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/^Cc^r/ /TZ^^^^^C A 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 JOHN S T a A R T MILL 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL, 
 
 BY / 
 
 EDWARD JENKS, 
 
 B.A., LL.B., 
 
 Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 
 and Lecturer at Petnbroke College, Cambridge. 
 
 GEORGE ALLEN, 
 
 SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT. 
 1888. 
 

 7? ^^33 
 
 9558 
 
 Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. 
 
TO MY FRIENDS 
 
 THE RESIDENTS AT TOYNBEE HALL, WHITECHAPEL, 
 
 WHO HAVE GRACIOUSLY ALLOWED ME TO SHARE IN THEIR GOOD WORK, 
 
 THIS ATTEMPT TO ESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 OF TWO GREAT SOCIAL TEACHERS 
 
 IS (WITHOUT PERMISSION) 
 
 AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 
 
" The amelioration of outward circvimstances will be the 
 effect, but catt never be the means, of mental and moral 
 improvement." — Pestalozzi. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IT is necessary to say a few wcrds on the cir- 
 cumstances in which this essay was written. 
 
 In the year 1848, the friends and admirers of the 
 Rev. Charles Webb Le Bas, most of them members 
 of the Civil Service of India, and formerly students 
 at Haileybury College, founded an annual prize in 
 the University of Cambridge for an essay upon 
 some subject of general literature, to be awarded 
 in memory of Mr. Le Bas. 
 
 The regulations adopted by the senate confine 
 the competition for the prize to graduates of the 
 university of not more than three years' standing 
 from their first degree, and require the successful 
 essay to be published. 
 
 The prize was this year awarded to my essay 
 upon the subject ''Thomas Carlyle and John 
 Stuart Mill"; and in compliance with the regula- 
 tions I now commit it to the press. I have no 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 reason to suppose that it will escape the fate of 
 most oth^r prize essays, unless perchance the supe- 
 rior humanity of the subject may attract a notice 
 which its treatment will hardly justify. 
 
 As frequent quotations from the works of Carlyle 
 and Mill naturally occur in these pages, it may be 
 well to state here, once for all, the editions to which 
 reference is made. The case of Carlyle presents 
 little difficulty. I have used the uniform " People's 
 Edition," published in thirty-one volumes by Messrs. 
 Chapman and Hall, under the author's direct super- 
 vision. The references in the notes are made, not 
 to the volumes in the series, but to those of the 
 work in question ; but where, as in the case of the 
 Miscellanies, several works are contained in one 
 volume, the reference to the pages follows the volume, 
 so that the number quoted is always that actually 
 appearing above the passage referred to. This 
 course has, after considerable experience, proved to 
 me the simplest in practice. The two volumes of 
 .' Reminiscences^ posthumously published, are referred 
 to by the edition of Professor Norton, brought out 
 by Messrs. Macmillan last year; and Mr. Froude's 
 Biography is, in both parts, the first edition, pub- 
 lished by Messrs. Longmans. To distinguish briefly 
 between the two parts of this Biography, I have 
 referred to them as "First Forty" and "Second 
 Forty" respectively. 
 
Preface, ix 
 
 Unhappily there is no uniform edition of Mill's 
 works. It becomes necessary therefore to specify 
 in detail the editions referred to in the footnotes. 
 They are as follows : — 
 
 Principles of Political \ ,y . ^ a.^ ^ o o 
 
 -^ -^ j (Longmans) 2 vols, 8th ed. 1878 
 
 Exami?iation of Sir \ 
 
 William Ha^nilton'' s > ,, 5th ed. 1878 
 
 Philosophy. ) 
 
 Dissertations and Dis-^ „ 3 vols, 2nd ed. 1867 
 
 ciissions, ) 4th vol. 1875 
 
 Representative Govern- | ^^^ ^^ ^g^^ 
 
 ment. ) 
 
 Autobiography, (Longmans) 8th ed. 1886 
 
 System of Logic. „ People's ed. 1884 
 
 The Subjection of\ ^^ ^^_ ^gg 
 
 Wo7nen. ) 
 
 Utilitarianis7n. „ 9th ed. 1885 
 
 Conite and Positivism. (Triibner) 1865 
 
 Irish Land Question. (Longmans) 2nd ed. 1870 
 
 O71 Liberty. „ People's ed. 1884 
 
 Itiaugttral Address. „ „ 1884 
 
 Thoughts on Parlia-) ^^^^^ ^g 
 
 mentary Reform. ) 
 
 In extenuation of the paucity of references to 
 other writers, I may perhaps be allowed to mention 
 that the essay was written in Germany, beyond the 
 reach o^ English libraries. 
 
 E. J. 
 
 4, Essex Court, Temple, 
 May 1888. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 CAP. I. INTRODUCTORY . I 
 
 „ II. THE PROPHET OF THE LATTER DAYS . . 8 
 
 „ III. THE APOSTLE OF BENTHAMISM . . . . IO5 
 
 ,, IV. THE potter's CLAY 1 58 
 
 ,, V. PARERGA 205 
 
 „ VI. GLEANINGS 234 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 WHEN an estimate is to be formed of the 
 merits, and relative importance of two 
 characters, the critic may choose between two 
 methods of procedure. He may make resemblances, 
 or, on the other hand, differences, the leading idea 
 of his criticism. The decision depends in each case 
 upon the nature of the subject. 
 
 All great men are alike in the fundamental attri- 
 butes of character. Greatness, by every admission, 
 involves earnestness, purity, fidelity, love of truth. In 
 these essentials Carlyle and Mill were alike, and it 
 would be quite possible to begin a criticism with this 
 idea of resemblance as a guide. 
 
 But the point is not merely to seize an idea, but 
 to seize the most fruitful idea. There may be many 
 ways of climbing a mountain, but one is usually the 
 best ; and it w-ill need but a short consideration to 
 see that in the present case the best path is that 
 which starts from the idea of difference. 
 
 P^or if in their characters Carlyle and Mill betray 
 that elementary resemblance which marks all great 
 
 I 
 
2 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 men, in their work, still more in their mental atti- 
 tudes, they are wide as the poles asunder. 
 
 It ma}'' be said, without much fear of contradiction, 
 that the world's thinkers fall under two great leading 
 classes — men of letters and men of science. The 
 former are occupied with the spiritual interests of 
 mankind, its loves, hopes, fears, reverences, and 
 hatreds ; they deal only with circumstances as they 
 embod}'' or affect spiritual movements, and with the 
 ■material only as it appears in the light of the in- 
 visible. Within these limits they may differ widely 
 in degree, from the Dante, who follows man in his 
 path to heaven or to hell, to the De Musset, who 
 sings of the loves of the boudoir. 
 
 The man of science, on the other hand, deals only 
 with forms. He is concerned with discovering, ob- 
 serving, classifying, and reasoning from phenomena, 
 mental and physical. He sometimes claims to 
 intrude into a province which the man of letters 
 has treated as his own, but it is on the very ground 
 that it really belongs to his kingdom as it has just 
 been defined, — that it is a region, to use a technical 
 phrase, not of ovra, but of (f)aiv6/jL€va. And it does 
 occasionally happen that a man of unusual grasp 
 combines both hemispheres in his range of vision, 
 but even then it is not difficult to decide, in 
 any of his utterances, upon which his eye is 
 resting. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to do more than assert that 
 Carlyle belongs pre-eminently to the former of these 
 two classes : Mill, as clearly, to the latter ; and thus 
 
Introductory. 3 
 
 to establish a strong presumption in favour of the 
 differential method. 
 
 But there is another equally important considera- 
 tion. Carlyle and Mill differed not only in the 
 subjects with which they were occupied, but, as 
 decidedly, in the attitudes which they adopted 
 towards them. 
 
 Carlyle, first and last, stood alone. The message 
 which he brought had grown up from the depths of 
 his own soul in the solitude of a Scottish wilder- 
 ness. He followed no earthly banner, and fought 
 in no recognised army. Even when the eyes of 
 all that was most hopeful in England were turned 
 towards him as to a leader and a guide, he formed 
 no school or s^ct. Nor did he ever formulate a 
 system. Systems were his abhorrence. Springing, 
 autochthonous, from the rugged soil, he dwelt 
 apart from the ways of the world, crying. Repent, 
 Repent, and enforcing his message with burning 
 arrows of rebuke and entreaty. Then he passed 
 away, and left his words to stand or fall according 
 to their own inherent worth. 
 
 Mill was the chosen hope of a band of philoso- 
 phers, who looked to him to give their work form 
 and consistency. Carefully bred up in the lore of 
 the Benthamite school, he imbibed with his earliest 
 breath the thoughts and temper of stronger minds, 
 and then, perhaps unconscious of his position, in- 
 vested them with harmonious and enduring form. 
 His own personality was too strong to allow him to 
 be a mere compiler, but it was not strong enough to 
 
4 Thomas Carlyle and John Shtart Mill. 
 
 enable him completely to throw off influences so 
 powerful as those which shaped his youth. And 
 so it happened in his case, as so frequently before 
 and since, that the messenger delivered his message, 
 but couched in his own language, coloured by his 
 own views. He was one of a band whose members 
 reverenced him indeed as the most completely 
 equipped and skilful soldier of the troop, but he 
 was only prwius inter pares. He neither started nor 
 ended a movement. When he .died his successor 
 was ready, and the list of the Fathers is not closed 
 yet. 
 
 Is there a simple formula which shall express 
 these two distinctions clearly, and so serve as a 
 guide for our investigation ? I think such may be 
 found. 
 
 When in the days of Israel's glory there appeared 
 one professing a Divine message to the souls of men, 
 he was termed a prophet. No formal guarantee of 
 his mission was required, he might spring from any 
 rank in life, or from any country. If events justified 
 his words, he was a true prophet, and as such was 
 honoured ; if no confirmation of his sa3dngs ap- 
 peared, he was accounted false, and spurned. But in 
 either case he was a prophet, by the nature of the 
 task which he undertook. Carlyle was a prophet. 
 
 In course of time these prophecies became syste- 
 matized and expounded. There came schools and 
 teachers in the place of solitary figures. Shammai 
 and Hillel took the places of Isaiah and Habakkuk, 
 and drew learners, called, in the Hellenized language 
 
Introductory. 5 
 
 of the day, " disciples," around them. But it was 
 the learner's duty to do more than learn. When he 
 had himself imbibed he teaching of his master, he 
 was sent out to make proselytes. Thus the disciple 
 in one aspect became the apostle in another. Then 
 came a teacher whose influence was so great as to 
 stajnp with permanency all the institutions connected 
 with his name. His apostles became central figures 
 in the world's history, and so it comes to pass that 
 no better name than that of apostle can be found for 
 one who goes abroad to convert the world to the 
 teaching of his master. Such was Mill. 
 
 Carlyle was a prophet^ Mill an apostle. This formula 
 will serve well enough to indicate the lines upon 
 which we proceed. But, to pin the terms a little 
 more closely to the paper, a qualification may in each 
 case be added. The term prophet has so long been 
 associated principally with such teaching as Carlyle's, 
 that in his case we need not do more than employ an 
 attribute suggestive of date. In the case of Mill, as 
 apostleship is of all kinds, and the nature of its 
 message consequently somewhat dependent on cir- 
 cumstances, we shall require to use a term which 
 will suggest the nature of Mill's doctrine. Our first 
 concern will be, therefore, with The Prophet of 
 the Latter Days ; our next, with The Apostle of 
 Benthamism. 
 
 But it will not be sufficient to give isolated esti- 
 mates of the respective merits of the two men. We 
 must treat them as forces bearing on the same body, 
 or the significance of the conjunction will be lost. 
 
6 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuai^t Mill. 
 
 So it will be necessary, after endeavouring to 
 ascertain the nature of these two particular forces, 
 to attempt some estimate of their influence. It 
 requires little imagination to picture the condition 
 of any given period of history as the result of an 
 immense number of forces working upon certain 
 materials. And what is more, it seems in accord 
 with the general views of the greatest critics to 
 consider this attitude as at least profitable and 
 suggestive, if not absolutely the truth. For without 
 touching upon long-vexed questions of necessity and 
 free will, we may, I think, admit that the lives of men, 
 and pre-eminently of great men, have a palpable 
 effect upon external conditions. This was certainly 
 the view both of Carlyle and Mill. To trace these 
 effects is no easy task, and yet that would be poor 
 criticism which gave up the duty without a trial. So 
 we must endeavour to gauge the relative influences of 
 Carlyle and Mill upon the world in which they lived. 
 
 If we wish to cover this idea with a serviceable 
 formula, we shall hardly do better than by borrowing 
 a metaphor from that striking picture drawn by 
 St. Paul of the clay in the hands of the potter. 
 Perhaps the thought of the power there suggested 
 is too absolute to be strictly followed, but, as a 
 metaphor. The Potter s Clay may serve as the idea 
 of a third aspect from which to consider our subject. 
 
 Thus far we shall have considered Carlyle and 
 Mill in what appear to be their essential positions 
 as teachers. It has been said that every man is the 
 embodiment of an idea, and that the only way to 
 
Introductory, 7 
 
 understand him is to find that idea. But in addition 
 to this key notion, the life of an active man furnishes 
 generally other materials for consideration, — works, 
 so to speak, off the main line of thought, but important 
 enough to be worth some study. These we may call 
 Parerga, and under this head consider those achieve- 
 ments which, in the central study of our subject, 
 were for the sake of clearness omitted. 
 
 Finally, to make some attempt at completeness, it 
 will not be amiss to glance carefully over the ground 
 again, and see if we cannot gather up such minor 
 fragments as were unavoidably left over at the first 
 reaping. Lesser qualities of character and style, 
 small details of circumstance, though not in them- 
 selves sufficient to warrant incorporation into the 
 main idea, yet help, as Gleanings, to swell the final 
 harvest. Thus we have the rough sketch of an 
 essay on Carlyle and Mill. 
 
"CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PROPHET OF THE LATTER DAYS. 
 
 THE nineteenth century was born amid the roar 
 of battle. Napoleon, barely resting after 
 the first marvellous display which proved to an 
 astonished Europe that a new Titan had arisen, 
 was preparing that mighty march over the wrecks 
 of kingdoms, which led at last to the rock of 
 St. Helena. 
 
 But Napoleon himself was only the shadow of 
 a mightier force which, more secret in its workings, 
 but still more fatal, had prepared the way before 
 him. Like a destroying angel Voltaire had passed 
 over the land ; and creeds, institutions, and reputa- 
 tions, already hollow and ready to die, had withered 
 at his touch. So universal was the wreck that all 
 seemed lost, and the world of thought and behef 
 almost a blank sheet. It scarcely needed the 
 Diderots and the D'Alemberts to clear away the 
 fragments. What Voltaire had done for the rest 
 of Europe, that Hume had done for England, and 
 though appearances were steadier there, it needs but 
 little study of the period to see that England too. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 9 
 
 in the first years of the century, was hanging over 
 the abyss. 
 
 But man will not be content long with mere 
 denial. Of all the attempts at construction which 
 have from time to time been conceived, perhaps that 
 of Rousseau is the wildest. Yet it was an attempt 
 at something positive. Man had '' rights," and it 
 was his business to assert them. Following upon 
 the doctrines of Rousseau came the reactionism of 
 Chateaubriand and the attractive but unpractical 
 attempts of the St. Simonians, and then the ambitious 
 essay of Comte to found a new doctrine of ethics 
 upcn the results of scientific knowledge. On the 
 whole, however, the prospects from France were 
 not hopeful. She had destroyed the old temples, 
 but she could not build anew. 
 
 More promising was the outlook in Germany. 
 There a brilliant outburst of genius, heralded by 
 Lessing, had succeeded to the unhappy productions 
 of the Stiirm-iind-Drang Zeit^ or, in Carlyle's own 
 homely phrase, the ^' bowl-and-dagger department."^ 
 Goethe, Schiller, Richter, Novalis, were digging 
 deep below the conventions of denial and assertion 
 which a shallower age had been content to accept as 
 truths, and were finding that a noble life was still 
 to be lived, that reverence and faith, under new 
 forms indeed, were still possible. The world was 
 invited to believe that a man who saw in all its 
 depth and breadth the despair which was brooding 
 like a nightmare over the mind of Europe, could yet 
 
 ^ State of German IJterature, p. 132. 
 
ro Thomas Carlyle and Jo /m Stuaj^t Mill. 
 
 calmly face the problem and assert that deliverance 
 was possible ; that he who could produce Werter 
 and Faust was yet capable of Wilhehn Meister. 
 Kant and Fichte, too, on the scientific side, had 
 boldly rejected the scepticism ^ of Voltaire and 
 Hume, and accepted intuition as a surer guide than 
 logic towards the solution of the great problems of 
 existence. 
 
 In England also there were strivings after better 
 things. The vehement orthodoxy of Johnson, and 
 the sentimental piety of Cowper, were no longer 
 possible for the generation which had studied Hume 
 and the Philosophes. Much had to be cleared away 
 before the ground would be ready for the builder. 
 But in the passionate discontent of Byron and 
 Shelley a kindly criticism will see the hope of a 
 brighter day. At least it was something that they 
 refused to be content with obvious untruth. Death, 
 we know, cut short the promise shadowed forth by 
 their splendid powers, and left the work to other 
 hands. Coleridge too, after a brief burst of splendour, 
 sank into a chaos relieved only by stray flashes 
 of genius. But Wordsworth's light was burning 
 brightly in his mountain home : he at least had found 
 peace, and shown the world by example that a life 
 of piety, simple and poor as it was, could still be 
 worthy of a man. Wordsworth's value is one of 
 
 2 It is scarcely necessary to say that I do not use the 
 word " scepticism " in a theological sense. I am well aware 
 that the Protestant stories of Voltaire's atheism have been 
 adopted from the Jesuits: Deo erexit Voltai?'e. Yet I look 
 upon his work on the whole as destructive. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 1 1 
 
 the most difficult of all estimates in English literature. 
 At first neglected, then almost worshipped, then 
 allowed to sink again into oblivion, he is perhaps 
 only now finding his true place. But it is surely 
 not too much to say that Wordsworth may be 
 reckoned as one of the most hopeful factors in the 
 spiritual condition of the first quarter of the century. 
 One other influence must be noticed, before we 
 come to that which was undoubtedly the most 
 striking feature of the time. That the Oxford move- 
 ment, v^ith all its extravagance and false sentiment, 
 had a deep meaning, few thoughtful men will deny. 
 The national church had long slumbered in con- 
 tented lethargy, but the action of the Reform 
 Parliament upon the subject of the Irish temporalities 
 served as a warning which did not fall unheeded. 
 Earnestness is the best feature of the teaching which 
 Newman, and Pusey, and Keble strove to enforce. 
 Religion was to be no longer a thing of social 
 convenience and state policy, of magistracies and 
 benefices, but a genuine spiritual power. Unfortu- 
 nately, this earnestness looked for inspiration to 
 the past rather than the present. St. Francis and 
 Savonarola were its models, and St. Francis and 
 Savonarola, exquisite characters as they are, were 
 no guides for the days of 1 830. So, after a 
 brilliant opening, the movement waned. Its greatest 
 champion found for his soul a haven which for 
 the majority of men can only be termed, as it has 
 in fact often been termed, impossible. The feeling 
 passed from religion to art, and we find it again, 
 
12 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 with its best feature still prominent, in the pre- 
 Raphaelite school of Rossetti and his followers, and, 
 rash as it may sound to say so, probably in the 
 tones of such poems as Dolores and The Garden 
 of Proserpine^ with which Mr. Swinburne has as- 
 tonished and fascinated the world. A stone is thrown 
 into the' lake, and it is hard to tell where the ripples 
 end, yet one cannot help looking upon the Oxford 
 movement as a dying force, too alien to English genius 
 to be of the first importance here. Its influence is still 
 great in details,— you can hardly enter a village 
 church without being reminded of it, — but it is an 
 influence which seems to work principally on those 
 who are out of the main current of thought. 
 
 I have little hesitation in assuming that the real 
 teacher of the century's youth was, not Newman, 
 but Bentham. A strange, patriarchal figure is this 
 which rises before us as we turn our eyes back upon 
 the years. A cynical enthusiast, better than his 
 creed, yet consistent to the last in the practice of his 
 philosophy, careless of his own fame, generous, even 
 prodigal of his labour, a powerfully acute thinker on 
 great subjects, yet almost childishl}'- credulous on 
 minor points, his ghost still haunts the memory of 
 Queen's Square days with pathetic persistence. Many 
 of those who are consistent Benthamites know 
 nothing of his writings ; some, perhaps, never heard 
 his name. It is through his interpreters that he 
 is known. And yet his teaching was marvellously 
 simple. The only real things in life, says Bentham, 
 are the sensations known as pleasures and pains* 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 13 
 
 No one doubts what is a pleasure and what is a 
 pain, though the varieties of each differ infinitely. 
 The duty of the good man is to seek to minimise the 
 quantity of pain in the world, and to increase to 
 its full possibility the quantity of pleasure. Thus 
 the end of ethics is the Greatest Happiness of the 
 Greatest Number, for happiness means the presence 
 of pleasure and the absence of pain. Devotion to 
 a more exalted ideal is mere asceticism, intuition 
 is only another name for prejudice. The duty of 
 philosophers is, by a study of phenomena, the causes 
 of pleasures and pains, to decide by what arrange- 
 ments the desired end may be obtained. The duty 
 of the unlearned is to observe the rules thus dis- 
 covered by the wise. It is true that man does 
 always what pleases him, i.e., his acts are the result 
 of his volitions, but by education he may be taught 
 what course of conduct will, by increasing the 
 pleasures of others, really in the end give him 
 most happiness. 
 
 Such, popularly described, is the famous doctrine 
 of Hedonism, which, with various modifications, has 
 played so great a part in the development of the 
 century. Its success was prompt and wide-reaching. 
 On a first reading, the earlier chapters of the famous 
 Traites de Legislation seem irresistible ; it is only 
 after careful thought that the mind sees possible 
 alternatives. 
 
 Seldom has a single seed of thought yielded such 
 a prolific harvest. To it can be traced the growth 
 of that great scientific movement which is the striking 
 
14 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 feature of the century. The movement has many 
 branches, but leaves and fruit ahke betray a common 
 origin. Phenomena, forms, are the subjects of all 
 the scientific schools ; their teaching is improvements 
 in these. 
 
 First and foremost come the many divisions of 
 the ph3^sical school, boasting the names of Brewster, 
 f^arada}^, Herschel, Darwin, and, later, of Tyndall 
 and Huxle}^, whose teaching, at first purely logical, 
 has long assumed, as it was bound to do, an ethical 
 cast. But on the mental side the activity was no 
 less keen. In politics. Mackintosh, Grote, Jeffrey, Sir 
 George Lewis, Brougham, and Macaulay developed a 
 science of the forms of government which succeeded 
 to the popular harangues of O'Connell and Sir 
 Francis Burdett. The phenomena of mind were 
 studied by Brown, James Mill, Bain, and Martineau, 
 and a new impetus given to the science of psychology, 
 suggested long ago by Hartley. The economists, 
 McCulloch, Ricardo, and Nassau Senior, laboured 
 upcn the phenomena of wealth, and built on the 
 foundation of Adam Smith a philosophy which was 
 destined to strange fortunes. Finally, in the province 
 of law, really the nidus of all this activity, but 
 strangely overlooked amid the general fervour, 
 Austin, neglected, and impeded by ill-health, was 
 slowly working at that hard-grained task, which will 
 long remain as a monument of his undaunted 
 perseverance. 
 
 Side by side with these, infected with their spirit, 
 but not working with their single eye, was a band 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 15 
 
 of men whose real duty lay elsewhere, but who 
 unhappily conceived themselves bound to allay a 
 conflict which in truth never existed, but which the 
 world seemed determined to imagine, the so-called 
 conflict between religion and science. Among all 
 the solutions of the problem which were suggested 
 by the Maurices, Kingsleys, Colensos, and Stanleys, 
 the 'obvious explanation seems never to have pre- 
 sented itself. And so we have the unhappy spectacle 
 of a number of gifted and noble natures striving to 
 reconcile irreconcileables, spending their lives in 
 fighting for the forms instead of teaching the spirit 
 of their beliefs. A little clearer insight into the 
 nature of religion and science would have saved them 
 a world of pain. Had a single philosopher of note 
 announced that truth, honesty, simplicity, reverence, 
 purity, were obsolete virtues, then indeed the 
 champions of religion might have sounded the war- 
 note. But no such gospel, in word at least, was 
 preached, and they v^ho should have been on the 
 watch to detect and ward off the real dangers which 
 lay under this intense devotion to science, were 
 themselves occupied in pseudo-scientific investiga- 
 tions, which were to lead to conclusions to which 
 they had already made up their minds. 
 
 In addition to these intellectual influences, the 
 extraordinary increase of material wealth which 
 followed upon the inventions of Watt, Hargreaves, 
 Ark Wright, and the Stephensons gave a character 
 of its own to the time. Wealth was passing from 
 the hands of the landowners to those of the manu- 
 
 ■^ 
 
1 6 Thomas Carlyle and John Stua7^t Mill. 
 
 facturers, and the excitement aroused by the agitation 
 for the Reform Bill had exalted the influence of 
 the House of Commons to its highest pitch, at the 
 same time that Reform itself had lodged the power 
 of the House in the hands of the middle classes. 
 The new rulers of the nation were men whose 
 claims to distinction often lay principally in the 
 amount of their wealth, sometimes too unscrupu- 
 lously won by methods not the most creditable. 
 The change in the conditions of labour, brought 
 about by the introduction of machinery, had dis- 
 organized the working-classes, and left them at 
 the mercy of their employers. The old craft-guilds, 
 with their rules to secure fair treatment of the 
 labourer and good quality for his work, had fallen 
 into decay, and no substitute had as yet been 
 found. The state of affairs amongst the artizan- 
 classes may be gathered from such books as 
 Bamford's Life of a Radical — a picture of the 
 most hopeful material going to ruin for want of 
 guidance. 
 
 The violent agitations in the labour-market, pro- 
 duced by the sudden cessation of a long war and 
 an unusual uncertainty of harvests, spread misery 
 and discontent. The workmen saw their masters 
 amassing huge fortunes and spending them in luxur}^, 
 while their own condition was infinitely less desirable 
 than it had been in the old days of cottage industry 
 and long apprenticeships. And they were fed 
 with political doctrines, which they applied, doubt- 
 less, in a sense other than that understood by their 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 17 
 
 teachers, and stored up as formidable weapons for 
 the struggle which many amongst them believed 
 to be imminent. A pessimist observer, calmly 
 surveying the national aspect in the year of grace 
 1830, might have summed up the situation thus: 
 an idle aristocracy ; a plutocracy callously absorbed 
 in the pursuit of wealth ; a proletariat smouldering 
 in discontent. 
 
 Meanwhile, like a lonely watchman of the night, 
 sat a strange figure looking down from a Scottish 
 wilderness upon all this world. What thoughts 
 arose in the mind of Carlyle as he paced in solitude 
 those rugged hills, we can only guess from the 
 glimpses which he himself has given us. Here is 
 a passage which must have been then trembling on 
 his pen, and which seems to describe his attitude 
 towards the world. It is put into the mouth of his 
 creation, Professor Teufelsdrockh : — 
 
 ^^ Ach, mei?i Lieber ! ... it is a true sublimity to dwell 
 here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through 
 smoke and fiery exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient 
 reign of Night — what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his 
 Hunting-Dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire ? 
 That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to 
 rest, and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and 
 there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed- 
 in, and lighted to the due pitch for her ; and only Vice and 
 Misery, to prowl and moan like night-birds, are abroad : that 
 hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is 
 heard in Heaven ! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapours, 
 and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting- 
 vat lies simmering and hid ! The joyful and the sorrowful are 
 there ; men are dying there, men are being born ; men are 
 praying, — on the other side of a brick partition, men are curs- 
 ing ; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud 
 Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within 
 
1 8 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 damask curtains ; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or 
 shivers hunger-stricken in its lair of straw ; in obscure cellars, 
 Rouge et Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard, 
 hungry vi lains ; while Councillors of State sit plotting, and 
 playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are men. 
 The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready ; and 
 she, full of hope and fear, glides down to fly with him over the 
 borders : the Thief, still more silently, sets to his picklocks and 
 crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their 
 boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, 
 are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts ; but in 
 the Condemned Cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and 
 faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness, which 
 is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. 
 Six men are to be hanged on the morrow ; comes no hammer- 
 ing from the Rabenstein ? — their gallows must even now be 
 o" building. Upwards of five hundred thousand two-legged 
 animals without feathers lie around us, in horizontal positions ; 
 their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. 
 Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens 
 of shame ; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over 
 her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears 
 moisten. — All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing: 
 but a little carpentry and masonry between them ; — crammed 
 in, like salted fish in their barrel ; — or weltering, shall I say, 
 like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to 
 get its head above the others : such work goes on under that 
 cloud counterpane ! — But I, 77iei7i Werther, sit above it all ; I 
 am alone with th^ Stars.'^ 
 
 This is a picture by a master's hand. Design 
 and execution are aHke great. There is immense 
 power of imagination, a wide knowledge of life, 
 deep sympathy, richness and yet harmony of detail, 
 splendour of light, and gloom of shade. It is worth 
 while to look somewhat closer at the artist. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle was born in the year 1795, in the 
 little border township of Ecclefechan in Dumfries- 
 shire. Life had revealed itself to him from the first 
 ^ Sartor Resartiis, p. 14. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 19 
 
 as a battle ; not, indeed, a hopeless struggle, but 
 a condition which allowed no scope for idleness. 
 His parents were of a too rare type of peasant 
 race, — ^an earnest, God-fearing, thrifty, energetic 
 pair. The father whom Carlyle has so lovingly 
 sketched in his "Reminiscences," was, even after 
 all allowance for filial affection, no ordinary man. 
 St^rn perhaps to the outward eye, but for the rest 
 all that a man with his chances could well be. " He 
 was very kind, and I loved him," * is the touching 
 confession which the son makes at the brink of 
 the father's grave. We shall see something of 
 the meaning of this word kind^ so lightly used, 
 yet in its origin so full of meaning, as we trace 
 Carlyle's history. 
 
 But if his love was for his father, Carlyle's 
 affection played round his mother. His grief at 
 her death was too deep for formal expression ; 
 but enough records remain to preserve to us a 
 story of almost idyllic tenderness. To her the 
 first news of every success was sent ; with her 
 Carlyle unbosomed himself of his troubles. His 
 first earnings were devoted to her comfort ; on her 
 he leant in his hours of deepest despair. His fear 
 to wound her feelings often made him speak in 
 parables to her ; but love is marvellously quick 
 to see through an allegory. 
 
 Well did his parents deserve the respect and 
 love he bore them. His father was poor, and 
 some sage of authorit}^ had tempted him with the 
 
 * Reminiscences^ vol. i., p. 45. 
 
