Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 6

any reader of its pages who brings acuteness and passion,
but no patience nor calm accuracy of meditation? Objects of thought
and observation far simpler, more free from all blinding and distorting
elements, more accessible to direct and ocular inspection, are by
rational consent reserved for the calmest and most austere moods and
methods of human intelligence. Nor is denunciation of the conditions
of a problem the quickest step towards solving it. Vituperation of the
fact that supply and demand practically regulate certain kinds of
bargain, is no contribution to systematic efforts to discover some more
moral regulator. Take all the invective that Mr. Carlyle has poured out
against political economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according to
M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire inadequateness of political
economy to sum up the laws and conditions of a healthy social
state--and no one more than the present writer deplores the mischief
which the application of the maxims of political economy by ignorant
and selfish spirits has effected in confirming the worst tendencies of the
commercial character--yet is it not a first condition of our being able to
substitute better machinery for the ordinary rules of self-interest, that
we know scientifically how those rules do and must operate? Again, in
another field, it is well to cry out: 'Caitiff, we hate thee,' with a 'hatred,
a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel, and all
scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and disappearance from
the scene of things.'[2] But this is slightly vague. It is not scientific.
There are caitiffs and caitiffs. There is a more and a less of
scoundrelism, as there is a more and a less of black annihilation, and
we must have systematic jurisprudence, with its classification of caitiffs
and its graduated blasting. Has Mr. Carlyle's passion, or have the
sedulous and scientific labours of that Bentham, whose name with him
is a symbol of evil, done most in what he calls the Scoundrel-province
of Reform within the last half-century? Sterling's criticism on
Teufelsdröckh told a hard but wholesome truth to Teufelsdröckh's
creator. 'Wanting peace himself,' said Sterling, 'his fierce dissatisfaction
fixes on all that is weak, corrupt, and imperfect around him; and instead
of a calm and steady co-operation with all those who are endeavouring
to apply the highest ideas as remedies for the worst evils, he holds
himself in savage isolation.'[3]

[2] Latter-Day Pamphlets. II. Model Prisons, p. 92.
[3] Letter to Mr. Carlyle, in the Life, Pt. ii. ch. ii.
Mr. Carlyle assures us of Bonaparte that he had an instinct of nature
better than his culture was, and illustrates it by the story that during the
Egyptian expedition, when his scientific men were busy arguing that
there could be no God, Bonaparte, looking up to the stars, confuted
them decisively by saying: 'Very ingenious, Messieurs; but who made
all that?' Surely the most inconclusive answer since coxcombs
vanquished Berkeley with a grin. It is, however, a type of Mr. Carlyle's
faith in the instinct of nature, as superseding the necessity for patient
logical method; a faith, in other words, in crude and uninterpreted sense.
Insight, indeed, goes far, but it no more entitles its possessor to
dispense with reasoned discipline and system in treating scientific
subjects, than it relieves him from the necessity of conforming to the
physical conditions of health. Why should society be the one field of
thought in which a man of genius is at liberty to assume all his major
premisses, and swear all his conclusions?
* * * * *
The deep unrest of unsatisfied souls meets its earliest solace in the
effective and sympathetic expression of the same unrest from the lips of
another. To look it in the face is the first approach to a sedative. To find
our discontent with the actual, our yearning for an undefined ideal, our
aspiration after impossible heights of being, shared and amplified in the
emotional speech of a man of genius, is the beginning of consolation.
Some of the most generous spirits a hundred years ago found this in the
eloquence of Rousseau, and some of the most generous spirits of this
time and place have found it in the writer of the Sartor. In ages not of
faith, there will always be multitudinous troops of people crying for the
moon. If such sorrowful pastime be ever permissible to men, it has
been natural and lawful this long while in præ-revolutionary England,
as it was natural and lawful a century since in præ-revolutionary France.
A man born into a community where political forms, from the
monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow shams
disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is mainly

official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself alike from
the spirit of justice, the