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of long, certainly, his literary manner is uneasily self-conscious, nervously sarcastic, wanting equally in simplicity and in good temper, being never tranquil,1 and only attaining good-humour in the form of humour, and not always in that form. But when he exof pounds Goethe's poetry," or German metaphysics, we are clearly in the presence of a factitious enthusiasm. For metaphysics, despite a certain vein of elementary mysticism, he had no natural faculty, as he virtually admitted later by his avowed abandonment of all such study. He could think penetratingly in that as in other provinces, in flashes, in disconnected perceptions; but for the strenuous and patiently minute analysis of ideas, which is the task of the true metaphysician, he had no turn. Read his ruis early essay on Novalis, for the most part a worthless performance, 4 do not need his partial admission that he did not understand what he was so arrogantly writing about. His strength, his true bent, did not lie that way; and he was just doing what so many weaker young men have done-what, in fact, we have all done in our youth-putting on a priggish fashion of thought which was not cut to his measure. "The prig," it has been well et it said, "is the same in all times and in all countries, obeying not his own needs, but the needs of others which he believes ought to be his." 5 That is a measles which in the order of nature we ought to pass through in our youth; and nobody can accuse Carlyle of having had later attacks, though the dregs of his German seizure lingered a good while. "Priggishness," says the writer I have just quoted, "priggishness, the vice of imitation, is, in fact,

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1 Compare Sterling's criticism of Sartor, in Carlyle's Life of Sterling, Part ii., ch. 2.

Cf. Dr. Garnett, Life of Carlyle, p. 31.

3 See his complete repudiation of Kantism in the chapter on Coleridge in the Life of Sterling.

4 Though it was approvingly patted by Schopenhauer. Wallace's Life of S., p. 162. I do not understand Dr. Garnett's partial commendation (Life, p. 52).

5 F. Lloyd and W. Newton, Prussia's Representative Man (a work on Kleist), p. 123.

the egg-shell which the sturdy bird can break, but in which the weak perishes." Carlyle was not of the perishing sort.

1

V.

But this matter of Carlyle's quasi-transcendental philosophy requires further attention. We are told to this day, by writers of standing, that "The guiding principle of all Carlyle's ethical work is the principle of Fichte's speculation, that the worl of experience is but the appearance or vesture of the divine idea or life; and that he alone has true life who is willing to resign his own personality in the service of humanity, and who strives incessantly to work out the ideal that gives nobility and grandeur to human effort." Now, Fichte's philosophy, as here stated, is itself incomplete and inconsistent, since the very stipulation as to there being only one true life is a flat denial of the premiss that all life is the expression of the divine idea. But apart from that, Fichte undoubtedly was possessed in practice by his Pantheism, whereas Carlyle, however he may have followed Fichte in his youth, certainly never adjusted his "ethical work" to Fichte's main doctrine. The whole contention suggests how hard it is for transcendentalists ́in general, and for Carlyleans in particular, to relate their theories sincerely to life. Carlyle's practical doctrine, the doctrine of his "Past and Present," his "Latter-Day Pamphlets," his "Chartism," his "Friedrich," and his "Shooting Niagara," is the absolute negation of his early Fichtean idealism; and in his later work, save in irrelevant interjections, he does not even affect to repeat his idealistic formulas. If he thought he adhered to his early philosophy he was in this respect more profoundly inconsistent, more hopelessly divided against himself, than in any other, manifold as his inconsistencies were. If the universe be but the vesture of a conscious and purposive innate life, call it Spirit or Person, or what you will, what sense is there in all these volumes of Carlylean

1 Professor Adamson, cited and endorsed by Dr. Garnett, Life of Carlyle, p. 30.

1

objurgation against the tendencies of things, all these lamentations and curses over the downward course of civilisation? Carlyle, we are told, was only using a metaphor when he bracketed or opposed God and Devil in discussing current conduct; but even as a metaphor his Devil is meaningless if he really held the Pantheism he professed. He was lampooning the Universe; shrieking against the stars in their courses; and insanely calling on mankind, whom he had called the mere garment of deity, passing phantasms of the eternal existence, to overrule that eternal existence itself. I will readily confess that I never met, either in life or in literature, a transcendental Theist, or, indeed, any Theist, who was plausibly consistent in applying his philosophy to practice; but if we are to regard Carlyle as throughout life a Transcendentalist, he is the most scandalous case of zealous inconsistency on record. One is fain to surmise that his Transcendentalism was just one of the borrowed fashions of his youth, of which he felt the unfitness in his later life; and that he became just a straightforward irrational Theist of the traditional sort, making a God for every day of the year out of his impressions for the time being. In all his practical teachings his God is just the other side of his Devil, a thing to swear by. His admirers forgetfully insist that his faith in God was constant. If that were so, one could only answer that there is not the least logical difference between his Theism and his Diabolism, and that his Devil is as real to him as his God. It is not for me here to decide whether Carlyle in his heart of hearts had any genuine faith whatever. It would hardly be conclusive to take him finally by his despairing avowal in private that God seemed to leave the world to itself. 2 But I am bound to point out that there is nothing to be made out of his religion but the old alternatives of a good God temporarily

1" Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical, and defiantly inconsistent," says Mr. Morley (Misc., i., 143). It is not clear that Mr. Morley felt this to be a vice.