20 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart MilL 
 
 cowardly suggestion that a boy, if educated, would 
 grow up to despise his family.^ This was a bitter 
 thought for a stern man, conscious of his own 
 worth, and he could not but know that it had 
 a meaning. Yet with a " noble faith " ^ he put 
 it aside, and did what he believed to be right, 
 leaving the consequences. So Carlyle was sent 
 to Annan school, and, when the time came, to 
 Edinburgh University, that he might occupy the 
 highest position within his parents' range of vision, 
 the post of a minister of the Scottish Kirk. 
 
 At Edinburgh Carlyle was taught mathematics, 
 and learnt, without teaching, much that his pre- 
 ceptors guessed little of, from books and men. 
 How he managed in a few years, as a poor 
 student or pedagogue, to amass that vast store 
 of mental wealth which shines so conspicuously 
 even through his earliest writings, can be guessed 
 only by those to whom the ways of genius are 
 familiar. The critics of Ampere's day wondered 
 whence the bourgeois author drew his descriptions 
 of high life. The element of imagination does not 
 seem to have entered into their calculations. 
 
 Before long it became clear that Carlyle would not 
 occupy the position for which his parents had destined 
 him, or indeed any other conventional niche. There 
 was a fatal feature in his character, which shut him 
 out from the broad path. He was troubled with a 
 conscience. 
 
 ^ Reminiscences, vol. i., p. 19. 
 6 Ibid. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. . 2 1 
 
 Perhaps this is the keynote to the whole of Carlyle'^s 
 history ; it may be well, therefore, to sound it clearly. 
 Society is composed, for the most part, of men who 
 assent with their lips to one set of propositions, and 
 by their lives assert an inconsistent creed. Most 
 men will admit that it is wrong to tell a lie ; but it is 
 agreed that lies of a certain kind are admissible in 
 practice. Few men will openly allege that money- 
 making is the true end of existence, but very many 
 will devote their whole lives to the making of money. 
 And so it comes about that the man of the world has 
 a double system of ethics — one side for Sunday wear, 
 the other for weekdays. Compromise is the virtue 
 which the world delights to honour. 
 
 Carlyle was so constituted that such a position was 
 an impossibility for him. It was hardl}^ a question 
 of rejecting a falsehood — he could not have lived a 
 day with it. A sentence from his journal puts the 
 matter in a nutshell. . '' 'All true, Mr. Carlyle, But' : 
 I say, 'All true, Mr. Carlyle, And.'" ^ The first 
 part of the quotation is the suggestion of the man 
 of the world ; the latter, Carlyle's answer — '' Get 
 thee behind me, Satan," This attitude he reso- 
 lutely maintained during his whole life, — at what 
 cost, let each man judge for himself who has tried 
 the like. 
 
 At the very outset it cut him off from the Scottish 
 
 Church. It was impossible for him to believe 
 
 literally in the Westminster Confession, and he 
 
 could not join a calling which demanded such a 
 
 "^ First Forty, vol. ii., p. 206. 
 
2 2 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 belief. So he turned, with no great eagerness, to 
 schoolmastering. 
 
 But here, too, there were difficulties. The powers 
 of Kirkcaldy town hardly recognized the true posi- 
 tion of affairs. From their point of view, Carlyle 
 was their servant, bound to execute their orders. 
 Carlyle did not adopt this view, and threw up the 
 affair in disgust. Judged by his own lofty standard, 
 he stands condemned for this. He was not required 
 to make any false profession, by word or act. His 
 conscientious labours could hardly have failed to 
 do good, and the work lay to his hand. Had the 
 " Infinite Nature of Duty " been as clear to him then 
 as it afterwards became, he would not have deserted 
 his post. But he was conscious of great powers, 
 and the thought of wasting them in a country town 
 proved too much for him. 
 
 He was now possessed of that perfect independ- 
 ence which consists in having no particular place 
 in the world. His history for the next few years 
 is not a cheerful, if a somewhat common story. 
 Attempts at this and that, aimless wanderings to 
 and fro, stormy spiritual conflict, — the experience 
 is perhaps necessary, but it is unpleasant whilst it 
 lasts. 
 
 The conduct of his parents during these years 
 was such as to bind Carlyle's heart to them for ever. 
 It was no common disappointment that their son had 
 turned aw^ay from what seemed to them the highest 
 and most sacred of callings. The}^ could hardly 
 conceal that they looked upon the flight from Kirk- 
 
The Prophet of tJie Latter Days. 23 
 
 caldy as a mistake. To the resolute, ever-busy 
 farmer, the sight of a man in the prime of Hfe, 
 loitering about in idleness, or with only the pretence 
 of reading, must have been terribly exasperating. 
 And James Carlyle was no meek saint. 
 
 Yet there was not a word of reproach, no slightest 
 reference to the toil spent in providing means which 
 seemed now destined to be thrown away, no urgings 
 towards a " career of fame and wealth," such as 
 some fathers are not ashamed to hold out before 
 their sons. Though they could have no sympathy 
 with his doubts, Carlyle's parents saw that they 
 could not judge of his difficulties, and with supreme 
 wisdom they left him to fight his own battle, merely 
 assuring him, by expressive acts of kindness, of 
 their earnest wishes for his welfare. It is no exag- 
 geration to say that, had they acted otherwise, 
 their son might have ended his days in a madhouse. 
 
 At last, after a dreary night, the morning began 
 to dawn. In the course of his omnivorous reading, 
 Carlyle had been attracted by the promising subject 
 of German Literature. With indomitable energy he 
 had taught himself German, helped only by grammar 
 and dictionary. Learning won this way, by the 
 sweat of the brow, is not lightly forgotten, and 
 Carlyle to the end of his days was a master of the 
 German tongue. His venture proved successful ; 
 he was one, as he himself tells us,^ whom Goethe 
 had helped to lead out of spiritual obstruction, "into 
 peace and light." Moreover, the study brought him 
 ^ Goethe^ " Miscellanies," vol. i., p. 213. 
 
24 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 a mission. He had before done craft-work for Sir 
 David Brewster on the Encyclopcsdia, and had 
 translated Legendre. Now he was to begin a 
 labour of love, the introduction of German literature 
 to the world of English thought. The first step was 
 a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, a task 
 performed in such a way as to win the approval 
 of the artist himself. Then followed the beautiful 
 Life of Schiller, which Goethe valued so highly 
 that he had it translated into German under his 
 own eye. Thus encouraged, Carlyle produced in the 
 periodicals of the day a series of essays, principally 
 on German Literature, which now stand as the first 
 four volumes of Miscellanies, in the complete 
 editions of his works. The merits of these essays 
 we shall have to consider further on ; at present 
 we are concerned with the outward circumstances 
 of the writer. 
 
 In the year 1826 Carlyle had married. It was a 
 step which meant more for one of his nature even 
 than for other men, and, unpleasant as the subject 
 has become, we cannot entirely pass over it. 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle was a singularly gifted woman, with 
 a sense of duty hardly less strong than her hus- 
 band's. At the time of their marriage she was 
 considerably above him in social position, though 
 her own generosity had left her no superiority in 
 worldly wealth. Had she remained single, or 
 married an ordinary man, she would probably have 
 risen into note as a woman of talent. Her critical 
 abilities were really great, her power of fascination 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 25 
 
 conspicuous. By the side of her husband's genius 
 she was, of course, dwarfed ; she was Mrs. Carlyle, 
 and nothing more. 
 
 The clouds of reproach which have burst over the 
 husband of this woman shape themselves into two 
 distinct accusations. He is said to have married her 
 without being in love with her, and to have treated 
 her -with carelessness, if not with actual cruelty. 
 
 As to the first charge, it is of course no answer to 
 say that thousands of men have done the like with- 
 out being blamed for it. A man who poses as a 
 teacher of the multitude cannot escape by conform- 
 ing to the standard of the multitude. And certainly 
 Carlyle would have rejected such a defence with 
 scorn. 
 
 What, then, is the evidence ? Apparently, one 
 fragment written in late life by Mrs. Carlyle in 
 a private note-book, from which it appears that 
 Carlyle, in criticising one of Thackeray's novels, 
 had spoken lightly of ^^ the thing called lovey^ Mrs. 
 Carlyle was a sorely-tried woman, and we can 
 forgive her for taking in far too literal a sense 
 an isolated expression of opinion. But that a bio- 
 grapher should bring a serious charge against the 
 man he professes to reverence, without showing 
 better warrant than this, is altogether too disgrace- 
 ful. Mr. Froude is really to blame for the 
 indecent outburst of joy that took place on the 
 publication of the biography. The people who had 
 been stung by the arrows of Carlyle's wrath, but 
 '^ First Forty ^ vol i., p. 285. 
 
2 6 Thomas Caidyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 who had not had the grace to be thankful for the 
 wounds, saw their chance of revenge. This man, 
 who had preached such a high gospel in such an 
 uncomfortably forcible way — he was after all no 
 better than other people. How delightful ! There 
 may have been, among the shrewdest, a few who 
 saw that it was not Carlyle, but his biographer, 
 that was to blame. In truth Mr. Froude, by his way 
 of treating the subject, has managed to leave an 
 impression which is entirely unwarranted by the 
 evidence. He has unrivalled opportunities of 
 knowing the real state of the case, yet he never 
 produces any substantial ground for his criticisms. 
 He is continually maundering on through moral 
 platitudes about the marriages of men of genius, 
 coming back again and again to the subject, like 
 a wasp to a rotten apple, till at last the reader is 
 brought to believe that Carlyle married his wife for 
 the same reasons that actuated him in buying a 
 horse. And all this from a hasty note of a vaguely 
 reported conversation. 
 
 On the other side there is abundant evidence. 
 Carlyle's letters to his wife, extending over long 
 years, are some of the tenderest and most affection- 
 ate epistles in the English language. Nothing but 
 consummate hypocrisy could have fabricated such 
 letters. Carlyle could not be a day absent from his 
 wife without writing her every detail of his occupa- 
 tions. On each birthday he offered her a little gift, 
 with the most humble entreaties for its acceptance. 
 The memoir which he wrote in his latest years is 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 2 J 
 
 filled with the most exquisite details, such as love 
 alone could have noticed. It is true that he would 
 not sacrifice his conscience to her wishes, but what 
 would such a woman as Mrs. Carlyle have thought 
 of the man who could have stooped to that ? 
 Carlyle might with justice adopt the noble tone of 
 the old Cavalier poet : — 
 
 I could not love thee, Dear, so much, 
 Loved I not Honour more. 
 
 With the second charge the case is much the 
 same. Mr. Froude treats us to whole pages of 
 disquisition, but to hardly a word of proof. We 
 may admit, at once, that, whatever her faults, 
 nothing would have justified Carlyle in treating with 
 neglect or unkindness the woman who had devoted 
 her life to his welfare. That Mrs. Carlyle was 
 offended — unreasonably many will think — by the 
 attention her husband paid to the wishes of Lady 
 Harriet Baring, is quite clear. In her anger she 
 meditated the extreme step of a separation. Whether 
 she was justified is quite another matter. The offence 
 consisted in the visits of Carlyle to the house of a 
 woman who had shown him real kindness, and who 
 took a delight in his society. Mrs. Carlyle was always 
 welcome in her husband's company, and could hardly 
 blame him for an absence which her own refusal to 
 join him had caused. For the rest, the quarrels seem 
 to exist mainly in Mr. Froude's imagination. Mrs. 
 Carlyle was often unhappy, but there might be many 
 reasons for that. Carlyle was not what is generally 
 termed a cheerful man. Mrs. Carlyle found life 
 
2 8 Thomas Carlyle and John Shtaj't Mill. 
 
 hard, but to her husband it was not a bed of roses. 
 Yet there is one piece of criticism on this sad subject 
 which ought not to be overlooked. It comes from 
 one who was friendly enough to both parties to 
 rejoice in their happiness, but who was far too 
 keen-sighted to be deceived by appearances. In the 
 diary which Emerson kept during his second visit to 
 England, under date October 1847, ^^ wrote these 
 words: — " C. and his wife live on beautiful terms. 
 Their ways are very engaging, and, in her bookcase, 
 all his books are inscribed to her, as they came from 
 year to year, each with some significant line." ^" 
 
 This was written just twelve months after the 
 Baring episode, and with the charitable hope which 
 it suggests we might leave the subject, were it not 
 that justice demands a word on Carlyle's side of 
 the case. 
 
 Whether or not Carlyle was in love with his wife, 
 it stands on her own confession that she was not in 
 love with him. She had been passionately attached 
 to Edward Irving before she made her husband's 
 acquaintance, and Irving's foolishness alone pre- 
 vented a marriage. With her usual fatal accuracy 
 she has pronounced her own condemnation : ^' I 
 married for ambition. Carlyle has exceeded all that 
 my wildest hopes ever imagined of him — and I am 
 miserable." ^^ 
 
 It is a relief to turn from this sad, though probably 
 exaggerated topic, to one charming incident, the last 
 
 ''^ Correspo7ide7ice of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. ii., p. 148. 
 ^1 First Forty, vol. i., p. 291. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 29 
 
 we shall notice in Carlyle's early life. In the year 
 1833 Emerson, then young and unknown, took up 
 his pilgrim's staff and journeyed to the wilderness 
 of Craigenputtock, where Carlyle was living in 
 solitary state. He had heard the prophet's voice over 
 three thousand miles of sea, and had recognized the 
 ring of genius. To America undoubtedly belongs, 
 with -Germany, the honour of discovering Carlyle 
 before his own countrymen were aware of him. 
 " A prophet is not without honour, save in his 
 own country." 
 
 It is a striking incident, too, this visit of Emerson's, 
 made all the more picturesque by his own simple 
 way of telling it. He came unannounced, walked 
 with Carlyle over the heather, and as they went 
 they talked of all things in heaven and earth. Who 
 does not know the keen joy of unrestrained talk 
 with a brother soul ? — as different from '' conversa- 
 tion" as Niagara from a scent-squirt! Emerson 
 stayed but a few hours. Like a flash of light 
 he came and went, and we can fancy how Carlyle 
 would muse over his visit, comparing it with the 
 life of man — ^' out of eternity, into eternity." But 
 the deed was touching and grateful, and the lonely 
 prophet could count another human soul which his 
 words had reached. 
 
 For the rest, his lot had hardly been genial. He 
 was now (1834) nearly forty years old, and still a 
 vagabond in the earth. The same inflexible resolu- 
 tion to be altogether true had shut him out from 
 one employment after another. It is remarkable 
 
30 Tho7nas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 that, even in this period of his obscurity, no one 
 who came into contact with him ever questioned his 
 genius. The httle work of his that was accepted 
 was paid for at a higher rate than that of any other 
 craftsman ; yet, even with this tribute to his merits, 
 the world could find no place for him. He would 
 not say or do the smallest thing which he did not 
 believe to be true, and so men found him impractic- 
 able, for they believed in truth only theoreticall3^ 
 He was passed over for this and that humble em- 
 ployment, in favour of this and that conventional 
 nonentit}^ His overflowing generosity, too, had 
 sorely tried his resources. With scarcely sufficient 
 money for his bare wants, he was supporting his 
 brother in a costly course of education. He might 
 have had wealth and place, if only he would have 
 fallen down and worshipped. After forty days and 
 nights of fasting, he was tempted of the devil — 
 in the shape of Jeffrey. Jeffrey really wished him 
 well, according to his light. He recognized Carlyle's 
 transcendent abilities. If he would only suppress 
 those uncomfortable sayings of his which made every 
 one shudder, if he would but be somethings Whig, 
 Political Economist, even Radical, something with a 
 ticket on it, he might become even as Macaulay, with 
 his prospective peerage and his present ten thousand 
 a-year. Carlyle must have been more than human 
 if these temptations had been without attractions 
 for him. He saw clearly the necessity for earning a 
 living, he was no ascetic. He had his wife to care 
 for, his family to help. He knew he could do easily 
 
The P^^ophet of the Latte^^ Days. 3 1 
 
 the work for which many men were paid so highly. 
 But he had nailed his colours to the mast. Any- 
 thing that was honest and thorough, without sham 
 or futility about it, that he would gladly do, however 
 humble the task. But be anything or do anything 
 which his inmost conviction told him was false or 
 cowardly, that he would not. And so he was left for 
 many days in the wilderness. 
 
 II. 
 
 We have now reached the fulness of the time at 
 which the prophet is to descend from his watch- 
 tower and go up and down in the world. It will be 
 of the first importance to see if we can understand 
 something of the spiritual equipment of the man who 
 is henceforward to be such a striking figure. 
 
 In this task, as always, we must be careful to 
 begin at the right point. Carlyle complains ^^ of 
 Archdeacon Hare that in his biography of his friend, 
 he "takes up Sterling as a clergyman merely," that 
 is to say, he gives us an entirely false idea of the 
 man by insisting on only one aspect, and that not the 
 most important aspect, of his character. Carlyle has 
 suffered from a similar error. He has been treated 
 as a speculative philosopher rather than as a moral 
 force. The '' Jubilee " critic of the Daily News, in 
 his summary of the literary characters of the half- 
 century, was kind enough to say that '' Carlyle was 
 a very considerable thinker up to a certain point." 
 And the thousands of intelligent readers who resort 
 
 ^2 Life of Sterlings p. 3. 
 
32 Tho7iias Carlyle and John Shtart Mill. 
 
 to the leading articles of the Daily News for mental 
 pabulum will doubtless be confirmed in the impres- 
 sion that Carlyle was a sort of English Emerson 
 or Novalis. With the modest assertion of the Daily 
 News critic, regarded as an isolated statement, I 
 surely have no wish to quarrel. It is doubtless quite 
 true that '' Carlyle was a very considerable thinker 
 up to a certain point," and we need not enquire too 
 particularly whether that point is to be fixed within 
 his critic's range of mental vision or beyond it. 
 What it is necessary to notice is, that to figure 
 Carlyle as a speculative reasoner about the condi- 
 tions of the universe is to fall completely wide of 
 any approach to an understanding of his position. 
 
 Still more misleading is it to look at Carlyle as 
 a man of letters in the shallower sense of the term, 
 that is, as a man whose chief possession is his writing 
 faculty. His literary gifts were supremely splendid ; 
 we shall have occasion to examine them later on. 
 But he was not a literary man in the sense that De 
 Quincey, Macaulay, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, 
 all of them his contemporaries, were literary men. 
 For this class, if the truth must be told, he had no 
 little contempt. Carlyle wrote books because after 
 many trials he found that this was the one way in 
 which he could deliver his message to the world, the 
 only career allowed him b}^ the conditions of his time. 
 For intellect, as he has himself impressed upon us, 
 '' is not a tool, but a hand that can handle any tool." ^^ 
 Had Carlyle lived in the fifteenth century he would 
 ^^ Diderot, " Miscellanies," vol. v., p. 45. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 2>Z 
 
 have been a Savonarola; in the sixteenth, a Luther 
 or a WilHam the Silent ; in the seventeenth, a 
 Cromwell ; in the eighteenth, a Friedrich of Prussia. 
 
 This is but to say again that in Carlyle's moral 
 character we must look for the secret of his force. 
 
 We have seen before that the groundwork of this 
 character was its love of truth. Perhaps it is more 
 exact to say that this quality had at first been 
 developed principally on its negative side, as the 
 hatred of falsehood. It had hitherto been seen 
 chiefly in his refusal to make the smallest concession 
 to social conventions. But it also had been secretly 
 working in the indefatigable industry with which 
 Carlyle had read all manner of attainable books. 
 History, philosophy, science, poetry, even fiction, 
 of Greece, Rome, England, France, Germany, Italy, 
 Spain, had been stored up with amazing facility in 
 the depths of his mind. Never was a man less of 
 a pedant, yet no man ever shrank less from the 
 most revolting drudgery in his search after the truth. 
 The gigantic range of his knowledge must strike 
 every reader of Carlyle's works, no less than the 
 natural way in which his references seem to float 
 off him, as mere excess of mental wealth. 
 
 But another and more concentrated quality had 
 grown up in Carlyle during that long sojourn in the 
 wilderness. Amid so much that was uncertain and 
 contradictory in philosophy and science, he came to 
 rest with deUght on this one fact, that a man's duty 
 from day to day is tolerably plain to him. If he 
 confuse himself with speculations as to the origin 
 
 3 
 
34 Thomas Carlyle and John Stitai't Mill. 
 
 and sanction of duty, he ma}^ well happen to fall 
 into uncertainty ; but the plain man, who simply 
 looks for his dut}^, will ahva3^s find it. So the 
 '' Infinite Nature of Duty " became to Carhde a 
 fundamental fact, a thing to be held fast, obe3'ed, 
 and venerated. This belief transfigured all work in 
 his eyes ; the roughest toil, the humblest service, 
 was beautiful in this light. The man he delighted 
 to honour was the man who wasted no time in 
 pointing to his work, or discussing it, or trying 
 to find a way out of it, but simply did it, and 
 then turned to ''doe the nexte thynge." "Such 
 knowledge of the transcendental^ unmeasurable 
 character of Duty we call the basis of all Gospels, 
 the essence of all Religion : he who with his whole 
 soul knows not this, as yet knows nothing, as yet is 
 properly nothing." ^"^ 
 
 This was no theoretic fancy of Carlyle's. His life 
 was one long industry. Let a thing appear to be 
 his plain duty, and he set about it, and finished it, 
 regardless of difficulties. He had to write an article 
 on Diderot, and he thought it a matter of course to 
 read through his '' twenty-one octavos " as a pre- 
 paration.^^' At the age of sixty- three it appeared to 
 him that he ought to write a history of Friedrich of 
 Prussia. With indefatigable energy he set to work, 
 and, after thirteen j^ears of toil, produced a book 
 which has filled every competent critic in Europe 
 with admiring amazement. Join together this 
 
 ^•^ Johnson, " Miscellanies," vol. iv., p. 109, 
 1^ First Forty, vol. ii., p. 277. 
 
^ 
 
 The Prophet of the Latter Days, 35 
 
 reverent passion for work with the other feature of 
 intense hatred of falsehood, and we have in some 
 measure accounted for the fact that Carlyle's labours 
 are abundant in quantity and sterling in quality. 
 
 But there was another feature of his character 
 which perhaps still more marked him as one apart 
 from the world of his day. With all his being he 
 belfeved in God. Summing up the results of his 
 vast readings in the Bible of History, he could pro- 
 nounce, with an emphasis which sounded strange to 
 the men of his time, " Verily He is a God that 
 judgeth in the earth." Intuitionist as he confessedly 
 was,^*^ he drew this belief from the deepest study of 
 external events ; it was a conclusion from the most 
 rigorous and indefatigable process of induction. 
 "Might and right do differ frightfully from hour toB y^ 
 hour ; but give them centuries to try it in, they are 
 found to be identical." ^'^ And again : " With a nation, 
 when the multitude of the chances covers, in a great 
 measure, the uncertainty of chance, it may be said 
 to hold always that general suffering is the fruit of 
 general misbehaviour, general dishonesty." ^^ This 
 belief he held and enforced with a passionate 
 persistence which is almost unrivalled in modern 
 times. His faith was not a Sunday suit of clothes, 
 but an inward light, which brought him safely through 
 the quicksands on which his contemporaries were 
 
 ^^ "A man's ultimate monition comes only from within." — 
 Carlyle a7id Emerson^ vol. i., p. 217 ; and see pp. 352 
 and 353. 
 
 ^^ Chartism, p. 158. 
 
 ^^ Count Cagliostro, " Miscellanies," vol. v., p. 85. 
 
36 Thomas Carlyle and Jo Jin Stuart Mill. 
 
 wrecked. It is hardly necessary to say that Carlyle 
 did not express his belief in a theological formula. 
 Sterling had reproached him for not believing in 
 a "personal God." With characteristic vehemence 
 Carlyle had replied : '' Personal ! Impersonal ! One ! 
 Three ! What meaning can any mortal (after all) 
 attach to them in reference to such an object ? Wcr 
 darf Ihn Nennen ? I dare not and do not." ^^ He 
 saw that by quarrelling about formulas men lost 
 their hold on the reality. He reserved himself for 
 the reality, and his faith was as strong as that of 
 Isaiah or Ezekiel. What God was, or how we 
 knew Him, — whether as force, tendency, tradition, — 
 he did not care to enquire, but his whole life was 
 filled with His presence. 
 
 This then is the core of Carlyle's moral character. 
 He believed in truth, work, and a God of justice. 
 And this is really the key-point of his position, the 
 thing indispensable to know if we would understand 
 Carlyle. But there are two of his intellectual 
 qualities which we must also notice before proceeding 
 with his career. 
 
 The first of these we may call Insight or Imagina- 
 tion. With Carlyle truth was a sensation rather 
 than a conclusion. His eye pierced through the 
 most formidable and repulsive rubbish heaps, and 
 saw at once the jewel that lay beneath. This faculty 
 is most strikingly shown in his judgment of character. 
 It has been said that Carlyle's portraits live before 
 us. They live to us because they lived to him. He 
 ^^ Last Forty, vol. i., p. 43, 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days, 2)7 
 
 found Cromwell, as generally figured by English 
 writers, an absurd mass of inconsistencies ; a man 
 without ability, who from a country farmer became 
 ruler of England ; a hypocrite who was willing to 
 shed his blood in the cause of religion, — a thing 
 impossible in fact. Carlyle looked at the man, saw 
 through the obscurities which prejudice had raised 
 up, and boldly declared Cromwell to be a hero. It 
 was a rash thing to do, but so irresistible was his 
 demonstration that the judgment of the nation veered 
 round in obedience to it. So it was with Friedrich 
 Wilhelm of Prussia. Macaulay was the most popular 
 and trusted historian of the day. The theory of 
 causation was probably included among the articles 
 of his creed. Yet this man pronounced Friedrich 
 Wilhelm, the organizer of Prussia, the conqueror 
 of Charles XII., the protector of the Heidelberg 
 and the Salzburg Protestants, to be a mere savage 
 pedant, occupied principally with committing violent 
 assaults on the members of his family, and crimping 
 tall grenadiers. In the teeth of this verdict Carlyle 
 tears aside the rugged features of the outer Friedrich 
 Wilhelm, goes right down into the midst of his 
 troubles and difficulties, declares him to be a man of 
 genius, and justifies his judgment by one of the most 
 vivid and life-like of historical portraits. 
 
 The second quality, closely connected with this 
 gift of insight, is one for which it is very hard to find 
 an expressive name, perhaps because the quality itself 
 is so unhappily rare. - " Idealism " may possibly serve 
 as a suggestion of the profound impression made 
 
2,S Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 on Carlyle by common events and things. ' It is the 
 
 quality hinted at in Wordsworth's familiar lines : — 
 
 A primrose on the river's brim 
 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 
 And it was nothing more. 
 
 Take the extremely common phenomenon known 
 as man. To the ordinary observer a human being 
 is a '' forked radish with a curiously carved head," or 
 at most an entity possessing certain limited qualities 
 and capabilities. To the physiologist a man is a collec- 
 tion of intricate tissues known as flesh, blood, bones, 
 and the like. To the psychologist he is a com- 
 plicated series of mental phenomena hanging on the 
 thread of memory. Carlyle looked upon the matter 
 in a different light. 
 
 " * To the eye of vulgar Logic,'" says he (Teufelsdrockh), 
 " * what is man ? An omnivorous biped that wears breeches. 
 To the eye of Pure Reason what is he ? A Soul, a Spirit, and 
 divine Apparition. Round his mysterious Me, there lies, 
 under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), 
 contextured in the Loom of Heaven ; whereby he is revealed 
 to his like, and dwells with them in Union and Division ; and 
 sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with azure Starry 
 Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep hidden is he 
 under that strange garment ; amid Sounds and Colours and 
 Forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably over-shrouded : 
 yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not 
 thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of 
 Eternities ? He feels ; power has been given him to know, 
 to believe ; nay, does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial 
 primeval brightness, even there, though but for moments, look 
 through? Well said St. Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, 
 " The true Shekinah is Man : " where else is the God's- 
 Presence manifested, not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, 
 as in our fellow-man ? ' " 20 
 
 The significance of man, indeed, is a subject he is 
 
 '^^ Sartor Resartus, p. 44. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 39 
 
 never weary of dwelling on. Every human being 
 is ''hung on a moment of Time between two 
 Eternities ; " '' he waited a whole Eternity to be born, 
 and now has a whole Eternity waiting to see what 
 he will do when born." But Carlyle was not less 
 profoundly impressed by the sights of Nature. As 
 the only way in which this feature of his character 
 can be explained is by illustration, we may venture 
 one more quotation. It comes from the inimitable 
 essay called The Diamond NecklacCy and was pro- 
 bably provoked by the foolish talk, at one time 
 fashionable, about the necessary disappearance of 
 poetry and the Romantic from an enlightened and 
 scientific world. It was bad enough for a second- 
 rate critic like Hazlitt to predict such things, but 
 when Keats, whose work was disproof positive of 
 such a vaticination, gave the sanction of his name to 
 the foreboding, it was time for some one to speak 
 out. This is Carlyle's answer to the prophets of 
 evil : — 
 
 " In our own poor Nineteenth Century the writer of these 
 lines has been fortunate enough to see not a few glimpses of 
 Romance ; he imagines this Nineteenth is hardly a whit less 
 romantic than that Ninth, or any other, since centuries began. 
 Apart from Napoleon, and the Dantons, and Mirabeaus, whose 
 fire-words of public speaking, and fire-whirlwinds of cannon 
 and .musketry, which for a season darkened the air, are 
 perhaps at bottom but superficial phenomena, he has witnessed, 
 in remotest places, much that could be called romantic, even 
 miraculous. He has witnessed overhead the infinite Deep, 
 with greater and lesser lights, bright-rolling, silent-beaming, 
 hurled forth by the Hand of God: around him and under his 
 feet, the wonderfulest Earth, with her winter snow-storms 
 and her summer spice-airs ; and, unaccountablest of all, 
 hijnself standing there. He stood in the lapse of Time ; he 
 
40 Thomas Carlyle and Jo /m Stuart Mill. 
 
 saw Eternity behind him and before him. The all-encirding 
 mysterious tide of Force, thousandfold (for from force of 
 Thought to force of Gravitation what an interval !) billowed 
 shoreless on ; bore him too along with it, — he too was part of 
 it. From its bosom rose and vanished, in perpetual change, 
 the lordliest Real Phantasmagory, which men term Behtg ; 
 and ever anew rose and vanished ; and ever that lordliest 
 many-coloured scene was full, another yet the same. Oak- 
 trees fell, young acorns sprang. Men too, new sent from the 
 Unknovvn, he met, of tiniest size, who waxed into stature, into 
 strength of sinew, passionate fire and light : in other men 
 the light was growing dim, the sinews all feeble ; they sank, 
 motionless, into ashes, into invisibility ; returned back to the 
 Unknown, beckoning him their mute farewell. He wanders still 
 by the parting spot ; cannot hear them ; they are far, how far! — 
 " It was a sight for angels, and archangels ; for, indeed, 
 God Himself had made it wholly. One many-glancing 
 asbestos-thread in the web of Universal History, spirit-woven, 
 it rustled there, as with the howl of mighty winds, through 
 that ' wild-roaring Loom of Time.' Generation after genera- 
 tion, hundreds of them or thousands of them, from the 
 unknown Beginning, so loud, so storm ful-busy, rushed torrent- 
 wise, thundering down, down ; and fell all silent, nothing but 
 some feeble reecho, which grew ever feebler, struggling up; 
 and oblivion swallowed them all. Thousands more, to the 
 unknown Ending, will follow : and thou here, of this present 
 one, hangest as a drop, still sungilt, on the giddy edge, one 
 moment, while the Darkness has not yet ingulfed thee. O 
 Brother ! is that what thou callest prosaic ; of small 
 interest ? " ^i 
 
 The force of this imagination is so vivid that we 
 might almost feel tempted to say of Carlyle as the 
 Veronese of Dante, Eccovi V iioni cK e stato aU 
 Inferno. It is so true as to be raised entirely above 
 the level of fancy. The materials made use of are 
 the simplest and most widely acknowledged facts. 
 The passage is no more fiction than are the revela- 
 tions of the microscope. 
 
