To have asserted these principles so emphatically is one of Carlyle's greatest merits; and if he obtained emphasis at the cost of exaggeration, overstatement, grotesque straining of language and imagery, and much substantial error as to facts, I can only say that the service remains, and is inestimable. But there is a less pleasing qualification to be made. The objection to the ballot as a purely mechanical arrangement is combined, as we have just seen, with the objection founded upon the prevalence of fools. That stinging phrase, 'mostly fools,' has stuck in our throats. The prophet who tells us that we are wicked may be popular—perhaps, because our consciences are on his side; but the prophet who calls us fools is likely to provoke our wrath. I, at least, never met a man who relished that imputation, even if he admitted it to contain a grain of truth. But, palatable or not, it is clearly fundamental with Carlyle. The world is formed of 'dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led;' the great men are the 'guides of the dull host, who follow them as by an irrevocable decree.' They are the heroes to whom alone are granted real powers of vision and command; realities amongst shams, and knowers amongst vague feelers after knowledge. We need not ask how this theory was reached; whether it is the spontaneous sentiment of a proud and melancholy character, or really a fair estimate of the facts; or, again, a deduction from the 'hero' doctrine. With that doctrine, at any rate, it naturally coincides. To exalt the stature of your hero, you must depress his fellows. If Gulliver is to be a giant, he must go to Lilliput. There is, however, a gap in the argument which is characteristically neglected by Carlyle. He would never have fairly accepted the doctrine—whose was it?—that, though a man may be wiser than anybody there is something wiser than he—namely, everybody. The omission is critical, and has many consequences. For one may fully admit Carlyle's estimate: one may hold the difference between a Shakespeare and an average contributor to the poet's corner of a newspaper, or between a born leader of men, a Cromwell and a Chatham, and the enormous majority of his followers, as something hardly expressible in words: one may admit that the history of thought or society reveals the more clearly, the more closely it is studied, the height to which the chosen few tower above the average; one may even diminish the percentage of the wise from a tenth to a hundredth or a thousandth: and yet one may hold to the superior wisdom of the mass. No ballot-box, it is true, will make the folly of the nine equal to the wisdom of the one. Or it can tend that way only if the foolish majority have some sense of the need of superior guidance. But the ignorance and folly of mankind, their incapacity for forming any trustworthy judgment on any given point, may also be consistent with a capacity for groping after truth, and they have the advantage of trying experiments on a large scale. The fact that a creed commends itself to the instincts of many men in many ages is a better proof—Carlyle himself being the judge—that it contains some truth than the isolated judgment of the most clearsighted philosopher. The fact that an institution actually makes men happy and calls forth their loyalty is a more forcible argument in its favour than the opinion of the most experienced statesman. And, therefore, the fact that any society is chiefly made up of fools is quite consistent with the belief that it is collectively the organ through which truth gradually manifests itself and wins a wider recognition. Securus judicat orbis may be a true maxim if we interpret it to mean that the world decides—not as the experimenter but as the experiment. Carlyle systematically overlooks this blind semi-conscious process of co-operation upon which the 'hero' is really as dependent as the dull flock which he leads. History, as he is fond of saying, is the essence of innumerable biographies. To find the essence of the biographies, again, he goes to the essential biographies; that is, to the biographies of the men who give the impulse, not of those who passively submit to the impulse. This apotheosis of the individual is dictated by his imaginative idiosyncrasy, as much as by his theory of history. He must have the picturesque concrete fact; the living hero to be the incarnation of the idea; and, accordingly, history in his page is like a gigantic panorama in which the painter sacrifices everything to obtain the strongest contrasts, and makes his lights stand out against vast breadths of unspeakable gloom. The hero is thus made to sum up the whole effectual force, and all that is done by the Greeks is attributed to the arm of Achilles. Some awkward results follow. Frederick is a hero who has obvious moral defects, and readers are startled by Carlyle's worship of such an idol. Yet it follows from the assumptions. For Frederick, in Carlyle's theory, means the development of the German nation. That the growth of the German influence in Europe was a phenomenon which naturally and rightfully excited Carlyle's strongest enthusiasm requires no demonstration. If the credit of that, as of every other great achievement, must be given to some solitary hero, Frederick doubtless has the best claim to the honour. We may no doubt say that Frederick, in spite of this, was selfish and cynical, and may confine our praises to allowing his possession of perspicacity enough to see the capabilities of his position. A great man may do an involuntary service to mankind, because his genius inclines him to range himself on the side of the strongest forces, and therefore of what we vaguely call progress. But the hero-worshipper naturally regards him as not merely an instrument, but the conscious and efficient cause of the progress itself.
