Thomas Carlyle, A Biography | Page 4

from heaven to earth, and the elements made ministers of Prospero's
wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest of matter has
doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life in some
directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet the
demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of
becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called
into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated
goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who
throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, With, at every
mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age,
are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the

darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of
prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a
great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable,
accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He swallows
formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes
analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner
him by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he
failed to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither
by syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the
"Form" of Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential
Calvinist or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist,
practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is
consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of
the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time
was among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together
by the link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was
himself an expert in mathematics, the mental science that most
obviously subserves physical research: but of Physics themselves
(astronomy being scarcely a physical science) his ignorance was
profound, and his abusive criticisms of such men as Darwin are
infantile. This intellectual defect, or rather vacuum, left him free to
denounce material views of life with unconditioned vehemence. "Will
the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in his half comic, sometimes
nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern Europe undertake to
make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously of the railways,
without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit the battle-fields
of Friedrich II.--
Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring....
The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still
infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight
through immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You
unfortunate, you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not
know that unless you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable
sense, you are lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where
mere brutes are buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I
want what Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift

railways and sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that?
The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in
mere steel or stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were
INSINCERITY in Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without
Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY without Sense. In our time these
two last powers have made such strides as to threaten the Reign of Law.
The Democrat without a ruler, who protests that one man is by nature
as good as another, according to Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In
deference to the mandate of the philanthropist the last shred of brutality,
with much of decision, has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in
office and Mercy not only tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When
Sir Samuel Romilly began his beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at
school, talkers of treason were liable to be disembowelled before
execution; now the crime of treason is practically erased, and the free
use of dynamite brings so-called reforms "within the range of practical
politics." Individualism was still a mark of the early years of the
century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" survived in Mirabeau's "never
name to me that _bête_ of a word 'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's
threat to the Austrian ambassador, "I will break your empire like this
vase"; in Nelson turning his blind eye to the signal of retreat at
Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres Vedras against the world:
it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found perhaps its latest
political representative in Prince Bismarck.
This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided
sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the
men who have made manners, not to the manners which have made
men, to the