 2^ The Dia^nond Necklace, "Miscellanies," vol. v., p. 134. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 41 
 
 Such was the gospel Carlyle was about to announce 
 to the world. What was his title to stand forward 
 as a teacher of men ? 
 
 The essays he had already written were probably 
 more or less known. Most of them were on literary 
 subjects, and though they displayed great knowledge 
 and considerable skill, were not in themselves 
 sufficient to warrant the inference of great originality. 
 Still there were passages here and there which ought 
 to have put. the disciples of Bentham on their guard. 
 *' Mr. Taylor is simply what they call a Philtster;. 
 every fibre of him is Philistine. With us such men 
 usually take to Politics, and become Code-makers and 
 Utilitarians."^^ And the writer looks forward to the 
 time when " in our inward world there will again be 
 a sunny Firmament and verdant Earth, as well as 
 a Pantry and culinary Fire." ^^ 
 
 Still more in two remarkable essays upon the 
 condition of society, entitled Signs of the Times 
 and Characteristics y had Carlyle flashed out strange 
 rays. In the first of these he had ventured to 
 christen the times the '' Mechanical Age," to taunt 
 the Economists with the flagrant contradiction of 
 their theories by patent facts, to speak of ''the A 
 mighty interest taken in mere political arrangements,^* ^*/ ^^ 
 and to sum up his indictment in the charge that " inf 
 the management of external things we excel alli 
 
 22 Historic Survey of German Poetjy, " Miscellanies," vol. 
 iii., p. 241. 
 
 -^ State of German Literature^ ibid., p. 216. 
 24 Signs of the Times, ibid., vol. ii., p. 239. 
 
42 Thovias Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 other ages ; while in whatever respects the pure 
 moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, 
 we are perhaps inferior to most civilized ages." -'' 
 This criticism must have sounded strange to the 
 readers of the EdinburgJi Revienj, accustomed as they 
 were to felicitations on an " Age of Progress/' as to 
 which pleasing theory Carlyle aptly enough reminds 
 them, that while it is probable that the happiness and 
 greatness of mankind have on the whole progressed, 
 it by no means follows that a particular nation at 
 ^ particular time is in a condition of advance. 
 
 The Characteristics was still more outspoken. 
 Carlyle here says boldly that the age, which is plum- 
 ing itself upon its advance in wealth, philosophy, 
 and enlightenment, is in an essentially unhealthy 
 state, of which this very self-analysis and self- 
 laudation is evidence. " The healthy know not of 
 their health, but only the sick," — this is the text 
 of the discourse. The diseases of society, '' physical 
 and spiritual, " are pointed out in the plainest 
 language. 
 
 " Wealth has accumulated itself into masses ; and Poverty, 
 also in accumulation enough, lies impassably separated from 
 it ; opposed, uncommunicating, like forces in positive and 
 negative poles. The gods of this lower world still sit aloft on 
 glittering thrones, less happy than Epicurus" gods, but as 
 indolent, as impotent ; while the boundless living chaos of 
 Ignorance and Hunger welters terrific in its dark fury, under 
 their feet. How much among us might be likened to a 
 whited sepulchre ; outwardly all pomp and strength ; but 
 inwardly full of horror, and despair, and dead-men's bones ! 
 Iron highways, with their wains fire-winged, are uniting all 
 ends of the firm Land ; quays and moles, with their innumer- 
 
 2^ Signs of the Ti??ies, " Miscellanies," vol. ii., p. 245. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 4 
 
 "> 
 
 able stately fleets, tame the Ocean into our pliant bearer of 
 burdens ; Labour's thousand arms, of sinew and of metal, all- 
 conquering ever3'\vhere, from the tops of the mountains down 
 to the depths of the mine and the caverns of the sea, ply 
 unweariedly for the service of man ; yet man remains un- 
 served. He has subdued this Planet, his inhabitation and his 
 inheritance ; yet reaps no profit from the victory." -^ 
 
 The aspect of the spiritual condition is no more 
 satisfactory. In religion men are discoursing of the 
 evidences instead of doing the works : '' The most 
 enthusiastic Evangelicals do not preach a Gospel, 
 but keep describing how it should and might be 
 preached. . . . Considered as a whole, the Christian 
 Religion of late ages has been continually dissipat- 
 ing itself into Metaphysics."-' Literature has become 
 a thing of advertising, inspiration has given place to 
 affectation, view-hunting thrives. The popularity of 
 metaphysics is another sign of this morbid intro- 
 spective condition. *' Metaphysics is the attempt of 
 the mind to rise above the mind." -^ 
 
 In this state of affairs, men go various wa3'S. 
 Some accept a purely material view, deciding 
 that '^ nothing is certain in the world except this 
 fact of Pleasure being pleasant," — which fact they 
 determine to make good use of. Others, '^ to whom 
 the Universe is not a w^arehouse, or at best a fancy 
 bazaar, but a mystic temple and hall of doom,"-^ 
 are sorely perplexed. Some take up with ''worn 
 out symbols of the Godhke ; " others " have dared to 
 
 -^ Characteristics ^ "Miscellanies," vol. iv., p. i8. 
 ^^ Ibid., p. 20. 
 -s Ibid., p. 24. 
 ^ Ibid., p. 2"] . 
 
44 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 say No, and cannot yet say Yea," the fate of these 
 being hard enough. 
 
 This picture is dark, but it is worth noting, by 
 those who sum up Carlyle as a dyspeptic pessimist, 
 that now, when the glow of youth was long over, 
 when his own prospects were at their very lowest, 
 he ends this prophecy, in which he has shown such 
 a full appreciation of the evils of the time, with a 
 note of high promise : — 
 
 " A Faith in Religion has again become possible and 
 inevitable for the scientific mind ; and the word Free-Thinkitr 
 no longer means the Denier or Caviller, but the Believer, or the 
 Ready to believe." ^'^ . . . " Here on Earth we are as Soldiers, 
 fighting in a foreign land ; that understand not the plan of the 
 campaign, and have no need to understand it ; seeing well what 
 is at our hand to be done. Let us do it like soldiers ; with 
 submission, with courage, with a heroic joy. 'Whatsoever 
 thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.' Behind us, 
 behind each one of us, He Six Thousand Years of -human 
 effort, human conquest ; before us is the boundless Time, 
 with its as yet uncreated and unconquered Continents and 
 Eldorados, which we, even we, have to conquer, to create ; 
 and from the bosom of Eternity there shine for us celestial 
 guiding stars." ^^ 
 
 III. 
 
 Here were evidences of originality and power, had 
 the world chosen to see them. But there was one 
 question which in any case the world had a right to 
 ask, which any man has a right to ask of one who 
 offers to act as his guide. What had been the fate 
 of Carlyle's own search after light ? Sympathy is 
 the only real key to human hearts, and the sufferer 
 
 ^^ Characteristics^ p. 36. 
 31 Ibid., p. 38. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 45 
 
 shrinks from assistance proffered by a hand which 
 never felt the pain. Had Carlyle himself been 
 through the furnace of affliction ? Had he tossed in 
 the fever which he saw to be parching men's souls*? 
 How had he found relief ? 
 
 The answers to these questions are to be gathered 
 from -the pages of Sartor Resartus, which had then 
 just appeared in the numbers of Eraser. This 
 won"tlerful work, the picture of a soul struggling 
 towards the light, is the record of Carl3^1e's ex- 
 perience in the land of darkness. By it his right 
 to speak is fully vindicated, for, unlike Werter 
 and Childe Harold, it does not leave us with intenser 
 despair in the midst of our troubles, but takes 
 us through and beyond them to the other side. This 
 fact is well worthy of notice as evidence of Carlyle's 
 character. It is easy to make out a strong case 
 against life ; the difficulty lies in pointing to the 
 remedy. It may possibly be a relief to the sufferer 
 to go over his woes with him, to paint his troubles 
 in deeper colours than he himself can devise for 
 them ; but the real duty of the physician is, after all, 
 to effect a cure. 
 
 Few books have caused such difficulty to critics 
 as Sartor. By an enthusiastic admirer it has been 
 termed the greatest book in the English language ; 
 by a contemporary it was spoken of as '' d — d 
 stuff." ^^ The greatest book in the English language 
 it certainly is not, for it deals too exclusively with 
 the special conditions of a particular time. The 
 
 ^^ First Forty, vol. ii., p. 430. 
 
46 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart MilL 
 
 first rank in literature is reserved for works which 
 handle the things vital to all mankind in all ages, 
 the daily life, the familiar sights and sounds of 
 nature, the great passions and hopes of all men. 
 But just as certainly Sartor is not '' d — d stuff;" 
 anything but that, as those who have felt its value 
 can testify. It will be worth while to try and get a 
 fair understanding of it. 
 
 As to the substance, it is, as we have said, the 
 record of a soul struggling towards the light, passing 
 from careless unconsciousness to anxiety, from 
 anxiety to doubt, from doubt to denial and despair ; 
 then suddenly finding the turning-point and reaching 
 firm ground. In its form, it is a myth ; we must 
 look for its truth in the idea, not in the details. Carlyle 
 is using the undoubted right of every author to convey 
 his meaning in the vehicle which seems to him most 
 suitable. There is profound truth in the parable, but 
 the truth is in the meaning, not in its dress : — 
 
 Marchen, noch so wunderbar, 
 Dichterkiinste machen's wahr. 
 
 Sartor appears as the Life and Writings of Herr 
 Teufelsdrockh, — an entirely imaginary person, it 
 need hardly at this period be said, except that 
 the picture is so vividly drawn that it is even now 
 occasionally mistaken for a portrait.^^ This plan has 
 enabled Carlyle to impart as much of his own history 
 as he wishes, and at the same time to add any 
 fictitious circumstances needed to convey his thoughts. 
 
 ^^ I have heard the sayings of the " German Professor 
 Teufelsdrockh" quoted with approval in a London pulpit. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 47 
 
 His manner of treating the scheme is throughout 
 masterly. Wild conjectures, thrown out merely as 
 guesses, which would have sounded absurd from an 
 Englishman of his day, come with perfect propriety 
 from the mouth of the mysterious little figure which 
 haunts the Gasthaits Zur Grunen Ganz, in the 
 mythical university-town of Weissnichtwo. It would 
 be a grateful task to put together some picture of 
 Teufelsdrockh from the scattered touches which 
 lie in the pages of Sartor, but we are bound to 
 consider here the meaning rather than the form of 
 the work. 
 
 The parable has tw^o sides, one speculative, and the 
 other practical or moral. The idea of the former is 
 simple, though it is worked out with great force of 
 detail. It may be stated briefly as " the world in 
 clothes." The idea, of course, was not entirely new. 
 Swift, in his Tale of a Tub, had suggested the universe 
 as " a large suit of clothes which invests every- 
 thing,"^* this view being maintained by a sect who 
 worshipped at the throne of the Tailor and Goose. 
 But Swift made little use of the notion, being satis- 
 fied with a superficial application of the train of 
 thought which it suggested. By Carlyle it is worked 
 out with a completeness which leads to the most 
 striking results. Teufelsdrockh has a '^ humour of 
 looking at all Matter and Material Things as Spirit,"^^ 
 and in this mood all matter is regarded as so much 
 clothes, or accessories, of the spirit which it em- 
 
 3^ Swift, Tale of a Tub, sect. ii. 
 ^^ Sartor, p. 19. 
 
48 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 bodies. "The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, 
 the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it 
 but a Garment, a clothing of the higher, celestial, 
 invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of 
 bright."^^ The grand mistake of the world is that it 
 has come to look upon the accessory as the principal. 
 It wraps garment after garment over a man, gar- 
 ments of office and honour, and so loses sight of 
 the man himself. It is the same in the world of 
 thought and feeling ; each thought is invested with 
 a formula, each feeling with a symbol, and then the 
 formula and the symbol only are seen, and men forget 
 that there is, or once was, anything else in them. 
 And so the reality does die out, and they remain, 
 like empty husks, a source of ill-understood uneasi- 
 ness and dissatisfaction — in short, mere shams. 
 
 But it is not with this side of Sartor^ interest- 
 ing as it is, that we are most concerned. It is 
 the practical aspect of it that illustrates Carlyle's 
 position. 
 
 This is mainly to be found in the second book, 
 which treats of the life of Teufelsdrockh. The 
 author has prepared us for a rather ragged story 
 by an amusing description of his materials as 
 contained i^i — 
 
 " six considerable Paper-bags, carefully sealed, and marked 
 successively, in gilt China-ink, with the symbols of the six 
 southern Zodiacal Signs, beginning at Libra ; in the inside of 
 which sealed Bags lie miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and 
 oftener Shreds and Snips, written in Professor Teufelsdrockh's 
 scarce legible cursiv-schrift ; and treating of all imaginable 
 
 ^^ Sartor, p. 45. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days, 49 
 
 things under the Zodiac and above it, but of his own personal 
 history only at rare intervals, and then in the most enigmatic 
 manner. "^^ 
 
 Nevertheless the story when it does come is clear 
 enough. 
 
 Teufelsdrockh is a Httle foundling, delivered one 
 evening by a mysterious stranger to the care of old 
 Andreas Futteral, ex-grenadier sergeant and regi- 
 mental schoolmaster in the Prussian service, and the 
 good Gretchen his wife, now living in placid retire- 
 ment in the village of Entepfuhl. All enquiries fail 
 to discover the genealogy of the little stranger, 
 who, after learning his own story, always keeps up 
 a pathetic half-despairing hope of some day meeting 
 with his real father. A beautiful sketch follows of 
 the period of a childhood, unconscious, yet not alto- 
 gether without wonder at the sights and sounds of 
 Nature. Very skilfully is introduced the first glimpse 
 of the dark side of things. 
 
 "Nevertheless, I were but a vain dreamer to say, that even 
 then my felicity was perfect. I had, once for all, come down 
 from Heaven into the Earth. Among the rainbow colours that 
 glowed on my horizon, lay even in childhood a dark ring of 
 Care, as yet no thicker than a thread, and often quite over- 
 shone; 3^et always it reappeared, nay, ever waxing broader and 
 broader ; till in after years it almost overshadowed my whole 
 canopy, and threatened to engulf me in final night. It was 
 the ring of Necessity whereby we are all begirt ; happy he 
 for whom a kind heavenly Sun brightens it into a ring of 
 Duty, and plays round it with beautiful prismatic diffractions ; 
 yet ever, as basis and as bourn for our whole being, it is 
 there." 38 
 
 Meanwhile the young Teufelsdrockh lays out 
 
 3'' Sartor, p. 52. 
 25 Ibid., p. 67. 
 
 4 
 
50 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 his " very copper pocket-money on stall-literature," 
 which, as it accumulates, '' he with his own hands 
 sews into volumes." He soon strides past the village 
 schoolmaster, and is sent to the Hinterschlag-Gym- 
 nasiunif an institution on which he comments 
 unfavourably. " The Hinterschlag Professors knew 
 syntax enough ; and of the human soul this much : 
 that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be 
 acted on through the muscular integument by ap- 
 pliance of birch-rods." ^^ It is much the same at the 
 nameless university which succeeds the: Hinterschlag- 
 Gymnasium. ^* The hungry young looked up to 
 their spiritual Nurses, and, for food, were bidden 
 to eat the east-wind."**^ Teufelsdrockh and the friend 
 whom he makes here mourn over this unsatisfactory 
 state of things, and work out the best conclusion 
 possible, namel}^, to do the utmost they can towards 
 educating themselves. ** Here are Books, and we 
 have brains to read them ; here is a whole Earth 
 and a whole Heaven, and we have eyes to look on 
 them. Frisch zu T"^^ In the striking and humorous 
 criticism of the university,'*^ as well as in the resolu- 
 tion arrived at, those who know the details of 
 Carlyle's early years will see that he was making 
 use of his own experiences. 
 
 At the university Teufelsdrockh begins that long 
 course of painful enquiry which afterwards brings 
 him down to the depths. Here, too, he opens the 
 question which always looms so largely over the 
 
 39 Sartor, p. 73. ^^ Ibid., p. 81. 
 
 ^0 Ibid., p. 79. ^2 Ibid., pp. 76-79. 
 
The _ Prophet of the Latter Days. 51 
 
 horizon of a poor man — How shall I earn a 
 living? The immediate answer, accepted with small 
 faith in its permanence, is the profession of the law, 
 a course which, as we know, Carlyle once attempted. 
 Teufelsdrockh's abilities are recognized, but his 
 originality is too great to be appreciated : the world 
 is willing to be amused by him as a curiosity, but 
 it does not see its way to help him. In society 
 his* shy pride and hatred of shams make him an 
 awkward figure. He has the unpardonable gift of 
 sarcasm, and occasionally uses it. He is requested 
 to write an epitaph on a deceased notability, and, 
 with a pedantic adhesion to historical accuracy, 
 produces an inscription''^ over which thousands of 
 readers have shrieked with laughter, but which 
 would assuredly make the strangest figure in a 
 well-conducted churchyard. 
 
 But the crowning offence is yet to come. 
 Teufelsdrockh, almost a beggar, without connec- 
 tions, with no hope of employment, and with an 
 exterior which makes the polite world shudder, has 
 the audacity to fall in love with a fair dowerless 
 maiden of (more or less) high degree. Whether this 
 episode was consciously suggested by Carl3de*s 
 acquaintance with Margaret Gordon we need not 
 trouble to speculate. No sketch of a type-life could 
 be at all complete without the introduction of the 
 well-nigh universal incident. Teufelsdrockh is not 
 entirely despised by the fair one herself, but it is 
 needless to Say that her relatives, especially her 
 
 ^^ Sartor^ p. 91. 
 
52 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 " Duenna Cousin, in whose meagre, hunger-bitten 
 philosophy the reUgion of young hearts was, from 
 the first, faintly approved of," ^^ soon put a stop to 
 the affair. In these practical days parents and 
 guardians do not enquire about a young man's 
 character ; their duty towards their daughters and 
 wards leads them to take an interest only in his 
 " plans and prospects." 
 
 This is the final stroke to any hopes Teufelsdrockh 
 may have nourished of finding his calling by one 
 of the conventional methods. Henceforth he is an 
 outcast, and must pilgrim alone over untrodden 
 ways to some City of Refuge. Urged by a ''name- 
 less Unrest," like lo by the gadfly, he wanders up 
 and down through the earth, seeking peace and 
 finding none. The world tells him that it is his 
 duty to seek happiness, but happiness seems to fly 
 from him as he pursues it, and he is not without a 
 suspicion that happiness, even if it could be attained, 
 were hardly worthy to be considered the main object 
 of a man's life. 
 
 " Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Pas- 
 sion ; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction 
 others ^7^q/if by? I know not, only this I know, If what thou 
 namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. 
 With stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much. 
 But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of 
 Conscience to the diseases of the Liver ! Not on Morality, 
 but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold : there brandishing 
 our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the 
 Devil, and live at ease on the fat things /ze has provided for 
 his elect.'* ^^ 
 
 With other philosophies it is the same. The 
 ^ Sartor, p. loi. *^ /did., p. 112. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 53 
 
 Teufelsdrockh who has " the humour of looking at 
 all matter and material things as spirit," can hardly be 
 expected to find absorption in any of the pursuits that 
 satisfy men to whom a primrose is only a primrose. 
 His position is too rare to attract fellow-sufferers; 
 he wanders on alone, down to the deepest gulfs of 
 despair. One thing only saves him from absolute 
 wreck—'' I nevertheless still loved Truth, and would 
 abate no jot of my allegiance to her. ' Truth ! ' I 
 cried, ' though the Heavens crush me for following 
 her ; no Falsehood ! though a whole celestial Lubber- 
 land were the price of Apostasy.' " ^^ Of real religion 
 he sees the beauty, nay the absolute necessity ; but 
 he cannot believe in the reality of any existing form. 
 His insatiable spirit of inquiry arises from a desire 
 to know^ the truth, not from a wish to explain away 
 a disagreeable duty. 
 
 At last there comes reHef. After a fit of wild fear, 
 in which his imagination has pictured to him a whole 
 universe of nameless terrors, he suddenly asks him- 
 self, What, after all, is the worst that can befal me ? 
 It would be a crime to attempt any paraphrase of 
 such an essential passage : — 
 
 " Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in 
 the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog- 
 day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little 
 Rue Saint-Thomas de VEnfer, among civic rubbish enough, 
 in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchad- 
 nezzar's Furnace ; whereby doubtless my spirits were little 
 cheered ; when, all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and 
 I asked myself, ' What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a 
 coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering 
 
 ^® Sartor, p. 113. 
 
54 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 and trembling ? Despicable biped ! what is the 'siim-total of 
 the worst that lies before thee ? Death ? Well, Death ; and 
 say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man 
 may, will, or can do against thee ! Hast thou not a heart ; 
 canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be ; and, as a Child of Free- 
 dom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, 
 while it consumes thee? Let it come then ; I will meet it- and 
 defy it ! ' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of 
 fire over my whole soul, and I shook base Fear away from me 
 for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength ; a spirit, almost 
 a god. Ever from that time the temper of my misery was 
 changed ; not fear or whining sorrow was it, but indignation, 
 and grim, fire-eyed defiance. 
 
 " Thus had the Everlasting No {das ezvige Neiii) pealed 
 authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, my Me ; 
 and then it was that my whole Me stood up, in native God- 
 created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such 
 a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that 
 same Indignation and Defiance, in a ps3'chological point of view, 
 be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said, ' Behold, thou 
 art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's) ; ' 
 to which my whole Me now made answer, ' I am not thine, but 
 Free, and for ever hate thee ! ' " ^^ 
 
 The importance of this passage for our imme- 
 diate purpose is, that Carlyle has himself acknow- 
 ledged it as an exact reproduction of his own 
 experience.^^ 
 
 The extreme pressure is now relaxed. Teufels- 
 drockh can leave the Me with a grim indifference, and 
 look into the Not-Me which surrounds him. Accord- 
 ingly w^e have a wonderful chapter of observation, by 
 which we are made to feel instinctively that a kindly 
 study of our fellow-creatures and the world around us 
 is a wholesome relief from morbid introspection. But 
 Carlyle does not leave us here. He has got as far 
 
 ^'' Sartor^ p. ii6. 
 
 4& First Forty ^ vol. i., p. loi. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 55 
 
 as Voltaire ; but he is by no means content with the 
 negative philosophy of Ferney. He has come safely 
 through the Valley of the Shadow; but he means to 
 reach the Delectable Mountains. " Our wilderness 
 is the wide world in an Atheistic Century, our Forty 
 Days are long years of suffering and fasting ; never- 
 theless, to these also comes an end. Yes, to me also 
 was^ given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness of 
 battle, and the resolve to persevere therein while life 
 or faculty is left." ^^ Again he attacks the problem of 
 happiness, feeling that here lies the knot. It is the 
 thing that all men strive after ; it is likely, therefore, 
 to have something to do with the universal dissatis- 
 faction. The solution in this case too, as in the 
 other, comes by a sudden inspiration. What, after 
 all, do men mean by happiness ? If it be the satis- 
 faction of all conceivable desires, it is evidently vain 
 to look for it so long as possibility continues to 
 transcend actuality. But if, again, it be looked upon 
 as a reward of merit, to be nicely apportioned to 
 desert, there is a simple way out of the difficulty. 
 What if the merits that men plume themselves on 
 are extremely doubtful in character ? 
 
 " I tell thee, Blockhead, it all comes of thy Vanity ; of what 
 thou fanciest those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that 
 thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel 
 it a happiness to be only shot ; fancy that thou deservest to 
 be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp. 
 . . . Make thy claim of wages a zero, then ; thou hast the 
 world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of our time write : 
 ' It is only with Renunciation {Entsageii) that life, properly 
 speaking, can be said to begin.' " ^'^ 
 
 *^ Sartor, p. 127. ^° Ibid., p. 132. 
 
56 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 And once more : — 
 
 "Foolish Soul ! what Act of Legislature was there that thou 
 shouldest be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right 
 to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to 
 ibe Happy, but to be Unhappy ! "^^ 
 
 So by turning to the other side of the picture 
 we get the answer to the riddle — not rights, but 
 duties : — 
 
 . " Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by action. 
 ITherefore, Do the duty which lies 7iea?'est thee, which thou 
 Ifenowest to be a duty ! Thy second duty will already have 
 fcecome clearer."''^ "Love not Pleasure; love God. This is 
 jthe Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved : 
 nvherein whoso walks and works it is well with him."^^ 
 
 This is not the place at which to discuss the value 
 of Carlyle's teaching ; we are at present anxious to 
 ascertain only what that teaching was. But I cannot 
 forbear inserting, as commentary on the train of 
 thought which led to the '' Everlasting Yea," a passage, 
 written indeed long afterwards, but relating almost 
 to the same period as that in which Carlyle was then 
 living, by Mill himself, till then an avowed apostle 
 of the theory which Carlyle had just been denouncing. 
 The words occur in that chapter of his Autobiography 
 which corresponds most closely to the Sartor; — 
 
 If\ << Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds 
 I fixed on some object other than their own happiness. . . . The 
 1 only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external 
 
 J» to it, as the purpose of life." ^* 
 
 With the second book closes the vital part of 
 
 ^^ Sartor, p. 132. '"^ Ibid., p. 133. 
 
 ^2 Ibid., p. 135. ^^ Autobiography, p. 142. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 57 
 
 Sartor, regarded as a picture of Carlyle's spiritual 
 history. The remainder is occupied with wonderful 
 speculations on institutions and social problems, 
 which show that the writer has thought deeply and 
 with great original force. The main idea is still the 
 " Clothes-philosophy." Religion, politics, sociology, 
 speculation of all kinds, are passed under review, and 
 all found to be labouring under the same disease. 
 Everywhere men mistake the shadow for the sub- 
 stance, the material for the spiritual. On all these 
 questions Carlyle's views appear later on, and it will 
 be better to treat them as applied teaching than as 
 mere speculation. We have seen that the central | y 
 precept of his teaching is simple — '* Love not 
 pleasure, love God." Let Duty, not Happiness, be 
 the Ideal. And this will give us the key to his 
 message. Nevertheless, that we may get some idea 
 of the power and faculty with which that message 
 was to be delivered, we may take one splendid pas- 
 sage as a specimen of the prophet's gifts. It occurs 
 in the chapter entitled Natural Supernatiiralism^ in 
 which the deepest questions that can agitate the 
 mind of man are handled with a power of thought 
 which can leave scoffers no excuse for pretending 
 to despise the intellectual abilities of the man whose 
 teaching so ill accords with their inclinations. 
 Carlyle has been musing over immortality, space, and 
 time ; touching reverently, almost fearfully, the great 
 mysteries of life. Suddenly he bursts out : — 
 
 " O Heaven ! it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we 
 not only carry each a future Ghost within him, but are, in very 
 
 1 
 
58 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 deed, Ghosts ! These Limbs, whence had we them ; this 
 stormy Force ; this Hfe-blood with its burning Passion ? They 
 are dust and a shadow ; a Shadow-system gathered round our 
 Me ; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine 
 essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his 
 strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes ; force dwells 
 in his arm and heart ; but warrior and war-horse are a vision ; 
 a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, 
 as if it were a firm substance : fool, the Earth is but a film ; it 
 cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond the 
 plummet's sounding. Plummet's ! Fantasy herself v/ill not 
 follow them. A little while ago, they were not ; a little while, 
 and they are not — their very ashes are not. 
 
 " So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. 
 Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body ; 
 and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission 
 APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends : one 
 grinding in the Mill of Industry ; one hunter-like climbing the 
 giddy Alpine heights of Science ; one madly dashed to pieces 
 on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow: — and then the 
 Heaven-sent is recalled ; his earthly vesture falls away, and 
 soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like 
 some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's artillery, 
 does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in long- 
 drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. 
 Thus, like a God-created, fire breathing Spirit-host, we emerge 
 from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; 
 then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are 
 levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, 
 which is but dead, and a vision, resist Spirits which have 
 reality and are alive ? On the hardest adamant some foot- 
 print of us is stamped-in ; the last Rear of the host will 
 read traces of the earliest Van. But whence? — O Heaven, 
 whither ? Sense knows not ; Faith knows not ; only that it 
 is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. 
 
 ' We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little Life 
 Is rounded with a sleep.' " ^^ 
 
 With these burning words on his hps, the prophet 
 ^5 Sartor, pp. 184, 185. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days, 59 
 
 descended from his lonely watch-tower, and took up 
 his abode among men. 
 
 IV. 
 
 At first no one seemed to heed him. It is hard 
 for an intelligent reader in these days to understand 
 how the critics of those failed to discover that the 
 author of Sartor Resartus was a man of genius 
 in the best sense of the term. The real secret 
 probably lay in the nature of the critics themselves. 
 It needs, if not genius, at least great ability, to dis- 
 cover genius in a new form, and there was extremely 
 little genius in the critical world of 1834. A gene- 
 ration which worshipped Macaulay was not likely 
 to appreciate Carlyle. Strangely enough, in this new 
 flight, as before, the first encouraging sign came from 
 over the sea, from the America about which Carlyle 
 often said hard things. 
 
 The struggle of life was as stern as ever. It was 
 the old story of the fight between conscience and 
 convention. Temptation came now in the form of an 
 offer of a post on the Times, a prospect which to the 
 natural man must have been alluring enough. Carlyle 
 had to live by his pen, he was within small distance 
 of actual want, and here was an offer from the first 
 and the most generous journal of the day. But the 
 tacit conditions were fatal. The writer in the Times 
 must accept the creed of the Times, and in this creed 
 Carlyle did not, could not, believe. So he gratefully 
 declined the offer, and turned resolutely to face 
 poverty again. With some people it is necessary 
 
6o Thomas Carlyle and John Shtart Mill. 
 
 to go into details. They do not understand moral 
 heroism unless it results in a pecuniary sacrifice. 
 For such people this incident ma}^ be instructive, 
 and difficult to get over. For those who understand 
 Carlyle it will pass, as an act to be admired indeed, 
 but almost as a thing of course. 
 
 Carlyle was ultimately preserved from bankruptcy 
 by a scheme devised by one of his few really sincere 
 friends — a plan of public lecturing. The experiment 
 was moderately successful, and was repeated. The 
 lecturer felt that he gave sterling value for his wages, 
 but he saw the dangers of the practice, and deter- 
 mined to make it only a temporary expedient. 
 