Hence, too, the apparent immorality which some people discern in Carlyle's denunciations of 'red tape' formulas, and the ordinary conventions of society. Undoubtedly, such fetters must snap like packthread when opposed to the deeper forces which govern the growth of nations. No set of engagements on paper will keep a nation on its legs if it is rotten at the core, or maintain a balance of power between forces which are daily growing unequal. It is idle to suppose that any contract could bind, or otherwise can preserve, the vitality of effete institutions. And hence arise a good many puzzling questions for political casuistry. It is hard to say at what precise point it becomes necessary to snap the bonds, and when the necessity of change makes revolution, with all its mischiefs, preferable to stagnation. The hero-worshipper who regards his idol as the supreme moving force, has to make him also the infallible judge in such matter. He stands above—not the ultimate rules of morality, but—the whole system of regulations and compromises by which men must govern themselves in normal times—and decides when they must be suspended in the name of the higher law. The only appeal from his decision is the appeal to facts. If the apparent hero be really self-seeking and vulgarly ambitious, he and his empire will be crushed like Napoleon's. If, on the whole, his decision be right, as inspired from above, he will lay the foundations of a new order on an unshakable basis. And, therefore, Carlyle is naturally attracted to the revolutionary periods, when the underlying forces come to the surface; when the foundations of the great deep are broken up, all conventions summarily swept aside, and the direct as well as the ultimate attention is to the great principles of its social life. Therefore he sympathises with Mirabeau, who had 'swallowed all formulas,' and still more with Cromwell, whose purpose, in his view, was to make the laws of England a direct application of the laws of God. Puritan and Jacobin are equally impatient for the instantaneous advent of the millennium, and so far attract equally the man who shares their hatred of compromise and temporising with the world.
Here we come to the final problem. Cromwell's Parliament, he says, failed in their attempt to realise their 'noble, and surely necessary, attempt.' Nay, they 'could not but fail;' they had 'the sluggishness, the slavish half-and-halfness, the greediness, the cowardice, and general fatuity and falsity of some ten million men against it—alas! the whole world and what we call the Devil and all his angels against it!' This is the true revolutionary doctrine. The fact that a reform would only succeed fully if men were angels is with the ordinary Conservative a reason for not reforming at all; and with your genuine fanatic a reason not for declining the impracticable, but for denouncing the facts. We have, however, to ask how it fits in with any such theory of progress as was possible for Carlyle. For some such theory must be held by anyone who makes the victory of truth and justice over shams and falsehoods a corner-stone of his system. It has been asked, in fact, whether there is not a gross inconsistency here. If Cromwell's success proved him to be a hero, did not the Restoration upset the proof? The answer, frequently and emphatically given by Carlyle, as in the lecture on the hero as king, is an obvious one. Cromwell represents an intermediate stage between Luther and the French Revolution. Luther told the Pope that he was a 'chimera;' and the French gave the same piece of information to other 'chimeras.' The whole process is a revolt against certain gigantic shams, and the success very inadequately measured by any special incident in the struggle. The French Revolution, with all its horrors, was a 'return to truth,' though, as it were, to a truth 'clad in hellfire:' and its advent should be hailed as 'shipwrecked mariners might hail the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless seas and waves.' And throughout this vast revolutionary process, our hope rests upon the 'certainty of heroes being sent us;' and that certainty 'shines like a polestar, through murk dustclouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.'
