Nineteenth Century Questions

by James Freeman Clarke

This was the secret of the enthusiasm felt for Carlyle, in those days, by so many of the younger men and women. He taught us to look at realities instead of names, at substance instead of surface,—to see God in the world, in nature, in life, in providence, in man,—to see divine truth and beauty and wonder everywhere around. He taught that the only organ necessary by which to see the divine in all things was sincerity, or inward truth. And so he enabled us to escape from the form into the spirit, he helped us to rise to that plane of freedom from which we could see the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, God in man, heaven on earth, immortality beginning here, eternity pervading time. This made for us a new heaven and a new earth, a new religion and a new life. Faith was once more possible, a faith not bought by the renunciation of mature reason or the beauty and glory of the present hour.

But all this was taught us by our new prophet, not by the intellect merely, but by the spirit in which he spoke. He did not seem to be giving us a new creed, so much as inspiring us with a new life. That which came from his experience went into ours. Therefore it might have been difficult, in those days, for any of his disciples to state what it was that they had learned from him. They had not learned his doctrine,—they had absorbed it. Hence, very naturally, came the imitations of Carlyle, which so disgusted the members of the old school. Hence the absurd Carlylish writing, the feeble imitations by honest, but weak disciples of the great master. It was a pity, but not unnatural, and it soon passed by.

As Carlyle thus did his work, not so much by direct teaching as by an influence hidden in all that he said, it did not much matter on what subject he wrote,—the influence was there still. But his articles on Goethe were the most attractive, because he asserted that in this patriarch of German literature he had found one who saw in all things their real essence, one whose majestic and trained intelligence could interpret to us in all parts of nature and life the inmost quality, the terza essenza, as the Italian Platonists called it, which made each itself. Goethe was announced as the prophet of Realism. He, it should seem, had perfectly escaped from words into things. He saw the world, not through dogmas, traditions, formulas, but as it was in itself. To him

"the world's unwithered countenance
Was fresh as on creation's day."

Consider the immense charm of such hopes as these! No wonder that the critics complained that the disciples of Carlyle were "insensible to ridicule." What did they care for the laughter, which seemed to them, in their enthusiasm, like "the crackling of thorns under the pot." Ridicule, in fact, never touches the sincere enthusiast. It is a good and useful weapon against affectation, but it falls, shivered to pieces, from the magic breastplate of truth. No sincere person, at work in a cause which he knows to be important, ever minds being laughed at.

But besides his admirable discussions of Goethe, Carlyle's "Life of Schiller" opened the portals of German literature, and made an epoch in biography and criticism. It was a new thing to read a biography written with such enthusiasm,—to find a critic who could really write with reverence and tender love of the poet whom he criticised. Instead of taking his seat on the judicial bench, and calling his author up before him to be judged as a culprit, Carlyle walks with Schiller through the circles of his poems and plays, as Dante goes with Virgil through the Inferno and Paradiso. He accepts the great poet as his teacher and master,[26] a thing unknown before in all criticism. It was supposed that a biographer would become a mere Boswell if he looked up to his hero, instead of looking down on him. It was not understood that it was that "angel of the world," Reverence, which had exalted even a poor, mean, vain fool, like Boswell, and enabled him to write one of the best books ever written. It was not his reverence for Johnson which made Boswell a fool,—his reverence for Johnson made him, a fool, capable of writing one of the best books of modern times.

This capacity of reverence in Carlyle—this power of perceiving a divine, infinite quality in human souls—tinges all his biographical writing with a deep religious tone. He wrote of Goethe, Schiller, Richter, Burns, Novalis, even Voltaire, with reverence. He could see their defects easily enough, he could playfully expose their weaknesses; but beneath all was the sacred undertone of reverence for the divine element in each,—for that which God had made and meant them to be, and which they had realized more or less imperfectly in the struggle of life. The difference between the reverence of a Carlyle and that of a Boswell is, that one is blind and the other intelligent. The one worships his hero down to his shoes and stockings, the other distinguishes the divine idea from its weak embodiment.

Two articles from this happy period—that on the "Signs of the Times" and that called "Characteristics"—indicate some of Carlyle's leading ideas concerning right thinking and right living. In the first, he declares the present to be an age of mechanism,—not heroic, devout, or philosophic. All things are done by machinery. "Men have no faith in individual endeavor or natural force." "Metaphysics has become material." Government is a machine. All this he thinks evil. The living force is in the individual soul,—not mechanic, but dynamic. Religion is a calculation of expediency, not an impulse of worship; no thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of man to his invisible Father, the Fountain of all goodness, beauty, and truth, but a contrivance by which a small quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a much larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. "Virtue is pleasure, is profit." "In all senses we worship and follow after power, which may be called a physical pursuit." (Ah, Carlyle of the Present! does not that wand of thine old true self touch thee?) "No man now loves truth, as truth must be loved, with an infinite love; but only with a finite love, and, as it were, par amours."

In the other article, "Characteristics," printed two years later, in 1831, he unfolds the doctrine of "Unconsciousness" as the sign of health in soul as well as body. He finds society sick everywhere; he finds its religion, literature, science, all diseased, yet he ends the article, as the other was ended, in hope of a change to something better.

These two articles may be considered as an introduction to his next great work, "Sartor Resartus," or the "Clothes-Philosophy." Here, in a vein of irony and genial humor, he unfolds his doctrine of substance and form. The object of all thought and all experience is to look through the clothes to the living beneath them. According to his book, all human institutions are the clothing of society; language is the garment of thought, the heavens and earth the time-vesture of the Eternal. So, too, are religious creeds and ceremonies the clothing of religion; so are all symbols the vesture of some idea; so are the crown and sceptre the vesture of government. This book is the autobiography of a seeker for truth. In it he is led from the shows of things to their innermost substance, and as in all his other writings, he teaches here also that sincerity, truthfulness, is the organ by which we are led to the solid rock of reality, which underlies all shows and shams.