Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 3

he has rendered both to
literature and history. This work may be in time superseded with the
advance of knowledge, but the value of the first service will remain
unimpaired. It was he, as has been said, 'who first taught England to

appreciate Goethe;' and not only to appreciate Goethe, but to recognise
and seek yet further knowledge of the genius and industry of Goethe's
countrymen. His splendid drama of the French Revolution has done,
and may be expected long to continue to do, more to bring before our
slow-moving and unimaginative public the portentous meaning of that
tremendous cataclysm, than all the other writings on the subject in the
English language put together. His presentation of Puritanism and the
Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most elevating
period of the national history in any way really intelligible. The Life of
Frederick the Second, whatever judgment we may pass upon its
morality, or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a model of
laborious and exhaustive narration of facts not before accessible to the
reader of history. For all this, and for much other work eminently
useful and meritorious even from the mechanical point of view, Mr.
Carlyle deserves the warmest recognition. His genius gave him a right
to mock at the ineffectiveness of Dryasdust, but his genius was also too
true to prevent him from adding the always needful supplement of a
painstaking industry that rivals Dryasdust's own most strenuous toil.
Take out of the mind of the English reader of ordinary cultivation and
the average journalist, usually a degree or two lower than this, their
conceptions of the French Revolution and the English Rebellion, and
their knowledge of German literature and history, as well as most of
their acquaintance with the prominent men of the eighteenth century,
and we shall see how much work Mr. Carlyle has done simply as
schoolmaster.
This, however, is emphatically a secondary aspect of his character, and
of the function which he has fulfilled in relation to the more active
tendencies of modern opinion and feeling. We must go on to other
ground, if we would find the field in which he has laboured most
ardently and with most acceptance. History and literature have been
with him, what they will always be with wise and understanding minds
of creative and even of the higher critical faculty--only embodiments,
illustrations, experiments, for ideas about religion, conduct, society,
history, government, and all the other great heads and departments of a
complete social doctrine. From this point of view, the time has perhaps
come when we may fairly attempt to discern some of the tendencies

which Mr. Carlyle has initiated or accelerated and deepened, though
assuredly many years must elapse before any adequate measure can be
taken of their force and final direction.
It would be a comparatively simple process to affix the regulation
labels of philosophy; to say that Mr. Carlyle is a Pantheist in religion
(or a Pot-theist, to use the alternative whose flippancy gave such
offence to Sterling on one occasion[1]), a Transcendentalist or
Intuitionist in ethics, an Absolutist in politics, and so forth, with the
addition of a crowd of privative or negative epithets at discretion. But
classifications of this sort are the worst enemies of true knowledge.
Such names are by the vast majority even of persons who think
themselves educated, imperfectly apprehended, ignorantly interpreted,
and crudely and recklessly applied. It is not too much to say that nine
out of ten people who think they have delivered themselves of a
criticism when they call Mr. Carlyle a Pantheist, could neither explain
with any precision what Pantheism is, nor have ever thought of
determining the parts of his writings where this particular monster is
believed to lurk. Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the
trouble of thinking. As I once wrote elsewhere:
[1] Life of John Sterling, p. 153.
'The readiness to use general names in speaking of the greater subjects,
and the fitness which qualifies a man to use them, commonly exist in
inverse proportions. If we reflect on the conditions out of which
ordinary opinion is generated, we may well be startled at the profuse
liberality with which names of the widest and most complex and
variable significance are bestowed on all hands. The majority of the
ideas which constitute most men's intellectual stock-in-trade have
accrued by processes quite distinct from fair reasoning and consequent
conviction. This is so notorious, that it is amazing how so many people
can go on freely and rapidly labelling thinkers or writers with names
which they themselves are not competent to bestow, and which their
hearers are not competent either to understand generally, or to test in
the specific instance.'
These labels are rather more worthless than usual in the