With equal fearlessness he attacked the cheap optimism based on material prosperity, which brags of the enormous commercial expansion made possible by the invention of machinery; which boasts of the rapid increase in population—so many more million mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, and so much more food and raiment produced—from decade to decade. These facts, he insisted, are not of themselves evidences of progress. Your inventions procure greater comfort, a more exuberant luxury; but do comfort and luxury necessarily build up character?—do they not rather unbuild it? Are your newly bred millions of bodies more than bodies? Take a census of souls, has their number increased? Though your steam-horse carries you fifty miles an hour, have you thereby become more virtuous? Though the lightning bears your messages, have you gained bravery? Of old, your aristocracy were soldiers: is the brewer who rises from his vats to the House of Lords—is any other man owing his promotion to the tradesman’s skill in heaping wealth—more worshipful than they? Let us not say that this amazing industrial expansion may not conduce to the uplifting of character; but let us strenuously affirm that it is of itself no indication of moral progress, and that, if it fail to be accompanied by a corresponding spiritual growth, it will surely lead society by the Byzantine high-road to effeminacy, exhaustion, and death.
A different gospel, this, from that which Carlyle’s great rival, Macaulay, was preaching,—Macaulay, who lauded the inventor of a useful machine above all philosophers! Different from the optimism—which gauges by bulk—of the newspapers and the political haranguers! Different, because true! Yet, though it sounded harsh, it stirred consciences,—which smug flatterings and gratulations can never do; and it gave a tremendous impetus to that movement which has come to overshadow all others,—the movement to reconstruct society on a basis, not of privilege, not of bare legality, but of mutual obligations.
Any inventory, however brief, of Carlyle’s substance, would be incomplete without some reference to his quarrel with Science. To Science a large part of the best intelligence of our age has been devoted,—a sign of the breaking away of the best minds from the cretinizing quibbles of theology into fields where knowledge can be ascertained. It is a truism that Science has advanced farther in our century than in all preceding time. By what paradox, then, should Carlyle slight its splendid achievements? Was it not because he revolted from the materialistic tendency which he believed to be inseparable from Science, a tendency which predominated a generation ago more than it does to-day? Materialism Carlyle regarded as a Gorgon’s head, the sight of which would inevitably petrify man’s moral nature.
Moreover, Carlyle’s method differed radically from that of the scientific man, who describes processes and investigates relations, but does not explain causes. Pledged to his allegiance to tangible facts, the man of science looks at things serially, pays heed to an individual as a link in an endless chain rather than as an individual, lays emphasis on averages rather than on particulars. To him this method is alone honest, and, thanks to it, a single science to-day commands more authenticated facts than all the sciences had fifty years ago. But there are facts of supreme importance which, up to the present at least, this method does not solve. The mystery of the origin of life still confronts us. Consciousness, the Sphinx, still mutely challenges the caravans which file before her. The revelations of Science seem, under one aspect, but descriptions of the habitations of life from the protoplasmic cell up to the human body. Immense though the value of such a register be, we are, not deceived into imagining that it explains ultimates. How came life into protoplasm at all? Whence each infinitesimal increment of life, recognizable at last in the budding of some new organ? And when we arrive at man, whence came his personality? Each of us is not only one in a genealogical series stretching back to the unreasoning, conscienceless amœba, but a clearly defined individual, a little world in himself, to whom his love, his sorrow, his pain and joy and terror, transcend in vividness all the experiences of all previous men: a microcosm, having its own immediate relations—absolute relations—with the infinite macrocosm. Science, bent on establishing present laws, measures by æons, counts by millions, and has warrant for ignoring your brief span or mine; but to you and me these few decades are all in all. However it may fare with the millions, you and I have vital, pressing needs, to supply which the experience of the entire animal kingdom can give us no help. Upon these most human needs Carlyle fastened, to the exclusion of what he held to be unnecessary to the furtherance of our spiritual welfare. He busied himself with ultimates and the Absolute. Not the stages of development, but the development attained; not the pedigree of conscience, but conscience as the supreme present reality; not the species, but the individual,—were his absorbing interests.
