Kingsley would elevate the degraded portion of the race until the lowest member be made to feel the transmuting agency of Christianity. He was first led into sympathy with the poor operatives in the English factories by reading Mayhew's Sketches of London Labor and London Poor, and, in connection with Maurice, organized coöperative laboring associations as a check to the crushing system of competitive labor. Their plans succeeded, and many abject working men have been brought into a higher social and moral condition than they had hitherto enjoyed. These humanitarian efforts have attracted large numbers to the reception of the tenets entertained by those putting them forth. "For," the unthinking say, "if the opinions of these men will lead them to labor on this wise for the social elevation of our fellow-beings, they must needs be correct, and if so, worthy of our reception." But if Neo-Platonism can make Maurices, Kingsleys, and a whole school of "Muscular Christians" and "Christian Socialists," nothing less than the pure religion of Christ can raise up Howards, Wilberforces, and Budgetts.
The philosopher has always exerted a great power upon those who do not philosophize. He is regarded by many as the inhabitant of a sphere which few can enter, and his dictates are heard as fiats of a rightful ruler. Those who cannot understand him fully often congratulate themselves that the few unmistakable grains they have gathered from his opinions are nuggets of pure gold, and entitled to the merit of becoming the world's currency. The philosopher is not his own interpreter. There has seldom been one who knew how to tell his thoughts to the masses. That is the province of the popular writers who have adopted his opinions, and know how to deal them out almost imperceptibly in the form of poetry and fiction. One great philosophical mind has sometimes dictated the literature of generations, and, in earlier periods, of entire centuries.
This influence of philosophy on literature is furnished with a new illustration at the present day; some of the most popular and attractive writers of Great Britain have extracted their opinions from one or more of the later philosophers of Germany, and incorporated them into current poetry, finance, and history. The effect has been to furnish the people with a literature which possesses all the weight of vital religious truth in the minds of those readers who prefer to derive their creed from some enchanter in letters to seeking it immediately from the Bible or its most reliable interpreters.
The department of literature in question inculcates as its cardinal principle that man is unconscious of his power, he can do what seems impossible, does not worship his fellows enough, is purer than his clerical leaders would have him imagine, and ought, like certain of his predecessors, to arouse to lofty efforts, assert his dignity and divinity, and strive to advance the world to its proper glory and perfection. The authors of these exciting and flattering appeals do not surround their theory with proper safeguards, nor do they tell the world that they have served up a delectable dish of Pantheism for popular deglutition. The case is stated clearly by one who understands the danger of this tendency, and whose pen has already been powerful in exposing its absurdity. "In our general literature," says Bayne, "the principle we have enunciated undergoes modification, and, for the most part, is by no means expressed as pantheism. We refer to that spirit of self-assertion, which lies so deep in what may be called the religion of literature, to that wide-spread tendency to regard all reform of the individual man as being an evolution of some hidden nobleness, or an appeal to a perfect internal light or law, together with what may be called the worship of genius, the habit of nourishing all hope on the manifestation of the divine, by gifted individuals. We care not how this last remarkable characteristic of the time be defined; to us its connection with pantheism, and more or less close dependence on the teaching of that of Germany, seem plain, but it is enough that we discern in it an influence definably antagonistic to the spirit of Christianity."[163]
The parentage of literary Rationalism in England is attributable to Thomas Carlyle. Having "found his soul" in the philosophy of Germany, we hear him, in 1827, defending the criticism of Kant as "distinctly the greatest intellectual achievement of the century in which it came to light." But the opinions of Fichte and Richter have subsequently had more weight with Carlyle, and he has elaborated them in many forms. Fichte, in particular, has influenced him to adopt a theory which gives a practical denial to the Scriptural declarations of the fallen state of humanity. Effort being goodness, the exterior world is only tolerable because it furnishes an arena for the contest of work. Man will never receive any prize unless he bestir himself to the exercise of his own omnipotence. Individual life is all the real life possessed by this world, and it is gifted with a spiritual wand capable of calling up wondrous forms of beauty and worth. It matters not so much what man works for, since his effort is the important matter. All ages have had a few true men. The assertion of self-hood constitutes greatness; and Zoroaster, Cromwell, Julius Cæsar, and Frederic the Great; heroes of any creed or no creed, Pagan or Jew, are the world's worthies, its great divinities. Men need not be conscious that they are doing great deeds while in the act, nor, when the work is accomplished, that they have performed anything worthy a school-boy's notice. On the other hand, worth is tested by actual unconsciousness, "which teaches that all self-knowledge is a curse, and introspection a disease; that the true health of a man is to have a soul without being aware of it,—to be disposed of by impulses which he never criticises,—to fling out the products of creative genius without looking at them."
