The teaching of “Sartor Resartus” is entirely negative; and when you ask what Carlyle had to contribute to constructive thinking about our hateful social system, the answer is: nonsense. He saw the evils, and scolded at them—and scolded equally hard at the forces which are to remedy the evils. Carlyle had contempt for the people, out of whose lap he had sprung; he despised democracy and the whole machinery of popular consent. He repaid America for discovering him by ridiculing the Union cause; he denounced the reform bill of 1867 as “Shooting Niagara.”
Carlyle’s way to set the world right is revealed to us in a book called “Hero-Worship.” First we have to find the Great Man; and then we have to obey him. “Obedience is the primary duty of man”—meaning, of course, the man like you and me, who is spelled with a little m. The one who is spelled with a capital letter is the Autocrat, who makes us do what we ought to do. “A nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants never came to much in the world.”
Our Great Tyrant sets us all hard at work. He makes us build houses and cultivate farms—but no machinery or railroads, because these constitute Industrialism, which is a Mammon-Monster. If we do our work by machinery we have leisure, and that is dangerous; we must have Work, and then more Work, our one safe Deliverance from Devil-Mischief—you see how one picks up the style of the “Gospel of Silence”!
Having got the houses built, what next? Why then, to save us from the Idleness-Imp we set to work knocking the houses down with cannon-balls. I don’t mean that Carlyle always advocated war; what he did was to glorify systems of government which historically have resulted and psychologically must result in war. At the age of fifty-eight, having surveyed the whole of history, our Scotch hero-worshipper selected the greatest of human heroes to become the subject of a grand state biography in six volumes: and whom do you suppose this hero turns out to be? Frederick of Prussia, who stole Silesia from his cousin, and seized Poland and divided it up among Austria, Russia and himself; Jonathan Wild the Great, founder of the Hohenzollern Heroism, and great-great-grandfather of our World War!
I dutifully read those six large volumes, and studied the series of charts in which the strategy of Frederick’s military campaigns is set forth. I learned a fascinating parlor game, which consists in moving here and there little black and white oblongs representing regiments and brigades and divisions and other military formations of human beings. The white oblongs represent your own human beings, and the black oblongs represent the human beings you propose to destroy; you pound them to pieces with artillery, you sweep them with volleys of musketry, you charge them with cavalry and chop them with sabres—and then you move up other oblongs, called reserves, and continue the procedure. It is safer to play this game on paper, because when you get through, you can throw the paper into the waste-basket, and do not have some tens of thousands of dead and mutilated men and horses decaying all over your back yard.
A pitiful ending for a Prophet and Preacher who aspires to the Remaking of Mankind in Capital Letters! Just a poor, bewildered old dotard, dyspeptic and crotchety, helpless and blundering, aspiring to a certain end and working to the opposite end.
“But why should anyone consider such a man great?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“I have been trying to formulate that to myself. It is because he had the grace to be unhappy about our modern world. He did not get drunk on moonshine; he did not tell himself that God was going to do what it was obviously the business of men to do. He didn’t persuade himself that Evolution was going to do it, or that Time was going to do it, or that Faith was going to do it. He didn’t prattle about one increasing purpose running through the ages, or about one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves. He didn’t decide to dream his dream and hold it true, or to have moments when he felt he could not die. He didn’t tell us that Love will conquer at the last, or that his faith was large in Time—”
“This appears to be a transition,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Precisely. We are about to begin a new chapter: The Lullaby Laureate, or Queen Victoria’s Super-Soothing Syrup.”