It is well that we have a 'certainty' of the coming hero; for the essay seems to show the weakness of all excessive reliance upon individuals. Cromwell's life, as he tells us emphatically, was the life of the Commonwealth, and Cromwell's life was at the mercy of a 'stray bullet.' Where then is a certainty of progress in a world thus dependent upon solitary heroes, in a wilderness of fools, liable to be snuffed out at a moment's notice? So far as certainty means a scientific conviction resting on the observation of facts, we, of course, cannot have it. It is a certainty which follows from our belief in the overruling power which will send heroes when there is work for heroes to do. And Carlyle can at times, especially in his earlier writings, declare his faith in such a progress with full conviction. 'The English Whig,' says Herr Teufelsdröckh, 'has, in the second generation, become an English Radical, who, in the third, it is to be hoped, will become an English rebuilder. Find mankind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower; the phœnix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling earth with her music; or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral swansong immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer.' And the phrase, as I think, gives the theory which in fact is more or less explicitly contained in all Carlyle's writings.
It is plain, however, that progress, so understood, is a progress consistent with long periods of the reverse of progress. It implies an alternation of periods of reconstruction and vital energy with others of decay and degeneration. And in this I do not know that Carlyle differs from other philosophers. Few people are sanguine enough to hold that every generation improves upon the preceding. But the modern believer in progress undoubtedly believes that this actual generation is better than the last, and that the next will be better still; and is very apt to impute bad motives to anyone who differs from him. Here, of course, he must come into flat opposition to Carlyle. For Carlyle, to put it briefly, regarded the present state of things as analogous to that of the Lower Empire; a time of dissolution of old bonds and of a general ferment which was destroying the very tissues of society. So far he agrees, of course, with many Conservatives; but he differs from them in regarding the process as necessary, and even ultimately beneficial. The disease is one which must run its course; the best hope is that it may run it quickly; the attempt to suppress the symptoms and to regain health by making time run backwards is simply chimerical. Thus he was in the painful position of one who sees a destructive process going on of which he recognises the necessity whilst all the immediate results are bad.
To the ardent believer in progress such a state of mind is, of course, repulsive. It implies misanthropy, cynicism, and disbelief in mankind. Nor can anybody deny that Carlyle's gloomy and dyspeptic constitution palpably biassed his view of his contemporaries as well as of their theories. The 'mostly fools' expresses a deeply-rooted feeling, and we might add 'mostly bores,' and to a great extent humbugs. And this, of course, implies a very low estimate of the powers of unheroic mankind, and therefore of their rights. If most men are fools, their right to do as they please is a right to knock their heads against stone walls. Carlyle perhaps overlooked the fact that even that process may be useful training for fools. But even here he asserted a doctrine wrongly applied rather than false in principle. It shocks one to find an open advocacy of slavery for black Quashee. But we must admit, and admit for the reasons given by Carlyle, that even slavery may be better than sheer anarchy and barbarism; that, historically speaking, the system of slavery represents a necessary stage in civilisation; and therefore that the simple abolition of slavery—a recognition of unconditional 'right' without reference to the possession of the instincts necessary for higher kinds of society—might be disguised cruelty. The error was in the hasty assumption that his Quashee was, in fact, in this degraded state; and the haste to accept this disheartening belief was but too characteristic. That liberty might mean barbarism was true; that it actually did mean it in certain given cases was a rash assumption too much in harmony with his ordinary aversion to the theorists of his time.
