Take a census of souls, hastheirnumber increased? Though your steam-horse carries you fifty miles an hour, have you thereby become more virtuous? Though the lightning bears your messages, have you gained bravery? Of old, your aristocracy were soldiers: is the brewer who rises from his vats to the House of Lords—is any other man owing his promotion to the tradesman’s skill in heaping wealth—more worshipful than they? Let us not say that this amazing industrial expansion may not conduce to the uplifting of character; but let us strenuously affirm that it is of itself no indication of moral progress, and that, if it fail to be accompanied by a corresponding spiritual growth, it will surely lead society by the Byzantine high-road to effeminacy, exhaustion, and death.
A different gospel, this, from that which Carlyle’s great rival, Macaulay, was preaching,—Macaulay, who lauded the inventor of a useful machine above all philosophers! Different from the optimism—which gauges by bulk—of the newspapers and the political haranguers! Different, because true! Yet, though it sounded harsh, it stirred consciences,—which smug flatterings and gratulations can never do; and it gave a tremendous impetus to that movement which has come to overshadow all others,—the movement toreconstruct society on a basis, not of privilege, not of bare legality, but of mutual obligations.
Any inventory, however brief, of Carlyle’s substance, would be incomplete without some reference to his quarrel with Science. To Science a large part of the best intelligence of our age has been devoted,—a sign of the breaking away of the best minds from the cretinizing quibbles of theology into fields where knowledge can be ascertained. It is a truism that Science has advanced farther in our century than in all preceding time. By what paradox, then, should Carlyle slight its splendid achievements? Was it not because he revolted from the materialistic tendency which he believed to be inseparable from Science, a tendency which predominated a generation ago more than it does to-day? Materialism Carlyle regarded as a Gorgon’s head, the sight of which would inevitably petrify man’s moral nature.
Moreover, Carlyle’s method differed radically from that of the scientific man, who describes processes and investigates relations, but does not explain causes. Pledged to his allegiance to tangible facts, the man of science looks at things serially, pays heed to an individual as a link in an endless chain rather than as an individual, lays emphasis on averages rather than on particulars. To him this method is alone honest, and, thanksto it, a single science to-day commands more authenticated facts than all the sciences had fifty years ago. But there are facts of supreme importance which, up to the present at least, this method does not solve. The mystery of the origin of life still confronts us. Consciousness, the Sphinx, still mutely challenges the caravans which file before her. The revelations of Science seem, under one aspect, but descriptions of the habitations of life from the protoplasmic cell up to the human body. Immense though the value of such a register be, we are, not deceived into imagining that it explains ultimates. How came life into protoplasm at all? Whence each infinitesimal increment of life, recognizable at last in the budding of some new organ? And when we arrive at man, whence came his personality? Each of us is not only one in a genealogical series stretching back to the unreasoning, consciencelessamœba, but a clearly defined individual, a little world in himself, to whom his love, his sorrow, his pain and joy and terror, transcend in vividness all the experiences of all previous men: a microcosm, having its own immediate relations—absolute relations—with the infinite macrocosm. Science, bent on establishing present laws, measures by æons, counts by millions, and has warrant for ignoring your brief span or mine; but to you and me these few decades areall in all. However it may fare with the millions, you and I have vital, pressing needs, to supply which the experience of the entire animal kingdom can give us no help. Upon these most human needs Carlyle fastened, to the exclusion of what he held to be unnecessary to the furtherance of our spiritual welfare. He busied himself with ultimates and the Absolute. Not the stages of development, but the development attained; not the pedigree of conscience, but conscience as the supreme present reality; not the species, but the individual,—were his absorbing interests.
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.
Such was the substance of Carlyle’s message. Remarkable as is its range, profound as is its import, it required for its consummation the unique powers of utterance which Carlyle possessed. Among the masters of British prose he holds aposition similar to that of Michael Angelo among the masters of painting. Power, elemental, titanic, rushing forth from an inexhaustible moral nature, yet guided by art, is the quality in both which first startles our wonder. The great passages in Carlyle’s works, like the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sixtine Chapel, have no peers: they form a new species, of which they are the only examples. They seem to defy the ordinary canons of criticism; but if they break the rules it is because whoever made the rules did not foresee the possibility of such works. Transcendent Power, let it take whatever shape it will,—volcano, torrent, Cæsar, Buonarotti, Carlyle,—proclaims: “Here I am,—a fact: make of me what you can! You shall not ignore me!”
