The opinions anyone holds in this momentous crisis are largely determined by those he has imbibed from the thinkers of the past, and it is interesting to notice how much Carlyle has been brought into the discussion on both sides. A somewhat systematic consideration of the bearing of his teachings on the present war may therefore not be altogether profitless.
For many reasons he is not the sort of man to invite much attention from journalistic, academic, and dilettante writers. He is unpopular in a double sense; for he is neither superficial nor facile, and his ideas are opposed to the optimistic convictions that dominate in this generation. Some insist that he is responsible for the extravagant paradox and persistent denial of the obvious and the accepted indulged in so freely by such journalistic products as Shaw and Chesterton, but these men only imitate his manner to pervert his meaning. That they imitate him, however, is proof of his influence; for the popular writer does not imitate anyone whose repute is not of the highest.
The academic mind is indifferent or hostile to him because the formlessness of his writings and their abnormal character seem serious defects to those to whom the formal is more important than the substantial. His learning, too, while undoubtedly extensive, is not always accurate or orthodox. The king is not the “cunning or the kenning” man, and his contempt for “logic-choppers” and “word-mongers” does not commend him to such as value the theoretical above the practical.
To the dilettante he is equally repellant. He hated mediocrity and superficiality, and he had inconveniently high standards. This latter reason is the openly avowed one for hostility towards him in the case of an English writer, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who freely denounces him in his diffuse discussions of the war, but also cites facts that tend to disprove his contention that Carlyle is without influence; for he tells of repeated experiences with British workingmen who were readers of Carlyle and ardent believers in his gospel.
Carlyle is undoubtedly a strong influence in Great Britain. The superficial regard him as a reactionary and an obscurantist who believed in despotism and serfdom, but those who live closer to the realities of life detect in his writings a passionate sympathy for the humble and the oppressed. He may not exert much influence in the learned or the artistic world, but he is certainly a social and a political force. Writers on British politics constantly refer to his influence over the more intelligent voters of the working classes, and this demonstrates power of the most pregnant kind.
Outside of Great Britain, too, there are evidences of his influence. It is mostly within the English speaking world, but some accuse him of being the progenitor of Nietzsche and his cult of the superman. This is only superficially true, however, for Nietzsche was exactly the sort of person he denounced as “quack” and “simulacrum;” but, as in the case of Shaw and Chesterton, this proves influence, even though it be of a negative sort. In the United States his French Revolution has apparently had much influence in the way of making our attitude towards the past less formal and academic, and in bringing about a tendency to look more at the principles than at the facts of history. He has also given us such familiar expressions as “captains of industry,” the “unspeakable Turk,” and many others not generally recognized as his; and the man who fashions our daily speech gives the strongest possible proof of influence. Here, too, however, his influence is chiefly in the political and social world, and we can see the effect of his ideas in one of our most important pieces of recent legislation, the selective draft; for this act aims to realize his cardinal principle, that the necessary work of a nation shall be compulsory and shall be apportioned equitably and in such a way as to ensure each man getting the task for which he is fitted.
II
The chief question about Carlyle at present, however, is not the extent of his influence, but how far his teachings justify the theories and practices now dominant in Germany. The Germans point to his advocacy of their cause in 1870, and to his glorification of Frederick the Great, as proofs that he would approve of, and even exalt, all that they have done. The kaiser has quoted him in a widely discussed speech about “one man with God being a majority,” while less prominent Germans have freely appealed to his authority. The English speaking world has seemed, on the whole, disposed to admit that Carlyle’s doctrines justify, or at least tend to produce, ideas such as those that now obsess Germany. Some writers, like the Mr. Hueffer already mentioned, have seized the opportunity to belabor his memory as a traitor; while others have risen up to defend him, although they seem to do so less from conviction than a desire to deprive the Germans of support. Anyone who knows Carlyle more than superficially, however, knows that the present German policy would earn from him nothing but furious denunciation; and the reason would not be because the Germans began the war, as D. A. Wilson argues in The Fortnightly Review for February, 1916, nor because he was pro-Russian, nor because of any other personal prejudice or predilection, but because the German nation today exhibits about all the vices he inveighed against as most dangerous to the peace of the world and the progress of civilization.
It would be idle to deny that Carlyle did exalt the German nation and German policies to the English-speaking world, but we shall have to qualify this exaltation if we accept Dr. Johnson’s principle that an author’s works need editing a generation or so after their composition. This dictum is based on the obvious necessity of recognizing that the force of what a man says is conditioned by the current opinion of his time and by his attitude towards it, and it also recognizes the truth of one of Carlyle’s own observations: “It is man’s nature to change his dialect from century to century; he cannot help it though he would.” The dialect of the nineteenth century was not that of the twentieth, and Carlyle’s use of it was affected by several things that still further obscure his meaning for us. He opposed strongly what he regarded as many popular fallacies of his time, and in opposing them he overemphasized things that seemed to him to discredit or to disprove them. To the undisciplined British populace, impatient of all control and clamoring for the removal of all restrictions on individual liberty, he extolled the docile German people; but it was not their absolute so much as their comparative virtue that he was praising, and he would have recognized that, under other circumstances, their submissiveness could prove a vice, as, indeed, it has. Another fact, pointed out by Colonel T. W. Higginson, a man whose extreme humanitarianism was calculated to make him unsympathetic towards the eulogist of Dr. Francia, is that Carlyle was a humorist and a man to whom the humorous attitude was second nature. It will be necessary, therefore, to discount his praise of the German people and of German institutions, for two reasons; the first, because it was heightened to serve as a corrective to the tendency towards license in his countrymen; and the second, because, as a humorist, and also because of his ardent temperament, he invariably indulged in over-statement.
There is much besides this to indicate that Carlyle’s praise of Germany in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is anything but evidence that he would endorse Kultur and Schrecklichkeit. His fundamental teaching is that we must not be formal, rigidly logical, or addicted to any fixed method of thinking. The nature of things must be determined from their effects, and not from any external characteristics. The national attributes of any people are not permanent, but they are capable of wide variation, and much of his invective and striking metaphor was poured forth in an effort to prove that this variation is very largely a question of good or bad leadership. In sustaining this thesis he traces the history of Germany more completely than he does that of any other country; and he indicates several periods, notably that of the Thirty Years’ War, and the reign of Frederick I, when Prussia, at least, was contemptible in its policies. France, too, he argues, has not always been the mischief-maker of Europe; for to him the French Revolution was a salutary outburst of the native integrity of the French people, to sweep away the intolerable hypocrisies and injustices of the Old Regime, and to improve not only French, but human society as well.