MODERN HUMANISTS. THOMAS CARLYLE. I. 66 Ir is now over sixty-three years since the aged Goethe, in talk with the devout Eckermann, passed on Carlyle an encomium which has often been quoted. Carlyle," he said, "is a moral force of great importance. There is in him much for the future, and we cannot foresee what he will produce and effect." This notable praise, from the greatest modern man of letters, was bestowed when the subject of it was little over thirty years old, and had done only his "Life of Schiller" and a few translations and reviews to earn it. Heine and Mr. Swinburne combine to remind us that Jupiter's approving nods were bestowed with a somewhat Olympian caprice; and Carlyle himself must sometimes have grimaced at the fact that the eye which saw a great moral force in him saw a greater in Byron. But, thirty years afterwards, a very different authority summed up Carlyle's achievement in terms of the forecast of Goethe. Of Harriet Martineau, though she did him a substantial service at a time when he confessedly needed it," Carlyle never speaks in his letters or journals, after a first allusion, without some of his plentiful derision; but 2 as Byron had never 1 Eckermann's Conversations, Eng. tr., p. 277. 2 Goethe said that a character of such eminence (xisted before, and probably would never come again." 3 See Froude, Carlyle's Life in London, i., 97, 105. L A she is none the less one of his best advocates in the end. When she wrote her account of her life in the belief that it was near its close, she thus eulogised him: If I am warranted in believing that the society I am bidding farewell to is a vast improvement upon that which I was born into, I am confident that the blessed change is attributable to Carlyle more than to any influence besides." ""1 But she made some remarkable concessions, which raise a question that we shall have to face again in our survey. "He may be," she grants, "himself the most curious opposition to himself; he may be the greatest mannerist of his age while denouncing conventionalism-the greatest talker while eulogising silence the most woeful complainer while glorifying fortitudethe most uncertain and stormy in mood while holding forth serenity as the greatest good within the reach of man; but he has none the less infused into the mind of the English nation sincerity, earnestness, healthfulness, and courage." Some of Harriet Martineau's judgments-for instance, that on Macaulay-fail to recommend themselves to posterity; but her eulogy of Carlyle, though he would have been the last to acknowledge the results she ascribed to his works, states a popular view; and, in any case, there are plenty of accomplished and influential men of letters who have in the main taken up her parable-Mr. Morley, Mr. Lowell, Dr. Garnett, Mr. Hutton, Professor Masson, Mr. Conway, and many more. Certainly, Carlyle was one of the leading figures in English life in his old age, and M. Taine, twenty years ago, remarked that he was the writer to whom average Englishmen referred a foreigner who asked for the leading English thinker.2 This celebrity, as everybody knows, was built up by a long course of literary work certainly not planned to conciliate the British public, either in style or in doctrine; and while we must remember that in all ages it has been a popular thing to denounce the age, the fact of Carlyle's fame and standing is in itself significant. To estimate him aright, we have first to realise what kind 1 Autobiography, i., 387. 2 Herr Oswald, writing in 1882, notes that already the rising generation was turning away from Carlyle. Thomas Carlyle: ein Lebensbild, S. 3. of a society it was into which he was born, and how he stood related to it. And, to begin with, without deciding how far Harriet Martineau was right in her explanation, we have to allow for an immense difference in moral culture between the age into which he came and ours. Perhaps the best side of the old régime is to be seen in Jane Austen's incomparable novels. We there contemplate a middle-class and upper-class society in which nobody has a suspicion that social reconstruction is a thing to be considered. Jane Austen's people, indeed, are impossible in this one point of their exclusion of all human problems from their minds at a time when England was in the first furious swing of the reaction against the French Revolution. But while we can see that they must have talked in cant formulas about the horrors of democracy, as they and she talked in cant formulas about the great issues of life and death, it remains clear that they did little more. The society of that age held the ethic of its classic novels, in which the problem of the hero was to get an income somehow without doing anything to earn it,1 and that of the heroine to combine disinterested love with a good final settlement. Religion was a paralysing convention, which, when she touched it, reduced Jane Austen's own acute intelligence to torpor and inanity. That good society could, or should be, anything but a fortuitous collection of people with easy incomes, nobody ever surmised that society is, in truth, an organic though monstrous whole, in which the rich live on the labour of the poor, was a doctrine never even discussed, since mere political democracy was itself a horror of great darkness. 2 At the beginning of this century, it must be remembered, the average English intelligence was abnormally deadened and hide 1 The vogue of this ideal in fiction is a measure of the socio-economic ethic of any period. Originally it was universal, either in the shape of the "prince " motive or in that of the young man who comes to fortune. We have it in our best fiction as late as Thackeray's 'Philip," and it is still prevalent in the worse. 66 2 See, for instance, her preparation for poetical justice on Mr. Elliot in Persuasiou, by the revelation that in his youth he had done a good dee of Sunday travelling. bound. Look to the matter of bookselling, and you will find that after the outbreak of the French Revolution, after the issue of Burke's "Reflections," there was an almost complete arrest among the middle and upper classes of the movement of rational and critical thought, which, rising a century before, had persisted through the corrupt Georgian period despite pietistic revival, and was taking new paths when Burke thought its progress had ceased. For instance, Godwin's "Political Justice," Mary Wollstonecraft's "Rights of Women," and the English translation of the works of Voltaire, seem all to have stopped dead in the bookseller's hands, after starting with every sign of popularity. The editions cease in the last decade of the century. People were simply frightened back into orthodoxy, stupor, and respectability; and the nation turned in the mass to the brute excitement of war. What did survive was a new democratic politics and a new democratic Freethought, both kindled by the red-hot sincerity of Thomas Paine, and destined not to be trodden out again. But all this remained tabu to upper class society, which in the mass touched a lower intellectual depth than it had reached for centuries. Compared with the respectability of the first quarter of this century, the previous century, which has been belittled by so many people, including Carlyle, is as a festival day compared with a British Sunday: it had curiosity, vigour, intelligence, lucidity, and, above all, wit; where the reigning tone and temper of the reactionary period-the tone of "good society," as apart from the obscure circles where new life germinated-was at once witless, joyless, and cowardly. What kind of thinking subsisted was, broadly speaking, the commonplace of Dr. Johnson, whom Carlyle would have us regard as a peculiarly vital man type, starved by the moral famine of the eighteenth ceny; and whom Professor Hales" now invites us to regard as really 2 Compare the famous Who now reads Bolingbroke? with Mr. Morley's mment, Voltaire, 4th ed., p. 65. 2 Paine's work was continued in the next generation by Richard Carlile, who suffered at the hands of the English Government the atrocious penalties of nine years' imprisonment. 3 Introd. to Mrs. Napier's ed. of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, p. xxiii. 1 |