Cobwebs of Thought | Page 7

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the setting forth of some striking and fundamental difference in thought,
and it would be hard to find anywhere a greater and a more vivid
contrast than that between Carlyle and George Eliot. For George Eliot's
philosophy was centred in the well-being of the Race.
Carlyle's was summed up in the worth of the Individual.
George Eliot teaches in prose and still more in poetry that Personality,
with its hopes, loves, faiths, aspirations, must all be relinquished, and
its agonies and pains endured, should Humanity gain by the sacrifice
and the endurance.
She considers the Individual as part of collective humanity, and that he
does not live for himself, he has no continuance of personal life, he has
no permanence, except as a living influence on the Race. This is the
Positivist creed, the Racial Creed.
Beyond the influence that it exerts, spiritual personality is doomed. It is
not humanity in God but humanity in itself which is to exist from age to
age, solely in the memory of succeeding generations.
"Oh may I join the Choir Invisible Of those immortal dead, who live
again In minds made better by their presence."
Permanence and continuance and immortality are in the race alone.
George Eliot's strong accentuation of the race is the Gospel of
annihilation to the individual. Yet the most personal and imaginative of
poets has treated this lofty altruism in his strange, sad, beautiful poem
of "The Pilgrims," with a fervour greater even than that of George
Eliot.
Here are two stanzas:
"And ye shall die before your thrones be won. Yea, and the changed
world and the liberal sun Shall move and shine without us and we lie
Dead; but if she too move on earth and live, But if the old world with
the old irons rent, Laugh and give thanks, shall we not be content? Nay
we shall rather live, we shall not die, Life being so little and Death so

good to give."
"Pass on then and pass by us, and let us be. For what life think ye after
life to see? And if the world fare better will ye know? And if men
triumph, who shall seek you and say?"
"Enough of light is this for one life's span. That all men born are mortal,
but not Man: And we men bring death lives by night to sow, That man
may reap and eat and live by day." --SWINBURNE.
Turning from the moral grandeur of self-abnegation that fills the
philosophy of humanity, we feel the contrast of strong human
personality, which animates us with an inspiring sensation as we listen
to the prophet of individualism.
Few can have read Carlyle's writings in their youth, without having
experienced an indescribable and irresistible stimulation, to accomplish
some real work, to make some strenuous endeavour "before the night
cometh." Carlyle's contempt for sloth, stings; his bitter words are a
tonic, they scourge, encourage, and at times plead with poetic fervour.
"Think of living. Thy life wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of
earth is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. _It is thy own; it is all thou
hast to front Eternity with._ Work then like a star unhasting and
unresting."
The man's soul, naked through sloth, or clothed through works, has to
meet its doom, and to bear it as it best can. For Carlyle ignored the
collective view of mankind, the single soul had to prostrate itself before
the Supreme Power. This Supreme Power was almost as vague (to him)
as George Eliot's Permanent Influence is to us. For Carlyle did not
believe "that the Soul could enter into any relations with God, and in
the sight of God it was nothing." There is nothing singular in this. The
religious, but independent-minded Joubert thought "it was not hard to
know God, provided one did not force oneself to define Him," and
deprecated "bringing into the domain of reason, that which belongs to
our innermost feeling."
This very well represented Carlyle's view, but it occupies but a small
place in his writings. All his books, his letters, pamphlets, histories,
essays show his profound living belief in the worth of individual men,
as the salt of the earth, and the young are always greatly influenced by
strong personalities. But the mature mind that struggles after catholicity
of taste, and wide admiration, receives some rude shocks from Carlyle's

treatment of humanity, as Dr. Garnett has well shown in his excellent
biography of Carlyle; indeed it has led with some to the parting of the
ways. For the hopes and inspirations of poet, reformer, teacher, became
in great part to him as "the idle chatter of apes" and "the talk of Fools."
Mazzini's world-wide sympathies, his life of many deaths for his
country, were unintelligible to