Thomas Carlyle, A Biography | Page 5

rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not
inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous
tribute to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its
currents may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary
journal, the _Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :--
"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous
fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated,
formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most

powerful and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a
philosophy of history that would have better harmonised with the time
of Queen Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at
human progress, there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was
not the hero that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in
the race that produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and
not the bubble the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the
light it was a fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built Sartor
Resartus and the Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan
had declared that the earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless.
The great stream of modern thought has advanced; the theory of
evolution has been universally accepted; nations, it is acknowledged,
produce kings, and kings are denied the faculty of producing nations."
_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary of
this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied
assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not
move,"--that Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors
who confronted Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of
recent criticism extant: for what is his French Revolution but a
cannonade in three volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done,
a hurricane of revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old
fortresses, an assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and
upheaval? Secondly, every new discovery is apt to be discredited by
new shibboleths, and one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were
platitude to say that Mr. Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled
student of nature, as careful and conscientious in his methods, as
fearless in stating his results, but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius,
who has thrown Hoods of light on the inter-relations of the organic
world. But there are whole troops of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba
magistri," who, accepting, without attempt or capacity to verify the
conclusions of the master mind, think to solve all the mysteries of the
universe by ejaculating the word "Evolution." If I ask what was the
secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's divining rod, and you answer
"Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart and sick in head, I were
referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to Grimm's Law or to the
Magnetic Belt.

Let us grant that Cæsar was evolved from the currents in the air about
the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and
Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil,
William I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a
flame from the altar of the mediæval church, Barbarossa a plant grown
to masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose
memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze,
Bacon a _réchauffé_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch
dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or
Corsican Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at
all events, were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied
and dominated.
So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men
are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance
in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In
an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education,
when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised
to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest
civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead
the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be
accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a
mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the
matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain
that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become
civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more,"
preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second
"Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier
date "Luria" had