Thus we see how Carlyle approached the great questions of life invariably as a moralist. Mere erudition, which too often tends away from the human, did not attract him. Science, which he beheld still unspiritualized, he undervalued: what boots it to know the “mileage and tonnage” of the universe, when our foremost need is to build up character? In politics, in philosophy, in religion, likewise, he set this consideration above all others: before its august presence outward reforms dwindled into insignificance.
Such was the substance of Carlyle’s message. Remarkable as is its range, profound as is its import, it required for its consummation the unique powers of utterance which Carlyle possessed. Among the masters of British prose he holds a position similar to that of Michael Angelo among the masters of painting. Power, elemental, titanic, rushing forth from an inexhaustible moral nature, yet guided by art, is the quality in both which first startles our wonder. The great passages in Carlyle’s works, like the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sixtine Chapel, have no peers: they form a new species, of which they are the only examples. They seem to defy the ordinary canons of criticism; but if they break the rules it is because whoever made the rules did not foresee the possibility of such works. Transcendent Power, let it take whatever shape it will,—volcano, torrent, Cæsar, Buonarotti, Carlyle,—proclaims: “Here I am,—a fact: make of me what you can! You shall not ignore me!”
Of Carlyle’s style we may say that, whether one likes it or not, one can as little ignore it as fail to perceive that he makes it serve, with equal success, whatever purpose he requires. It can explain, it can laugh, it can draw tears; it can inveigh, argue, exhort; it can tell a story or preach a sermon. Carlyle has, it is computed, the largest vocabulary in English prose. His endowment of imagination and of humor beggars all his competitors. None of them has invented so many new images, or given to old images such fresh pertinence. Your first impression, on turning to other writings after his, is that they are pale, and dim, and cold: such is the fascination inalienable from power. Excess there may be in so vehement a genius; repetition there must be in utterances poured out during sixty years; an individuality so intense must have an equally individual manner; but there is, rightly speaking, no mannerism, for mannerism implies affectation, and Carlyle’s primal instinct was sincerity. His expression is an organic part of himself, and shares his merits and defects.
Carlyle won his first reputation as a historian; singularly enough, his achievements in history have temporarily suffered a partial eclipse. Teachers in our colleges refer to them dubiously or not at all. Does the fault lie with these same teachers, or with Carlyle? A glance at the methods of the school of historical students which has sprung up during the last generation will explain the disagreement.
History, like every other branch of intellectual activity, has responded to the doctrines of Evolution. That most fertile working hypothesis has proved, when applied here, not less fruitful than in other fields. It has caused the annals of the past to be reinvestigated, every document, record, and monument to be gathered up, and the results have been set forth from the new point of view. Evolutionary science, as we saw above, fixes its attention primarily on the processes of development, and regards the individual, in comparison with a species or the race, as a negligible quantity. A similar spirit has guided historical students. They have turned away from “great captains with their guns and drums,” away from figure-head monarchs, away from the achievements of even the mightiest individuals, to scrutinize human action in its collective forms, the rise and supremacy and fall of institutions, the growth of parties, the waxing and waning of organisms like Church or State, in whose many-centuried existence individual careers are swallowed up. Using the methods of Science, these students have persuaded themselves that history also is a science, which, in truth, it can never be. Judicial temper, patience, veracity,—the qualities which they rightly magnify,—were not invented by them, nor are these the only qualities required in writing history. Speaking broadly, facts lie within the reach of any diligent searcher. But a fact is a mere pebble in a brook until some David comes to put it in his sling. True history is the arrangement and interpretation of facts, and—more difficult still—insight into motives: for this there must be art, there must be imagination.
To the disciples of the “scientific school” it may be said that the heaping up of great stores of facts—the collection of manuscripts, the cataloguing of documents, the shoveling all together in thick volumes prefaced by forty pages of bibliography, each paragraph floating on a deep, viscous stream of notes, each volume bulging with a score of appendices—is in no high sense history, but the accumulation of material therefor. It bears the same relation to history as the work of the quarryman to that of the architect; most worthy in itself, and evidently indispensable, but not the same. Stand before some noble edifice,—Lincoln Cathedral, for instance, with its incomparable site, its symmetry and majestic proportions: scan it until you feel its personality and realize that this is a living idea, the embodiment of strength and beauty and aspiration and awe,—and you will not confound the agency of the stone-cutters who quarried the blocks with that of the architect in whose imagination the design first rose. Neither should there be confusion between the historical hodman and the historian.