This applies to all Carlyle's preachings about contemporary politics; the weakest of his writings are those in which his rash dogmatism, coloured by his gloomy temperament, was employed upon unfamiliar topics. But the pith and essence of them all is the intense conviction that the one critical point for modern statesmen is the creation of a healthy substratum to the social structure. That the lives of the great masses are squalid, miserable, and vicious, and must be elevated by the spread of honesty, justice, and the unflinching extirpation of corrupt elements, the substitution of rigorous rulers for idle professors of official pedantry, busy about everything but the essential—that is the sum and substance of the teaching. That he attributes too much to the legislative power, and has too little belief in the capacities of the average man, may be true enough. But this one thing must be said in conclusion. The bitterness, the gloom, even the apparent brutality, is a proof of the strength of his sympathies. He is savage with the physician because he is appalled at the virulence of the disease and the inadequacy of the remedy. He may shriek 'quack' too hastily, and be too ready to give over the patient as desperate. And yet I am frequently struck by a contrast. I meet a good friend who holds up his hands at Carlyle's ferocity. We talk, and I find that he holds that in politics we are all going to sheer destruction or 'shooting Niagara'; that the miserable Radicals are sapping all public spirit; that faith is being undermined by malcontents and atheists; that the merchant has become a gambler, and the tradesman a common cheat; that the 'British workman' is a phrase which may be used with the certainty of provoking a sneer; and, briefly, that there is not a class in the country which is not on the highroad to decay, or an institution beyond the reach of corruption. And yet my friend sits quietly down and enjoys his dinner as heartily as if he were expecting the millennium. What shall I say? That he does not believe what he says, or that his digestive apparatus was in most enviable order? I know not; but certainly Carlyle was not capable of this. He took things too terribly in earnest. When workmen scamped the alterations in his house, or the railway puffed its smoke into his face, he saw visible symbols of modern degeneracy, and thought painfully of the old honest wholesome life in Annandale—of steady God-fearing farmers and self-respecting workmen. All that swept away by progress and 'prosperity beyond example'! That was his reflection; perhaps it was very weak, as certainly it was very unpleasant to worry himself about what he could not help, and sprang, let us say, all from a defective digestion. And yet, though I cannot think without pity of the man of genius who felt so keenly and thought so gloomily of the evils around us, I feel infinitely more respect for his frame of mind than for that of the man who, sharing, verbally at least, this opinion, can let it calmly lie in his mind without the least danger to his personal comfort.
THE STATE TRIALS
It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on the whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not generally share that impression; and, on the contrary, have said a great many fine things about the charm of conversing with the choice minds of all ages, with the innuendo, to use the legal phrase, that they themselves modestly demand some place amongst the aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort upon our teachers. Are you not, we observe, exceedingly given to humbug? The youthful student takes the poet's ecstasies and agonies in solemn earnest. We who have grown a little wiser cannot forget with what complacency the poet has often devised a new agony; how he has set it to a pretty tune; how he has treasured up his sorrows and despairs to make his literary stock in trade, has taken them to market, and squabbled with publishers and writhed under petty critics, and purred and bridled under judicious flattery; and we begin to resent his demand upon our sympathies. Are not poetry and art a terrible waste of energy in a world where so much energy is already being dissipated? The great musician, according to the well-worn anecdote, hears the people crying for bread in the street, and the wave of emotion passing through his mind comes out in the shape, not of active benevolence, but of some new and exquisite jangle of sounds. It is all very well. The musician, it is probable enough, could have done nothing better. But there are times when we feel that we would rather have the actual sounds, the downright utterance of an agonised human being, than the far-away echo of passion set up in the artistic brain. We prefer the roar of the tempest to the squeaking of the Æolian harp. We tire of the skilfully prepared sentiment, the pretty fancies, the unreal imaginations, and long for the harsh, crude, substantial fact, the actual utterance of men struggling in the dire grasp of unmitigated realities. We want to see Nature itself, not to look at the distorted images presented in the magical mirror of a Shakespeare. The purpose of playing is, as that excellent authority is constantly made to repeat, to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. But, upon that hypothesis, why should we not see the age itself instead of being bothered by impossible kings and queens and ghosts mixed up in supernatural catastrophes? If this theory of art be sound, is not the most realistic historian the only artist? Nay, since every historian is more or less a sophisticator, should we not go back to the materials from which histories are made?