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traordinary self-consciousness with which his conceit is associated-his egoism. Egoism was never, perhaps, illustrated in such completeness, such perfection. He himself quite as eminently deserved the epithet "poor, skinless creature" that he applied to Rousseau. "Perhaps none of you could do what I am doing," he reflects bitterly, viewing the Hyde Park procession of dignities. The observation was true enough, but why was it not too trite for him to make and to record? It is the railing of the peasant at the patrician panorama. Even in his most objective writings he never gets away from himself. His personality confuses his history. You are never allowed to escape from it. It is obtrusive, exasperating, domineering. The simplest record is alembicated with his view of the facts. In his "Frederick," for example, he divides attention with his hero; he is incessantly-wearisomely-parading his views, preaching his gospel, even complaining, now humorously, now querulously, always superfluously, of the difficulties of his task; pervading the scene, in short, with his extremely accentuated personality. His ideal of "unconsciousness" in the famous essay on "Characteristics" has its origin, no doubt, in the exasperation of his egoism, which obsessed him and under which he chafed and fretted till soothed by conceit. Introspection irritated him supremely and made him long for the automatic play of faculty which he accordingly generalized into a millennial principle of mental activity. But his introspection never led him beyond self-consciousness into self-discipline - the compensation which its inevitability in the modern world has for less egoistic spirits. Discipline in thought, feeling, and expression is the one thing he conspicuously neglected.

For with his extraordinary powers and his self-consciousness, wilfulness is certainly to be connected as the next most salient trait of his commanding personality. "The most shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen," Lowell calls him quite truly. Only, "whim" is too extenuated a term -or too depreciatory, if one chooses to apply to an element of so much energy. His surrender to whim is so voluntary, so absolute, such a sin against light, that to call him merely our "whimsical philosopher," as Mr. John Morley does, is both

patronizing and inadequate. With him caprice means not intellectual frivolity, but a temperamental perversity of which he is the willing slave. He will say anything that inclination or even temper suggests to him. "Once more the tragic story of a high endowment with an insufficient will," he says of Coleridge. It is the exaggerated "sufficiency" of his will on the contrary that renders the story of his own high endowment quite as tragic. It is singularly tragic that owing to it the weightiest utterances of his splendid genius should be so often robbed of the intellectual responsibility that alone confers authority. All this we knew, however, before the revelations of Froude. Froude's fatal contribution to our knowledge of his master is the disclosure of his lovelessness. The genial basis that theretofore might credibly have been inferred beneath the various phases of his contradictory and prevailing "humor" now appears as a certain aridity of soul. One can hardly avoid the conclusion-his biographer has so copiously documented his own explicitness about it-that he did not know what love is, that he had never experienced the sensation of it in either its tension or its transports, its energy or its enervation. The remorse in the references to his wife in the Reminiscences" is so intolerably pathetic because it witnesses in truly fatalistic fashion a fundamental incapacity. His feeling for his family is very fine; but it illustrates a kind of ethnic devotion to the clan and has a side of very subtly vicarious selfishness quite removed from the "leaving of self" that love is. He was naïvely ready to sacrifice his wife to it. He was quite ready in fact to let her go if she had any doubts about her vocation as his wife. It is small wonder that philanthropy meant nothing to him, that service of any kind did not attract him, that his heroes, however admirable, are never winning. The affections never retarded, deflected, or stimulated him in his steady march to distinction. Distinction, too, was undisguisedly, even professedly, his aim and end, as much as it ever was that of any of his brother Scots who had victoriously invaded the "mad Babylon" of London. It was his "mission" - the whole of it. Only, in achieving it, he never had the slightest temptation to seek

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it on any terms but his own. Apparently shows that it had not, in old-fashioned he never had any temptations of any kind. Duty and desire were curiously interconvertible terms to him. He lived a life of ideal integrity, of blameless conduct, of complete consecration to the development and functional expression of his extraordinary powers. But his nearest approach to passion is petulance, except when he is occupied with reprehension or reproof. Who ever thinks of "the storms and tempests of his furious mind," or conceives of him as "Miserrimus," or finds that "his laugh jars on one's ear"-as Thackeray says of Swift? His laugh, indeed, however boisterous, was largely reflex, one suspects after reading Froude-genuine enough, no doubt, but hardly "infectious." Passion implies the state of being "beside one's self," and though clearly a Titan, and a wofully wilful one, Carlyle's truly Scotch self-possession is distinctly canny. His temperamental tumultuousness was singularly intellectual. It is his thinking, not himself, that is agitated. He could never, he says, do any long-continued, "decisive intellectual operation" without getting" decidedly made ill by it." And perhaps the exclusiveness with which his mind monopolized his feeling is at once the most characteristic trait of his personality and the most determining characteristic of his work.