 His real life lay in the preparation of one of the 
 most striking and impressive works which has ever 
 appeared in England. We remember his worship of 
 truth, and his steadfast belief in the futility of shams. 
 He was now to support this faith by an illustration. 
 Some fifty years before the time at which he wrote, 
 France had become a perfect incarnation of falsehood. 
 The king did not govern, the nobles had no duties, 
 the army was filled with officers who could not fight, 
 the administration with men who could not administer, 
 the priesthood with priests who did not believe. The 
 duty of the finance-minister was to hide the inevitable 
 approach of the evil day under a mask of lies ; on 
 all hands was starvation, discontent, disbelief; but 
 all that was influential in the nation combined to 
 assume, in spite of facts, that things were going well. 
 
 Then the crash came. With one accord the starved 
 multitudes rose and declared war on this mockery of 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 6i 
 
 rule. The task of destruction was soon accomplished ; 
 but the more difficult task of re-creation remained. 
 The nob/esse failed to achieve it, the botirgeois failed, 
 the sansculottes failed. The disease of falsehood had 
 eaten into the souls of all men ; nothing that they 
 attempted would stand the test of facts. At last 
 came one who refused to shut his eyes, who adhered 
 strictly to fact, and what the whole nation had in 
 vain tried to do, he by his single will accomplished. 
 Fact was too strong for formulas. 
 
 On this text Carlyle preached his sermon. The 
 French Revolution is generally spoken of as a 
 history, and it undoubtedly illustrates Carlyle's very 
 decided views on the subject of history ; but it is 
 primarily a sermon. It presupposes in its readers 
 a knowledge of the bare facts, just as a preacher 
 assumes a knowledge of the Bible in his hearers. 
 As a preparation for the examination-room the book 
 cannot be recommended ; it was sent as a message 
 -by its author to the hearts of his countrymen, as a 
 message to be pondered over and laid to heart, as a 
 thing of practical importance to be understood. This 
 seems the true light in which to look at the work. 
 Carlyle had no expectation that it would bring him 
 fame or reward ; he was burdened with the weight 
 of his convictions, and could not rest till they were 
 told. Men had not read Sartor, — perhaps the 
 form had been to blame. But here they should see 
 that in the actual matter-of-fact history, which mere 
 text-books would verify, those principles which he 
 had so vehemently asserted in Sartor did actually 
 
62 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 govern the world. And so, in sorrow of heart and 
 sore discouragement, with the near prospect of 
 starvation before him, he put feature after feature, 
 line after line, into the picture, till at last it appeared 
 as we know it now, so vivid and powerful, so resist- 
 less in its teaching, that we almost shudder to read it. 
 Men who can smile at the blood-and-thunder creations 
 of Poe and Duboisgobey, who can view with perfect 
 equanimity Irving's study of the death of the old 
 French king, and listen unmoved to the tragedian's 
 delineation of Eugene Aram's terrors, are held to 
 this picture of Carlyle's by a resistless fascination, a 
 nameless dread that the horrible thing will repeat 
 itself some day. It is all so real ; the teller of the 
 story seems to have lived through those awful scenes, 
 to be describing men whom his own eyes have beheld. 
 Scarcely anything so vivid had been produced since 
 Dante wrote his Inferno. 'Mt was like a load of 
 fire burning up my heart," said Carlyle himself of it,"" 
 and we can well understand his meaning. Robes- 
 pierre, and Marat, and Carrier, and Philippe Egalite ; 
 the Noyades, the September massacres, the Bastille, 
 — all rise before us with the reality of life. There is 
 no straining after the horrible, — the author shows that 
 he can see beauty as well as ugliness, for nothing is 
 more wonderful in the book than the exquisite chapter 
 in which Charlotte Corday appears, performs her 
 allotted task, and vanishes again for ever. But the 
 facts are stern, and with relentless accuracy we see 
 the drama move on to its dread fulfilment. 
 ^^ Second Forty ^ vol. i., p. 128. 
 
TJlc P 1^0 P J Let of tJie Latter Days. 63 
 
 It is pleasant, for tlic sake of England's credit, to 
 be able to say tliat this noble challenge did not fall 
 on utterly deaf ears. Slowly but certainly men 
 grew to realize that here was amongst them one of 
 a different order from themselves, one whose heart 
 was great with inspired thoughts, whose life was 
 devoted to a grand ideal. From the publication of 
 the French Revolution may be dated the acknow- 
 ledgment of Carlyle's genius. Henceforward he 
 speaks as a power; still, it is true, misunderstood 
 and only half-believed, but no longer passed over 
 in silence. lie had spoken of the past ; he was now 
 to apply his teaching to the present. 
 
 The Reform Bill had not brought the Millennium. 
 There had been immense political activity, new 
 institutions, and alterations in old forms ; but there 
 was no evidence of any improvement in the national 
 character. Electors were as bribable as ever, 
 speeches in Parliament and out of it just as in- 
 sincere. The (juestions that really interested the 
 House were questions of power and place ; there 
 seemed as little sense of responsibility as before. 
 The effect of the change in the composition of the 
 Lower House was to produce, as the ruler of the 
 nation, presumably the wisest and greatest character 
 of the day, — Lord Melbourne. Such a leader was 
 only possible in a Parliament which had definitely 
 taken compromise as its watchword, which was 
 determined to shut its eyes to all graver c^uestions, 
 and live simply on sufferance. 
 
 But the Reform agitation had been too deep and 
 
64 Thojnas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 serious to pass entirely away without another effort. 
 Beyond the range of the middle-class politicians, 
 whose ideal was Lord Melbourne and Compromise, 
 there was a band of agitators who declined to accept 
 half-measures, and whose indignation at what they 
 deemed a betrayal of trust was deep and sincere. 
 The views of these men had taken shape in the 
 famous "Charter" of 1838, and Chartism was 
 henceforth to be reckoned with as a political and 
 social force. Instead of seeing in it the natural 
 outcome of existing causes, instead of recognizing 
 the justice there was in it, and setting seriously to 
 work to remove the causes of the agitation, the 
 politicians of the day agreed to treat the phenomenon 
 as trivial, even pretended to doubt its existence. 
 Nowhere can obliquity of vision be so readily com- 
 manded as in the House of Commons. Things 
 which are not convenient to be seen are treated, 
 by a dexterous use of the forms of the House, as 
 if they were not. Such was the way in which a 
 Reformed Parliament agreed to treat Chartism. It 
 was the old story of the ladder that had done its 
 work. 
 
 This conduct filled Carlyle with indignation. The 
 deepest sympathies of his nature were with the class 
 from which the majority of the Chartists were 
 drawn, the class from which he himself had sprung. 
 He could see that under the somewhat pedantic 
 exterior of Chartism there lay a real meaning, and 
 his reading of the difficulty well illustrates his wa}'' 
 of looking at a subject. The political philosopher of 
 
 I 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 65 
 
 the day, if asked to exi)lain the meaning of Chartism, 
 would probably have defined it as "a demand for 
 the Charter," and, if i)re.ss((l further, might have 
 explained that *' the Charter" meant universal suf- 
 frage, vote by ballot, and so on through the famous 
 Six Points. This was not Carlyle's way of looking 
 at the matter. Let us hear his view in his own 
 lai^guage : — 
 
 " Chartism mcjins the l)itl('r (lisc()i)t("iit ^rown licrcM* and I) 
 mad, the wioiij^ ('oiidition, tlKMcfoif;, or tlu* wrong disixxsition, 4 
 of tho working classes (W England." ■"'^ 
 
 These were plain words, and if either alternative 
 were correct the matter was one of the gravest 
 import, one which demanded the instant attention of 
 those who professed to rule the nation. The action 
 of Parliament on the question Carlyle summed up 
 in a few caustic sentences. "Alas ! the remote ob- 
 server knows not th(.' nature of Parliaments : how 
 Parliaments, extant there for the British Nation's 
 sake, find that they are extant withal for their own 
 sake. . . . Hitherto, on this most national of 
 (juestions, the Collective Wisdom of the Nation 
 has availed us as good as nothing whatever."'^'" 
 
 Then follows a remarkably acute criticism of the 
 statistics with which the pro[)hets of smooth things 
 had been proving the non-existence of Chartism. It 
 must have astonished those.' who knew Carlyle 
 only as the mystic philosopher of Sartor^ to read 
 such cool, matter-of-fact remarks on sublunary 
 
 •'"^ ('hartiwt, " Misa^llanics," vol. vi., p. no. 
 •'" Ibid.^ p. 112. 
 
 5 
 
66 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 matters. But it is really a little surprising to hear 
 Carlyle denounced as " unpractical " by those who 
 profess to have read his works. When he chose 
 to go into details, Mill himself could not be more 
 scientific. He seems almost to have taken pains, in 
 the earlier chapters of Chartism, to show that he 
 did not overlook the facts which every one else saw. 
 He gives the new Poor Law its due meed of praise, 
 he recognizes the fact that a change in the condi- 
 tions of industry is inevitably attended with much 
 temporary suffering, he appreciates the immense 
 possibilities of good that lie in the new discoveries 
 in mechanics and physics. But an advocate is 
 surely not bound to confine himself to his adver- 
 sary's side of the case. And Carlyle is here 
 acting as the advocate of the working classes. Is 
 the practical man he who sees only his own side 
 of the question, or he who sees both, all the sides ? 
 A manufacturers' Parliament had a clear enough 
 appreciation of the advantages which the new state 
 of things brought to their own class, but they showed 
 no disposition to share these advantages with the men 
 whom they used as their instruments to gain them. 
 The new Poor Law was well ; it abolished a fright- 
 ful nuisance. But it was only negative. It pro- 
 hibited idleness under penalties, but it made no 
 effort to provide work. Change in the conditions of 
 labour might be good, but at least it was the duty 
 of those to whom they brought wealth to seek to 
 minimise the sorrows of those to whom they brought 
 suffering. No positive effort was made to improve 
 
I'he J^rophct of tlic T Aider Days. 67 
 
 matters. Whctlicr it was incrc selfishness, or 
 vvliclhci' it was tliat tlicy were appalled hy tlie 
 dil'lieulties of the problem, the j)()Iili(iaiis of tlx^ day 
 adopted a doctrine wliicli seemed to ('arlyU.- tlic 
 most cowardly and futile of all doctrijics wliicJi 
 could possibly be [)rofessed by men who pn.'tended 
 to govern — the doctrine of laissez-faire, or the 
 reckiction of State actioji lo a minimum, "a chief 
 social principle which this j)r(,'scnt wrilci-, for one, 
 will by no manner of mcins believe in, but pro- 
 nounce at all fit times to be false, heretical, and 
 damnable, if ever augiit was."^'" lie regarded it as 
 a sheer resignation by rulers of the v(,'ry task they 
 were called on to do. if they felt their inability to 
 govein, let them honestly resign (lieii- position. But 
 to continue to goveiii in name, under cover of such 
 a policy, was to draw the wages of an office after 
 giving up all pretence of doing tlu! woik. A theory 
 which assumed the capacity of eveiy (jue to judge of 
 his own interests seemed to Carlyle, emancipated as 
 he was from formulas, to be simply a lie. What 
 capacity could the peasant or operative, forc(Ml to 
 W(jrk all his waking houi's for a bare subsistence, 
 be supposed to leserve foi- sjieculation upon his 
 interests? The one "right" of such a m.'in was to 
 be governed wise ly and faithfully, led and guided to 
 find his true interest. "Ah, it is not joyful mirth, 
 it is sadder than tears, the laugh Humanity is forced 
 t(j, at laissez-faire applied to ])oor peasants, in a 
 world like our Europe of the year i<S39.""" Against 
 "" Chartism, j). 121. "" //y/V/., p. 131. 
 
6S TJiomas Carlylc and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 this principle Carlyle once for all hurls down a great 
 defiance ; he is its sworn foe for the remainder of 
 his life. 
 
 ^or the rest, his method is characteristic. Not in 
 reforming of institutions lies the remedy, but in 
 the reformation of character. The real grievance of 
 the working classes is not even their hunger, but 
 the feeling of injustice which the conduct of their 
 rulers has forced upon them. All around them they 
 see duties neglected. An aristocracy might at least 
 realize that it had to do something besides preserve 
 game ; a plutocracy, that its sole calling was not to 
 live in luxury. The landowner must recognize the 
 fact that every peasant on his land is under his care, 
 to be helped and put in the way of work. The 
 capitalist must be made to see that he does not 
 fulfil his duty to his hands when he pays them their 
 bare wages, and then turns them off to starve. By 
 his action he has fixed their mode of life, and he is 
 responsible for its continuance, or at least for a 
 substitute. At any rate. Government might do two 
 things, which on no respectable theory could be said 
 to infringe the sacred liberty of tlie subject. It might 
 educate the nation's children, and provide a scheme 
 of emigration for those whom it did not want to 
 keep at home. 
 
 " For all this of the ' painless extinction,' and the rest, is in 
 a world vvliere Canadian Forests stand unlelled, boundless 
 Plains and Prairies unl)rokiMi with the i)longh ; on the west 
 and on the east green desert spaces never yet made white 
 with corn ; and to the overcrowded little western nook of 
 Europe, our Terrestrial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or 
 
The PropJicl of tJic Latter Days. 69 
 
 t('iiaiiti-(l by ii(im;i(li-s, is slill (Myiii^, Come ;iii(l lill iik-, coiiu; 
 and n-;!)) in<' ! And in an lOn^^Iand, willi vvcaiUi and means 
 lor iMdving such as no nation ever bcl'oic had. With Hhi|)S, 
 with warsliips rottiii;.,' idh-, which, hut biihlcn mov*; and not 
 rot, nii/^^ht bridge; all oci^ans. Willi trained mkmi, (uhicatcul to 
 pen and practise, to administer and a( t ; l^rielleHS liarristi^r.s, 
 (;har)j;eless (!ler^y, taskless Scholars, laii^niishin^ in all court- 
 honses, hidinj; in obscure garrets, besie;^in/i; all antechandx-rs, 
 in passionate' want of sim|)ly one Ihinj^^, Work ; with as 
 many llaH'-pay Oliicers ol' bolli Services, weariu;; tlu'itiselves 
 dowii in wretched Irdinni, as mi^ht lead an I'anij^rant host 
 larger than Xerxes' was! .... Alas! where are now thcr 
 llengsts and Alarics of our still-/.;lowinj^, still-ex|)aiidinK 
 ICtuope; who, when their hom<' is /.^rown too narrow, will 
 eidist, and, like lire-|)illars, guide onwards those- superfluous 
 uiasses of iudoinitabh^ living Valour ; ecpupped, not now with 
 tlu; battle-axe and war-chariot, but with the steam-engines and 
 l)loughshanr ? When- are they ? — Preserviuj? their gjiin(\" "' 
 
 It is ail iiwkward fact lor those who ticat Carlylc's 
 teaching as unpractical that within a twclvcinonth 
 of tlie |)iihlicalio!i of Chartism two distinct crioits 
 were made by Government to cairy its reconmiend- 
 ations into effect. At the close of tlie year 1H39, in 
 spite of the bitter opposition of the hiissrr^-Jdin: 
 school, a bill was passed which ])rovi(Ie(l lot- an 
 incn.'ase of the education grant, upon condition of 
 increased inspection by oflicials of the way in which 
 it vv.i;. .idministered. And in Janu.ny J.S/jo was 
 established the Colonial Land and I'jiii^iation 
 IJoard, for the pm'pose of assisting the spontaiK-ous 
 efforts of the over-crowded centres to iclieve them- 
 selves by emigration. I>e)th the'se- efforts, we-rc Small 
 in themselves, l)iit they ai(! notewoithy as among 
 the- first syiiipte)iiis e)!',!!! aw.'d<ene(l sense e)f duty on 
 
 "' C/ia/ii.sf/t, pp. 1H5, 186. 
 
yo Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 the part of the ruling classes, and as the initial steps 
 in a line of policy which has increased in import- 
 ance ever since that day. Chartism was bought 
 eagerly by those whose welfare Carlyle had at heart, 
 and doubtless helped powerfully to turn the tide 
 against philosophic Radicalism. The seed had been 
 sown, but the harvest was not yet. 
 
 More and more the optimism of the Edinburgh 
 Review seemed at fault. The Repeal agitation in 
 Ireland was assuming a terrible aspect, intensified 
 by the economic difficulties of the country. The 
 distress was spreading to England, and in the 
 northern towns thousands of half-starved operatives 
 clamoured for work. The remedy proposed was 
 free trade, and there was no lack of sympathy in 
 Carlyle for the heroic labours of Cobden and his 
 associates. He could not speak of the Corn Laws 
 without a scornful indignation which would have 
 made him a priceless acquisition to the army of the 
 League. But he saw that the Corn Laws were 
 surely doomed, and did not care to waste his 
 strength in slaying the slain. And he saw too, 
 though Cobden and his friends did not, that Free- 
 trade alone could not save England. It is not 
 without a first feeling of surprise that w^e read the 
 glowing anticipations of universal happiness in 
 which the advocates of the League at this time 
 indulged. Yet we ought, perhaps, hardly to wonder. 
 The Free-traders were men of intelligence and 
 boundless energy, but their whole lives were for the 
 time wrapped up in their immediate work, and they 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 71 
 
 had no eyes for anything beyond. Carlyle was of 
 a different order. He saw that the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws would have only a negative effect; 
 it would remove an absurd stumbling-block, but it 
 would not take the blind man by the hand and lead 
 him into the path of safety. It was only laissez- 
 faire after all, and against laissez-faire Carlyle had, 
 as we know, declared war. His eye was fascinated 
 by the huge masses of unorganized labour scattered 
 up and down in the land. His wide knowledge of 
 history convinced Jiim that if this raw material was 
 to develop into really permanent prosperity, there 
 must be some attempt to organize it. Industrial 
 England of 1840 was not an organism which had 
 become able, by inherited instinct, to develop and 
 manage itself ; it was essentially a new and untried 
 thing, working under new conditions. As well expect 
 a child to feed and educate itself, as a mass of toiling 
 mill-hands to rise to real intelligence and consistency 
 without help. Here, put in a form which appears 
 so often in Carlyle's works, is the problem which 
 seems so difficult to answer in any way but his : — 
 
 " Why, the four-footed worker has already got all that this 
 two-handed one is clamouring for ! How often must I remind 
 you ? There is not a horse in England, able and willing to work, 
 but has due food and lodging, and goes about sleek-coated, 
 satisfied in heart. And you say. It is impossible. Brothers, 
 I answer, if for you it be impossible, what is to become of 
 you ? It is impossible for us to believe it to be impossible. 
 The human brain, looking at those sleek English horses, refuses 
 to believe in such impossibility for English men."*^^ 
 
 In saying that Carlyle was concerned not so much 
 
 ^2 Past and Present, p. 19. 
 
72 Thomas Carlyle and JoJmi Stuart Mill. 
 
 with phenomena as with the causes of phenomena, 
 we ought to make one striking exception. There 
 was one phenomenon which seemed to him to 
 transcend in vital importance all other facts. This 
 was the appearance of a great man. The tendency 
 v-" of science is to lay stress on events rather than 
 men, to minimize the agent that the process may 
 be exalted. In his lectures on Heroes, delivered 
 in 1840, Carlyle laid down a defiantly opposite 
 theory of the universe. The secret of the world's 
 history for him lay in its great men. They were the 
 causes, not the effects, of movements and tendencies. 
 He accepted them as great ultimate facts of history, 
 not as incidents to be accounted for. This view 
 becomes henceforward another cardinal article of 
 his creed, and we see it insisted on in the work 
 to which we must now look. 
 
 Carlyle's message to the world of industrial dis- 
 tress is contained in the book known as Past and 
 Present^ published at the beginning of the year 
 1843. 
 
 A few masterly touches at the beginning show 
 us how clearly he appreciated the really pressing 
 anomalies of the times. 
 
 " England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply 
 for human want in every kind ; yet England is dying of 
 inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms 
 and grows ; waving with yellow harvests ; thick-studded with 
 workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of 
 workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and 
 the willingest our Earth ever had ; these men are here ; the 
 work they have done, the fruit they have realized, is here, 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. y2> 
 
 abundant, exuberant on every hand of us ; and behold, some 
 baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying. Touch 
 it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers ; none 
 of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it ; 
 this is enchanted fruit!" ^^ 
 
 Might it not be that the answer to the problem 
 was simpler than men thought, that they had over- 
 looked it because it was so simple ? Such things had 
 happened. Men had been trying all sorts of external 
 remedies for the diseases of society ; it did not occur 
 to them to think that the quality of the men they 
 set to guide it might have something to do with 
 the matter. It is always so much more pleasant to 
 criticise schemes than men, others than ourselves. 
 So long as men persisted in assuming that the course 
 they were on was necessarily the right one, they 
 would hardly be likely to find a solution which lay 
 in another direction. There was endless experi- 
 menting upon institutions and political machinery. 
 What if men were to look a little at results, in the 
 character of themselves and their rulers ? 
 
 Here Carlyle breaks off abruptly to draw a most 
 striking and suggestive picture of a long-forgotten 
 state of society, a glimpse into which had just been 
 afforded him by the publication of the Camden 
 Society's edition of Jocelynde Brakelond's Chronicle. 
 Jocelyn tells an artless but vivid tale of a great 
 English monastery in the twelfth century. The 
 monastery, an isolated unit, under its own laws 
 and rulers, formed no unlikely miniature of a greater 
 
 ^^ Past a}id Present, p. i. 
 
74 Thomas Carlyle and John S heart Mill. 
 
 kingdom. Carlyle found in Jocel^'^n's history, written 
 without theory or other purpose than as a record of 
 fact, the account of two rulers of this little territory. 
 The one had been idle and worthless, content to 
 let things go their own way, practising an uncon- 
 scious laissez-faire ; with the result that his abbey 
 went fast along the road to ruin. The other had 
 been a wise and resolute man, who put his own 
 comfort out of sight, and made his duty his first 
 thought. His duty was to govern, not to enjoy 
 himself; and he did it. Under him the little king- 
 dom had flourished ; abuses had been corrected, old- 
 standing evils remedied, and a picture of industry 
 and genuineness substituted for the old caricature 
 of idleness and falsehood. 
 
 Ars est celare artein. There is hardly a note or 
 comment all through this part of the book. With 
 exquisite skill the old past is made to live before 
 us; the uneventful life of a quiet corner of bygone 
 England unfolds itself calmly and clearly. The 
 artist seems to have no other object than to make 
 us see with our own eyes what is actually going on. 
 Yet we feel clearly that all this has an application to 
 the present. The deep laws of life are the same for 
 us as for Abbot Samson and his monks in the Abbey 
 of St. Edmund. Our circumstances have altered 
 strangely, but in ourselves we are the same. 
 There is a new door, but it is the old lock. A silent 
 sermon, yet for all seeing creatures most eloquent, is 
 this wonderful piece of historical art. 
 
 But, unfortunately, there are people, a great many 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 75 
 
 people, wlioarc not seeing ereatures. So in the tliiitl 
 division of his work Carlyle turns again to present 
 conditions, and reads off one by one the features of 
 the time. First he notices the universal toleration 
 with which shams are regarded. Nothing is what it 
 seems to he ; the duty of the workman is not to do 
 genuine work, but to persuade people that he has 
 doiit-' it. 
 
 "The V(;ry Paper 1 now vviilc f)n is made, it .S(;ems, paMly 
 of |)la.st(;r-linic well-smoof Ixd, .ind obstructs my writing! 
 Yon are hu^ky if you can lind any good Paper,— any work 
 really done ; search wher(; you will, JVom highest Phantasm 
 a|)cx to lowesl ICnchantcd basis.' '" 
 
 This accusation has been signally seconded by 
 subsequent events. In f<S43 lOnglish manufactures 
 were in recpiest all over ICuroj^e as the most genuine 
 in the market. Now the world has found out that 
 they cannot be relied on, and Carlyle's words read 
 like a prophecy in the vulgar sense of the term. 
 
 " No one man can depart from the Irnth williont damag(! to 
 hims(;ir; no oik- million of nn-n ; no Twenty-seven Millions of 
 m(Mi. . . . ' Khetoric all this ? ' No, my brother, very singular 
 to say, it is Fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. 
 Forgf)tten in these; days, it is old as the foundations of the 
 Universe, and will <rn(lui(; initil tlu* Universe ceascr. It is 
 I'orgoltc'n now; and tin; lirst UK'ntiou of it puckers thy sweet 
 countenance into a snec-r: but it will be brought to mind 
 again, — unl<\ss indeed the Law of Gravitation chance to cease, 
 and men iind that they can walk on vacancy.""'' 
 
 Amid all these shams it was a comfort to find 
 something in which men really did believe, were it 
 
 ''' Past (171(1 Present, p. 121. 
 "•'' Ibid., p. 123. 
 
76 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 ever so unworthy of honour. This one fact Carlyle 
 found in the worship of wealth. " Thank Heaven 
 that there is even a Mammonism, any\\'\m.^ we are 
 in earnest about," '^^ Dilettanteism, which divided 
 the upper world with Mammonism, was far more hor- 
 rible, for its very essence was a denial of everything. 
 The adaptation of the Koran story of the Dead Sea 
 Apes to the polite of the day was not perhaps cal- 
 culated to conciliate their attention ; but Carlyle was 
 too much in earnest to think of conciliation. Ernst 
 ist das Lcben is the motto of Past and Present. 
 Again and again he returns to the charge. Is there 
 nothing better to be done than to earn money ? Is 
 that man fulfilling his destiny who draws a hundred 
 thousand a year from a country in which he does 
 no stroke of work ? Has an employer of labour no 
 other concern with the souls and bodies of his 
 labourers than to pay them their wages ? Is it the 
 duty of governors merely to let things alone ? Is 
 there nothing wrong when in one street thousands 
 of shirts lie rotting for want of wearers, and in the 
 next lie thousands of naked men waiting to be 
 clothed ? Is the pursuit of happiness really the 
 highest vocation to which man can be called ? Oh 
 for one of the old heroes to show a degenerate world 
 what could be done by real self-sacrifice ! " My 
 brother, the brave man has to give his life away.""'' 
 It is not till a. man realizes this truth that the possi- 
 bility of greatness dawns upon him. Let him leave 
 
 ^^ Past and Present^ p. 126. 
 '^"^ Ibid., p. 175. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. "jy 
 
 thinking of his prospects and turn simply to his 
 duty. 
 
 <« ( 
 
 But my future fate?' Yes, thy future fate, indeed! 
 Thy future fate, while thoumakest// the chief question, seems 
 to me — extremely questionable. . . . Work is Worship , . . 
 yes. . . . Its cathedral the Dome of Immensity, — hast thou 
 seen it ? coped with the star-galaxies ; paved with the green 
 mosaic of land and ocean ; and for altar verily the star-throne 
 of the Eternal ! Its litany and psalmody the noble acts, the 
 herojc work and suffering, and true heart-utterance of all the 
 Valiant of the Sons of Men. Its choir-music the ancient 
 Winds and Oceans, and deep-toned, inarticulate, but most 
 speaking voices of Destiny and History, — supernal ever as of 
 old. Between two great Silences : 
 
 * Stars silent rest o'er us, 
 Graves under us silent 1 ' 
 
 Between which two great Silences, do not, as we said, all 
 human Noises, in the naturalest tunes, most /rtY<?niatu rally 
 march and roll ? " ^^ 
 
 By the side of this splendid pieceof exalted eloquence 
 we may place a fragment of prophecy as cool and acute 
 as ever man of business framed. The contrast will 
 give us perhaps the best idea we can spare time to 
 get of the range and depth of Past and Present, 
 and the horoscope cast by the later extract may be 
 interesting to readers of the present day. 
 
 "Yes, were the Corn Laws ended to-morrow, there is 
 nothing yet ended ; there is only room made for all manner 
 of things beginning. The Corn Laws gone, and Trade made 
 free, it is as good as certain this paralysis of industry will 
 pass away. We shall have another period of commercial 
 enterprise, of victory and prosperity; during which, it is likely, 
 much money will again be made, and all the people may, by 
 the extant methods, still for a space of years be kept alive 
 and physically fed. The strangling band of famine will be 
 loosened from our necks ; we shall have room again to breathe ; 
 
 ^^ Past afid Present, p. 200. 
 
"J?) Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 time to bethink ourselves, to repent and consider. A precious 
 and thrice-precious space of years ; wherein to struggle as for 
 life in reforming our foul ways ; in alleviating, instructing, 
 regulating our people ; seeking, as for life, that something like 
 spiritual food be imparted them, some real governance and 
 guidance provided them ! It will be a priceless time. For 
 our new period or paroxysm of commercial prosperity will 
 and can, on the old methods of ' Competition and Devil take 
 the hindmost,' prove but a paroxysm ; a new paroxysm — 
 likely enough, if we do not use it better, to be our last."^^ 
 
 The reader of the year 1888 is invited to reflect 
 upon this passage. 
 
 "Yes, but Liberty, Liberty," exclaims the politician; 
 "what right has anyone to guide another?" To 
 whom Carlyle's reply is stern enough : — 
 
 " Despotism is essential in most enterprises ; I am told, they 
 do not tolerate ' freedom of debate ' on board a Seventy-Four ! 
 Republican senate and plebiscita would not answer well in 
 Cotton Mills. And yet observe there too : Freedom, not 
 nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom ; this is in- 
 dispensable. We must have it, and will have it ! To recon- 
 cile Despotism with Freedom : well, is that such a mystery ? 
 Do you not already know the way? It is to make your 
 Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny ; but just too, as 
 Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God : all men obey 
 these, have no ' Freedom ' at all but in obeying them. The 
 way is already known, part of the way ; and courage and some 
 qualities are needed for walking on it ! " "^^ 
 
 For some time, to Carlyle at least, the horizon 
 , seemed to be brighter after this storm. It is not a 
 small testimony to the worth of Peel's character, that 
 two such men as Carlyle and Cobden, so different in 
 powers and mental attitude, yet both so strikingly 
 free from prejudice and conventionality, should have 
 
 ^^ Past and Prese?it, p. 159. 
 ^0 Ibid., p. 241. 
 
The Frop/iel' of the Latter Days. 79 
 
 singled him out as the only possible hope of the 
 English nation. Cobden's admiration led him to 
 prefer the old-fashioned Tory to the leaders of his 
 own party. Carlyle saw, in the man who had dared 
 to face a storm of reproach and calumny, a statesman 
 of a higher order than the Palmerstons and the 
 Russells. Peel had started boldly on the path of 
 free-trade in spite of the most ominous signs of dis- 
 approval from his followers. He had ultimately 
 repealed the Corn Laws. He had dealt boldly and 
 effectively with O'Connell's attempt at rebellion. 
 He had placed the finances of the national bank 
 on a firm footing. He had made provision for Irish 
 education in the teeth of sectarian bigotry. 
 
 But in a constitutional country a minister must do 
 more than govern wisely. He must keep his party 
 well in hand, by cajolement or bribery of some kind. 
 Chatham had despised the humbler arts of '' manage- 
 ment," but even Chatham had fallen. It was the 
 same with Peel. He demanded fresh powers to 
 meet the Irish difficulty, and his false friends saw 
 their chance. They united with his avowed enemies 
 to drag him from office, and to seat a government 
 which had promptly to make the same demand for 
 which Peel had been ejected. Again Peel stood out 
 nobly, and begged the House, if it felt any remorse 
 for its conduct, to show it by strengthening the 
 hands of the existing government. With such a 
 statesman to fall back on, there was still hope ; but 
 meanwhile he was out of office, and things again 
 went awry. 
 
