It is plain, therefore, that he did not affirm the Germans to be intrinsically good and the French intrinsically bad. His aim was to show that nations rise in proportion to the extent to which their purposes are just and their methods intelligent, and that they invariably fall if they deal unjustly with their own citizens or their neighbors. Sometimes he contrasted the French unfavorably with the Germans, as, for instance, when he says that the martial ardor of the French may be compared to blazing straw, while that of the Germans is more like the burning of anthracite coal. This, however, is due to his having, like a great many other people, an impression that the French are more likely to exhibit superficial and glittering qualities, while the Germans are conspicuous for the commonplace virtues of industry and thoroughness. Nothing was more insidious, in his opinion, than to prefer brilliancy to solid worth; and it was the danger of this preference he was emphasizing, more than the native depravity of the French national character, when he compared the Gallic temperament unfavorably with the Teutonic.
III
His attitude towards efficiency was also the direct opposite of the present German conception of it. To him efficiency was a matter of adaptation and improvisation, while the German theory is that it is a question of fixed method and elaborate mechanism. Nobody ever despised more than Carlyle the perennial fallacy that things can be done better by the hocus pocus of procedure than by the intelligent application of the available means to the end desired. He censured any effort to achieve things automatically. He was never tired of ridiculing trust in formulas. He insisted that the intelligence must be unfettered by preconceptions or by a rigid plan. His hero was a man who had “swallowed all the formulas,” and who proceeded to adapt means to ends in any way that was effective, passing rough-shod over theory, convention, dogmas, or any other restrictions on his freedom of action. It is true that he did insist on the necessity of having accurate and comprehensive knowledge, and on thoroughness and other essentials of what the Germans regard as scientific procedure. These things, however, were to him not major but minor virtues. They were the auxiliaries to success, but they were never to be considered as sufficient to ensure success, for they had always to be supplemented by intelligence and insight. This is shown by his depreciation of mere “beaver” industry, and by his fondness for satirizing “pipe-clay,” by which he meant senseless military routine. No crime, in his eyes, was worse than a failure to recognize the dominant importance of the sensibly and intellectually imponderable and intangible elements that are part of every human problem; so that he reprehended as vices the very things that have been most characteristic of the Germans during the present war.
Another thing that Carlyle abused and the Germans display, is insincerity. Nothing comes in for more invective from him than this, and to him it meant primarily a subjective attitude. Vanity was its chief cause, in his opinion. Truth, however unpalatable, must be recognized; while fiction, however flattering, must be scorned. Personal relationships must not sway our judgment, and he railed with especial violence against unwarranted optimism inspired by conceit. He pointed out, as one of Frederick the Great’s chief virtues, the fact that he was influenced by no delusions created by vanity or sentimentality. He says Frederick looked facts squarely in the face, and instances his once offending his brother, the Crown Prince, by telling him that he had surrounded himself with flatterers, and reminding him that the Austrians, his enemies in the field, would not flatter him. Carlyle also points out that Frederick’s wars were all conducted on a frank basis, so far, at least, as acknowledgment to himself of the real situation was concerned. There was no indulgence in the theatrical or the spectacular, certainly in none that deceived only himself. Frederick wasted no energy in striving for apparent triumphs that had no practical worth. He disregarded purely political or sentimental influences. Berlin was twice entered by the enemy during the Seven Years War, because Frederick never paid a military price for a political or a temporary victory, but he yielded territory whenever strategy demanded it. How different is this from Germany’s present military policy, which sacrifices permanent advantages for the appearance of victory, and does not succeed in achieving even a convincing appearance of that? It is plain that the cheap posturing of the German military policy is just the sort of thing Carlyle hated and despised, and nobody who has read him more than casually can have escaped realizing that his insistence on the necessity of recognizing fact in an honest and unbiased manner is a condemnation of the delight in conscious and unconscious mendacity displayed by the present German government.
Stupidity he warned against as one of the chief implements of the devil. There is no other crime, he often said, for morality is largely a matter of intelligence. Better be a villain than a fool, he implies, by quoting approvingly the boast of the Scotch family that it had produced “many a blackguard but not one blockhead.” The mind which cannot or will not perceive the obvious, or which persists in denying the unflattering, is not only hopeless but vicious. Preferring to credit their prejudices or their desires, instead of the lesson of events, was the chief crime he ascribed to the men he held responsible for the worst catastrophes of history. For mere density and well-intentioned incompetence, as in the case of Louis XVI, he had some pity; but for stupidity arising from wanton obstinacy and arrogance he had nothing but wrath and scorn. It would be difficult to find in history a parallel for the infatuated folly of the German military and political policy during this war, but we find Carlyle reprehending less aggravated and perverse displays of trust in bombast, brutality, and pretension, in the case of countries like Spain and Austria; and this is only one of many things that show how monstrous in his eyes would seem the insensate policy which has made Germany the shame of civilization, and has alienated from her every country in the world except a few contiguous ones that tolerate or assist her through fear or rapacity.