III

ONE of the tragedies of the strenuous intellectual life is the disproportion between its conclusions and their cost. So much struggle in the pursuit of mere simplification, so much apologetics for so concise a credo, such a wide waste of philosophizing for such a circumscribed foothold of faith, such a sea of speculation through which to reach so narrow a strand of certainty! To arrive at his not complex philosophy Carlyle passed through a prodigious amount of thinking; demondriven and tempest-tossed in the process. His own account of his abandonment of traditional religious dogmas is acutely pathetic-an account of a Titanic experience with issue of hardly corresponding importance, one may say. It was not a chastening experience. It left him intolerant even to the point of exacting it of others, which

phraseology, been "sanctified to his use." He reproaches Coleridge contemptuously for having merely "skirted the howling deserts of infidelity." His own "firm lands of faith beyond" were substantially Coleridge's country, however. His title to them was really his belief in the superiority of the Vernunft or reason to the Verstand or understanding, as he often explicitly says; though, unhampered as always by a sense of chivalry, he ridicules it as mere apparatus when his business is to exhibit the vagueness of Coleridge. He resented Coleridge's complacent placidity. The remark that "Socrates is terribly at ease in Zion" is doubtless accurately ascribed to him. He would probably have grumbled at the good fortune of the penitent thief. His own salvation had been so hardly won that he prescribed the purgatory of agonized mental conflict as a preliminary to the paradise of settled conviction. His bitter experience, too, in a measure, explains the vehemence with which he held his convictions. They were not very recondite, as I say. Froude's attempt to construct an extraordinary esoteric credo for him out of some disjecta memoranda he had himself discarded is extraordinarily inept, and reduces to a belief in God and the universe as His expression "The light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty," is the criterion, indifference to happiness the basis, and "work not wages" the end, of his philosophy.

This substantially sufficed him in the way of philosophical baggage. But the energy with which he preached exclusively this rather exiguous gospel shows that it was the residuum of heroic-and perhaps to most men unnecessary-sacrifices. Energy, however, not intellectual complexity, distinguishes him-energy even more than its direction. He never even addresses the intellect pure and simple. His appeal is to the heart and the soul. For example, in the countless changes he rings upon his central idea of the unworthiness of happiness as a motive—and the eloquence, the convincingness, the fire and intoxicating, magnetic cogency with which he does this gives him his place in the classic pantheon

he never, so far as I remember, calls attention to what is now termed (in a jargon

he would scout) the hedonistic paradox. The reasonableness of the statement of this phenomenon by Jesus: "He that loveth his life shall lose it" is quite foreign to the Hebraic spirit of his treatment of the general theme. He does not make you ponder its mystic and significant import. In fact, he never makes his reader ponder at all. He arouses the sensibilities and the will directly by an energy of pronouncement, adjuration, irony that sets the sympathetic in responsive vibration with the definite ideal of duty, of sacrifice, of performance, of abnegation, so intently felt and so masterfully set forth.

The traces of his perturbation are to be found, too, in the character of this ideal which though definite enough is hardly to be called positive. At least, it lacks tragically-aspiration. Its end, its haven, its heaven is rest, not activity. "That is how I figure Heaven," he said once substantially, "just rest." This is carrying the "Du sollst entbehren" very far, farther than Buddhism, whose inspiration is certainly not fatigue. "Rest" is not even "calm," the partial and temperamental ideal of old age, while youth

"-hears a voice within it tell: Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well."

