CHAPTER IX
CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE
It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and the sociologist to be superseded. In the march of events the specialist is fated to be left behind. The influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As the present writer has elsewhere said:—Carlyle has been called a prophet. The word in these days has only a vague meaning. Probably Carlyle earned the name in consequence of the oracular and denunciatory elements in his later writings. Then, again, the word prophet has come to be associated with the thought of a foreteller of future events. A prophet in the true sense of the word is not one who foretells the future, but one who revives and keeps alive in the minds of his contemporaries a vivid sense of the great elemental facts of life. Why is it that the Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of temperament and all degrees of culture? Because in it, especially in the Psalms, Job, and the writings of Isaiah and his brother prophets, serious people are brought face to face with the great mysteries, God, Nature, Man, Death, etc.—mysteries, however, which only rush in upon the soul of man in full force on special occasions, in hours of lonely meditation, or by the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, Eternities, and Silences, become so weak that even good men have sorrowfully to admit that they live lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it:
"Each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will."
The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate utterance to keep alive in the minds of his countrymen a deep, abiding sense of life's mystery, sacredness, and solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle did for the moderns. In the whole range of modern literature, it is impossible to match Carlyle's magnificent passages in Sartor Resartus, in which, under a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form the warp and woof of human life.
Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to those mechanical scientists who imagine that Nature can be measured by tape-lines, and duly labelled in museums:—
'System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our little fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us; but who knows what deeper courses these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes) our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's eclipses; by all which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time (unmiraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence through Æons of Æons. We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume it is,—whose Author and Writer is God.'
Agree or disagree with Carlyle's views of the Ultimate Reality as we may, there can be nothing but harmony with the spirit which breathes in the following:—
'Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou the "Living Garment of God"? O Heavens, is it in very deed, He, then, that ever speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
'Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, and Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping in unknown tumults; like soft streamings of celestial music to my too-exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my Father's!'