Of Carlyle’s style we may say that, whether one likes it or not, one can as little ignore it as fail to perceive that he makes it serve, with equal success, whatever purpose he requires. It can explain, it can laugh, it can draw tears; it can inveigh, argue, exhort; it can tell a story or preach a sermon. Carlyle has, it is computed, the largest vocabulary in English prose. His endowment of imagination and of humor beggars all his competitors. None of them has invented so many new images, or given to old images such fresh pertinence. Your first impression, on turning to other writings afterhis, is that they are pale, and dim, and cold: such is the fascination inalienable from power. Excess there may be in so vehement a genius; repetition there must be in utterances poured out during sixty years; an individuality so intense must have an equally individual manner; but there is, rightly speaking, no mannerism, for mannerism implies affectation, and Carlyle’s primal instinct was sincerity. His expression is an organic part of himself, and shares his merits and defects.
Carlyle won his first reputation as a historian; singularly enough, his achievements in history have temporarily suffered a partial eclipse. Teachers in our colleges refer to them dubiously or not at all. Does the fault lie with these same teachers, or with Carlyle? A glance at the methods of the school of historical students which has sprung up during the last generation will explain the disagreement.
History, like every other branch of intellectual activity, has responded to the doctrines of Evolution. That most fertile working hypothesis has proved, when applied here, not less fruitful than in other fields. It has caused the annals of the past to be reinvestigated, every document, record, and monument to be gathered up, and the results have been set forth from the new point of view. Evolutionary science, as we saw above, fixes itsattention primarily on the processes of development, and regards the individual, in comparison with a species or the race, as a negligible quantity. A similar spirit has guided historical students. They have turned away from “great captains with their guns and drums,” away from figure-head monarchs, away from the achievements of even the mightiest individuals, to scrutinize human action in its collective forms, the rise and supremacy and fall of institutions, the growth of parties, the waxing and waning of organisms like Church or State, in whose many-centuried existence individual careers are swallowed up. Using the methods of Science, these students have persuaded themselves that history also is a science, which, in truth, it can never be. Judicial temper, patience, veracity,—the qualities which they rightly magnify,—were not invented by them, nor are these the only qualities required in writing history. Speaking broadly, facts lie within the reach of any diligent searcher. But a fact is a mere pebble in a brook until some David comes to put it in his sling. True history is the arrangement and interpretation of facts, and—more difficult still—insight into motives: for this there must be art, there must be imagination.
To the disciples of the “scientific school” it may be said that the heaping up of great stores offacts—the collection of manuscripts, the cataloguing of documents, the shoveling all together in thick volumes prefaced by forty pages of bibliography, each paragraph floating on a deep, viscous stream of notes, each volume bulging with a score of appendices—is in no high sense history, but the accumulation of material therefor. It bears the same relation to history as the work of the quarryman to that of the architect; most worthy in itself, and evidently indispensable, but not the same. Stand before some noble edifice,—Lincoln Cathedral, for instance, with its incomparable site, its symmetry and majestic proportions: scan it until you feel its personality and realize that this is a living idea, the embodiment of strength and beauty and aspiration and awe,—and you will not confound the agency of the stone-cutters who quarried the blocks with that of the architect in whose imagination the design first rose. Neither should there be confusion between the historical hodman and the historian.
Indubitably, history of the highest kind may be written from the evolutionist’s standpoint, but as yet works of the lower variety predominate. Therefore, in a time when the development of institutions chiefly commands attention, Carlyle, who magnifies individuals, will naturally be neglected. But in reality, histories of both kinds areneeded to supplement each other. All institutions originate and exist in the activities of individuals. The hero, the great man, makes concrete and human what would otherwise be abstract. Environment does not wholly explain him. It is easy to show wherein he resembles his fellows; that difference from them which constitutes his peculiar, original gift is the real mystery, which the study of resemblances cannot solve. Men will cease to be men when personality shall lose its power over them.