8o Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart 3Iill. 
 
 For the Irish Famine of 1846 no Government was 
 directly responsible, although the severity of its 
 results was largely due to the thoroughly vicious 
 system of land-tenure which had been allowed to 
 grow up in the country. But it soon became 
 apparent that political disaffection was mingled 
 with genuine distress, encouraged to activity by 
 the fate of Peel's attempt at firm government. The 
 Ministry had to ask for a Coercion Act, for a Treason 
 Felony Act. The conviction of Mitchel was fol- 
 lowed by the abortive insurrection of Smith O'Brien 
 and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. 
 Things were no better in England. The monster 
 Chartist meeting was fixed for April 1848, and 
 though, thanks to the admirable preparations made 
 to meet it, the plan failed of its immediate object, 
 there was sufficient energ}/- to show that the life of 
 Chartism was by no means extinct. The country 
 gentlemen were taunting the manufacturers with the 
 condition of their operatives, and the manufacturers 
 thought that they repelled the charge if they pointed 
 to similar features in the lot of the agricultural 
 labourer. Palmerston was bent on embarking the 
 nation in a war for the sake of an enterprising 
 foreigner who wished to make a thousand pounds 
 by brandishing the terrors of English protection. 
 Abroad, things were in the wildest confusion. In 
 France the abdication of Louis Philippe had been 
 followed by an attack of Bonapartism which 
 threatened to produce endless complications. In 
 Austria, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Hungary, thrones 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 8 1 
 
 were rocking in the storm of revolution. Even to 
 Prussia, the one country in Europe in which the art 
 of government appeared to be understood, the move- 
 ment had spread. BerHn had been declared in a state 
 of siege. Everywhere was uncertainty and agitation. 
 
 Carlyle could not see this unmoved. It seemed to 
 him that the day of judgment for the sins of the 
 world was about to arrive, and he determined to 
 make one heroic effort to avert the catastrophe. The 
 Latter Day Pamphlets were the desperate effort of 
 a man who saw, to persuade others of what was 
 actually passing before them. 
 
 It is hard for us, who live in the days which 
 Carlyle's teaching had helped to mould, to realize 
 the audacity of the Latter Day Pamphlets. But no 
 magazine, great as was Carlyle's name by that time, 
 would allow them to appear in its pages ; they were 
 published simply as political tracts. It was seriously 
 supposed by a section of the reading public that their 
 author had gone mad or taken to drink. For the 
 moment no one dreamed of attempting to act upon 
 their teaching. It may be worth while to see what 
 were the outrages perpetrated by the offending work. 
 
 The remedy for the universal wreck of old systems 
 was everywhere announced to be Democracy, that is 
 to say, the government of all by all, or, as Carlyle 
 preferred to put it, no government at all. Govern- 
 ment, by the nature of the case, supposes a ruler and 
 a ruled ; if all men were to be rulers there could be 
 none left to be ruled. Democracy, in its purest form, 
 was evidently impossible. 
 
 6 
 
82 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 But this was practically admitted, and all the 
 nations of the earth were clamouring for consti- 
 tutions, that is to say, were asking to be governed by 
 paper rather than by men. Everything was to go 
 by vote ; it was assumed that voting would settle 
 everything. The engine which was to reform Europe 
 had been tried for nearly two hundred years in 
 England, and it was just becoming clear that it 
 was a failure. All the arguments from ancient 
 democracies were foolish, for the conditions were 
 wholly different. So it was too with the one example 
 of even a moderately successful modern democracy — 
 America. 
 
 " Cotton crops and Indian corn and dollars come to light, 
 and half a world of untilled land, where populations that 
 respect the constable can live, for the present zvithout GoYQxvi- 
 ment : this comes to light ; and the profound sorrow of all 
 nobler hearts, here uttering itself in silent, patient, unspeakable 
 ennui, there coming out as vague elegiac wailings, that there is 
 still next to nothing more. 'Anarchy//?/^ a street-constable,' 
 that also is anarchic to me, and other than quite lovely." ^^ 
 
 For the fatal, to Carlyle the blasphemous, ten- 
 dency of Democracies was to set up sham-governors, 
 men whom the world would not trust with the care 
 of any enterprise which it really valued, but whom it 
 complacently accepted as rulers because they were 
 colourless and inoffensive. 
 
 " Alas, there lies the origin, the fatal necessity, of modern 
 Democracy everywhere. It is the Noblest, not the Sham- 
 Noblest ; it is God-Almighty's Noble, not the Court-Tailor's 
 Noble, nor the Able-Editor's Noble, that must in some approxi- 
 
 ^^ Latter Day Pa77iphlets, p. 17. 
 
The Pi^ophet of the Latter Days, %2) 
 
 mate degree be raised to tlic supreme ])lace ; he and not a 
 counterfeit, — under penalties ! Penalties deep as d(^atb, and 
 at length terrible as hell-on-earth, my constitutional friend." ^^ 
 
 But a deeper meaning lay under these symptoms. 
 Men were trying to dispense, not only with govern- 
 ment, but with all other human relations. The 
 world presented itself to Carlylc much as it did to 
 Burke, as a thing of infinitely complex construction, 
 every fibre of it united with every other fibre, every 
 part dependent on every other for mutual assistance 
 and support. 
 
 " I say, there is not a Red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, 
 can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart 
 for it : will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical 
 fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the 
 centre of gravity of the Universe.''" 
 
 And it was supposed that all this complex mass 
 of relationships and duties could be held together by 
 the ''sole nexus of cash-payment," that the duties 
 of every man to the world could be adjusted and 
 settled by the periodical payment of certain sums 
 of money. Certainly there were signs that the old 
 framework was breaking up. Freedom of divorce 
 was beginning to be talked of, servants no longer 
 considered themselves members of their master's 
 family, but simply as labour-merchants performing 
 certain bargains ; in a word, the tendency of things 
 was towards anarchy. This Carlyle saw, long before 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold's famous book was written. 
 Thirty thousand jieedlewomen, the newspapers said, 
 
 ^2 Latter Day Pamphlets, p. 19. 
 "^"^ Sartor Resartus, p. 70. 
 
84 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 were starving upon agony wages in London alone, 
 and yet on all hands was the cry that decent semps- 
 tresses could not be had for any money. Three 
 million paupers were "rotting in forced idleness," 
 and yet everywhere work was waiting to be done. 
 The boast of liberty in such circumstances seemed 
 to Carlyle to be mockery. 
 
 " When shall we have done with all this of British Liberty, 
 Voluntary Principle, Dangers of Centralisation, and the like ? 
 It is really getting too bad. For British Liberty, it seems, the 
 people cannot be taught to read, British Liberty, shuddering 
 to interfere with the rights of capital, takes six or eight 
 millions of money annually to feed the idle labourer whom it 
 dare not employ. For British Liberty we live over poisonous 
 cesspools, gulley-drains, and detestable abominations ; and im- 
 potent London cannot sweep the dirt out of itself. ■ British 
 Liberty produces — what ? Floods of Hansard Debates every 
 year, and apparently little else at present. If these are the 
 results of British Liberty, I for ore move we should lay it on 
 the shelf a little, and look out for something other and 
 farther." ^^ 
 
 The thing was not to boast of political names, but 
 to find real governors. 
 
 Carlyle's next attack was perhaps the boldest he 
 ever made, and to superficial thinkers it still seems 
 the most questionable. The Abolitionist agitation 
 had started an idea in the minds of the proverbially 
 obtuse English nation, and, as usual, they ran it to 
 death. " A blind, loquacious pruriency of indis- 
 criminate Philanthropism, substituting itself, with much 
 self-laudation, for the silent, divinely-awful sense of 
 right and wrong." ^^ A most flagrant instance of this 
 
 ^^ Latter Day Pa??iphlets, p. 25, 
 ^^ Ibid., p. 43. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 85 
 
 tendency had just come under Carlyle's notice. He 
 had visited Millbank prison, and had seen scoundrels 
 of the profoundest kind placed in a condition which 
 he, simple as were his tastes and small his wants, 
 felt inclined to envy. No one who knows anything 
 of Carlyle will accuse him of hard-hearted ness ; he 
 was compassionate to an almost blamable extent. 
 But the sense of justice was strong in him, and it 
 roused his indignation to think that hard-working, 
 innocent men and women should be taxed almost of 
 necessaries to keep such scoundrels in comfort. And 
 he saw under the philanthropic movement a con- 
 science-stricken acknowledgment of injustice. Men 
 felt that the misery and the crime were partly their 
 own fault; and it was easier to soften the criminal's lot 
 than to remove the causes which led him into crime. 
 But this seems to be only a digression. Carlyle 
 has started with a fierce attack on the existing theories 
 of government; he turns now to their practical results. 
 The machinery of the State departments was ill 
 calculated to stand the fire of such a weapon as 
 Carlyle's criticism. Those were the days when ap- 
 pointments went openly by what was euphoniously 
 termed '^ interest ;" in other words, by jobbery. The 
 question was not the merits of the candidate, but the 
 claims of his supporters. The inquiry of 1855 had 
 not revealed the depths of the abuses, but there was 
 a general assumption that the Civil Service was not 
 a thing that could be boasted about. In this attack, 
 as well as that on the philanthropic movement, we 
 get a decided confirmation of Carlyle's diagnosis from 
 
86 Thomas Ca7dyle and John Stitart Mill. 
 
 a man who had not indeed Carlyle's genius and in- 
 sight, but who had the gift of seeing things which 
 were plainly before him. The novels of Charles 
 Dickens show that, even to one whose whole nature 
 led him to take an optimistic view of social arrange- 
 ments, these things appeared to be too bad. 
 
 To Carlyle the inefficiency of the governing machine 
 seemed far more important than the decay of the 
 consultative organ. Two things he found funda- 
 mentally wrong in Government offices. The work 
 was ill done, and it was the wrong kind of work. 
 Serious charges these, which, however, no one of the 
 day seemed inclined to dispute. Even grave official 
 personages declared the departments to be almost 
 past reform. Carlyle's suggestion went as usual to 
 the heart of the matter. No good work could be 
 expected so long as no pains were taken to select 
 good workmen. An incompetent w^orkman could 
 not produce satisfactory work merely because he 
 was put into a Government office. You cannot make 
 rules of thumb for the discovery of the best men ; 
 but at least you can remove obstacles from the way 
 of attaining them. For instance, the maxim which 
 requires the responsible head of a department to 
 be elected to Parliament as a preliminary to ap- 
 pointment, is simply a premium upon anarchy and 
 ineptitude, for an office held on such a tenure can 
 never command the confidence of subordinates, nor 
 are the qualifications needed for a successful fight 
 at the hustings the least guarantee of administrative 
 talent. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. Sy 
 
 And if, by Heaven's blessing, says Carlyle, you 
 do get some able men, there is work enough for 
 them to do. Foreign affairs are very much better 
 left alone ; they amount generally to mere itching. 
 But in the Home Office, and the Colonial Office ! 
 There are idle soldiers to be made to earn their pay, 
 convicts to be turned into useful pioneers of labour 
 in ^distant lands, a people to be educated in the 
 elements of knowledge, colonies to be organized, 
 paupers to be set to work. If men would only 
 realize that these things have to be done, not left 
 alone, half the battle would be over. 
 
 The next subject of attack is one which every 
 thinking politician, from Aristotle downwards, has 
 recognized as the special evil of popular governments, 
 but which is perhaps the most difficult of all poHtical 
 evils to cure. It is hard to forbid a" man to recom- 
 mend himself by every artifice in his power, more 
 especially if he speak, not evil, but good, of the 
 powers that be. Yet it is a demonstrable fact that 
 the institution known as " stump-oratory" is fatal to 
 the character of governments created by its means. 
 The stump-orator speaks what he thinks will please 
 his audience, not what he believes to be true. He 
 promises anything that sounds most attractive. It 
 is his only chance of success. He is elected to 
 Parliament, to office. Here he must do, not what 
 he believes to be best, but what he has promised. 
 
 The malady had spread to other organs. In all 
 the professions. Church, law, and medicine, the suc- 
 cessful man was the man who could talk, not the 
 
SS Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 man who could act or think. Even in hterature, 
 whose action may be defined to be thought, there 
 was the same worship of mere words. 
 
 From the stump-orator the prophet passes naturally 
 to Parliament, the goal of the stump-orator's ambition. 
 Perhaps nowhere, in the whole of his critical writings, 
 does Carlyle show a more masterly appreciation of 
 realities than in his estimate of the past and present 
 meaning of Parliament. After an historical analysis 
 of the rise and development of the institution with 
 which Professor Stubbs himself could hardly find 
 fault, he proceeds to point out how the real function 
 of Parliament has passed into other hands. 
 
 " In countries that can stand a Free Press, — which many 
 cannot, but which England, thanks to her long, good training, 
 still can, — it is evident the National Consult or 7'eal Parlia- 
 mentary Debate goes on of itself, everywhere, continually. Is 
 not the 72>;z^j" newspaper an open Forum, open as Forum never 
 was before, where all mortals vent their opinion, state their 
 grievance ; — all manner of grievances, from loss of your 
 umbrella in a railway, to loss of your honour and fortune by 
 unjust sovereign persons ? One grand branch of the Parlia- 
 ment's trade is evidently dead for ever ! And the beautiful 
 Elective Parliament itself is nothing like so living as it used to 
 be. If we will consider it, the essential truth of the matter is, 
 every British man can now elect himself \.o Parliament with- 
 out consulting the hustings at all. If there be any vote, idea, 
 or notion in him, on any earthly or heavenly thing, can he not 
 take a pen, and therewith autocratically pour forth the same 
 into the ears and hearts of all the people, so far as it will go ? 
 Precisely so far, and, what is a great advantage too, no farther. 
 The discussion of questions goes on, not in St. Stephen's now, 
 but from Dan to Beersheba, by able-editors and articulate- 
 speaking creatures that can get others to listen to them. This 
 is the fact, and it demands to be attended to as such, — and 
 will produce changes, I think, by-and-by. 
 
 "What is the good of men collected, with effort, to debate 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 89 
 
 on uhe benches of St. Stephen's, now when there is a TiTnes 
 newspaper ? Not the discussion of questions, only the 
 ultimate voting of them (a very brief process, I should think !) 
 requires to go on, or can veritably go on, in St. Stephen's now. 
 The honourable gentleman is oftenest very wearisome in 
 St. Stephen's now ; his and his constituency's aye or no is all 
 we want of the honourable gentleman there ; all we are ever 
 like to get of him there, — could it but be had without admix- 
 tures ! If your Lordship will reflect on it, you will find it an 
 obsolete function, this debating one of his ; useless in these 
 new times, as a set of riding post-boys would be along the 
 line'of the Great Western Railway."''^ 
 
 But Parliament, having lost its true function of 
 safety-valve, had taken to a function for which it was 
 wholly unfitted, the task of government. Never was 
 a more impossible attempt. In the whole course of 
 history only two parliaments had succeeded in govern- 
 ing — the Long Parliament of the Civil War, and the 
 French Convention. And these succeeded -by-virtue 
 of the fact that each had in ultimate reserve a power 
 which was in the highest degree "unconstitutional" 
 and unparliamentary — Cromwell, and the guillotine. 
 The force of this criticism we shall have occasion to 
 notice further on. 
 
 But it is in the last of the terrible Pamphlets 
 that Carlyle reaches the full height of his power. 
 Always when he is dealing with institutions he be- 
 trays an impatient sense of the unimportance of the 
 subject ; it is only when he is speaking of character 
 that his inspiration is supreme. Under the title of 
 Jesuitism he sweeps together all the falseness and 
 baseness which he sees in the world around him, and 
 
 ^^ Latter Day Pamphlets, pp. i88, 189. 
 
go Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 sears it with the lightning of his wrath. In his enthu- 
 siasm for genuineness, Carlyle had once humorously 
 expressed his admiration of a thoroughgoing lie. 
 
 " Glorious, heroic, fruitful for his own Time, and for all Time 
 and all Eternity, is the constant Speaker and Doer of Truth ! If 
 no such again, in the present generation, is to be vouchsafed 
 us, let us have at least the melancholy pleasure of beholding 
 a decided liar."^^ 
 
 But with cant, the falsehood which half deceived 
 itself as well as others, Carlyle waged relentless war. 
 Everywhere he saw it, in the determination of men to 
 build not on actual visible truth, but on conventions 
 and shams. And most loathsome of all was the fact 
 that this worship of cant so often came from the lips 
 of those who made a fair show in the flesh. 
 
 " ' Be careful how you believe truth,' cries the good man 
 everywhere ; ' composure and a whole skin are very valuable. 
 Truth — who knows ? — many things are not true ; most things 
 are uncertainties, very prosperous things are even open 
 falsities that have been agreed upon. There is little certain 
 truth going. If it isn't orthodox truth, it will play the very 
 devil with you.' " "'^ 
 
 Those who think Carlyle's indignation excessive 
 can hardly have reflected how deeply cant really 
 goes into our nature. Not to speak of religion, 
 which is saturated with it, there is hardly any 
 province of human affairs in which it is not predomi- 
 nant. In the very clothes we wear, we consult not 
 our own convictions of what is best, but our antici- 
 pations of what our neighbours will consider most 
 
 " Count Cagliostro, " Miscellanies," vol. v., p. 68. 
 ^^ Latter Day Pamphlets^ p. 264. 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 91 
 
 fitting. In our food we are often ashamed to avow 
 preferences which may seem to argue discredit. The 
 man whose income is i^500 a year thinks it his duty 
 to " keep up a position " warranted only by an income 
 of twice that amount. We even engage in " amuse- 
 ments " for which we have not the sHghtest rehsh, 
 because it is comme il faut to pretend to Hke them. 
 Thejnost utterly unmusical family must keep a piano 
 in its drawing-rcom,and profess to admire Beethoven ; 
 the most illiterate millionaire must have his '' study." 
 And this is the practice of people who profess on 
 Sunday to believe that '' all liars shall have their part 
 in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone." 
 
 Against this wide-spreading falsehood Carlyle lifts 
 his voice in one passionate appeal, passing from 
 fierce indignation to pathetic reproach, which, as it is 
 almost his last direct utterance on the subjects that 
 lay nearest his heart, I shall venture to give entire. 
 It is long to write, but so splendid an example of the 
 prophet's powers and teaching will bear repetition. 
 
 " How can you believe in a Heaven — the like of you ? 
 What struggle in your mean existence ever pointed thither- 
 ward ? None. The first heroic soul sent down into this world, 
 he, looking up into the sea of stars, around into the moaning 
 forests and big oceans, into life and death, love and hate, and 
 joy and sorrow, and the illimitable loud-thundering loom of 
 Time, — was struck dumb by it (as the thought of every earnest 
 soul still is) ; and fell on his face, and with his heart cried for 
 salvation in the world-whirlpool : to him the ' open secret of 
 the Universe ' was no longer quite a secret, but he had caught 
 a glimpse of it, — much hidden from the like of us in these 
 times : ' Do nobly, thou shalt resemble the Maker of all this ; 
 do ignobly, the Enemy of the Maker.' This is the ' divine 
 sense of Right and Wrong in man ' ; true reading of his 
 position in this Universe for evermore ; the indisputable God's 
 
92 Thomas Cai4yle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 message still legible in every created heart, — though speedily- 
 erased and painted over, under ' articles,' and cants, and empty 
 -ceremonials, in so many hearts ; making the 'open secret' a 
 very shut one indeed ! — 
 
 " My friends, across these murky floods of twaddle and 
 philanthropism, in spite of sad decadent ' world trees,' with 
 their rookeries of foul creatures, — the silent stars, and all the 
 eternal luminaries of the world, shine even now to him that has 
 an eye. In this day as in all days, around and in every man, are 
 voices from the gods, imperative to all, if obeyed by eveji 
 none, which say audibly, ' Arise, thou son of Adam, son of 
 Time ; make this thing more divine, and that thing,— and 
 thyself, of all things ; and work, and sleep not ; for the Night 
 Cometh, wherein no man can work.' He that has an ear may 
 still hear. 
 
 " Surely, surely this ignoble sluggishness, sceptical torpor, 
 indifference to all that does not bear on Mammon and his 
 interests, is not the natural state of human creatures ; and is 
 not doomed to be their final one ! Other states once were, or 
 there had never been a Society, or any noble thing, among 
 us at all. Under this brutal stagnancy there lies painfully 
 imprisoned some tendency which could become heroic. 
 
 " The restless gnawing ennui which, like a dark dim ocean- 
 flood, communicating with the Phlegethons and Stygian deeps, 
 begirdles every human life so guided — is it not the painful 
 cry even of that imprisoned heroism ? Imprisoned it will 
 never rest ; set forth at present, on these sad terms, it cannot 
 be. You unfortunates, what is the use of your money-bags, of 
 your territories, funded properties, your mountains of posses- 
 sions, equipments and mechanic inventions, which the flunkey 
 pauses over, awestruck, and almost rises into epos and pro- 
 phecy at the sight of ? No use, or less than none. Your skin 
 is covered, and your digestive and other bodily apparatus is 
 supplied ; and you have bi^t to wish in these respects, and 
 more is ready ; and — the bevils, I think, are quizzing you. 
 You ask for ' happiness,' ' O give me happiness ! ' — and they 
 hand you ever new varieties of covering for the skin, ever new 
 kinds of supply for the digestive apparatus, new and ever new, 
 worse or not a whit better than the old ; and — and — this is 
 your happiness ? As if you were sick children ; as if you 
 were not men, but a kind of apes ! 
 
 "I rather say, be thankful for your ennui; it is 3^our last 
 mark of manhood ; this at least is a perpetual admonition and 
 true sermon preached to you. From the chair of verity this, 
 
The P^^ophet of the Latter Days. 93 
 
 whatever chairs be chairs of cantxiy. Happiness is not come, 
 nor like to come ; ennui, with its great waste ocean-voice, 
 moans answer, Never, never. That ocean-voice, I tell you, is 
 a great fact ; it comes from Phlegethon and the gates of the 
 Abyss ; its bodeful never-resting inexorable moan is the voice 
 of primeval Fate, and of the eternal necessity of things. Will 
 you shake away your nightmare and arise ; or must you lie 
 writhing under it, till death relieve you ? Unfortunate crea- 
 tures ! You are fed, clothed, lodged as men never were before ; 
 every day in new variety of magnificence are you equipped and 
 attended to ; such wealth of material means as is now yours was 
 never dreamed of by man before : — and to do any noble thing, 
 with all this mountain of implements, is for ever denied you. 
 Only ignoble, expensive, and unfruitful things can you now do ; 
 nobleness has vanished from the sphere where you live. The 
 way of it is lost, lost ; the possibility of it has become incredible. 
 We must try to do without it, I am told. — Well, rejoice in 
 your upholsteries and cookeries, then, if so be they will make 
 you 'happy.' Let the varieties of them be continual and 
 innumerable. In all things let perpetual change, if that is a 
 perpetual blessing to you, be your portion instead of mine ; 
 incur that Prophet's curse, and in all things in this sublunary 
 world ' make yourselves like unto a wheel.' Mount into your 
 railways ; whirl from place to place, at the rate of fifty, or if 
 you like of five hundred miles an hour : you cannot escape 
 from that inexorable all-encircling ocean-moan of ennui. No : 
 if you would mount to the stars, and do yacht-voyages under 
 the belts of Jupiter, or stalk deer on the ring of Saturn, it 
 would still begirdle you. You cannot escape from it, you can 
 but change your place in it, without solacement except one 
 moment's. That prophetic Sermon from the Deeps will con- 
 tinue with you till you wisely interpret it and do it, or else 
 till the crack of Doom swallow it and you. Adieu : Att revoir.'"''^ 
 
 In this whirlwind of rebuke and exhortation the 
 prophet vanishes, and leaves us only the man for 
 future study. His greatest work was now over, 
 and it remained only for him to live out his days 
 in the calm discharge of humbler duties. His next 
 production was a strange contrast to the fire and 
 
 ^^ Latter Day Pamphlets, pp. 284 — 286. 
 
94 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 fury of the Pamphlets — the loving, tender biography 
 of his dead friend, John Sterhng. In the exquisite 
 pages which close what is perhaps the most perfect 
 memorial of friendship to be found in English litera- 
 ture, Carlyle almost seems to be bidding farewell to 
 a world in which he has laboured so faithfully. But 
 there was work for him to do yet. For thirteen 
 years he toiled patiently, earnestly, at a task, the 
 completion of which was to raise him to the 
 unquestioned sovereignty of the intellectual world 
 of his day. Many a man might be proud of 
 Friedrich as the sole accomplishment of a life- 
 time ; to Carlyle it was a task performed in the 
 evening of life, when rest had been fairly earned, 
 and none could have cast the stone of reproach had 
 it been fully enjoyed. As a history, Friedrich of 
 Prussia falls to be touched on elsewhere ; we are 
 here only concerned to point out how the same 
 moral strength which had made its author's character 
 a power among men, shines everywhere through its 
 pages. There is the same patient seeking after truth, 
 the same fiery scorn of Aork neglected or half-done, 
 the same indignation at all baseness and stupidity, 
 the same unwearied sense of justice, the same firm 
 faith in the ultimate triumph of right. The fascination 
 which carries the reader without faltering through the 
 ten volumes of Friedrich is not by any means solely 
 due to the skill with which the subject is handled. 
 Behind the work we see the workman, earnest, 
 fateful, presiding like a destiny over the creation 
 of his hands, and we acknowledge the presence 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 95 
 
 of a master. The confidence which he inspires is 
 irresistible, we never think of questioning his con- 
 clusions. It does not surprise us to hear that even 
 in Germany at this hour Carlyle's book is made the 
 groundwork of the highest teaching on the period of 
 which he wrote. In the best qualities of German 
 authors Carlyle shows himself equal to them, and he 
 has a power which few of them possess. 
 
 Shortly after the publication of the last volumes of 
 Friedrich there happened an event which cannot 
 but be regarded as the climax of Carlyle's life. In 
 the days of his poverty he had lived, almost unknown, 
 in Edinburgh, the chief city of his native land. From 
 a struggling student he had risen, by the sheer force 
 of his own personality, to be the acknowledged head 
 of English literature, perhaps the truly greatest power 
 in England. Though he had received little recog- 
 nition from the land of his birth, his heart was with 
 her still. He was not the man to forget his early 
 struggles, or the scenes in which they had been 
 passed. 
 
 And now he was to return in honour to speak, 
 out of the treasures of his wisdom, words of counsel 
 to those who were entering, even as he had done 
 fifty years before, upon the struggle of life. It 
 would require his own pen to paint that scene 
 when he, aged and grey, but unconquered still, 
 stood before the young warriors who were gathering 
 to his banner. We know how strangely in those 
 days the world was drawn to the spot. Men 
 of letters, men of science, politicians, gentle and 
 
96 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 simple, travelled hundreds of miles in cold- April 
 weather to hear an old man speak for an hour to 
 a band of college students. It was felt by the world 
 that here was one whose speech was not mere words, 
 but something far deeper and more precious. It was 
 the man himself, and not his tongue, that told the 
 story. Worn with the weight of seventy years, 
 spent by the tempests of thought which had raged 
 over his soul, almost crushed by the intensity of 
 convictions which would give him no rest till he 
 had spoken them abroad, with the shadow of a great 
 unknown sorrow waiting just before his feet, the 
 man, as we see him there, is the most eloquent of 
 living sermons. The words which he spoke, read in 
 the dry light of posterity, seem nothing very wonder- 
 ful. He had nothing to add to his former teaching. 
 It may even be said that many men could proclaim 
 the value of diligence, honesty, reverence, zeal for 
 truth, frugality, hope. True, many men can proclaim 
 this by word of mouth. But how many men can 
 live it from day to day, from hour to hour, through a 
 life of seventy years ? That was the real meaning 
 of the man who stood in the Edinburgh Hall. And 
 old and young felt that such was his meaning, and 
 rose up to do him honour. One who has been 
 brought before a crowd of 3^oung faces, and thought 
 for a moment of the awful possibilities of good and 
 evil which lie behind those eager eyes, can realize 
 something of the feelings which must have rushed 
 over Carlyle's mind as he stood there. One who 
 has contrasted Carlyle's life and work with the lives 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 97 
 
 and doings of the multitudes who hved around him 
 can guess something of the thoughts which must 
 have been in the minds of those who heard him. 
 
 The next news was that Mrs. Carlyle was dead. 
 Carlyle had left her in perfect confidence of coming 
 back in a few days to tell her how he had fared. 
 Immediately after his speech he had written a word 
 of love, and again in his short visit to the home of 
 his youth, begging for an answer. The answer was 
 the silence of death. 
 
 For a man who did not love his wife he was 
 strangely overcome. Never, through all his trials, 
 had his spirit utterly broken down, but this was a 
 crushing blow. Henceforward his concern with the 
 world was that of a man who was leaving it, and 
 wished to set his house in order. The end was not 
 yet ; for fifteen years he lingered, and one may 
 almost hope that these long days of waiting were 
 happier, after the first shock was over, than his 
 former life had been. The portrait of this time 
 shows the defiant features of earlier days softened 
 into an expression of musing tenderness. There 
 was no dimming of the clear brain, bodily health 
 was still granted. In his seventy-sixth year Carlyle 
 uttered a word, calm, unanswerable, which changed 
 the opinion of England on the great struggle between 
 France and Germany. Four years later he wove a 
 series of beautiful stories out of the old lore of 
 Norway. But these seemed only to fill up the 
 time; calmly, almost longingly, he waited the end. 
 Honours rained in upon him, and these, so far as 
 
 7 
 
98 Thomas Carlyle and John Shtart Mill. 
 
 they were proofs of men's love, he valued, but for 
 their own sake they were nothing. Some he would 
 not accept ; he had not looked for reward other than 
 the approval of his conscience. So at length, in the 
 silver crown of his years, he passed gently away, 
 and slept with his fathers in the land which had 
 given him birth. He had earned his rest. 
 
 V. 
 
 One brief glance we must take, by way of summary, 
 at the figure with which we have journeyed so long, 
 and from which we are now to part. 
 
 Grandeur must, I think, be the first thought that 
 strikes us as we look at Carlyle. Among the crowd 
 of his contemporaries, the Hallams, De Quinceys, 
 Macaulays, Broughams, Grotes, Bulwers, he towers 
 like a giant. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, 
 Shelley, Keats, were all before his day ; they do not 
 dispute the field with him. And who else can be 
 named in the same breath ? Browning, perhaps, 
 but the place of Browning is yet unfixed in the 
 temple of fame. Perhaps, too, in the world of 
 physical science, the world of Brewster, Faraday, 
 and Darwin, there were to be found his intellectual 
 compeers, but we can never place the man who 
 observes on the same level with the man who 
 teaches. Of European names, if we except Goethe, 
 whom he acknowledged as his master, there is but 
 one who can be ranked with him — Victor Hugo. He 
 was the king of his generation, the true ava^ dvBpMV, 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 99 
 
 with the eye to see, and the heart to bear and do. 
 He was the central figure of his age, and we look 
 even now in vain for his equal. 
 