What proves the German policy most at variance with Carlyle’s philosophy, however, is the fact that it is guided by materialistic and cynical convictions. His basic belief was that the fundamental law of existence is morality; they jeer at any power that is not material. Besides this, he believed that reliance on the baser qualities of human nature can never lead anywhere but to perdition. The leadership which aims to secure itself by appealing to the selfishness or by satisfying the folly of mankind, is courting disaster. The German policy boastfully proceeds on the assumption that the only motives that govern human action are self interest of some base sort, and it credits humanity with as little intelligence as morality. It is true that Carlyle had slight respect for the intelligence or the integrity of the masses, but he insisted that nobility is inherent in human nature, and that a hero who knows how to arouse it, invariably appears whenever a government becomes so unjust or so incompetent as to be intolerable. The German theory is that the weak have no friends; Carlyle’s conviction was that nature avenges all injustice. The Germans declare that might makes right; Carlyle preached that right makes might, and on every question of fundamental morality he was diametrically opposed to them. “Savage animalism is nothing; inventive spiritualism is all,” he writes in one place, and implies in a thousand. The Germans proceed on exactly the opposite assumption. They trust in nothing but force, and the neo-Darwinism that guides their policy is only a combination of the ideas he denounced in the works of such men as Hume, Bentham, Comte, and Darwin himself, mixed with a sentimental egoism that he abominated above everything else.
IV
There is, of course, some reason for believing that Carlyle’s ideas resemble those of which the German policy is the expression, but there is none if we look beyond his superficial meaning. One reason for branding him as an advocate of German practices is his exaltation of Frederick the Great. Frederick began his first war by seizing Silesia, very much as Wilhelm II began the present war by seizing Belgium. As Carlyle justified the seizing of Silesia, many people cannot see why that does not warrant the conclusion that he would also justify the seizure of Belgium. Such people, however, forget that the Prussia of 1740 was not even the Prussia of 1914, to say nothing of the German Empire or the Teutonic Alliance. Carlyle would detect in Prussia a change in spirit, but even if this cannot be established, there is certainly no parallel between Frederick’s seizure of Silesia and Germany’s attack on Belgium. In 1740, Prussia was one of the small countries of Europe. Its population was about half that of Belgium in 1914, and its political importance was not much greater. It was situated between militaristic France and imperialistic Austria; and its immediate neighbors: Saxony, Bavaria, Poland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, were ready at any moment to profit by its misfortunes. Prussia’s seizure of Silesia was, therefore, very much as if Belgium, learning in advance of Germany’s plan of invasion, had seized German territory adjacent to its frontiers, and used it as a buffer to defend itself. It was the case of a small state preserving itself from the aggressions of a big neighbor aiming at world dominion. The methods employed may not have been technically legal, but they were justified; therefore Carlyle endorsed them. He believed that Frederick, cynic and materialist though he admits him to have been, nevertheless proved himself the valiant defender of his country’s right to self government. He also regarded Frederick as the man who did most in the eighteenth century to preserve Europe from being dominated by a lawless imperialism. The rulers of Austria, because of their almost uninterrupted possession of the office of Holy Roman Emperor, openly aimed at universal dominion, and never lost an opportunity of trying to realize it by force of intrigue. France, too, was striving for the domination of Europe, and Russia was just becoming conspicuous for the brutality and unscrupulousness of its political methods quite as much as for the vastness of the power it had suddenly developed. When these facts are considered, Frederick’s action must be admitted to have been, if not in the interests of democracy, at least in support of the principle of self-determination for which the Allies claim to be fighting against Germany; and Carlyle’s endorsement of it at least creates the presumption that he would not sympathize with Germany, which today, greatly extended, is playing the part of the bullying nations he commended Frederick for thwarting.
He seems, however, to advocate autocracy, and to deride democracy, and this would appear to put him in agreement with the kaiser and his professorial prompters. It is true that he did deride the notion that the decision of the majority is always right. He likewise insisted that all the constitutionality and legality conceivable will not ensure good government or justify incompetence or unrighteousness in power; and that, conversely, no formal or technical irregularity disqualifies a government which is beneficent and capable. He ridiculed the idea that political equality is synonymous with justice, but this does not mean that he believed in caste rule. His opposition to political equality was inspired by no respect for inherited authority or the sanctity of property, but was the result of a conviction that it is a crude and materialistic way of trying to solve an immensely complicated problem by a simple mechanical process. Not external equality, but equity, must be achieved to make government effective and successful, was his contention. Making men equal in political power, in his opinion, ensured that the government would be dominated by the ignorance and selfishness of the mass of men, rather than by the enlightenment and integrity of the relatively small portion of mankind whom nature fits for leadership by endowing them with superior moral and intellectual powers. He believed no man entitled to authority except on the basis of character and ability, and he was as bitterly opposed to the German scheme of class rule as he was to the quantitative methods of the radicals. It is entirely wrong to think that, because he denied that universal suffrage will guarantee justice and humanity, he endorsed injustice and oppression. He didn’t care how a government was organized or what it claimed to do, but he only inquired what it had succeeded in doing, and by this he judged it. The results of the German policy have been disaster for the world as well as for Germany, and he would condemn the German government for this, without being at all concerned about its form. He attached no importance to a government’s form; all he judged by was its spirit. He believed that a government is inevitably the expression of the intelligence and morality of the people it represents, and that any form is capable of proving either good or bad in operation. Germany may be an autocracy in form, but the German people almost unanimously endorsed the war and its enormities; so what we have is an exhibition of the fallibility of popular judgment more than a display of the evils of autocracy. On this point Carlyle’s position is clear, while that of the critics who accuse him of having endorsed German practices, because he denied that the majority is always right, is much more susceptible of being considered a justification of Kultur.