III
His attitude towards efficiency was also the direct opposite of the present German conception of it. To him efficiency was a matter of adaptation and improvisation, while the German theory is that it is a question of fixed method and elaborate mechanism. Nobody ever despised more than Carlyle the perennial fallacy that things can be done better by the hocus pocus of procedure than by the intelligent application of the available means to the end desired. He censured any effort to achieve things automatically. He was never tired of ridiculing trust in formulas. He insisted that the intelligence must be unfettered by preconceptions or by a rigid plan. His hero was a man who had “swallowed all the formulas,” and who proceeded to adapt means to ends in any way that was effective, passing rough-shod over theory, convention, dogmas, or any other restrictions on his freedom of action. It is true that he did insist on the necessity of having accurate and comprehensive knowledge, and on thoroughness and other essentials of what the Germans regard as scientific procedure. These things, however, were to him not major but minor virtues. They were the auxiliaries to success, but they were never to be considered as sufficient to ensure success, for they had always to be supplemented by intelligence and insight. This is shown by his depreciation of mere “beaver” industry, and by his fondness for satirizing “pipe-clay,” by which he meant senseless military routine. No crime, in his eyes, was worse than a failure to recognize the dominant importance of the sensibly and intellectually imponderable and intangible elements that are part of every human problem; so that he reprehended as vices the very things that have been most characteristic of the Germans during the present war.
Another thing that Carlyle abused and the Germans display, is insincerity. Nothing comes in for more invective from him than this, and to him it meant primarily a subjective attitude. Vanity was its chief cause, in his opinion. Truth, however unpalatable, must be recognized; while fiction, however flattering, must be scorned. Personal relationships must not sway our judgment, and he railed with especial violence against unwarranted optimism inspired by conceit. He pointed out, as one of Frederick the Great’s chief virtues, the fact that he was influenced by no delusions created by vanity or sentimentality. He says Frederick looked facts squarely in the face, and instances his once offending his brother, the Crown Prince, by telling him that he had surrounded himself with flatterers, and reminding him that the Austrians, his enemies in the field, would not flatter him. Carlyle also points out that Frederick’s wars were all conducted on a frank basis, so far, at least, as acknowledgment to himself of the real situation was concerned. There was no indulgence in the theatrical or the spectacular, certainly in none that deceived only himself. Frederick wasted no energy in striving for apparent triumphs that had no practical worth. He disregarded purely political or sentimental influences. Berlin was twice entered by the enemy during the Seven Years War, because Frederick never paid a military price for a political or a temporary victory, but he yielded territory whenever strategy demanded it. How different is this from Germany’s present military policy, which sacrifices permanent advantages for the appearance of victory, and does not succeed in achieving even a convincing appearance of that? It is plain that the cheap posturing of the German military policy is just the sort of thing Carlyle hated and despised, and nobody who has read him more than casually can have escaped realizing that his insistence on the necessity of recognizing fact in an honest and unbiased manner is a condemnation of the delight in conscious and unconscious mendacity displayed by the present German government.
Stupidity he warned against as one of the chief implements of the devil. There is no other crime, he often said, for morality is largely a matter of intelligence. Better be a villain than a fool, he implies, by quoting approvingly the boast of the Scotch family that it had produced “many a blackguard but not one blockhead.” The mind which cannot or will not perceive the obvious, or which persists in denying the unflattering, is not only hopeless but vicious. Preferring to credit their prejudices or their desires, instead of the lesson of events, was the chief crime he ascribed to the men he held responsible for the worst catastrophes of history. For mere density and well-intentioned incompetence, as in the case of Louis XVI, he had some pity; but for stupidity arising from wanton obstinacy and arrogance he had nothing but wrath and scorn. It would be difficult to find in history a parallel for the infatuated folly of the German military and political policy during this war, but we find Carlyle reprehending less aggravated and perverse displays of trust in bombast, brutality, and pretension, in the case of countries like Spain and Austria; and this is only one of many things that show how monstrous in his eyes would seem the insensate policy which has made Germany the shame of civilization, and has alienated from her every country in the world except a few contiguous ones that tolerate or assist her through fear or rapacity.
What proves the German policy most at variance with Carlyle’s philosophy, however, is the fact that it is guided by materialistic and cynical convictions. His basic belief was that the fundamental law of existence is morality; they jeer at any power that is not material. Besides this, he believed that reliance on the baser qualities of human nature can never lead anywhere but to perdition. The leadership which aims to secure itself by appealing to the selfishness or by satisfying the folly of mankind, is courting disaster. The German policy boastfully proceeds on the assumption that the only motives that govern human action are self interest of some base sort, and it credits humanity with as little intelligence as morality. It is true that Carlyle had slight respect for the intelligence or the integrity of the masses, but he insisted that nobility is inherent in human nature, and that a hero who knows how to arouse it, invariably appears whenever a government becomes so unjust or so incompetent as to be intolerable. The German theory is that the weak have no friends; Carlyle’s conviction was that nature avenges all injustice. The Germans declare that might makes right; Carlyle preached that right makes might, and on every question of fundamental morality he was diametrically opposed to them. “Savage animalism is nothing; inventive spiritualism is all,” he writes in one place, and implies in a thousand. The Germans proceed on exactly the opposite assumption. They trust in nothing but force, and the neo-Darwinism that guides their policy is only a combination of the ideas he denounced in the works of such men as Hume, Bentham, Comte, and Darwin himself, mixed with a sentimental egoism that he abominated above everything else.