 But, next to his grandeur, we notice his width 
 and scope. Moralist, poet, historian, critic, counsellor, 
 orator ; and in all supremely great. And there is 
 nothing in him of that littleness which shrinks from 
 small duties for fear of hurting its dignity. From a 
 criticism of Novalis to the mending of a farm-gate he 
 is the same simple, earnest worker. He has, indeed, 
 an antique simplicity, which of itself would mark 
 him as one to be admired. The plainest food, the 
 coarsest clothes, the smallest house, he took, from 
 choice, not, in later days at least, from necessity- 
 Tobacco was his only luxury, that and, if means 
 permitted, a horse, but if means did not permit, he 
 could do without it. His dearest friends were, all 
 his life, the members of his own family circle ; the 
 author of Friedrich was never happier than in the 
 Annandale farmhouse. The time breeds not many 
 such men. 
 
 Hardly less conspicuous were the other elementary 
 virtues of his character. Purity, earnestness, real 
 humility of spirit, tenderness towards suffering, 
 sympathy with wrong, it would hardly be necessary 
 to mention these but for the fact that the world 
 delights to stone its prophets if it can. Upon this 
 sad subject no word can be better than one of 
 Carlyle's own. *' No man is hero to his valet," runs 
 the proverb. '' No," said Carlyle, commenting upon 
 the aphorism ; " but that is generally the valefs 
 
lOO Tho7nas Caidyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 faulty Men who have bound themselves hand and 
 foot in the service of the devil, are not likely to be 
 enthusiastic over the prophet of God. 
 
 Looking with eyes for defects over Carlyle's life, 
 
 we shall find very little to reward us. Of his sins of 
 
 thought, whatever they may have been, we cannot, 
 
 of course, judge ; we may be fairly sure that he 
 
 himself did not spare them. The one fault which 
 
 did indisputably mar the completeness of his moral 
 
 character is one for which it is not easy to find a 
 
 name. Intolerance, it might be called, or impatience. 
 
 Carlyle loved his fellow-men with a deep pitying 
 
 love ; but their follies and stupidities roused his 
 
 wrath. He looked at them from his own lofty 
 
 standpoint, not from their humbler ground. But 
 
 it must be remembered that his judgments, harsh as 
 
 many of them read, have been in almost every case 
 
 strikingly affirmed by the great critic. Time. It was 
 
 because he saw more, not because he loved less, that 
 
 he was so stern. Still we do not find in his character 
 
 that rare combination of virtues of which we should 
 
 perhaps hardly be able to form an idea had we not 
 
 seen it in one or two rarest examples. To hate the 
 
 sin with a perfect hatred, and yet to cherish and bear 
 
 with the sinner as a loved brother who must be won 
 
 by patient pleading from determined suicide, this is 
 
 the subhmity of moral grandeur, and how many have 
 
 attained to it ? It demands total oblivion of self, 
 
 perfect heroism of spirit. The few, the very few, 
 
 who have reached it have won the world by the 
 
 irresistible fascination of their characters. This, 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. loi 
 
 something of this, was attained by him who, by 
 unwearied self-sacrifice, achieved the freedom of his 
 beloved country from a tyrant's yoke, and at whose 
 death "the little children cried in the streets" — by 
 William of Orange. Even nearer to the ideal came 
 the great Roman emperor upon whose shoulders 
 rested the cares of a whole world, and who, through 
 ajife of toil such as few men have borne, retained a 
 sweetness of temper and lovingness of thought which 
 a St. Francis might have envied. And most of all 
 w^as it manifested by him by whose character, as by 
 the sublimest of possible standards, all such efforts 
 are tried, by him who went about doing good, and, 
 for reward, had not where to lay his head. These 
 we may well place above Carlyle, but where are the 
 others ? 
 
 In intellectual gifts, too, we can find but one fault. 
 In almost every department of literature Carlyle's 
 knowledge and power were profound. In the world 
 of science, of course, there were many provinces 
 which he did not profess to know, upon which he 
 never pronounced an opinion. But there were 
 others of which he has been accused of ignorance, 
 simply because his conclusions do not agree with 
 the doctrines of those who have assumed the sole 
 right to judge. He has been laughed at by logi- 
 cians, politicians, economists, metaphysicians, but 
 with a strange forgetfulness his critics have omitted 
 to point out where he was wrong. Men of letters 
 know nothing about science, Carlyle was a man of 
 letters, ergo he knew nothing about science — that is 
 
102 Thomas Carlyle and John Stiiai^t Mill. 
 
 a. quite unexceptionable syllogism provided that both 
 premises be correct. But if a man of letters may 
 possibly know something of science, or if Carlyle 
 was not a man of letters in the exclusive sense which 
 the alternative implies, then perhaps the conclusion 
 is not quite so indisputable. 
 
 But one defect of intellect, indeed, Carlyle's warm- 
 est admirers must allow. His gifts of expression 
 were for man}^ purposes unparalleled in power. In 
 pathos, in humour, in impressiveness, in imaginative 
 force, he finds no rival in modern Enghsh literature. 
 But where perfect delicacy of style is required, 
 combined with perfect completeness of thought, 
 there Carlyle fails. His aesthetic faculties are at 
 fault. The final accomplishment of the poet, which 
 is so marked a feature of his master, Goethe, is 
 wanting to Carlyle. He could never have written 
 Keniist du das Land^ he could not even translate 
 it respectably. 
 
 But for those who make his style (oh ! the style ! !) 
 an excuse for denying his greatness, we can have 
 little sympathy. We begin to suspect, with Teufels- 
 drockh when his epitaph was rejected, that the 
 " alleged defect in the Latinity " is not the real 
 secret. People object to hearing unpalatable truths, 
 and any excuse is good enough as an escape. 
 
 Are we to proceed to '' account for " this man ? 
 Are we to point out that the conjunction of Scotch 
 Calvinism with German literature produced Thomas 
 Carlyle ? That his Sauerteigs, his Teufelsdrockhs, 
 and his Crabbes are the copies of Richter's imagi- 
 
The Prophet of the Latter Days. 103 
 
 nary creations; that his Sartor is compounded from 
 Reinecke der Fuchs and the Tale of a Tub, in about 
 equal quantities ? All these, and many more 
 influences there were, which he himself has openly 
 acknowledged. But that Carlyle and his works 
 could be, so to speak, "bred" in this way, — the 
 idea is ridiculous. Let me suggest a profitable 
 occupation to those who are fond of such pursuits. 
 The world could do very well with another Carlyle, 
 or even two. It would readily agree to pay a hand- 
 some sum to any one who could produce the required 
 article. Here then is a chance for the man of science. 
 Let him beg, borrow, or steal an infant Scotch Cal- 
 vinist, and inoculate him skilfully with German litera- 
 ture, especially taking care to educate him in such 
 works as will best bear reproduction. Then let him 
 exhibit his machine in public and claim the reward 
 from a grateful literary world. 
 
 No, Carlyle does not remind me of a machine. 
 There is one thing, however, of which he does most 
 persistently remind me. Often, as I have sat by 
 the blue waters of Lucerne, I have raised my eyes 
 towards the south, and looked steadily at the rugged 
 mountain which towers, like the advanced guard of 
 an army of giants, above the lake. In the morning 
 it is rarely clear, ever upon it are clouds and mists, 
 and its full grandeur is not seen. At midday the 
 sun beats on it, and the forms of pigmy tourists 
 scahng its sides break the silent loneliness. But at 
 night, when all around is still, when the clouds have 
 disappeared, and the sun, and the tourists, then I 
 
I04 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 have looked again. There it stands now, complete, 
 clear, peaceful. High above its neighbours rises the 
 rugged cliff, its stern aspect almost, in the peace of 
 night, turned to tenderness and welcome. From its 
 base, girt with peaceful villages, the eye travels up 
 its scar-seamed sides, passing here and there a 
 twinkling light. But above all sounds and sight of 
 men still rises that lofty form, till at last it rears its 
 stately head into the vast arch of night, and stands 
 there amid the eternal silence, alone — "alone with 
 the stars." That is Carlyle. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE APOSTLE OF BENTHAMISM. 
 
 THERE is a certain abstractedness about the 
 lives of men of science which renders them 
 peculiaily easy to summarize. When such men 
 have reached the point at which they definitely enter 
 upon their hfe-work, the records of their existence 
 become rather psychological studies than biogra- 
 phies in the ordinary sense of the term. Even the 
 appearance of their books does not always afford 
 a sure clue to their development, for often, as was 
 the case with Mill, the order of publication does not 
 correspond with the order of composition. The only 
 way of arriving at an estimate of their position is by 
 directing an analytical process upon their productions 
 as a whole. 
 
 This generalization holds good in the case which 
 we have now to study. Properly speaking, there 
 were only two events in Mill's life — the mental crisis 
 which he has described in the fifth chapter of the 
 Autobiography, and his friendship with Mrs. Taylor. 
 That is to say, these two circumstances only, so far 
 
io6 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 as we can tell, exercised a really decisive effect on 
 the current of his existence. 
 
 We may, therefore, proceed to glance at the 
 unusually valuable materials available for a study of 
 Mill's younger days, and then, having brought him 
 to the point at which his mental direction is fixed, 
 we may pass lightly over the remaining circumstances 
 of his life, and turn at once to an examination of his 
 works. 
 
 Just as it is clear that Carlyle appeals most 
 strongly to the moral side of our character, so it is 
 equally clear that, if we would see Mill in his most 
 significant aspect, we must look mainly at the 
 speculative or intellectual side of his life. His moral 
 character was, indeed, exceptionally admirable. An 
 inflexible love of truth, a perfect candour and great 
 humility of judgment, combined with purity of 
 conduct, conspicuous generosity, a high sense of 
 honour, and unwearied perseverance, are an ample 
 foundation for a great and impressive character. 
 And as such Mill undoubtedly stamped himself upon 
 the minds of those who knew him. But still it is as 
 the man of science, the speculative philosopher, that 
 he lives. He laid it down himself, as his mature 
 opinion, that '' the most important and most univer- 
 sally interesting facts of the universe " are the facts 
 of physical science. '^^ 
 
 Mill was born in the year 1806. His father, James 
 Mill, the author of a well-known work on psychology, 
 and a still better known work on the history of 
 ^° Inaugural Address ^ p. 21. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 107 
 
 British India, appears to have been a man distin- 
 guished rather by force than by amiability of 
 character. " For passionate emotions of all sorts, 
 and for everything which has been said or written in 
 exaltation of them, he professed the greatest con- 
 tempt." ®^ '' My father was not one with whom calm 
 and full explanations on fundamental points of 
 doctrine could be expected." ^^ And Mill himself, 
 highly as he esteemed his father, had, in his time of 
 trouble, to confess that he " was the last person to 
 whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help." ^^ 
 James Mill was, in fact, a man who lived by his 
 intellect only, and chose his associates chiefly by 
 reference to their speculative conclusions. 
 
 The main idea of this man with regard to his son's 
 education was, that he should be made to acquire 
 the utmost possible amount of scientific information. 
 The extent to which the son respcnded to the father's 
 plans astonishes the youth of average acquirements. 
 Mill could not remember the time at which he began 
 to learn Greek \>y the pleasing method of committing 
 to memory lists of '' vocables." ^^ Sad to say, it was 
 not till he was eight years old that he made acquaint- 
 ance with Latin, but this neglect was soon atoned 
 for. Before the completion of his twelfth year, he 
 says, " my father made me study " (the Rhetoric of 
 Aristotle) '' with peculiar care, and throw the matter 
 of it into synoptic tables." ^^ At the age of thirteen he 
 
 ®^ Autobiography ^ p. 49. ^^ Ibid., p. 5. 
 
 82 Ibid., p. 179. 8^ Ibid., p. 11. 
 
 s^ Ibid.., p. 135. 
 
io8 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 went through a complete course of political economy, 
 and before he was sixteen he had read Bentham's 
 Traites de Legislation, and decided that by the 
 philosopher of Queen's Square '' all previous moralists 
 were superseded." ^^ 
 
 The extraordinary effect produced by this relentless 
 system of cram is well illustrated by a confession 
 which Mill himself makes. " It did not seem to 
 me more strange that English people should believe 
 what I did not, than that the men I read of in 
 Herodotus should have done so." ^^ Doubtless in 
 after years Mill believed himself peculiarly fitted 
 by this esoteric course of education to ascertain the 
 conclusions of unbiassed consciousness, but sceptical 
 critics may suggest that in his mind the strong 
 •influence of his father's personality took the place 
 usually filled by a more complex series of 
 impressions. 
 
 It is not perhaps surprising that although, as he 
 is careful to inform us, '' I neither estimated myself 
 highly nor lowly : I did not estimate myself at 
 all," ^^ people sometimes found him "disagreeably 
 self-conceited." We all know the unmitigated 
 disgust with which older people find themselves 
 overcome in argument by an awkward boy in 
 his teens, and how they are not always very 
 scrupulous in the means they employ to turn the 
 tables. By virtue of their superior knowledge of the 
 world they generally succeed for the time in putting 
 the young aspirant at a disadvantage. But the 
 
 ^^ Autobiography^ p. 65. s'' Ibid.^ p. 43. ^^ Ibid., p. 33. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 109 
 
 latter's turn soon comes, and his adversaries are 
 then probably extremely sorry that they provoked 
 the combat. 
 
 In truth, by this process of forcing Mill acquired 
 and always retained a shade of pedantry. '' The 
 education which my father gave me," he says, " was 
 in itself much more fitted for training me to know 
 thg,n to doy ^^ In his mature years we find him 
 deprecating excessive praise of Caesar, on the 
 ground that he subverted a " free government," ®^ 
 and in one of the very rare passages in which he 
 betrays any enthusiasm, the inspiring subject is 
 ^' the idea that the infinitesimal calculus is a con- 
 ception analogous to the corpuscular hypothesis 
 in physics." ^^ 
 
 But it must be admitted that the amount of know- 
 ledge which the youthful Mill acquired by the process 
 was surprising. In spite of the demands made on 
 his time by his father, who did not scruple on one 
 occasion to make him read through twenty-one 
 years' numbers of the Edinburgh Review for the 
 paternal benefit, he succeeded in amassing a store 
 of learning which made him a most formidable 
 disputant in the debating societies to which he soon 
 ardently attached himself. His character at this 
 time is a strange mixture of self-confidence and 
 humilit}^ ; he has an academic positiveness, combined 
 
 89 Autobiography, p. 37. 
 
 9" Conite and Positivism, p. 190. He has, of course, the 
 precedent ot Milton, but Milton is writing an avowed polemic, 
 and seems to apologize for the argument. 
 
 9^ Ibid., p. 194. 
 
iio TJionias Carlylc and foJni Stuart Mill, 
 
 with a strong conviction of the mediocrity of his 
 natural gifts. 
 
 In estimating the influences at work upon Mill's 
 education, his visit to France must not be forgotten. 
 It does not correspond exactly with Carlyle's intro- 
 duction to German literature, for Mill was in no 
 particular trouble of mind at the time, and seems to 
 have begun the study of French rather as a duty than 
 as a refuge from despair. But the impression made 
 upon him by French thought and modes of life was 
 profound. It was from France that he afterwards 
 drew his inspiration, and the contrast pictured in the 
 Autohiograpliy^^'^ between the intellectual conditions 
 of France and England is by no means flattering to 
 the latter country. In the year 182 1, as has been 
 noted, he made acquaintance with the great work of 
 Bentham, and was entirely overcome by it. About 
 this time, too, he was much in the society of the 
 patriarch himself, so that, notwithstanding his 
 anxiety''"' to disclaim the reputation of a Benthamite, 
 we must take leave to doubt the complete inde- 
 pendence of views which corresponded so strikingly 
 with those of the author of the Traitc's dc Lc'g/s/a- 
 tion. In 1823 Mill entered the service of the East 
 India Company, in which he remained thirty-five 
 years. 
 
 Just at this period Btntham was establishing 
 the original IVestiuiiistcr Rcvitm', as the organ of 
 those uncompromising Radicals who were dissatisfied 
 
 ^^ Atitobiography^ pp. 59, 60. 
 '•'=* Ibid., p. 105. 
 
TJie Apostle of Benthamism. 1 1 1 
 
 with tlie half-hearted tone of the Edinburgh. The 
 appearance of the Westmmster will long be remem- 
 bered as a literary event by the amusing outburst 
 of indignation which shook the pages of the great 
 critical organ when it found the tables turned upon 
 it in a most audacious way. Not content with 
 expressing opinions opposed to those of the Whig 
 n^gazine, the founders of the Westminster went to 
 the length of publishing a scathing criticism from 
 the pen of James Mill upon the whole career of the 
 Edinburgh. It was on this occasion that Mill per- 
 formed the office of literary scavenger to his father, 
 by reading through the twenty-one volumes of the 
 Edinburgh which had by that time appeared. 
 
 In the pages of the new magazine Mill began to 
 attempt the reformation of the world on the lines 
 of Bentham. He appears to have thought that a 
 persistent application of logic would convince people 
 that the prejudices which they had inherited from 
 their forefathers ought to be immediately discarded. 
 His ambition was, at least mainly, intellectual. 
 " While fully recognizing the superior excellence of 
 unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we did not 
 expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct 
 action en those sentiments, but from the effect of 
 educated intellect enlightening the selfish feelings." "' 
 And again, " My zeal was as yet little else, at that 
 period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions." "'' 
 The immediate application which was to be made 
 
 '" Autobiography^ p. iii. 
 '^•' Ibid., p. loy. 
 
112 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 of the teachings of the new apostles was the deve- 
 lopment of representative government, and the pro- 
 motion of unlimited freedom of discussion. ^"^ It was, 
 perhaps, rather a scanty foundation upon which to 
 build a regenerated society, but it seemed sufficient 
 to its supporters at the time. 
 
 Meanwhile Mill had worn off a little of his 
 aloofness by joining, or rather forming, one or two 
 societies for the discussion of various questions, and 
 had thus lost somewhat of the pedantry which, as he 
 himself confesses, distinguished his earliest efforts. 
 
 These occupations and objects carried him on with 
 apparent satisfaction till his twenty-first year. Then 
 occurred that crisis in his mental history which is so 
 well described in the fifth chapter of the Autobio- 
 graphy^ and which . really decided the direction of 
 his life. He fell into a state of extreme depression, 
 partly mental, partly physical, induced, probably, by 
 overwork. Those who have had any experience of 
 the distressing effects of nervous exhaustion will be 
 able to sympathize with Mill. The illness, for such 
 it really is, usually proceeds entirely from physical 
 causes, but with a cruel caprice generally expends 
 its chief force on the mind, leaving the body, to all 
 appearance, untouched. The mind's eye becomes 
 hopelessly distorted, every object is seen in its 
 worst possible light, mankind in general appear to 
 be hovering on the brink of the grave, every post 
 seems to bring the news of a friend's death, the 
 smallest spot on the skin is an incipient cancer, and 
 ^^ Autobiography, p. io6. 
 
TJie Apostle of Benthamism. 1 1 3 
 
 a feeling of the general futility of all things takes 
 possession of the sufferer. The precise form in 
 which the attack came to Mill is best described 
 in his own words. '' In this frame of mind it 
 occurred to me to put the question directly to 
 myself: 'Suppose that all your objects in life were 
 realized ; that all the changes in institutions and 
 opinions which you are looking forward to could be 
 completely effected at this very instant, would this 
 be a great joy and happiness to you ? ' And an 
 irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 
 < No.' " '^^ This answer plunged him into despair. 
 He had no friends in whom to confide ; according 
 to all his previous beliefs he had been furnished 
 completely with armour against such a miserable 
 catastrophe as this, and yet he had failed ignomini- 
 ously. The machinery was all in perfect working 
 order, but there was no work to be done. '' I was 
 thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the com- 
 mencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship 
 and rudder, but no sail." '^^ 
 
 Not only had his philosophy failed in bringing 
 him, or allowing him to fall, into this condition ; it 
 now proved entirely unable to extricate him. The 
 deliverance came in a wholly unscientific way. 
 Instead of proving to himself by a correct process of 
 reasoning that his condition was absurd, and that 
 there was no foundation for his dissatisfaction, — 
 in fact, demonstrating that it did not exist,— Mill 
 
 ^'^ Autobiography, p. 134. 
 ^^ Ibid., p. 139. 
 
1 1 4 TJionias Carlylc and John Stuart Jllill. 
 
 continued to lie helpless till a sudden flash of 
 insight stirred the darkness. " I was reading, 
 accidentally, Marmontel's Me moires^ and came to 
 the passage which relates his father's death, the 
 distressed position of the family, and the sudden 
 inspiration by wliich he, then a mere bo}^, felt and 
 made them feel that he would be everything to them 
 — would supply the place of all that they had lost. 
 A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came 
 over me, and I was moved to tears. From this 
 moment my burden grew lighter." "'' It seemed that 
 deep below that artificial mass of learning there was 
 a human heart after all, which refused to be satisfied 
 with the pursuit of its own happiness. " The only 
 chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end 
 external to it, as the purpose of life." ^^ Moreover, 
 he had come to see that humanity was not solely 
 composed of intellectual faculties. " 1 ceased to 
 attach almost exclusive importance to tlie ordering 
 of outward circumstances, and the training of the 
 human being for speculation and action." '^^^ He 
 found that man had a soul as well as a brain, and 
 that spiritual culture was the necessary counterpart 
 of intellectual gymnastics. 
 
 In both points, then, in the nature of the relief 
 and the way in which it came. Mill's philosophy had 
 received a severe shock. The answer to his difficulties 
 had been, not some supremely ingenious triumph of 
 mental science, whereby the enemy was frightened 
 
 •'•* Autohioo;rap]n\ p. 140. ^^^^ Ih'uL, p. 143. 
 
 1^" Ibid., p." 142. ' 
 
The Apostle of Benlhainism. 1 1 5 
 
 off" for ever, but the command to turn his eyes away 
 from study of himself to the contemplation of a great 
 moral object. And this answer had not been the 
 result of a carefully worked out scientific process, 
 but liad come by a flash of intuition. No wonder 
 that Mill felt his confidence in his " system" shaken — 
 in fact, that he renounced it as a system altogether, 
 and substituted for it " a conviction that the true 
 system was something much more complex and 
 many-sided than I had previously had any idea of, 
 and that its office was to supply, not a set of model 
 institutions, but principles from which the institu- 
 tions suitable to any given circumstances might be 
 deduced." ^^^ He found that Coleridge and Words- 
 worth, and even Shelley, were as necessary as 
 Hartley and Condillac, and it is characteristic of the 
 circle in which he had previously moved that, though 
 the most peaceable of men, he was obliged, by this 
 conclusion, to break with one at least of its 
 members.*"' He became aware of a wider range 
 of sympathies in the men whose acquaintance he 
 now made, and it is probably to the happy issue 
 of this crisis that we owe that broad appreciation 
 of all the sides of a vexed question which so 
 honourably distinguishes Mill's writings. One of 
 the acquaintanceships which he made about this 
 time claims our special attention, for the other 
 party to the relation was no less a person than 
 Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 '"^ Autobiography^ p. i6i. 
 J'« IbUL, p. 1 50. 
 
1 1 6 Thonms Carlyle and JoJui Stuart Mill. 
 
 The friendship, for it amounted to friendship at 
 one time, between Mill and Carlyle, is more fitly 
 recorded in our account of the former than the latter, 
 for while there is no evidence that the prophet of 
 Craigenputtock was in any w^ay influenced by the 
 disciple of Bentham, there is good reason to believe 
 that, for a time at least, there was considerable 
 influence the other way. One of Carlyle's vivid 
 word-portraits gives us a good notion of Mill at this 
 time. " A slender, rather tall and elegant youth, 
 with small, clear, Roman-nosed face, two small, 
 earnestly-smiling ey'es, modest, remarkably gifted 
 with precision of utterance, enthusiastic, yet lucid, 
 calm ; not a great, yet distinctly a gifted and amiable 
 youth." ^^^ It is essentially the same Mill as that 
 depicted for us in the statue on the Thames 
 Embankment. 
 
 The circumstance which brought the two together 
 was the appearance, in the Examiner of 183 1, of 
 a series of articles by Mill entitled The Spirit of 
 the Age. Some expressions respecting the ultimate 
 end of political institutions, as the discovery of the 
 best and wisest men in a nation, led Carlyle to 
 exclaim, *' Here is a new Mystic," and, in spite of 
 Mill's disclaimer, he persisted for some time in the 
 opinion. At first the poetical form in which Carlyle's 
 teaching was embodied hid its real value from the 
 scientific mind of Mill, but after his mental attitude 
 changed he received the message eagerly, not, how- 
 ever, " as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to 
 ^^^^ First Fo)i}\ vol. ii., p. 190. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism, 1 1 7 
 
 animate." ^^^'* The estimate of his new friend formed 
 by the younj^cr man is interesting, and puts with 
 admirable clearness what isperhaj^s the true relation- 
 ship between the two. 
 
 " J (lid not, however, flctm myself a competent judge of 
 Carlylf*. I fe-lt that he was a f)0(;t, and that I was not; that 
 h(; was a man f;f intuition, which I was not ; and that as such, 
 ii^; not only saw many thin^^s long before me, which I could 
 (jnly when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and 
 prove, but that it was hi^fily proj>able he could see many 
 things which were not visibht to me <-.ven after they were 
 point'td out. I kn«-.w that 1 cf)uld not see round him, and 
 cf;uld never be certain that I saw over him ; and 1 \\('.\('.x pro 
 sumed to judge him with any d<-fiiiiteness, until he was inter- 
 preted to me by onr; greatly the superior of us both — who was 
 more a poet than he, and more a thinker than 1 — whose nature 
 inchided his, and infinitely more." ""' 
 
 This exceptionally gifted person was probably 
 Mrs. Taylor. 
 
 At first Mill w^as entirely overcome by the superior 
 genius of his friend, as he had once been by the 
 genius of Bentham. He entered upon a long cor- 
 respondence after Carlyle's return to Scotland in 
 1832, and we- cannot but regret that the letters of 
 this period, which would throw so much light upon 
 the relationship of two such striking figures, should 
 be unattainable by tlie outside pubfic. Mr. Froude 
 seems to hint that although Carlyle's part of the 
 correspondence is lost for ever. Mill's letters may 
 possibly some day be published. May it be so; and 
 without commentary. 
 
 i"'' Autohio^raphy, p. 175. 
 »"« Ibid., p. 176. 
 
1 1 8 Thomas Carlyle and John Stitart Mill. 
 
 A little incident which happened just after Carlyle's 
 final settlement in London has become classical. 
 Mill had borrowed the manuscript of the first 
 volume of the French Revolution^ being ardently 
 interested in the subject as well as the author. One 
 evening he appeared at Cheyne Row, a ghastly 
 picture of despair, to announce that through his 
 carelessness the volume had been destroyed. The 
 whole picture is very pathetic. Carlyle, though the 
 loss was crushing, for he knew what it meant, 
 heroicalty put himself aside, and did his best to 
 comfort his agonized friend. The latter, with a 
 want of tact which was all his life one of his fail- 
 ings, sta3'cd for hours reiterating his apologies, poor 
 Carlyle being only anxious on his own part to be 
 alone with his wife, that they might have a good cry 
 over the sorrow. At last Mill went, and after the 
 door had closed the first words Carlyle said were, 
 " Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up ; we 
 must endeavour to hide from him how very serious 
 this business is to us." ^"'' After a piteous night he 
 found resignation, and determined with indomitable 
 resolution t^ begin the task again. The pecuniary 
 loss — for Carlyle was within measurable distance of 
 want — Mill honourably insisted on making good, 
 much against his friend's wish ; but the mental and 
 physical labour involved in a re-writing could only 
 find its reward in the discipline which it aftbrded to 
 Carlyle himself. 
 
 Indeed, so close was the intimacy, that Mill at 
 ^^'' Scco7id Forty, vol. i., p. 28. 
 
The Apostle of Denthaniism. 119 
 
 one time seems to have contemplated transferring 
 a part of his exegetical powers from the writings of 
 Bentham to those of Carlyle.^"^ It is impossible to 
 speculate as to what would have been the result of a 
 combination of such diverse qualities ; probably it 
 was far better that Carlyle should be left, with all 
 his obscurity, to speak for himself. 
 • But the friendship was not to last. Mill believed 
 himself to have done the French Revolution a 
 substantial good by a well-timed and enthusiastic 
 review of it in the Westminster ; and when Carlyle's 
 pamphlet on Chartism was written, he offered, 
 though the circumstances made the offer not too 
 flattering, to let it appear in the final number of 
 the same magazine. As time went on, however, it 
 became evident that Mill's heart was still with 
 Benthamism, and Carlyle's teaching grew too un- 
 compromising to allow of its acceptance by orthodox 
 Radicals. Upon the publication of The Nigger 
 Question Mill openly declared war, in terms which 
 Carlyle dismissed with curt contempt.'"^ Hencefor- 
 ward the friendship was at an end. How far it 
 ultimately influenced Mill's character • it is very 
 difficult to say. We find, scattered up and down in 
 his works, frequent references to Carlyle's teach- 
 ing, but nearly always in a tone which seems to 
 argue, at the least, considerable doubt as to its 
 wisdom. The only event which can with safety be 
 pronounced to have had a lasting effect upon Mill's 
 
 '"^ Autobiography , p. 243. 
 ^"'■^ Second Forty, p. 28. 
 
I20 TJio))i(U Civlylc and JoIdi Shtar! Mil/. 
 
 iiiiiul, .'iHt 1 llic |);i:.^.iiii; ol (he iiiciiImI crisis (l(\S('ril)('(l 
 in \\\v lirdi clKiptcr of (he .1 tilohio^rn/^liy, is thai to 
 wliicli we iiiiisl now ;illu(l(", liis ;i((|ii;iint;Mi('(' with 
 Mrs. I'n.ylor. 
 
 it is soincvvhnt of n vc\\c{ to fiinl (hat, notwith- 
 staiuHni;' the ("haracd r of his early traiiiinj^', Mill 
 was still eapal)l(> of liillinL; in love. When and how 
 {\\c cailicr rccliiij; whirh he en(ert;iine(l lor the wife 
 «>r liis friend passed into (he sdoni^ci" i)assioii which 
 he aihnitted to hiinsell' alter the death k)[' her hus- 
 band, is a |)S3'eholoi;ii\d ([nest ion whieh it woukl 
 be liardly piolitahle to diseiiss. I'Vom the tone in 
 whieh the relercMiees to her in the yliilohioi^m/iJiy 
 are written, we nia\' infer that he was, at least alter 
 her husband's death, in lo\c with her to tlu^ fullest 
 (>\tent of the phr.ise. We have surniisiHl that she is 
 (he person ti> whom he makers allusion as one ** who 
 was more a poet than he" (Carlyle), " and more «i 
 thinker than I." In ant)lher place he eomparis hei", 
 in her eaiK da\s, to Shelley: "but in thon^ht and 
 intelliH't, Slu Il(>y, so far as his poweis were deve- 
 l(^pc(l in his short life, was but a child compared 
 with what sh(> ultimately b(>canu\" "" With the 
 example o^ ('(Muti^ belore us, we shall be cartful 
 in ai-ceptini; thi^ te.-timony e\(ai o( a scientific 
 philoso|iher, on such a subject, as literal criticism. 
 Mrs. Taylor never jniblisluHl anythiui;' in hw own 
 name ; we arc^ therefore unable to WW how far Mill's 
 subsecjiuMit writings were inlhuMictHl, and in what 
 diriu'tion, Im' this riaiiarkable coudMiialion o( Carlyle 
 
The Apostle of Benthaniiwi. i 2 i 
 
 and Shelley, lint, with George Kliot for an instanre 
 of woman's powers, wf- cannot assume that Mill's 
 testimony is sr>lely due to the' intoxicating atmo- 
 sphere of love. 
 