2 "I once said to him, not long before his death, that I could only believe in a God which (sic) did something. With a cry of pain, which I shall never forget, he said, 'He does nothing.'" Froude, L. L., ii., 260.

B

baffled by a bad God, and an omnipotent God who never gets his own way, because of the obstinacy of the creatures he himself created. Every Theist capable of reasoning moves towards Pantheism if he wants at any price to avoid Atheism; and Carlyle in many cases repudiates the old Deism and posits Pantheism; 1 but all the same he plunges into the crassest Deism every time he seeks to connect God with human affairs by way of practical teaching on conduct. It takes a real thinker, as distinct from a man of literary genius, to be a consistent Pantheist. The consistent Pantheist, if such a one there be, knows that between him and the philosophical Agnostic or Atheist there is no difference save that of name that the position of Spinoza, logically worked out, is just the position of Mr. Bradlaugh or Mr. Spencer, stripped of certain irrelevancies of formula. But it was impossible for Carlyle at any time of his life to think or speak of Atheism without foaming at the mouth in a mere passion of prejudice. Holding steadily neither by Deism nor Pantheism, he can only be described as a fanatic either for a hallucination or for a name. Call his creed Godism," and you limit the confusion of words by separately labelling his confusion of thought.3

2

VI.

Turn from the cosmological to the ethical side of his religion, and the confusion is, if possible, plainer. There is nothing in

1E.g., the Essay on Diderot: People's ed., pp. 50-1.

2 This was written while Mr. Bradlaugh was yet alive. I cannot now pass his name without a tribute to that power of analytic and penetrating thought in which he was no less remarkable than in his energy and sincerity of action.

In his old age (Dec. 1869) he wrote in his Journal (London Life, ii., 394) :-"I wish I had strength to elucidate and write down intelligibly to my fellow-creatures what my outline of belief about God essentially is." A tolerably decisive admission that it was not easily to be found in his published works. After the usual fling at Atheism, he goes on: "I find lying deep in me withal some confused but ineradicable flicker of belief that there is a 'particular providence.'" Quite so.

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literature, outside theology, to compare with his self-contradictions on Right and Might. A dozen times over he assures us that rights count for nothing, that our business is to find our mights; and a dozen times more he arraigns an injustice as being a withholding from men of their clearest rights. The confusion is exquisitely confounded in one of his letters, and in a piece of his talk preserved for us by Professor Norton.1 The sage, in his best and most entertaining manner, dilates to his disciple on a willow-pattern sort o' man, voluble but harmless, a pure herbivorous, nay, mere graminivorous creature, and he says wi' many terms o' compliment, that there's a great and venerable author,' meanin' myself, who's done infinite harm to the world by preachin' the gospel that Might makes Right; and he seems to have no idea that this is the very precise and absolute contrary to the truth I hold and have endeavoured to set forth, namely and simply, that Right makes Might. Well do I remember when in my younger days the force o' this truth dawned on me." Now, with all respect to Professor Norton's discipular piety, I am bound to say that a more frontless sophism was never framed by an accredited moralist. It is amazing that anybody should be duped by it. To say that Right makes (= implies) Might is not in the least to put the contrary of Might makes (= implies) Right : it is merely the verbal converse, and amounts to saying the very same thing over again; for if all Might is made by Right, and if Right always makes Might, then Might and Right are inseparable, and you cannot have Might without Right, which is exactly what is stated in the phrase Might makes Right. The real contrary to that phrase would just be, Might does not make Right; you may have Might without Right, or Right without Might. But this is what Carlyle expressly denied ; and I repeat that in denying it he destroyed the basis of ethics. Of course, in practice he affirmed it nearly as often as he denied it; 3 but the fact remains that

1 New Princeton Review, July, 1886, p. 5.

2 This was Mr. Lecky. See Carlyle's letter in the London Life, ii. 422. Yet Mr. Lecky was an attached friend. See p. 471.

3 In the letter last cited he affirms that there never was a

son of Adam