It implies the weariness of exhaustion, the sense of defeat. As an ideal it is warped by agitation. That it should have appealed so strongly to readers influenced by Carlyle indicates strikingly the demorali zation wrought among pious souls by the break up of the old faiths. But it is still more eloquent witness of the power of his energetic preachment of the irrelevance of the whole matter of reward for duty done. St. Paul's insistence upon the expectation of immortality and his wish not to have his disciples sorrow "even as others who are without hope" has been much exaggerated. And this expectation itself has been greatly overestimated, probably, as a selfish motive of virtuous performance peculiar to fanaticism and contrasting with Stoic nobility. "It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next," says Carlyle of Mahomet's success. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the

heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations." None the less, to have kindled this flame in so many breasts in a rational age, and by preaching the foregoing allurements" alone, without even recognition of the fact that they carry their recompense with them, and without the elevation and expansion either involved in the gaudium certaminis itself or attendant on victory in it here or hereafter, attests wonderfully both the intensity and the kindling quality of the preacher's emotional equipment.

Carlyle's intensity of feeling, however, not only outstrips his thinking and thus itself dies out long before the manifestations of it have lost their momentum, so that these come to seem almost mechanical, often, before they suddenly cease in some "Good Heavens" or otherwise essentially inarticulate interjection; it is rarely purified into true exaltation. Other great writers have felt as deeply, as intently, but the very depth and intensity of their feeling has resulted in that condition of concentrated calm and serene possession in which the mind seems to work with an unaccustomed freedom from the embarrassment and obstacles of less sensitive moments. Carlyle is often turbulent, tumultuous, conscious of his perturbation, impatient of the obstructions of coherent utterance, irritated at the necessity of effort in expression, exacerbated, violent, excessive. Despite his power therefore, which rarely fails to make itself felt, which is always to be either discerned or divined, he is, at times when his intensity of emotion should be both an inspiration and a constraint, its prey rather than its instrument. Thus his mood monopolizes his faculties and hampers quite as often as it stimulates his thought. His effort is absorbed in expressing it and not the ideas which have caused it. The shading of these, their efficacy, their attractiveness, their universal appeal, their relations and suggestions do not entrance him out of himself, but in proportion as they arouse his emotion sting him, as it were, into eloquent and apparently automatic exposition of their effect on him, into excited or contemptuous dithyramb and rhapsody. It is largely this strenuousness, I think, that gives his philosophy its special quality.

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And its quality conjoined with its character gives it a unique, even an isolated position.

IV

To be out of harmony with one's time and environment is a heavy handicap on energy, which is thus inevitably deflected instead of developed, however it may be intensified by isolation. It is inherently inimical to expansion, and Carlyle may really be said to have devoted his prodigious powers to the endeavor to transform the "epoch of expansion" in which he passed his life into an "epoch of concentration "to adopt Arnold's terminology. Unaided-or aided only by the futile of the intellectual world, the Froudes, the Kingsleys, the Ruskins-such an attempt must be both transitory and incomplete. "Epochs" are independent of individuals. It is their representative character that singularizes even the Titans of historic changes. Luther, for example, who attracted Carlyle immensely, disproportionately, incarnates the movement of concentration for which he stands, and did not produce it. The Renaissance produced it. It crystallized out of the expiring expansion whose hour was over. The epoch of expansion which Carlyle contested with such eloquence and energy was only beginning. So far as its movement of thought is concerned he never delayed its march an hour. He hardly even modified its evolution. He affected powerfully the varying feeling that accompanied it, but the feeling he aroused, being general, was so largely either absent altogether from the direction of specific practice it took or else impotent to check it, that this never sensibly stayed its steps. If utilitarianism has run its course it is in notable degree because its programme has been accomplished. If the world of thought was at all times insufficiently filled by it and ideality flourished synchronously with ever-increasing vigor, this was not because of Carlyle's direct contributions to it, but because it took advantage of his spiritual quickening in the development of its own spiritual philosophy very different from his. Nor is the current reaction which Liberalism in the exasperation of its discomfiture would fain attribute to Carlyle's miscalled Gospel of Force, so attributable.

The apologetics of the current gospel of force-in whose persistence, one may remark, too, in passing, nobody believesare wholly at variance with the Eternal Verities and Immensities, the heroisms and scorn of hedonism which form the basis of his Berserker credo.