 In 185 I Mill was made haj)|jy hy a marriaj:^e with 
 Mrs. 'J'ayloi-, whom the death of liej' first hushand 
 had set Wi-w In 1^58, upon the incori)oration of 
 ffje government of India with the general adminis- 
 tration of the State, he retired frr)m a service in 
 which he had laboured faithfully for many yr-ars, 
 with the most flattering expressions of approval. 
 He had some tim(! before been able, to his satisfac- 
 tir.n, " to indulge the inclination, natural to thinking 
 persons when the age of boyish vanity is once 
 past, for limiting my own society to a very few 
 persons."'" lie now ]jre[jared, in furtherance of this 
 resolution, to set off, in company with his wife, for a 
 prolonged visit to the South of Europe. liut his 
 hopes were cruelly frustrated by the death of his 
 crjmpanion in the first winter of their travel. Hence- 
 forward Avignon, the place of her burial, was his 
 real home. lie bought a small property there, and, 
 in the isolation to which his character had always 
 tended, sat down, almost alone, to his literary 
 labours. Once only did he emerge, for any 
 lengthened period, from his retreat. In the year 
 1865 he apj)eared like a spectre from the grave 
 (for the general impression was that he had been 
 some time deadj to take his seat as member for 
 Westminster in the House of Commons. '\\m\ 
 '" Autobiography^ \). 227. 
 
122 Thoinas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 manner of his election, and the conception he 
 formed of his duties, are no less creditable to himself 
 than to the electors who agreed to his terms. The 
 request to stand came quite spontaneously, and Mill 
 would only consent on the terms that he should do 
 no personal canvassing, and should not be bound 
 to represent the local interests of his constituency 
 in the House. The scene in which he confessed, in 
 the presence of a large meeting of working-men, to 
 the charge of having imputed to the working classes 
 that they were '' given to lying," is too well known 
 to need description. But the passage in which he 
 describes the plan which he followed during his three 
 sessions is well worth quoting, as a silent criticism 
 upon the motives which actuate the bulk of 
 politicians. ''When I had gained the ear of the 
 House . . . the idea I proceeded on was that when 
 anything was likely to be as well done, or sufficiently 
 well done, by other people, there was no necessity 
 for me to meddle with it." ^^^ But on subjects which 
 few would incur the odium of dealing with, although 
 their genuine principles should have led them that 
 way. Mill stood up in unflinching advocacy of the 
 Radical cause. 
 
 As a matter of course he lost his seat at the next 
 election, and turned back with perfect equanimity to 
 his Avignonese seclusion. He remained, as he had 
 long been, the inspirer and counsellor of the Radical 
 party till his death in 1870. We have seen what 
 was Mill's opinion of Carlyle. It will hardly do to 
 ^^^ Autobiography^ p. 284. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 123 
 
 close this sketch of Mill's life without recording the 
 final impression which he made upon the mind of his 
 quondam friend, although the passage is one which 
 exhibits Carlyle's characteristic fault of intolerance 
 in its strongest light. 
 
 "You have lost nothing by missing the Autobiography of 
 Mill. I have never read a more uninteresting book, nor 1 
 should say a sillier, by a man of sense, integrity, and serious- 
 ness of mind. The penny-a-liners were very busy with it, 
 I believe, for a week or two, but were evidently pausing in 
 doubt and difficulty by the time the second edition came out. 
 It is wholly the life of a logic-chopping engine, little more 
 of human in it than if it had been done by a thing of 
 mechanized iron. Autobiography of a steam-engine, perhaps, 
 you may sometimes read it. As a mournful psychical curi- 
 osity, but in no other point of view, can it interest anybod}^ 
 I suppose it will deliver us henceforth from the cock-a-leerie 
 crow about ' the Great Thinker of his Age.' Welcome, though 
 inconsiderable ! The thought of poor Mill altogether, and of 
 his life and history in this poor muddy world, give me real 
 pain and sorrow." ^^^ 
 
 Upon this estimate we shall take leave to differ 
 from Carlyle. It may well have been that, to a man 
 of his spiritual experience and insight, the record of 
 Mill's life afforded no instruction. But to average 
 mortals the history of a man of only ordinary 
 abiHties, who has raised himself, by patient perse- 
 verance and willingness to learn, to a position from 
 which he can survey almost the whole continent of 
 scientific knowledge, and draw from it such treasures 
 as he firmly believes will be serviceable to his fellow- 
 men, who affords an example of unwearied conscien- 
 
 ^13 Second Fo?i}', p. 420. 
 
124 Thomas Carlyle and Jo Jin Stuart Mill. 
 
 tiousness such as few men have to show, who is, 
 in all the relations of life, dutiful, affectionate, and 
 sympathetic, — such a history will never be without 
 value. 
 
 II. 
 
 We have now to consider what was the teaching 
 of Mill, both generally upon the conduct of life, and, 
 to a certain extent, specifically in its various depart- 
 ments. In estimating the teaching of a man of 
 science it would not be permissible for a writer who 
 treats his subject from a literary point of view to 
 enter into a discussion of the abstract soundness of 
 scientific doctrines. It is rather his business to 
 consider those doctrines in their relationship to life, 
 and to endeavour to gauge their effect, actual and 
 potential, upon the world. 
 
 It is fairly clear, from expressions in his writings, 
 that Mill regarded the state of a man's intellectual 
 faculties as the key to his character.^^* If we have 
 taken anything like a true view of Mill himself, the 
 maxim, whether sound or not as a general rule, 
 holds good in his case. The circumstances of his 
 life show that on almost all occasions he was the 
 slave of his intellectual convictions. It becomes, 
 therefore, important to summarise these convictions. 
 And it will be almost a matter of course to begin 
 
 114 
 
 Cf., e.g., Logic, bk. vi., c. xi., § 2, and Benthatn, 
 "Dissertations and Discussions," vol. i., p. 357. "The first 
 question in regard to any man of speculation is, what is his 
 theory of human life ? " 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 125 
 
 with his views upon the general system of the 
 universe. 
 
 The universe may be considered, according to the 
 general consent of philosophers, under two apparently 
 distinct aspects, variously expressed as the Internal 
 and the External, the Ego and the Non-Ego, Mind 
 and Matter. With regard to the external or material 
 pcrrtion of the universe Mill accepted the psycho- 
 logical theory, which, postulating a mind capable 
 of expectation, and also certain well-known laws of 
 association of ideas, explains matter as causes or 
 groups of causes, producing or tending to produce 
 sensations. '' Matter, then, may be defined a 
 Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked 
 whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the 
 questioner accepts this view of it. If he does, I 
 believe in matter : and so do all Berkeleians. In 
 any other sense, than this I do not." ^^^ The 
 determination of the transcendentalist philosophers 
 to see behind the phenomena of matter, a province of 
 noumena, to which phenomena owe their existence, 
 Mill regarded as nothing more than a conclusion 
 induced, through the powerful influence of associa- 
 tion, by a consideration of the law of causation. 
 
 With regard to mind, Mill was much less sure. 
 Memory was to him an ultimate, inexplicable fact ; 
 but he inclined to the psychological view of mind 
 as a series of sensations in some way unified by 
 this inexplicable fact of memory.^^*^ As this Memory 
 
 1^-^ Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy^ p. 233. 
 116 Ibid., pp. 248, 251. 
 
126 Thomas Carlyle and John Shiart MilL 
 
 may at any time reproduce past sensations without 
 any apparent reference to the existing conditions of 
 matter, a certain addition has to be made to com- 
 plete the theory. Accordingly, mind is said to 
 consist of a series of feelings, with a background 
 of possibilities of feeling. To this theory Mill, 
 though he expressly declines complete adherence 
 to it, did clearly very strongly lean. 
 
 With regard to man's position in this universe. 
 Mill named himself a necessitarian, but a necessi- 
 tarian who was nothing of a fatalist. The doctrine 
 of necessity he regarded only as a form of state- 
 ment of the law of causation. Given all the 
 antecedents, the consequences could be unerringly 
 predicted ; the reason why the law of causation 
 was denied in connection with human conduct being, 
 simply, that the antecedents were countless in 
 number, and hard to discover. But in the causes 
 of a particular action Mill by no means omitted 
 to include the volitions of the individual, merely 
 considering them as themselves part of a chain of 
 causation. ''His" (a man's) ''character is formed 
 by his circumstances (including among these his 
 particular organization), but his own desire to 
 mould it in a particular way is one of those 
 circumstances, and by no means one of the least 
 influential." ^^"^ And the peculiarity of this desire, 
 that which gives it its significant position of 
 individuahty, is that it is formed mainly by 
 
 ^""^ Logic, bk. vi., chap, i., §§2, 3; Sir William Ha?nilto?i's 
 Philosophy^ c. xxvi. ; and Autobiography ^ p. 169. 
 
The Apostle of BenthaTnism. 127 
 
 things exterior to the organization, viz., by expe- 
 rience. 
 
 Beyond this point Mill was an agnostic. Like 
 his father, he " yielded to the conviction that, con- 
 cerning the origin of things, nothing whatever can 
 be known." ^^^ Through all his life he showed the 
 utmost tenderness for those who built upon the 
 belief of a divine agency as the creative force of 
 the universe, provided that they did not make their 
 belief the basis of a scientific polemic. On such 
 occasions, of course, he felt bound to point out 
 what he deemed the flaws in their process. But 
 he never made any dogmatic assertion of atheism. 
 
 It is not very difficult to see how this scientific 
 creed translated itself into Mill's system of ethics. 
 His belief was that man's existence consisted of 
 sensations and possibilities of sensations. Regarded 
 in their ultimate effects, sensations could be divided 
 into two classes, pleasurable and painful, with, 
 perhaps, a third class of indifferent. Not only 
 did Mill believe that the true end of ethics w^as to 
 maximise the amount of pleasurable sensations in 
 the world, and to minimise that of the painful, but 
 he believed also that this was the object which every 
 man, so far as regarded his own case, consciously or 
 unconsciously set before himself. The point to be 
 noticed was, however, that few people avowed this 
 object, the majority disguising it under forms which, 
 for various reasons, they preferred to open acknow- 
 
 ^^s Autobiography^ p. 39. 
 
128 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 ledgment. And moreover some people were much 
 wiser than others in the means adopted. 
 
 " By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of 
 pain ; by unhappiness, pain, and the absence of pleasure." ^^^ 
 
 So far Mill is plain enough, but he is not quite so 
 clear when he comes to the proof of his assertion 
 that all men are really seeking happiness. 
 
 "Questions about ends are, in other words, questions 
 what things are desirable. ... In like manner, I apprehend, 
 the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is 
 desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end 
 which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in 
 theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing 
 could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can 
 be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that 
 each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires 
 his own happiness." ^^^ 
 
 It must be painfully evident to anyone at all 
 acquainted with the amenities of controversy that in 
 these passages lie ample opportunities for the most 
 unprofitable verbal wrangling. But in such a funda- 
 mental matter it is allowable for a critic to make 
 one or two observations, having due regard to the 
 dangers ahead. 
 
 Utilitarianism was written as a popular ex- 
 position of the doctrine from which the work takes 
 its name. It must be presumed therefore that the 
 author intended his language to be understood in its 
 ordinary, — not, where the two senses disagree, in 
 its technical meaning. If this view be correct. Mill 
 
 ^^^ Utilita?ianism, p. lo. 
 120 Ibid., pp. 52, 53. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 129 
 
 appears to have overlooked the ambiguity to which 
 his use of the word '' desirable " gives rise. Accord- 
 ing to him, the thing desirable is that which is 
 actually desired. But that is not the ordinary use of 
 the term. A thing which is '' desirable " is not that 
 which is desired, but that which ought to be desired. 
 It is no more true, according to the ordinar}^ use 
 of language, that " desirable " means *' that which 
 is desired," than that '' considerable " means '' that 
 which is considered." In each case the word, 
 although it may have had originally a purely logical 
 sense, has long since come, by a process of transition 
 with which all philologists are familiar, to acquire an 
 ethical, or, as Bentham would have said, a " deonto- 
 logical" meaning. I admit that the introduction of 
 the idea of ''ought" involves, the whole question of 
 ethical philosophy, but the point is whether Mill was 
 justified in quietly passing over all that question. 
 As it stands, his assertion is purely dogmatic. 
 
 Again, is it a fact that '' each person, so far as he 
 believes it to be attainable, desires his own happi- 
 ness " ? This question resolves itself into two : the 
 question of object, and the question of quantity. In 
 the first place, experience seems to contradict flatly 
 the dictum that each person desires his own happi- 
 ness. Putting aside the cases of those who deny 
 the assertion with their lips, — which denial is as 
 much entitled to be believed as any other testimony 
 of human beings to their own mental condition, — we 
 may look at the instances of those whose actions 
 seem to contradict the theory. A sane person who 
 
 9 
 
130 Thomas Carlyle and John Shtart Mill. 
 
 deliberately does an act which he knows to be 
 inconsistent with his happiness, can hardly be said, 
 in the ordinary use of language, to desire happiness. 
 Take the case of Charlotte Corday. She conceived 
 it to be her duty to assassinate Marat. She knew 
 perfectly well that the immediate consequence of 
 her act would be death by the guillotine. There is 
 no evidence that she was leading an unhappy life 
 before her resolution was taken, and there is very 
 strong evidence that she had no belief in a future 
 state in which compensation for loss of happiness 
 in this world would be given. Yet she deliberately 
 executed her purpose, and as deliberately awaited 
 the consequences. On no theory, except a theory 
 which begs the very question at issue, can she be 
 accounted insane. If happiness be, as Mill defines 
 it, "pleasure and the absence of pain," Charlotte 
 Corday did not desire happiness. 
 
 But if it be said that men desire happiness only 
 so far as the feeling is not counterbalanced by some 
 alternative desire, then the limitation '' so far as he 
 believes it to be attainable" is unmeaning. "Desire" 
 is no longer an absolute, but a relative expression, 
 representing only a conviction that a certain thing, 
 would be pleasant if it could be had. There seems, 
 however, no reason for limiting the feeling by the 
 possibilities of the case. I may desire a thing very 
 ardently, though I may know that I have not the 
 slightest chance of attaining it. 
 
 It must be carefully remembered that Mill did not, 
 in his mature years, propose happiness, either of 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 131 
 
 the individual or the community, as the conscious 
 standard of action. This had been his view in the 
 earlier days of his adhesion to Benthamism, but he 
 discarded it before attaining his intellectual majority. 
 Utility, by which famous term Mill means con- 
 duciveness to happiness, is only to be the ultimate 
 test to which doubtful questions are referred. 
 
 " Those who adopt utility as a standard can seldom apply 
 it truly except through the secondary principles ; those who 
 reject it generally do no more than erect those secondary 
 principles into first principles. It is when two or more of the 
 secondary principles conflict, that a direct appeal to some 
 first principle becomes necessary ; and then commences the 
 practical importance of the utilitarian controversy ; which 
 is, in other respects, a question of arrangement and logical 
 subordination rather than of practice." ^^^ 
 
 The " secondary principles " referred to in this 
 passage are the intuitive ideas of justice, truth, right 
 and wrong, mercy, revenge, by which the conduct of 
 the average man is really governed. It does occur 
 to me here to wonder whether the differences 
 between the moral views of the two men who are 
 the subject of this essay have not been greatly 
 exaggerated. It was probably Carlyle's private 
 opinion that the steady pursuit of the ends com- 
 monly understood by the terms justice, right, truth, 
 and such like, would in the long run lead to the 
 happiness both of the individual and the race ; but 
 if he entertained this view, it was as a speculation 
 only, and his profound conviction of the mistake of 
 making happiness the aim would lead him to sup- 
 
 ^21 Beniham^ "Dissertations," vol. i., p. 385. 
 
132 Thomas Carlyle and John Stua7^t Mill. 
 
 press any such opinion, lest it might weaken his 
 invective against the Benthamite doctrine. Mill, on 
 the other hand, seems to admit that the ordinary 
 intuitive process by which men shape their lives 
 does, in healthy cases, tend towards an unconscious 
 pursuit of utility ; but his deep distrust of the in- 
 tuitive process led him to exaggerate the importance 
 of a T^ko^ which, in his view, could be attained 
 only by experimental methods. But it must be 
 admitted that on one point, the famous doctrine of 
 Entsagen, the difference seems irreconcilable. Mill 
 could not appreciate renunciation unless it resulted, 
 or at least was intended to result, in the happines'g 
 of others. " All honour to those who can abnegate 
 for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when 
 by such renunciation they contribute worthily to 
 increase the amount of happiness in the world ; but 
 he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other 
 purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than 
 the ascetic mounted on his pillar." ^^^ Whether or 
 not Carlyle regarded renunciation as an act to be 
 ^' admired," is a difficult question to answer ; but it 
 . is quite clear from the passage in Sartor that he 
 looked upon it as the beginning of the higher life, 
 quite apart from any considerations of happiness. 
 
 It is worth while noticing that a few years before 
 the publication of Utilitarianism Mill seems to 
 have been attracted to another formula as an ex- 
 pression of the final aim of conduct. This was the 
 celebrated maxim of Wilhelm von Humboldt, that 
 ^22 Utilitarianism, p. 23. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 133 
 
 '' the end of man, or that which is prescribed by 
 the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, is the 
 highest and most harmonious development of his 
 powers to a complete and consistent whole." ^^^ This 
 maxim was, however, ultimately discarded for the 
 older standard, though it was destined to be natural- 
 ized in England by another foster-father. Readers 
 of Mr. Matthew Arnold's prose works will have no 
 difficulty in tracing its presence. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, it is necessary to remark 
 that Mill gives a very wide as well as lofty meaning 
 to the word " pleasure," considered as the founda- 
 tion of happiness. In addition to the admitted 
 stomachic or animal pleasures, there are the plea- 
 sures to be derived from a contemplation of *' the 
 objects of nature, the achievements of art, the 
 imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the 
 ways of mankind past and present, and their pro- 
 spects in the future." ^^* And the happiness kept in 
 mind by the utihtarian is not his own, but the 
 general happiness. " I must again repeat, what the 
 assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice 
 to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the 
 utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct 
 is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all 
 concerned." ^^^ Unfortunate^, however. Mill does 
 not appear to resolve a very elementary difficulty 
 on this point, which presents itself as an insuperable 
 barrier to the understanding of the " Greatest 
 
 ^^^ Liberty, p. 33. ^^^ Ibid.y p. 24. 
 
 ^^^ Utilitarianism^ p. 20. 
 
134 Thomas Carlyle and John Shear t Mill. 
 
 Happiness" principle by the ordinary mind. 
 " Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number." 
 Yes, but suppose there is a question between the 
 happiness and the number. Of two alternative 
 acts, let one produce x happiness divided amongst 
 six people, and the other 2x happiness divided 
 amongst four people. Which is to be preferred, 
 on the utilitarian principle ? I am the proprietor 
 of two theatres, one of which holds two hundred 
 people, the other five hundred. In the former only 
 does the law" allow me to provide free entertain- 
 ments. It is a question whether I am to give a 
 free performance in the small theatre to two hun- 
 dred charity children, to each of whom the amount 
 of happiness afforded would be infinitely greater 
 than that derived by an ordinary paying theatre- 
 goer from the same performance ; or whether, by 
 playing in the larger theatre, I shall afford pleasure 
 to five hundred persons instead of two hundred. 
 It may be that, measured by Bentham's Table, the 
 gross amount of pleasure will be greater in the 
 former case, which will accordingly produce the 
 Greatest Happiness, but the alternative gives happi- 
 ness to the Greatest Number. Which is to be 
 preferred ? 
 
 So much for Mill's teleology. We must now look 
 at the means by which the desired end was to be 
 won. 
 
 In one place Mill asserts that a happy life would 
 be attainable by the majority of mankind but for two 
 obstacles. "The present wretched education, and 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 135 
 
 wretched social arrangements, are the only real hin- 
 drance to its being attainable by almost all."^^'' It may 
 then be deemed fairly evident that he considered the 
 improvement of education and the reform of social 
 arrangements to be indispensable means towards 
 the desired end. And in another place he points 
 towards the progress of physical science as the 
 general means by which the object is to be gained. ^^''^ 
 We may therefore with fairness assume that in his 
 view it was to the general pursuit of science, mental 
 and physical, that the energies of mankind should 
 be turned. Undoubtedly he does elsewhere insist, 
 theoretically, upon the duty of cultivating the moral 
 and aesthetic, as well as the scientific faculties, but 
 the whole tenor of his life and writings goes to show 
 that it was to the latter that he almost entirely 
 devoted himself. It is very instructive to look at the 
 speech delivered by Mill as Rector of St. Andrew's, 
 just a year after Carlyle's famous appearance at 
 Edinburgh. Carlyle had spoken a few simple words, 
 urging the cultivation of noble and manly qualities ; 
 Mill takes his hearers over the whole field of learning, 
 examining its furrows one by one, suggesting im- 
 provements here and there, pointing out the uses of 
 this and that, but apparently with little heed to that 
 to which all culture ought to be subordinate, the 
 progress in dignity and completeness of man himself. 
 The special danger of such a philosophy as Mill's is 
 that it becomes absorbed in the means and forgets 
 the end. 
 
 ^^'^ Utilitarianism^ p. 19. ^^^ Ibid.y p. '22. 
 
136 TJiomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 With regard to the method to be used for acquiring 
 this beneficial knowledge Mill was very positive. 
 He was a firm adherent of the experimental school, 
 to which of course his venerated leader, Bentham, 
 belonged. Intuitions Mill regarded as the results of 
 previous experience, consolidated and petrified by the 
 working of the laws of association, — in fact, as in- 
 ductions framed when the means for framing sound 
 inductions were less available than in the present 
 time. '' The notion that truths external to the 
 mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, 
 independently of observation and experience, is, I 
 am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual 
 support of false doctrines and false institutions." ^^^ 
 And in the St. Andrew's speech he took special care 
 to warn his hearers against being "led away by talk 
 about inarticulate giants who do great deeds without 
 knowing how, and see into the most recondite truths 
 without any of the ordinary helps, and without being 
 able to explain to other people how they reach their 
 conclusions, nor consequently to convince any other 
 people of the truth of them." ^'^ He wrote a long and 
 careful book against the acknowledged head of the 
 philosophic nituitional school, Sir William Hamilton, 
 and may without doubt be considered as adhering 
 strictly to the last to his position. Yet there are one 
 
 ^^^ Autobiography^ p. 225, and cf. Comte and Posiiivis?n, 
 p. 72. 
 
 ^^ Inaugural Address, p. 27, and cf. also, p. 22: — "There 
 are but two roads by which truth can be discovered, observa- 
 tion and reasoning." 
 
The Apostle of Benthamisin. 137 
 
 or two passages in his works which seem to show an 
 appreciation of the vakie of intuition. " In scientific 
 investigation, as in all other works of human skilly 
 the way of obtaining the end is seen as it were 
 instinctively by superior minds in some comparatively 
 simple case, and is then, by judicious generalisation, 
 adapted to a variety of complex cases." ^^*^ As a 
 matter of fact, discoveries are nearly always made that 
 way. Kant himself has admitted the inability of 
 pure reason to discover truth. And it is somewhat 
 strange that Mill should not have seen that his own 
 view of intuitions, as the spontaneous development 
 of long courses of experience, was consistent with, 
 nay, almost necessarily involved, a very high appre- 
 ciation of their value. This obvious criticism has, 
 of course, been suggested by Mr. Herbert Spencer.^^^ 
 But with regard to the methods of experimental 
 treatment. Mill made a great advance on the merely 
 empirical and analytical system of Bentham. Perhaps 
 the most suggestive and valuable part of his Logic is 
 that in which he urges that the investigation of mental 
 and physical phenomena should be carried on by a 
 double process. The law is evolved by a deduction 
 from the fundamental laws of mind and matter 
 already known, and it is then to be verified by a 
 rigorous application of induction to the results of 
 observation and experiment. Or the process may 
 be conducted in the inverse order. In the science 
 of history, for instance, the science which treats of 
 
 ^^'* Logic , book vi., cap. i., § I. 
 
 131 Data of Ethics, ed. 1879, P- 123. 
 
138 Thomas Cmdyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 the development of communities of men, it is useless 
 
 to make shallow generalisations from empirical 
 
 observation of events. These generalisations must 
 • 
 
 be shown to coincide with the laws of ethology, with 
 the fundamental development of human character, 
 before they can claim to be looked upon as any- 
 thing more than accidents. '' Accordingly the most 
 erroneous generalisations are continuously made 
 from the course of history : not only in this country, 
 where history cannot yet be said to be at all culti- 
 vated as a science, but in other countries where it is 
 so cultivated, and by persons well versed in it. The 
 only check or corrective is constant verification by 
 psychological and ethological laws." "^ 
 
 The fundamental laws upon which all the de- 
 ductive sciences are based Mill appears to allow 
 were originally the result of simple intuition, ^^^ but 
 he in one place lays it down, rather dogmatically, 
 that ''nearly all the thoughts which can be reached, 
 by mere strength of original faculties, have long 
 since been arrived at."^^'^ This proposition seems to 
 be somewhat of the same character with those 
 which its author has elsewhere very wisely criticised, 
 to the effect that we cannot for the future expect any 
 great original productions in poetry and music. 
 
 Finally, we may notice one piece of advice which 
 Mill gave to the St. Andrew's students, as stamping 
 definitely the whole character of his method, and 
 
 ^^2 Logic, book vi., cap. x., § 4. 
 13^ Subjection of Women, p. 1 34. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 139 
 
 pointing out clearly the limits which that method 
 inevitably set to his range of thought. " If yoii want 
 to knoiv whether you are thinking rightly, put your 
 thought into words." ^^'' No single sentence could 
 show Mill's position more clearly than this, nor more 
 clearly mark him off from the other thinker with 
 whom this essay deals. The bent of his mind was 
 wholly logical, and logic is not creative, but explana- 
 tory. Notwithstanding Mill's heroic attempt to claim 
 for ratiocination the power of making discoveries,^^^ it 
 appears probable that he can only succeed by limiting 
 the meaning of the term '' discovery " to results which 
 lie only just beyond the border line of existing know- 
 ledge. It may possibly be that intuition is really a 
 lightning process of inference, but though differing 
 thus only in degree, it is clearly distinguishable by 
 every one from the process of ratiocination, still 
 more from that part of ratiocination which con- 
 sists of pure syllogisms. Logic is admirable as a 
 testing-instrument, but it requires continually to be 
 brought up to the level of new discoveries. It is 
 the second thing, but not the first. It is the mis- 
 tress of science, but the handmaid of art ; and art 
 came before science. 
 
 It is impossible to give more than a glance 
 at the details of the work which Mill did in the 
 field of science. His productions are invariably 
 characterised by three prominent features. They 
 are distinguished, first, by the close relationship which 
 
 ^^^ Inaugural Address, p. 27. 
 13^ Logic, book ii., cap. iii., § 2. 
 
1 40 Thomas Carlyle and Johi Stuart Mill. 
 
 they bear to actual life. In illustration no less than 
 in application the author shows an appreciation of 
 the conditions of life as a whole which renders his 
 works, even to the non-scientific reader, a continual 
 source of interest. It is a tradition of economists 
 that Mill once contemplated constructing his famous 
 work upon the principle of the '' economic man," i.e., 
 by figuring to himself a being possessed of but 
 one positive impulse, the desire of making money, 
 and one negative quality, laziness ; intending, after 
 working out his conclusions upon this basis, to 
 render them practical by making various allowances 
 for the complex conditions of human nature. But 
 his wide knowledge of the allowances which would 
 have to be made led him to abandon the scheme, 
 with the result that the work as we now have it is 
 one of the most human and vital productions on the 
 difficult subject of political economy. 
 
 Again, we notice in Mill's works a singular fear- 
 lessness in the application of principles. In his 
 juvenile days he had once in his father's company 
 made use of the very common expression that some- 
 thing was true in theory but false in practice. ^^'^ 
 The outburst of paternal wrath which followed the 
 utterance of this fallacy by a boy of twelve seems to 
 have sunk deep into his mind, and though the picture 
 of the wretched youth striving to evolve a definition 
 of theory, and the angry father upbraiding him for 
 his "unparalleled ignorance," may provoke mingled 
 feelings of mirth and indignation, there can be no 
 ^^^ Autobiography, p. 32. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 141 
 
 doubt that the world owes a great deal to the elder 
 Mill's severity. There is very little chance of an 
 unsound principle hiding its weakness from the 
 eye of a thinker who pursues its application to the 
 very utmost limits of practice, and, when he has 
 once accepted it, relies upon it absolutely in his 
 future speculations. 
 
 Thirdly, the feature of patience is very strongly 
 noticeable in Mill's vv^ritings. We know by his 
 Autobiography that many of them occupied years in 
 composition, were read and re-read, and always re- 
 written, that they might finally be the result of his 
 maturest thought. To this quality Mill himself 
 attached the highest importance. 
 
 " It was through them " {i.e.^ the meetings at Grote's house) 
 "that I acquired, or very much strengthened, a mental habit 
 to which I attribute all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, 
 in speculation ; that of never accepting half-solutions of diffi- 
 culties as complete ; never abandoning a puzzle, but again and 
 again returning to it until it was cleared up ; never allowing 
 obscure corners of it to remain unexplored, because they did 
 not appear important ; never thinking that I properly under- 
 stood any part of a subject until I understood the whole.^^ 
 
 And all readers of Mill's books can bear ample 
 testimony to the impression of security which the 
 evidence of this care makes upon them. 
 
 To turn, however, to our short view of the works 
 themselves. Mill's labours were concerned princi- 
 pally with three departments of speculation — politics, 
 pohtical economy, and logic. With the first of these his 
 name is for ever identified as an unflinching champion 
 
 ^^^ Autobiography^ p. 123. 
 
