Thomas Carlyle Part 12

Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh b.u.t.ter and milk and beef without limit:--

an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that "the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to G.o.d, freedom, and immortality.

Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population.

He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions other than his own:--

A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so that every honest willing workman who found England too strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to us "Come and till me, come and reap me"?

On this follows an eloquent pa.s.sage about our friendly Colonies, "overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans, and Chinese, to receive our s.h.i.+p-loads of living merchandise; but the problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps.

In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of _laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one, of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the superst.i.tion of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts, some of which may find a mark the archer little meant.

[Footnote: _Vide pa.s.sim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ ent.i.tled "Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."]

CHAPTER X

CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE

The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text.

With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting series of jottings ent.i.tled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism.

We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early a.s.sociations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in G.o.d as revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but that he threatened, almost with h.e.l.l-fire, all who dared on this point to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe.

This process is simplified by the fact that he a.s.sailed all convictions other than his own.

Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "wors.h.i.+ps of Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain.

Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his Journals of 1868-1869:--

Had no G.o.d made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good, generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."...

Canst _thou_ by searching find out G.o.d? I am not surprised thou canst not, vain fool. If they do abolish G.o.d from their poor bewildered hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of.

Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect "could not have been put into him by an ent.i.ty that had none of its own,"

in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men.

If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by a.s.sociation of ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for hurricanes and earthquakes to end with.

Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._--

Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm (unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms) appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles, says our new Evangelist.... n.o.body need argue with these people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to decide it their way. He who traces nothing of G.o.d in his own soul, will never find G.o.d in the world of matter--mere circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does not even wet the soles of my feet.

[Footnote: Cf. Oth.e.l.lo, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes on this question with the agitation of one himself not quite at ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.]

"Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul, "heaven becomes a gas, G.o.d a force, and the second world a grave." He fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional, religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called _Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish,"

and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of G.o.d's will and justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more intolerant than Carlyle of all s.h.i.+fts and devices to slur the difference between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jesus_." I asked if a true life could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so; but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:--

You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom I could un.o.bstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat.

What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_ of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and inspire them. He inherited and _coute que coute_ determined to persist in the belief that there was a personal G.o.d--"a Maker, voiceless, formless, within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at intervals." Thus, while a.s.serting that "all manner of pulpits are as good as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days.

"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the G.o.d on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's G.o.d is not a mere "tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted as his own. A personal G.o.d does not mean a great Figure Head of the Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he writes:--

I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In this at least there is no harm.

And about the same date to Erskine:--

"Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an altogether new emphasis; as if written and s.h.i.+ning for me in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there; when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay, I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an "After this manner pray ye."

Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, G.o.d will do the best for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:--

Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told: yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with G.o.d. Perhaps, if it so please G.o.d, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me.

On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her.

G.o.d is great. G.o.d is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the loss of his brother:--

"What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead.

Your brother is in very deed and truth with G.o.d, where both you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps: surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?"

After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns, never dogmatic:--

The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us.

"In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are G.o.d you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do you know more than I, or any of us?

And later--

What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted to go farther"?

To Emerson in 1867 he writes:--

I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against.

There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that he had to make war on credulity and to a.s.sail the pretences of a _formal Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles; sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history.

"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of "G.o.d in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in variations of the following strain:--

The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts.

Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, pa.s.sed away.

Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling akin to wors.h.i.+p, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan.

To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of ancient books--

Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit, Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua.

From pa.s.sages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a G.o.d who has written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The question between them and other critics who a.s.sert that "he had renounced Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out,"

and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Ma.s.son says that "Carlyle had abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side: but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard the teaching of Christ as final.

[Footnote: A pa.s.sage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for general quotation.]