In a word, no writer who has so stirred the moral or other emotions of his era has ever remained so foreign to its thought or so out of harmony with its spirit as exhibited in its specific aspirations. Specifically the two supreme influences of the nineteenth century have been the scientific and the democratic spirit. And each found in Carlyle an instinctive and a deliberate antagonist. Science he neglected, democracy he decried; both he enthusiastically and at times ridiculously despised -as indeed he did everything he did not like. Science, apparently, except the abstract science of mathematics, he knew nothing about. At thirty he was, in Froude's view, the best read man in England. For many years, at any rate, he had done little or nothing but read. His knowledge of history, of language, of literature was immense. It was; moreoverneed it be said-assimilated knowledge. Compare even such elementary and cursory evidence as the extempore" Lectures on the History of Literature" with even Hallam. But with science there is no witness of his having a speaking acquaintance. What he read of economics probably only served to whet his exasperation : from his point of view the abstraction of the so-called "economic man" was inherently trivial and his impatience found the relief of relaxation in deriding, without examination, the “dismal" and "beaver" sciences based on an interest which not only he did not share but which, on the contrary, actively irritated him. Similarly with the natural sciences to which so much of the best intellect of the time has been consecrated, which have had such a prodigious influence in the amelioration of the lot of man and which have so markedly shifted the very foundations of mankind's speculations, beliefs, and activities

foundations upon which it is within the truth to say a new literature has arisen. But it is not his ignorance of science which so much distinguishes his position as out of focus with his day and gener

ation. Other writers have been conspicuously ignorant of it, too, without losing their authority. Literature has often been very nobly independent of it, much even of the literature of our own time. On the other hand attention to it has sometimes not particularly served the larger purpose of literature, as, for example, with George Eliot, or else has served it only to give it an unsatisfying and conventional currency, as with Tennyson. And Carlyle's insight is so penetrating and clairvoyant that often it easily dispenses with its aid. This peasant Scotch Covenanter did not need to wait for the sanctions of the "Higher Criticism" in order to write his essay on Voltaire. His isolation and antagonism are mainly emphasized in this regard by his lack not of knowledge of nineteenth century science, but of the scientific spirit itself which is so eminent a mark of his century.

The scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and verification, between statement and proof, between appearance and reality. It is inspired by the impulse of investigation tempered with distrust and edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty and sceptical of seeming. Mirage does not fascinate, nor blankness dispirit it. It is enthusiastically patient, nobly literal, candid, tolerant, hos pitable. It has no major proposition to advocate or defend, no motive beyond that of attestation. It shrinks from temerity in assertion at the same time that it is animated with the ardor of divination. It is, in a word, the antithesis of such a spirit as Carlyle's, which deduces with confidence from conceptions vividly apprehended but never limited in thought, intensely imagined but neither scrupulously examined nor rigidly defined. The distinction is not one of practice, between a priori and inductive mental processes. The scientific spirit has certainly as much need of one as of the other, but it dictates the testing of its initial syntheses and holds the revelations of its "immediate beholdings" to be guesswork until tried by the surer standards of the "logical understanding." It has its weak side, inherently as well as in excess. Hamil ton's assertion that a mathematician should be a poet implies an ideal not often, perhaps, attained. But in greater or less di

lution it has supplied a tonic force in the speculation, the philosophy, and the art of the present day, a stimulus conspicuously lacking in the writings of Carlyle which sag, in consequence, often into the vague and the questionable.

Even more than the scientific spirit, democracy has characterized the age of Carlyle, and it is its democracy chiefly that makes him ill at ease in it. He lived to see it run its course perhaps as an abstract ideal, but this was because practically the century had become interpenetrated with it. His own bitter denunciations of it in principle, of course-he never denounced or advocated anything except in principle

had little or no weight. The reaction he preached was taken by his day for the "moonshine" which he termed its own convictions. That democracy has failed in the exalted mission with which the eighteenth century charged it, that as a panacea its inefficiency has become evident, that it has developed unexpected weakness apparently inherent in its own scheme, that instead of radically revolutionizing society it has itself been modified in many ways in the course of its evolution, that it has proved a disappointment to such writers as Scherer and Lecky does not obscure the fact that it is the working hypothesis of the world.] Dithyramb in its praise is doubtless out of date, but it has not given place to dithyramb in its censure. To Carlyle, however, it was equally abhorrent in theory and in practice, idiotic in idea and in fact inexecutable. To him it essentially contravened the order of nature, the immutable law of the universe. He hated it instinctively. And from his aversion, one may suspect, he deduced his categorical principles of a spiritual cohesion of society, obliterating the independence of its units, the right of the wise and energetic to rule, the right of the foolish and weak to be ruled—his mediævalism, in a word

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