[4] First printed in The Forum, New York, December, 1895.
In a time like our own, when literature on either side of the Atlantic lacks original energy; when the best minds are busy with criticism rather than with creation; when ephemeral story-tellers and spineless disciples of culture pass for masters, and sincere but uninspired scholars have our respect but move us not,—we shall do well to contemplate anew the man who by his personality and his books has nobly swayed two generations of the English-speaking race, and who, as the years recede, looms more and more certainly as the foremost modern British man of letters. Men may look distorted to their contemporaries, like the figures in a Chinese picture; but Time, the wisest of painters, sets them in their true perspective, gives them their just proportions, and reveals their permanent features in light and shade. And sufficient time has now elapsed for us to perceive that Carlyle belongs to that thrice-winnowed class of literary primates whom posterity crowns. He holds in the nineteenth century a position similar to Johnson’s in the eighteenth, and to Milton’s in the seventeenth,—each masterful, but in a different way; each typifying his age without losing his individuality; all brothers in preëminence.
When, for convenience’ sake, we classify Carlyle among men of letters, we fail to describe him adequately. The phrase suggests too little. Charles Lamb, the lovable, is the true type of men of letters, who illuminate, sweeten, delight, and entertain us. Carlyle was far more: he was a mighty moral force, using many forms of literature—criticism, biography, history, pamphlets—as its organs of expression. He had, as the discerning Goethe said of him, “unborrowed principles of conviction,” by which he tested the world. He felt the compulsion of a great message intrusted to him. There rings through most of his utterances the uncompromising “Thus saith the Lord” of the Hebrew prophets,—a tone which, if it do not persuade us, we call arrogant, yet which speaks the voice of conscience to those who give it heed. What, then, was his message?—what those “unborrowed principles of conviction” by which he judged his time?
Born in the poor village of Ecclefechan on December 4, 1795, his childhood and youth were spent amid those stern conditions by which, rather than by affluence, brave, self-reliant, earnest characters are moulded. His parents were Calvinists, to whom religion was the chief concern, and who taught him by example the severe virtues of that grim sect. Next to religion, and its active manifestation in a pious life, they prized education, begrudging themselves no sacrifices by which their son might attend the University of Edinburgh. They wished him to be a minister, but when he came to maturity he recognized his unfitness for that vocation and abandoned it. They acquiesced regretfully, little dreaming that he who refused to be confined in some Annandale pulpit should become the foremost preacher of his age.
Carlyle’s reluctance was rooted in conscientious scruples. He began by questioning the authority of his Church; he went on to sift the authority of the Bible. Little by little the whole wondrous fabric of supernatural Christianity crumbled before him. He could not but be honest with himself; he could not but see how Hebrew legend had overgrown the stern ethical code attributed to Moses; how the glosses of Paul and Augustine and a hundred later religionists had changed or perverted the simple teaching of Christ. Awestruck, he beheld the God of his youth vanish out of the world. He wandered in the wilderness of doubt; he wrestled daily and nightly with despair. And then slowly, painfully, after brooding through long years, he saw the outlines of a larger faith emerge from the gloom. He fortified himself by acknowledging that, since righteousness is eternal, it cannot perish when we reject whatever opinions some Council of Westminster, of Trent, or of Nice may have resolved about it.
Only earnest souls who have experienced the wrench which comes when we first break away from the bondage of an artificial religion, and perceive that the moral law may be something very different from dogmas, know the pang it costs. The dread of losing the truth when errors are thrown over—nay, the apparent hopelessness of being able to decide what is truth—causes many to hesitate, and some to turn back. Carlyle was not, of course, the first in Britain to tread the desolate path from Superstition into Rationalism. In the eighteenth century—to go no farther back—two very eminent minds had preceded him; but in both Hume and Gibbon the intellectual predominated over the moral nature, and to temperaments like theirs the pangs of new birth are always less acute. It is because in Carlyle the moral nature preponderated—intense, fiery, and enduring—that he became the spokesman of myriads who since him have had a similar experience.
If we were to hazard a generalization which should sum up the nineteenth century, might we not affirm that the chief business of the century has been to establish a basis of conduct in harmony with what we actually know of the laws governing the universe? Hitherto, for ages together, men have not consciously done this, but they have accepted standards handed down to them by earlier men, who compounded these standards out of little knowledge, much ignorance, legend, and hearsay. Skeptics there have always been, but usually, like the skeptics who flourished in the last century, they have differed from the doubters in ours by the degree of their moral intensity. Whether we turn to Carlyle or to George Eliot, we find each tirelessly busy in substituting for the worn-out tenets of the past, springs of belief and conduct worthy to satisfy a more enlightened conscience.
Here, then, we have the corner-stone of Carlyle’s influence. Our world is a moral world; conscience and righteousness are eternal realities, independent of the vicissitudes of any church. If we seek for a definite statement of Carlyle’s creed, we shall be disappointed; he never formulated any. After breaking loose from one prison, he would have scoffed at the idea of voluntarily locking himself up in another. He held that to possess a moral sense is to possess its justification; that conscience is a fact transcending logic just as consciousness or life itself does. In the presence of this supreme fact he cared little for its genealogy. The immanence of God was to him an ever-present, awful verity.
Likewise, when we come to examine his philosophy, we discover that he constructed no formal system. He absorbed the doctrine of Kant and his followers, and may be classed, by those who insist that every man shall have a label, among the transcendentalists: but his main interest was the application of moral laws to life, the trial of men and institutions in the court of conscience, rather than the exercise of the intellect in metaphysical speculations. The mystery of evil may not be explained for some ages, if ever; while we argue about it, evil grows: the one indispensable duty for all of us, he would say, is to combat evil in ourselves and in society now and here. The stanch seaman, when his ship founders, does not waste time in meditating why it should be that water will sink a ship, but he lashes together a raft, if haply he may thereby come off safe.
In these respects we behold Carlyle a true representative of his time. Before the vast bulk of sin and sorrow and pain he did not cower; he would fight it manfully. But the smoke of battle darkened him. The spectacle of mankind, dwelling in Eternity, yet ignorant of their heritage, pursuing “desires whose purpose ends in Time;” of souls engaged from dawn to dusk of their swift-fleeting existence, not on soul’s business, but on body’s business, worshiping idols they know to be false, deceiving, persecuting, slaying each other,—confirmed a tendency to pessimism to which his early Calvinism had predisposed him. But Carlyle’s pessimism must not be confounded with Swift’s misanthropy, or with Leopardi’s blank despair, or with the despicable Schopenhauer’s cosmic negation of good. Carlyle was neither cynic nor misanthrope. He might exclaim with Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” but he would mean that the ways and works of man are vain in comparison with his possibilities, and with the incalculable worth of righteousness. “Man’s unhappiness, as I construe,” he says, “comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even the Shadow of Ourselves.”