Nineteenth Century Questions

by James Freeman Clarke

To investigate this question is our purpose now,—and in doing so we will consider, in succession, these two Carlyles.

I. It was about the year 1830 that readers of books in this vicinity became aware of a new power coming up in the literary republic. Opinions concerning him varied widely. To some he seemed a Jack Cade, leader of rebels, foe to good taste and all sound opinions. Especially did his admiration for Goethe and for German literature seem to many preposterous and extravagant. It was said of these, that "the force of folly could no further go,"—that they "constituted a burlesque too extravagant to be amusing." The tone of Carlyle was said to be of "unbounded assumption;" his language to be "obscure and barbarous;" his ideas composed of "extravagant paradoxes, familiar truths or familiar falsehoods;" "wildest extravagance and merest silliness."

But to others, and especially to the younger men, this new writer came, opening up unknown worlds of beauty and wonder. A strange influence, unlike any other, attracted us to his writing. Before we knew his name, we knew him. We could recognize an article by our new author as soon as we opened the pages of the Foreign Review, Edinburgh, or Westminster, and read a few paragraphs. But it was not the style, though marked by a singular freedom and originality—not the tone of kindly humor, the good-natured irony, the happy illustrations brought from afar,—not the amount of literary knowledge, the familiarity with German, French, Italian, Spanish literature,—not any or all of these which so bewitched us. We knew a young man who used to walk from a neighboring town to Boston every week, in order to read over again two articles by Carlyle in two numbers of the Foreign Review lying on a table in the reading-room of the Athenæum. This was his food, in the strength of which he could go a week, till hunger drove him back to get another meal at the same table. We knew other young men and young women who taught themselves German in order to read for themselves the authors made so luminous by this writer. Those were counted fortunate who possessed the works of our author, as yet unpublished in America,—his "Life of Schiller," his "German Romance," his Review articles. What, then, was the charm,—whence the fascination?

To explain this we must describe a little the state of literature and opinion in this vicinity at the time when Carlyle's writings first made their appearance.

Unitarianism and Orthodoxy had fought their battle, and were resting on their arms. Each had intrenched itself in certain positions, each had won to its side most of those who legitimately belonged to it. Controversy had done all it could, and had come to an end. Among the Unitarians, the so-called "practical preaching" was in vogue; that is, ethical and moral essays, pointing out the goodness of being good, and the excellence of what was called "moral virtue." There was, no doubt, a body of original thinkers and writers,—better thinkers and writers, it may be, than we have now,—who were preparing the way for another advance. Channing had already unfolded his doctrine of man, of which the central idea is, that human nature is not to be moulded by religion, but to be developed by it. Walker, Greenwood, Ware, and their brave associates, were conducting this journal with unsurpassed ability. But something more was needed. The general character of preaching was not of a vitalizing sort. It was much like what Carlyle says of preaching in England at the same period: "The most enthusiastic Evangelicals do not preach a Gospel, but keep describing how it should and might be preached; to awaken the sacred fire of faith is not their endeavor; but at most, to describe how faith shows and acts, and scientifically to distinguish true faith from false." It is "not the Love of God which is taught, but the love of the Love of God."

According to this, God was outside of the world, at a distance from his children, and obliged to communicate with them in this indirect way, by breaking through the walls of natural law with an occasional miracle. There was no door by which he could enter into the sheepfold to his sheep. Miracles were represented, even by Dr. Channing, as abnormal, as "violations of the laws of nature;" something, therefore, unnatural and monstrous, and not to be believed except on the best evidence. God could not be supposed to break through the walls of this house of nature, except in order to speak to his children on some great occasions. That he had done it, in the case of Christianity, could be proved by the eleven volumes of Dr. Lardner, which showed the Four Gospels to have been written by the companions of Christ, and not otherwise.

The whole of this theory rested, it will be observed, on a sensuous system of mental philosophy. "All knowledge comes through the senses," was its foundation. Revelation, like every other form of knowledge, must come through the senses. A miracle, which appeals to the sight, touch, hearing, is the only possible proof of a divine act. For, in the last analysis, all our theology rests on our philosophy. Theology, being belief, must proceed according to those laws of belief, whatever they are, which we accept and hold. The man who thinks that all knowledge comes through the senses must receive his theological knowledge also that way, and no other. This was the general opinion thirty or forty years ago; hence this theory of Christianity, which supposes that God is obliged to break his own laws in order to communicate it.

But the result of this belief was harmful. It tended to make our religion formal, our worship a mere ceremony; it made real communication with God impossible; it turned prayer into a self-magnetizing operation; it left us virtually "without God and hope in the world." Thanks to Him who never leaves himself without a witness in the human heart, this theory was often nullified in practice by the irrepressible instincts which it denied, by the spiritual intuitions which it ridiculed. Even Professor Norton, its chief champion, had a heart steeped in the sweetest piety. Denying, intellectually, all intuitions of God, Duty, and Immortality, his beautiful and tender hymns show the highest spiritual insight. Still it cannot be denied that this theory tended to dry up the fountains of religious faith in the human heart, and to leave us in a merely mechanical and unspiritualized world.

Now the first voice which came to break this enchantment was, to many, the voice of Thomas Carlyle. It needed for this end, it always needs, a man who could come face to face with Truth. Every great idol-breaker, every man who has delivered the world from the yoke of Forms, has been one who was able to see the substance of things, who was gifted with the insight of realities. Forms of worship, forms of belief, at first the channels of life, through which the Living Spirit flowed into human hearts, at last became petrified, incrusted, choked. A few drops of the vital current still ooze slowly through them, and our parched lips, sucking these few drops, cling all the more closely to the form as it becomes less and less a vehicle of life. The poorest word, old and trite, is precious when there is no open vision. We do well continually to resort to the half-dead form, "till the day dawn, and the day-star arise in our hearts."

But at last there comes a man capable of dispensing with the form,—a man endowed with a high degree of the intuitive faculty,—a born seer, a prophet, seeing the great realities of the universe with open vision. The work of such a man is to break up the old formulas and introduce new light and life. This work was done for the Orthodox thirty years ago by the writings of Coleridge; for the Unitarians in this vicinity, by the writings of Thomas Carlyle.