Wagner lived to old age, full of honors, and left a widow and a son, poetically named Siegfried. The widow died recently, but the son still survives, to bask in his father’s glory, and to gather in the shekels of the music pilgrims. It is possible to appreciate to the full the sublimity of the revolutionary Wagner without paying reverence to this family institution which he has left behind, or for the hordes of “Schwaermer” who come to eat sausages and drink beer and revel in emotions which they have no idea of applying to life. Is there anything in all the tragedies imagined by Richard Wagner more tragic than the fate which has befallen the young Siegfried-Bakunin—whose prestige and tradition are now the financial mainstay of the White Terror in Germany, the Jew-baiting, Communist-shooting mob of the “Hakenkreutzler,” or Bavarian Fascisti?
CHAPTER LXVIII
THE GOSPEL OF SILENCE
Ogi has been wandering about the cave with a discontented expression on his face, showing a disposition to growl at whatever gets in his way. Mrs. Ogi, whose job is to notice domestic weather-signs, inquires: “What is the matter with you?”
Says Ogi: “I have to write an uninteresting chapter.”
“I can’t, because it deals with an interesting man.” As she cannot guess that riddle, he goes on to complain: “If only I had been writing this book twenty-five years ago, when I thought ‘Sartor Resartus’ the most delightful book ever penned! But I went on, and got an overdose of Carlyle. I read almost all that Gospel of Silence in forty volumes; and now I sit and ask: what did I learn from it? Some facts, of course: history and biography. But did I get a single valid idea, one sound conclusion about life?”
“Explain it quickly, and pass on,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“I explain the human race, blocked from the future by a sheet-steel door. We need the acetylene torch of spiritual fervor; also we need the engineering brain, to say: “Put it here, and here, and cut the hinges.” In the face of this task, some of the wielders of the torch go off and get drunk. Others fall down on their knees and pray. Others forbid us to touch the door, because God made it and it is His will. Others write noble verses with perfect rhymes, to the effect that man is born to trouble, and great art teaches us to endure discomfort with dignity. Others take fire with zeal, and proceed to butt the door down with their heads. They butt and butt, until their heads ache. I realize how undignified it is to describe a great master of English prose as a ‘sorehead’; yet there happens to be no other word in the language that so tells the story of Thomas Carlyle.”
He was the son of a carpenter in Scotland, and suffered from poverty and neglect, and through a long life from indigestion. He complained pathetically that Emerson ate pie and was well, while he ate plain oatmeal and was miserable. He was irritable, and hard to get along with—we are privileged to know about this, because both he and his wife wrote endless letters to their friends, detailing their domestic troubles, and these letters are published in many volumes, and we can read both sides and take our choice. Tennyson refused assent to the proposition that the Carlyles should have married elsewhere; because then there would have been four miserable people instead of two.
Carlyle made himself, and also his literary style; he was a hack writer, biographer and translator, and struggled along with a dissatisfied young wife in a lonely country cottage. “Sartor Resartus” was written at the age of thirty-five, and sketches the philosophy of an imaginary German professor, whose name translated means “Devil’s Dung”; this professor’s philosophy being based upon the discovery that everything in civilization is merely clothes, the outside of things, the shams and pretensions and conventions. It is funny to imagine our statesmen and diplomats and prominent society personages stripped, not merely of their medals and ribbons, but also of their shirts and trousers; very few of them would look imposing—and the same applies to civilization with its proprieties, moralities and religions. This work of uproarious mischief fell absolutely flat in well-dressed and well-mannered England, and Emerson and a few people in far-off Boston had to inform the British cultured classes that they had a new prophet among them.