Accepting, therefore, the inherent antagonism in the two points of view,—antagonism which implies parity and not the necessary extinction of one by the other,—we can judge Carlyle fairly. Among historians he excels in vividness. Perhaps more than any other who has attempted to chronicle the past, he has visualized the past. The men he describes are not lay figures, with wooden frames and sawdust vitals, to be called Frenchmen or Germans or Englishmen according as a different costume is draped upon them; but human beings, each swayed by his own passions, striving and sinning, and incessantly alive. They are actors in a real drama: such as they are, Carlyle has seen them; such as he has seen, he depicts them. To go back to Carlyle from one of the “scientific historians” is like passing from a museum ofmummies out into the throng of living men. If his portraits differ from those of another artist, it does not follow that they are false. In ordinary affairs, two witnesses may give a different report of the same event, yet each may, from his angle of observation, have given exact testimony. Absolute truth, who shall utter it? Since history of the highest, architectonic kind is interpretation, its value must depend on the character of the interpreter. Not to be greatly esteemed, we suspect, are those grubbers among the rubbish heaps who imagine that Carlyle’s interpretation of the French Revolution, or of Cromwell, or of Frederick, may be ignored. Character, insight, and imagination went to the production of works like these: they require kindred gifts to be appreciated.
Neither of Carlyle’s portrait gallery, unparalleled in range, in which from each picture an authentic human face looks out at us; nor of his masterpieces of narration, long since laureled even by the unwilling,—is there space here to speak. In portraiture he used Rembrandt’s methods: seizing on structural and characteristic traits, he displays them in strong, full light, and heightens the effect by surrounding them with shadows. As a biographer he succeeded equally well in telling the story of Schiller and that of John Sterling: the latter a most difficult task, as it must always be to make intelligible to strangers a beautiful characterwhose charm and force are felt by his friends, but have no proportionate expression in his writings. As an essayist he has left models in many branches: “Mirabeau,” “Johnson,” “Goethe,” “Characteristics,” “Burns,” “History,” stand as foothills before his more massive works. His is creative criticism, never restricted, like the criticism of the schools, to purely literary, academic considerations, but penetrating to the inmost heart of a book or a man, to discover what deepest human significance may there be found. A later generation has, as we have noted, adopted a different treatment in all these fields: bending itself to trace the ancestry and to map out the environment of men of genius; concentrating attention on the chain rather than its links; necessarily belittling the individual to aggrandize the mass. It behooves us, while we recognize the value of this treatment as a new means to truth, not to forget that it is not the only one. By and by—perhaps the time is already at hand—we shall recognize that the other method, which deals with the individual as an ultimate rather than in relation to a series, which is human rather than abstract, cannot be neglected without injury to truth. Either alone is partial; each corrects and enlightens the other.
Meanwhile we will indulge in no vain prophecies as to Carlyle’s probable rank with posterity. That a man’s influence shall be permanent dependsfirst on his having grasped elemental facts in human nature, and next on his having given them an enduring form. Systems struggle into existence, mature, and pass away, but the needs of the individual remain. Though we were to wake up to-morrow in Utopia, the next day Utopia would have vanished, unless we ourselves had been miraculously transformed. To teach the individual soul the way of purification; to make it a worthy citizen of Eternity which laps it around; to kindle its conscience; to fortify it with courage; to humanize it with sympathy; to make it true,—this has been Carlyle’s mission, performed with all the vigor of a spirit “in earnest with the universe,” and with intellectual gifts most various, most powerful, most rare. It will be strange if, in time to come, souls with these needs, which are perpetual, lose contact with him. But, whatever befall in the future, Carlyle’s past is secure. He has influenced theéliteof two generations: men as different as Tyndall and Ruskin, as Mill and Tennyson, as Browning and Arnold and Meredith, have felt the infusion of his moral force. And to the new generation we would say: “Open your ‘Sartor;’ there you shall hear the deepest utterances of Britain in our century on matters which concern you most; there, peradventure, you shall discover yourselves.”