Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 5

a
scientific aspect of these things, an order among them that can only be
understood and criticised and effectually modified scientifically, by
using all the caution and precision and infinite patience of the truly
scientific spirit, is a truth that is constantly ignored even by men and
women of the loftiest and most humane nature. In such cases
misdirected and uncontrolled sensibility ends in mournful waste of
their own energy, in the certain disappointment of their own aims, and
where such sensibility is backed by genius, eloquence, and a peculiar
set of public conditions, in prolonged and fatal disturbance of society.
Rousseau was the great type of this triumphant and dangerous sophistry
of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking
nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for
mentioning a man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly
high-minded life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that
ever lived. Community of method, like misery, makes men acquainted
with strange bed-fellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral
worth may notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the
same method, and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle.
With each of them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and
society a retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for
truth and right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection
and a factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly
solved by external observation and history. In connection with each of
them has been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimentalism, when
circumstances draw away the mask. Not the least conspicuous of the
disciples of Rousseau was Robespierre. His works lay on the table of
the Committee of Public Safety. The theory of the Reign of Terror was
invented, and mercilessly reduced to practice, by men whom the
visions of Rousseau had fired, and who were not afraid nor ashamed to
wade through oceans of blood to the promised land of humanity and
fine feeling. We in our days have seen the same result of sentimental
doctrine in the barbarous love of the battle-field, the retrograde passion
for methods of repression, the contempt for human life, the impatience
of orderly and peaceful solution. We begin with introspection and the
eternities, and end in blood and iron. Again, Rousseau's first piece was

an anathema upon the science and art of his time, and a denunciation of
books and speech. Mr. Carlyle, in exactly the same spirit, has
denounced logic mills, warned us all away from literature, and
habitually subordinated discipline of the intelligence to the passionate
assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks respectfully
of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is using the term in
a special sense of his own, and confounding it with 'the exact summary
of human Worth,' as in one place he defines it. Thus, instead of
co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual energy, virtue with
intelligence, right action of the will with scientific processes of the
understanding, he has either placed one immeasurably below the other,
or else has mischievously insisted on treating them as identical. The
dictates of a kind heart are of superior force to the maxims of political
economy; swift and peremptory resolution is a safer guide than a
balancing judgment. If the will works easily and surely, we may
assume the rectitude of the moving impulse. All this is no caricature of
a system which sets sentiment, sometimes hard sentiment and
sometimes soft sentiment, above reason and method.
In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than
anybody else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right and an eager
desire for social activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away from
him the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and
that our social action is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting
perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual
self-possession, to have added another name to the illustrious catalogue
of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his
sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an
imaginative and highly emotional manner. Depth of benevolent feeling
is unhappily no proof of fitness for handling complex problems, and a
fine sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing
effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the composition
of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any reason
for supposing that the author would have made a competent
Commissioner of Works.
Why should society, with its long and deep-hidden processes of growth,

its innumerable intricacies and far-off historic complexities, be as an
open book to