Cobwebs of Thought | Page 7

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 Carlyle, who also described, as "a sawdust kind of talk," John Stuart Mill's expression of belief and interest in reforming and raising the whole social mass of toiling millions.
Bracing and stimulating, as is Carlyle's strong, stern doctrine of independence, of work, and of adherence to Truth for its own sake, we