Man is the centre of the universe, which is everywhere clothed with life. His is a spiritual power capable of effecting the great transformations needed by his fellows. Let him be earnest, then, and evolve the fruits of his wonderful strength. Since his mission is work, here is Carlyle's gospel which calls him to it: "Work is of a religious nature; all true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to the sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all sciences, all spoken epics, all acted heroisms, martyrdoms,—up to that 'Agony of bloody sweat,' which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not 'worship,' then I say the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky." Work implies power, and power in the individual is what society needs to keep it within proper bounds. Social life requires the will of the single mind and hand; republicanism is therefore the dream of fanatics, and ought not to be tolerated anywhere. Popular rights are a fiction which the strong hand ought to dissipate at a thrust. The greatest men are the greatest despots, and the exercise of their unlimited authority is what entitles them to our worship. Napoleon III. preaches the pure gospel of politics in his Life of Julius Cæsar. Absolute subjection—call it slavery, if you please—is the proper state of large bodies of helpless humanity, who are absolutely dependent upon some master of iron will for guidance and development.
Such being Carlyle's view of human rights, it is not surprising that he has applauded the most gigantic effort in history to establish a government upon the system of human bondage. But all slavery will by and by vanish like the tobacco-smoke of "Teufelsdröckh." Part of the world's best work will be the unceasing effort for its universal and perpetual extermination; and posterity will honor those who labor for this consummation as greater benefactors and workers than all the divinities idolized by the author of Sartor Resartus and the Life of Frederic the Great.
While Carlyle's system does not appear to flatter humanity its effect is of that character. He would make his readers believe that they are pure, great, and capable beings like those deified by him. The adulation being too great for many who peruse his pages, large numbers of readers are led into dangerous vagaries. "The influence of Carlyle's writings," says an essayist, "and especially of his Sartor Resartus, has been primarily exerted on classes of men most exposed to temptations of egotism and petulance, and least subjected to anything above them,—academics, artists, littérateurs, strong-minded women, 'debating' youths, Scotchmen of the phrenological grade, and Irishmen of the young-Ireland school."[164] There are very many beside this grotesque group, who exclaim, with one of his warmest admirers, "Carlyle is my religion!" There are others again who say gratefully what John Sterling wrote him in his last brief letter, "Towards me it is still more true than towards England that no man has been and done like you."[165]
The time has not yet come when men can awake from the spell of a charmer like Carlyle. But the illusion will some day be dissipated, and many of his readers in Great Britain and America will feel deeply and almost despairingly that, in the original fountain of his teaching, there was "a poison-drop which killed the plants it was expected to nourish, and left a sterile waste where men looked for the bloom and the opulence of a garden of God." It behooves those who idolize him to examine the image before which they stand. He is a man of unquestioned boldness and some originality, and no one of the present generation has greater power to dazzle and bewilder the young. Happily, age brings with it the clearing up of much of the obscurity of youth, and on the additional light of increasing years we depend for the illumination of many a mind obscured by his sentiments. The late R. A. Vaughan, a careful observer of the tendencies of English thought, says: "It may not be flattering to Mr. Carlyle, but we believe it to be true that by far the larger portion of the best minds, whose early youth his writings have powerfully influenced, will look back upon the period of such subjection as the most miserably morbid period of their life. On awaking from such delirium to the sane and healthful realities of manful toil, they will discover the hollowness of that sneering, scowling, wailing, declamatory, egotistical, and bombastic misanthropy, which, in the eye of their unripe judgment, wore the air of a philosophy so profound."[166] The time will also come when Carlyle will be revealed to all in his true character: as the theologian preaching a pagan creed; as the philosopher emasculating the German philosophy which he scrupled not to borrow; as the stylist perverting the pure English of Milton and Shakspeare into inflated, oracular Richterisms; and as the arch demagogue who, despising the people at heart, assigned no bounds to his ambition to gain their hearing and cajole them into the reception of his unmixed Pantheism.