Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 8

Mr.
Carlyle's doctrine was perfect. It effectually put an end to the mood of
Byronism. May we say that with the neutralisation of Byron, his most
decisive and special work came to an end? May we not say further, that
the true renovation of England, if such a process be ever feasible, will
lie in a quite other method than this of emotion? It will lie not in more
moral earnestness only, but in a more open intelligence; not merely in a
more dogged resolution to work and be silent, but in a ready
willingness to use the understanding. The poison of our sins, says Mr.
Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not intellectual dimness chiefly, but
torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but all unveracity, torpid or fervid,
breeds intellectual dimness, and it is this last which prevents us from
seeing a way out of the present ignoble situation. We need light more
than heat; intellectual alertness, faith in the reasoning faculty,
accessibility to new ideas. To refuse to use the intellect patiently and
with system, to decline to seek scientific truth, to prefer effusive
indulgence of emotion to the laborious and disciplined and candid
exploration of new ideas, is not this, too, a torpid unveracity? And has
not Mr. Carlyle, by the impatience of his method, done somewhat to
deepen it?
It is very well to invite us to moral reform, to bring ourselves to be of
heroic mind, as the surest way to 'the blessed Aristocracy of the
Wisest.' But how shall we know the wisest when we see them, and how
shall a nation know, if not by keen respect and watchfulness for
intellectual truth and the teachers of it? Much as we may admire Mr.
Carlyle's many gifts, and highly as we may revere his character, it is yet
very doubtful whether anybody has as yet learnt from him the precious
lesson of scrupulosity and conscientiousness in actively and constantly
using the intelligence. This would have been the solid foundation of the
true hero-worship.
* * * * *
Let thus much have been said on the head of temperament. The historic
position also of every writer is an indispensable key to many things in
his teaching.[5] We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's case, that he

was born in the memorable year when the French Revolution, in its
narrower sense, was closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the
great century of emancipation and illumination was ending darkly in
battles and confusion. During his youth the reaction was in full flow,
and the lamp had been handed to runners who not only reversed the
ideas and methods, but even turned aside from the goal of their
precursors. Hopefulness and enthusiastic confidence in humanity when
freed from the fetters of spiritual superstition and secular tyranny,
marked all the most characteristic and influential speculations of the
two generations before '89. The appalling failure which attended the
splendid attempt to realise these hopes in a renewed and perfected
social structure, had no more than its natural effect in turning men's
minds back, not to the past of Rousseau's imagination, but to the past of
recorded history. The single epoch in the annals of Europe since the
rise of Christianity, for which no good word could be found, was the
epoch of Voltaire. The hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth
and tenth centuries was passed lightly over by men who had only eyes
for the moral obliquity of the church of the Encyclopædia. The brilliant
but profoundly inadequate essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the
outcome in Mr. Carlyle of the same reactionary spirit. Nobody now, we
may suppose, who is competent to judge, thinks that that estimate of
'the net product, of the tumultuous Atheism' of Diderot and his
fellow-workers, is a satisfactory account of the influence and
significance of the Encyclopædia; nor that to sum up Voltaire, with his
burning passion for justice, his indefatigable humanity, his splendid
energy in intellectual production, his righteous hatred of superstition, as
merely a supreme master of persiflage, can be a process partaking of
finality. The fact that to the eighteenth century belong the subjects of
more than half of these thirty volumes, is a proof of the fascination of
the period for an author who has never ceased to vilipend it. The saying
is perhaps as true in these matters as of private relations, that hatred is
not so far removed from love as indifference is. Be that as it may, the
Carlylean view of the eighteenth century as a time of mere scepticism
and unbelief, is now clearly untenable to men who remember the
fervour of Jean Jacques, and the more rational, but not any less fervid
faith of the disciples of Perfectibility. But this was not