142 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 of the doctrine of laissez-faire , and as an earnest but 
 conscientious advocate of representative government. 
 With regard to the object of the state, and consequently 
 the Hmit of state authority, he has spoken clearly in 
 that which he has himself described as the most 
 carefully composed and sedulously corrected of his 
 writings ^^^ — the essay On Liberty. He has there laid 
 it down that "the sole end for which mankind are 
 warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering 
 with the liberty of action of any of their number, is 
 self-protection." ^**^ This principle Mill applied only 
 to societies in a certain stage of development, not 
 perhaps exactly defined, but which would in his view 
 undoubtedly have included all European countries 
 at the present day, except, possibly, Spain. With 
 regard to these countries. Mill held firmly to the 
 conviction that each individual was the best judge of 
 his own interests, and, apparently, did not accept the 
 view that the misery of a large part of the community 
 is of itself, apart from its ultimate consequences, an 
 evil from which the remainder ought to be protected. 
 The state of affairs contemplated by the advocates 
 of the laissez-faire principle was briefly defined by 
 Carlyle as '' Anarchy plus a street constable." "^ 
 
 It must, however, be noticed that in the fifth book 
 of his Political Economy Mill gives a rather wide 
 scope to the idea of self-protection, so far relaxing 
 the strictness of laissez-faire as to permit of the 
 
 ^^^ Autobiography, p. 250. 
 
 ^^^ Liberty, p. 6. 
 
 ^^^ Latter-Day Pamphlets, p. 17. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 143 
 
 regulation by Government of education, perpetual 
 contracts, colonization, and scientific experiment.^*^ 
 The Political Economy was written eleven years 
 before the essay On Liberty ; but whether the 
 author meant, in his later expression, to modify 
 his former views, is rather a difficult question to 
 answer. 
 
 With regard to the means by which the object of 
 the state was to be realized, Mill's main plan was 
 to advocate the maintenance and improvement of 
 representative government. The outlines of the 
 system had been sketched by Bentham many years 
 before, and elaborated by James Mill in his Essay on 
 Government. The improvements suggested by Mill 
 himself seem to be connected by the thread of a 
 purpose which runs through them all — the improve- 
 ment of the moral tone of the community, and, 
 thereby, of the government. Towards this object 
 was directed his uncompromising hostility to the 
 introduction of the ballot, to the ''delegate" theory, 
 to the placing of unlimited power in the hands of 
 majorities. In these three articles he was of course 
 opposed to the orthodox Radicals of the day. The 
 ballot was included in the famous '' Six Points " of 
 the Charter, it was persistently advocated by the 
 most energetic of the Radical leaders, and was, as 
 every one knows, eventually carried. Mill's treatment 
 of the question is characteristic of his thoroughness. 
 He points out the inconsistency of giving a man a 
 vote on the ground that he is fitted to use it for 
 ^^^ Political Economy, book v., vol. ii,, pp. 576 — end. 
 
144 Thomas Carlyle and John Shtart Mill. 
 
 honourable purposes, and then allowing him to 
 employ a method of voting which affords scope for 
 unlimited indulgence of unworthy motives. He saw 
 that the conditions under which a tenant or workman 
 required protection against his landlord or employer, 
 other than the protection afforded by the possession 
 of the vote itself, were rapidly passing away. Even 
 in i860 a good tenant was far too valuable to be 
 ejected on political grounds. Mill saw too that the 
 ballot gave room for still worse bribery than the 
 open system, by making it possible for the elector 
 to accept bribes from both parties. And he dreaded 
 the moral effect of the institution upon the electors. ^"^^ 
 How true his forebodings have proved will be pointed 
 out further on. 
 
 In the second point he was also opposed to that 
 powerful section of the Radical party of which Mr. 
 Bright was the spokesman. It was the contention 
 of this school that members were sent to Parliament 
 to register the votes of their constituents, that is, of 
 the majority, or supposed majority, of them. This 
 theory, if carried out, would simply place the 
 government of the country in the hands of those 
 least fitted to wield it, in the great mass of the 
 uninstructed. In other words, it would involve the 
 government of the wise by the ignorant. Mill's 
 view of the duties of an electorate was that it 
 was to choose its governors, not to govern. For 
 a recognition of honesty and abilit}^ little education 
 is required, but to judge of the competing merits of 
 1^3 Representative Governme7it, cap. x. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism, 145 
 
 two or more rival policies a man must possess special 
 skill and knowledge. 
 
 Upon the subject of minorities, Mill held firmly to 
 the view that a government which merely represents 
 the views of a majority is not a truly representative 
 government/** is, in fact, a class-government with a 
 colour of democracy in it. The means he proposed 
 for securing the effective representation of minorities 
 were, principally, a cumulative vote for persons of 
 superior education, and a scheme, something like 
 that developed by Mr. Hare, for a system of non- 
 local constituencies. 
 
 It seems to me that this thread of improvement in 
 the moral tone of democracies is also the link by 
 which to connect Mill's advocacy of the political 
 claims of women with the rest of his philosophy. 
 Doubtless his mind was ardently affected by what 
 seemed to him a flagrant example of cruel injustice. 
 His famous essay on The Subjection of Women is 
 animated by a tone far warmer than that which usually 
 marks his writings. He believed that the differences 
 in the legal positions of men and women were the 
 occasion of grievous practical suffering to all women, 
 but more especially to those whose circumstances 
 required them to support themselves by the exercise 
 of their business abilities. The peculiar composition 
 of Mill's nature, and his purely intellectual conception 
 of justice, may possibly have inclined him to take an 
 exaggerated view of the case ; certainly it seems hard 
 for any one who considers the conditions of modern 
 ^^ Representative Gover7tment, p. 133. 
 
 10 
 
146 Thomas Carlyle mid John Stuart Mill, 
 
 politics to get up a very strong feeling of wrong at 
 being excluded from the franchise. 
 
 But in his treatise Mill also lays great stress on 
 the moral influences which would in his view flow 
 from the equalisation of the conditions of the sexes. 
 The existing differences he considers to be harmful 
 in their operation upon the characters of men and 
 women, depriving society at large of an immense 
 amount of intellectual and moral force, producing a 
 totally false impression with regard to the actual 
 capabilities of either sex, and hindering the natural 
 gravitation of faculties towards their suitable occupa- 
 tions. Notwithstanding these social considerations, 
 the author of the essay, throughout what is evidently 
 an exceptionally deliberate work, shows himself to be 
 a thorough individualist, and the point in which his 
 arguments appear to be weakest is on the question 
 of the social necessity of maintaining unequal, or, 
 at any rate, dissimilar conditions. The only other 
 criticism which it seems necessary to make here is, 
 that in tracing the origin and growth of the existing 
 arrangements,^^^ Mill does not appear to have been 
 aware of the primitive polyandrous states of society, 
 which have since been explained by various writers 
 on the subject of sociology, as, for instance, by Mr. 
 McLennan. It ought to be noticed that in the Auto- 
 biography^^^ Mill expressly claims to have held the 
 substance of the view developed in The Subjection 
 of Women before becoming acquainted with Mrs. 
 
 ^^^ Subjectioji of Wo7nen, pp. 8, 9. 
 ^^^ Autobiogi^aphy, p. 244, note. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 147 
 
 Taylor, though he admits his indebtedness to her 
 for the working out of the principle. The article 
 published in Mill's name in the Westminster Review 
 of July 185 1, upon the same subject, is avowedly the 
 work of Mrs. Taylor. ^'^ 
 
 The object which Mill set before himself in the 
 Political Economy is clearly stated in the preface 
 to the book. The treatise of Adam Smith, the 
 foundation of modern English political economy, 
 had been a work dealing with its special subject 
 as a branch of general social philosophy ; its pages 
 were filled with matter which did not strictly belong 
 to economic science, but which bore more or less 
 directly upon it. In one place, for instance, Adam 
 Smith diverges into a history of European education. 
 
 The work had both gained and lost by this method. 
 Mr. Bagehot has pointed out^-^ the fact that of the 
 two greatest English writers on political economy 
 before Mill, the one, Adam Smith, who as an 
 university professor and man of theory might 
 have been expected to have dealt with his subject 
 in an abstract way, has in fact given us a work 
 abounding in happy illustration from past and 
 present circumstances, and full of practical detail ; 
 while Ricardo, the man of business and member of 
 Parliament, has produced a book almost repulsive 
 in its scientific hardness and remoteness from life. 
 Business men, the practitioners of political economy, 
 read Adam Smith, but will not read Ricardo. 
 
 ^^^ Dissertations and Discussions^ vol. ii., p. 411. 
 ^^^ Eco?iomic Studies, ed. 1880, p. 151. 
 
148 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart MilL 
 
 But if Adam Smith's work gains in popularity 
 by the method adopted, it loses in scientific value. 
 The multitude of allusions and details encumber 
 the mind of the author, and prevent him working 
 out his principles to their full extent. Accordingly, 
 as a scientific work, his book had become in many 
 points obsolete by Mill's time, though it will never 
 lose its historical interest. 
 
 It was Mill's object to produce a work which 
 should combine the practicality of the Wealth of 
 Nations with the correcter scientific matter of the 
 later writers. There can be no doubt that he has 
 succeeded admirably. The Political Economy is 
 a work full of interest for every intelligent reader, 
 economist or not. The frequent applications of 
 principle to existing circumstances, not merely by 
 way of illustration, but as part of the original 
 scheme, prevent anything like a feeling of difficulty 
 arising in the mind of the reader, except perhaps in 
 some of the more abstruse chapters on the subject 
 of money. The amount of knowledge on auxiliary 
 subjects displayed is so great as to give the work a 
 secondary value distinct from its primary importance. 
 
 On the other hand, by the testimony of universal 
 respect among those best qualified to judge, the 
 scientific value of the Political Economy is equal 
 to its attractiveness. Mill did not claim originality 
 for his matter ; the principal merit of his work is the 
 admirable skill with which the conclusions of others 
 are woven together, and the result stated with 
 scientific accuracy and yet with literary clearness 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism, 149 
 
 and grace. It is needless to say, in speaking of a 
 scientific work which has attained its fortieth year, 
 that its doctrines are here and there subjected to 
 criticism. For instance, the importance which Mill 
 attached to the subject of the distribution of wealth 
 is now generally considered to belong more properly 
 ^to that of consumption. And Mill's theory of the 
 wages fund, a theory which was probably in- 
 fluenced largely by his appreciation of Malthusian- 
 ism, has been of late severely criticized, in a popular 
 form by Mr. Henry George, and in a scientific spirit 
 by Professor Walker. Nevertheless, the work 
 remains still a standard guide to the subject ; every 
 English student is advised by his teachers to read 
 it thoroughly, and the latest authority pronounces 
 that the somewhat sweeping criticisms propounded 
 by more modern economists, such as Professor 
 Cairnes and Mr. Stanley Jevons, are not on the 
 whole justified. 
 
 Lastly, we come to Mill's labours on the subject 
 of logic. It is in this field, perhaps, that he shows 
 to best advantage ; the nature of the topic is cal- 
 culated to draw out to the utmost his unrivalled 
 patience and power of abstraction, his searching 
 self-examination and distrust of generalities. The 
 greater part of his well-known treatise is a sum- 
 mary, complete and critical, of the labours of his 
 predecessors, and exhibits the same features which 
 have been noticed in the consideration of the 
 Political Economy. But the theory of the syllo- 
 gism in the second book is a contribution of an 
 
150 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 original kind, and though it seems to fail in leading 
 to the conclusion which its author propounds, it is, 
 apart from that consideration, a discovery of great 
 interest and value. 
 
 It is in the last book, however, of the Logic 
 that the author shows the real powers of his mind. 
 It has been suggested that this book forms the most 
 valuable part of the work. It may now be ques- 
 tioned whether it is not the most valuable of all 
 Mill's writings, the only point which detracts from 
 its worth as an evidence of his powers being the fact 
 that for at least one of its most interesting features 
 he is indebted to Comte.^^'"^ 
 
 The idea of the book is the application of the 
 methods of ph^^sical science to the treatment of the 
 moral sciences. Hitherto these had been mainly 
 deductive. It is true that Hume, in his Treatise of 
 Human Nature, had suggested the alternative, — had, 
 in fact, thrown out the plan of a somewhat similar 
 work to that of Mill. But this side of Hume's 
 labours had not been followed up. Many studies, 
 which attracted much attention and absorbed the 
 energy of numerous scholars, were in a merely 
 chaotic state, owing to the want of scientific arrange- 
 ment. Histories, for instance, were written from 
 the point of view of the writer's prepossessions, or 
 were so destitute of all method as to be unworthy of 
 serious study. It was Mill's desire to change all 
 this by a proof of the possibility of inductive moral 
 sciences. 
 
 ^^^ Autobiography^ p. 210. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism, 151 
 
 He begins by setting boldly out in the search for 
 a science of human nature. The material side of 
 human nature had, of course, long been the subject 
 of scientific study as the matter of physiology and 
 its branches. But Mill proposed to extend the 
 process to the mental side, placing the inductive 
 science of psychology side by side with that of 
 physiology as the parent-stem of numerous branches, 
 the starting-point for a thorough investigation of the 
 laws of man regarded as a spiritual being. The 
 question whether psychology would ultimately prove 
 to be, as some philosophers asserted, itself a branch 
 of physiology, he preferred to leave open, maintain- 
 ing that, in its undecided condition, it did not inter- 
 fere with his plans. 
 
 From the conclusions of this fundamental inductive 
 science of psychology, which had already been pro- 
 pounded by his father, and was very shortly to 
 receive further treatment at the hands of Professor 
 Bain and Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mill proposed to 
 deduce another science, the science of the formation 
 of character. We have seen that it was one of the 
 essentials of his philosophy that the law of causa- 
 tion held in the matter of human conduct just as 
 completely as in the course of external events. 
 Consequently, if we could know the working of the 
 laws of mind, and the nature of the events upon 
 which they operate, we could trace the formation 
 and development of the character, both of the in- 
 dividual and the community. Owing to the complex 
 nature of the phenomena, this science of ethology (for 
 
152 Thomas Carlyle and John Shta7^t Mill. 
 
 so Mill proposed to call it) would not itself be capable 
 of being made an inductive science. An attempt to 
 construct it on inductive principles would lead to 
 mere empiricism, but, the general law being deduced 
 from the conclusions of psychology, its truth could 
 be tested by verification a posteriori. 
 
 Upon the sciences of psychology and ethology, 
 the sciences of individual life. Mill then proceeded to 
 build the science of man in society. Hitherto this 
 subject had been treated as an art, hardly as a 
 science. The object of most writers had been to 
 frame a system of precepts for the guidance of 
 rulers, not to ascertain the actual sequences of social 
 phenomena. The result had not been such as to 
 bring credit to the subject, for it was easy to see 
 that, in their philosophical views, these writers were 
 influenced mainly by their own prepossessions. 
 
 To one who held Mill's view of the doctrine of 
 necessity, the only difficulty in the way of the 
 evolution of a science of sociology lay in the com- 
 plex character of the phenomena involved. This 
 complexity led him to conclude that the social 
 science must of necessity be deductive, although 
 founded upon the inductive science of psychology. 
 But even after this determination the 'difficulties 
 were formidable. " If all the resources of science 
 are not sufficient to enable us to calculate a. priori 
 with complete precision the mutual action of three 
 bodies gravitating towards one another, it may be 
 judged with what prospect of success we should 
 endeavour to calculate the result of the conflicting 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism, 153 
 
 tendencies which are acting in a thousanci different 
 directions and promoting a thousand different changes 
 at a given instant in a given society." ^^^ It must be 
 noticed, however, that Mill's individualistic view of 
 society cleared away for him one great difficulty 
 which obstructs the efforts of socialist philosophers 
 even to imagine a social science. " The laws of 
 ^he phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing 
 but the laws of the actions and passions of human 
 beings united together in the social state. . . . Men 
 are not, when brought together, converted into 
 another kind of substance, with different properties. 
 . . . Human beings in society have no properties 
 but those which are derived from, and may be re- 
 solved into, the laws of the nature of individual 
 man."^^-^ It is needless to observe that there are, 
 and have long been, philosophers of eminence who 
 do not take this view of society. 
 
 For dealing with the phenomena of society as 
 conceived by Mill, there are two methods, both 
 consisting of a double process of deduction and 
 verification. The first, the discovery of Comte, 
 consists of generalizations from history, " verified, 
 not originally suggested, by deduction from the 
 laws of human nature." ^'^^ This process Mill con- 
 ceived to be most suitable for the study of sociology 
 regarded as embracing the totality of social con- 
 ditions. Society might be considered as in the 
 
 ^^° Logic, book vi., cap. ix., § i. 
 ^^'^ Ibid., cap. vii., § i. 
 
 152 
 
 Ibid., cap. ix., § i. 
 
154 Thomas' Carlyle and John Stuart Alill. 
 
 momentary condition of equilibrium, in which case 
 the necessary generahzations were obtained by an 
 anal3''sis of a large number of concurrent states, and 
 then explained by reference to the laws of psy- 
 chology. To the body of conclusions thus evolved 
 Comte gave the name of Social Statics. Or society 
 might be regarded as in a continual condition of 
 evolution, and then the generalizations to be ob- 
 tained would consist of rules of sequence observed 
 in a study of history in the ordinary sense of the 
 term, the difficult}^ in dealing with the enormous 
 number of the forces always at work being solved 
 by the attention being confined to that one which, in 
 Comte's view, was a sure key to the rest, — the pro- 
 gress of *'the speculative faculties of mankind, 
 including the nature of the beliefs which by any 
 means they have arrived at concerning themselves 
 and the world by which they are surrounded." ^'^ 
 These generalizations, when corrected by reference 
 to psychological laws, would form a body of Social 
 Dynamics, which, combined with the body of 
 knowledge known as Social Statics, would form 
 the science of General Sociology, the key to 
 the explanation of the phenomena of universal 
 history. 
 
 But, highly as he valued this historical m.ethod 
 as the true process for investigating the problems of 
 general sociology, Mill insisted upon the desirability 
 of a use of the Direct Deductive Method as the 
 means for a satisfactory study of departmental 
 1-^3 Logic; book vi., chap, x., § 7. 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 1 5 5 
 
 sociology. In his view there were many branches 
 of sociology which could be most advantageously 
 studied apart from the general conditions of society 
 in which they were imbedded. Thus Political 
 Economy, involved as it undoubtedly is in an 
 extremely complex state of social conditions, may 
 nevertheless be abstracted for the purposes of 
 scientific study with great advantage, provided only 
 that the real conditions of its existence be kept 
 ultimately in mind. Similarly v\/ith the case of 
 Political Ethology, or the science of tli(' aptitudes 
 and capabilities of the human mind for particular 
 forms of government. 
 
 These departmental studies are, according to Mill, 
 best carried on by means of the method which 
 begins with direct deduction from psychological 
 laws, and then verifies its conclusions by observa- 
 tion and experiment. Thus, it is a psychological 
 fact that the human mind is capable of feelings 
 social and individual, of v/hich the individual tend 
 always strongly to predominate. In the per- 
 formance, therefore, of an occupation at once social 
 and indivi(^ual, such as the carrying on of trade 
 or the conduct of government, it might be expected 
 that the individual interests of the agent would 
 be apt to override his sense of social duties. 
 To make this conclusion a reliable rule for the 
 guidance of investigation, or a safe foundation 
 for the construction of a theory, it will be 
 necessary to verify it by an extensive observation 
 of phenomena. Do the individual interests of men 
 
156 Thomas Carlyle and John Shtai^t Mill, 
 
 engaged in business or politics, as a general 
 rule, actually tend to obliterate their sense of social 
 duties ? 
 
 Here must end my feeble sketch of the intei;isely 
 interesting contents of the sixth book of the Logic. 
 Some attempt to estimate the results which have 
 flowed from the work in the forty years which 
 have elapsed since it made its appearance must 
 hereafter be made. At the present moment one 
 thing only remains to be offered as a criticism. 
 The thoroughly individualistic conception of the 
 whole scheme is obvious. Psychology, the science 
 upon which, according to Mill, the whole of the 
 moral sciences must ultimately rest, is with him 
 the science of the minds of men, not of the mind 
 of man. He works from the individual to society, 
 not from society to the individual. This fact is 
 really the key to the whole of Mill's intellectual 
 character. It explains his devotion to the inductive 
 method, which is a building up of particulars into 
 generals, his condemnation of intuition, which is the 
 communication of the individual with the universe, 
 his adhesion to laissez-faire and the rights of 
 minorities, his fondness for logic, which, at any 
 rate as at present conceived, is an individual pro- 
 cess; and it largely accounts also for his advocacy 
 of the claims of women. There was not a shade 
 of transcendentalism in him ; the few really great 
 thoughts which are to be found in his pages, of 
 which his well-known estimate of the functions of 
 labour in the physical universe is an admirable 
 
The Apostle of Benthamism. 1 5 7 
 
 specimen/'"''* are the results of hard logical proof. 
 The rarefied mountain-air which blows upon us as 
 we read the words of such men as Emerson never 
 visits the student of Mill ; but in place of it we 
 have the perfection of ordinary climate, in which 
 the hygienic conditions are in exact order, and 
 ^here is no need of spectacles to screen the eyes 
 from the glare of the sun. 
 
 1''' roliiical Economy t vol. i., p. 32. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE POTTER S CLAY. 
 
 WE have seen that in position and attitude 
 towards the world Carlyle and Mill 
 stand wide apart. The one is the solitary 
 prophet of a forgotten creed ; the voice of 
 one crying in the wilderness. The other is the 
 expounder, elaborator, and reformer of a doctrine 
 which has already taken firm hold on men's 
 minds. 
 
 In qualities, no less than in attitude, have we 
 also seen that they differed. Carlyle is the poet, 
 the orator, the artist, the intuitionist, the trans- 
 cendentalist, the German ; Mill, the logician, the 
 pleader, the man of science, the experimental 
 philosopher, the rationalist, the Frenchman. In 
 everything they are opposites, or, as one would 
 prefer to think, complements of each other. 
 
 Finally, we have seen that the teaching of the 
 two men was, in appearance at least, wholly 
 different. Carlyle's message is simple, " Let duty 
 be your first aim, your work your worship ; be 
 
The Potters Clay. 159 
 
 reverent, be true ; be righteousness your ideal. 
 ' Love not Pleasure ; love God. This is the 
 Everlasting Yea.' " In other terms Mill. '' Im- 
 prove your machinery of politics and education ; 
 study the interests of yourself and the world ; 
 examine everything, be satisfied with nothing that 
 ^ou cannot prove ; be the General Happiness your 
 supreme test of right and wrong," If we might 
 sum up the difference of teaching in a single 
 phrase, we should say : Carlyle is concerned with 
 the improvement of character, Mill with the im- 
 provement of conduct. 
 
 We have now to attempt some estimate of the 
 effect produced upon the world by the teaching of 
 the two men whom we have been considerins:. 
 And we may obtain a certain appearance of method, 
 if we first enquire what, from our knowledge of 
 human nature, we might suppose the impressions 
 to have been, and then ascertain by reference to 
 history whether our expectations have been ful- 
 filled. 
 
 The working lives of Carlyle and Mill fall 
 within the period of thirty-five years between 1833 
 and 1868. In the first of these years Sar/or began 
 to appear in the pages of Fraser, and in the last 
 Mill retired from parliamentary life to the solitude 
 of Avignon, Carlyle having already bidden farewell 
 to the world in the Edinburgh speech of 1866. 
 It is from this period and the few years which 
 preceded it, therefore, that both drew the colour 
 of their thoughts, and it is necessary to bear in 
 
i6o Thomas Carlyle and John Shiart Mill. 
 
 mind the character of the time, if we would under- 
 stand their relations with it. 
 
 We considered, in our study of Carlyle, the 
 leading social and political conditions of the age. 
 There can be no doubt of Carlyle's profound dis- 
 satisfaction with it. His whole meaning lies in 
 that dissatisfaction. But it must be pointed out 
 that the ennui which Carlyle saw was not a fiction 
 of his own imagination. Mill, writing in 1836, in 
 his optimistic days, says : — 
 
 *' There has crept over the refined classes, over the whole 
 class of gentlemen in England, a moral effeminacy, an 
 inaptitude for every kind of struggle. They shrink from 
 all effort, from everything which is troublesome and disagree- 
 able. . . . They cannot undergo labour, they cannot brook 
 ridicule, they cannot brave evil tongues : they have not the 
 hardihood to say an unpleasant thing to any one whom they 
 are in the habit of seeing, or to face, even with a nation 
 at their back, the coldness of some little coterie which sur- 
 rounds them."^^^ 
 
 It is pretty clear, then, that Carlyle and Mill were 
 agreed about the virtues of the aristocracy. The 
 middle classes were in full fervour of their worship 
 of the god Respectability, and the lower classes were 
 represented by Chartism. Mr. Tennyson (as he 
 then was) is so admirable a reflection of the feelings 
 of his generation, that we may reasonably expect 
 to find in his writings some evidence to guide us. 
 Let us look at this picture, drawn in 1855, by a 
 professed pessimist certainly, but presumably with 
 some reference to facts : — 
 
 i^" Civilization^ " Dissertations," vol. i., p. 180. 
 
The Potters Clay. i6i 
 
 Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace ? We have 
 made them a curse, 
 Pickpockets, each hand histing for all that is not its own; 
 And hist of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse 
 Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own 
 hearthstone ? 
 
 But these are the days of advance, the works of the men of 
 
 mind, 
 « When who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman's 
 ware or his word ? 
 Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind 
 The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword. 
 * * * * # 
 
 Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by, 
 
 When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, 
 
 like swine. 
 
 When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie ^ 
 
 Peace in her vineyard — yes ! — but a company forges the 
 
 • wine. 
 
 And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head, 
 
 Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled 
 wife, 
 And chalk, and alum, and plaster, are sold to the poor for 
 bread, 
 And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life, 
 
 And Sleep must lie down arm'd, for the villainous centre-bits 
 Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless 
 nights, 
 While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he 
 sits 
 To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights. 
 
 When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee. 
 And Timour Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones. 
 Is it peace or war ? Better war, loud war by land and by 
 sea, 
 War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred 
 thrones." ^^^ 
 
 And such, only braver, is the tone all through the 
 ^^•^ Maud, part i., I., stanzas vi. — xii. 
 
 I I 
 
1 62 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 works of the Corn-Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott, 
 who, true man as he was, spoke of things as he 
 saw them. Mr. Matthew Arnold too, criticizing 
 the latter years of our period, finds them tending 
 gravely towards anarch}'', the ideal of human con- 
 duct being " Doing as One Likes." ^'''^ Well, it is 
 very difficult to tell if one age is better or worse 
 than others. To Macaulay the times seemed 
 pleasant enough, and Mr. Roebuck, before the 
 repeal of the Corn Laws, could invite the Sheffield 
 cutlers to " consider our unrivalled happiness." 
 But on the whole it appears that the minds of 
 thoughtful people misgave them much during the 
 years 1833 — 1868. 
 
 As Carlyle himself pointed out, it was only the 
 middle part of the body social that had anything 
 earnest or satisfied in it. The middle classes were 
 absorbed in the worship of Mammon and Respecta- 
 bility, they were making money with all their might. 
 Political Economy was their creed, and a fortune 
 their heaven. It could not be expected that they 
 should pay very much attention to unorthodox 
 teachers. 
 
 But of the extremes — the one torpid, the other 
 feverishly dissatisfied — what should we expect their 
 conduct to be ? 
 
 If the victim of ennui have sufficient strength to 
 make an effort to deliver himself, he is generally 
 advised, he generally feels, that he ought to get 
 
 '•^" Cidture a)id Ana?'chy (written in 1869), 3rd edition, 
 pp. 50-61. 
 
The Potters Clay. 163 
 
 something to do. It does not occur to him that the 
 tendency to ennui is the result of a vicious disposi- 
 tion, of sellisliness long indulged, of evil habits and 
 excesses, of a low standard of life in general. He 
 generally attributes his unhappiness to external 
 causes, and catches eagerly at any suggestion which 
 «i<ixpends its effect upon them. 
 
 So too the feverish and excited patient takes 
 refuge from himself in temporary activity. The best 
 thing he can possibly do is to strive after calmness, 
 to avoid all occasions of agitation, to cease experi- 
 menting upon this and that medicine. But to these 
 remedies he does not incline. Me will try 'every- 
 thing ; in something there may be relief, and at least 
 it is a relief to be occupied. 
 
 Both these extremes then, wc might expect, would 
 accept far more readily the teaching of Mill than 
 that of Carlyle. People have always found Carlyle 
 " vague," and so in one sense he was. He had no 
 " Morrison's Pill " for the regeneration of mankind. 
 He did not believe that " the present wretched 
 education and wretched social arrangements " were 
 the only bars to universal happiness. With both 
 these classes Mill would have the early success 
 which an empiricist always enjoys. 
 
 But on another ground we might expect the effect of 
 Mill's teaching to be the more rapid. His philosophy 
 was framed upon a consideration of man as he ts, 
 Carlyle's upon a view of man as he ought to be. 
 Looking at the world from a positivist standpoint, 
 Mill strove to guide and elevate the tendencies which 
 
164 Thomas Carlyle and John Shtart Mill. 
 
 he saw to be actually existing ; possibly he had not 
 the mental force necessary to separate himself from 
 the feelings in which he shared, and to enable 
 him to contemplate alternatives. His philosophy 
 was, to a certain extent, the supplement of the 
 practices he saw around him. Consequently his 
 teaching came into no violent collision with esta- 
 blished tendencies and modes of thought. He was 
 truly orthodox, he always inclined to the opinion 
 of the majority. 
 
 Carlyle, on the other hand, was in violent opposi- 
 tion to the tendencies of the age. The " Spirit of 
 Progress " he openly mocked at ; Mammonism he 
 despised; the well-fed optimism of the Edinburgh 
 Review seemed to him a hollow sham. He flung 
 down his challenge against the whole intellectual 
 world. On these grounds, also, we should expect 
 that the influence of Mill would be early felt, while 
 that of Carlyle would fail to appear for some 
 time. 
 
 But, from what we know of human nature, we 
 might conjecture that the original verdict of the world 
 might come to be reversed. The appeal to the 
 understanding may be successful at first, and under- 
 standing goes sometimes a long way. There have 
 been men, such as Gibbon, with whom the intellectual 
 faculties always remain a sufficient guide, in whom 
 passion and enthusiasm appear to be non-existent. 
 But such cases are comparatively rare. In most 
 instances the man turns away from what he under- 
 stands to what he feels. His real beliefs are not 
 
The Potter s Clay. 165 
 
 things that can be discussed or put into language ; 
 they are above logical expression, they are transcen- 
 dental. In Mill's posthumous essays there are traces 
 which seem to show that even he felt this. And 
 certainly with most men, including those who, by 
 general consent, are accounted amongst the world's 
 fioblest, the need of some ideal is always felt. It 
 was Mazzini's expressed conviction that no great 
 cause was ever achieved without the help of heroes 
 who said in their hearts, '' It is the will of God." 
 Put into poetical language, such a craving is for 
 Shelley — 
 
 The devotion to something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow. 
 
 " Wouldst thou plant for Eternity," says Carlyle, 
 '* then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man 
 . . . wouldst thou plant for Year and Day, then 
 plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his self- 
 love and Arithmetical Understanding." ^^^ And so we 
 should expect that, after some time, especially if the 
 age were one of fading ideals, the world would turn 
 towards one who held up the prospect of a more 
 exalted faith. Let us see if we can verify these 
 a priori conclusions. 
 
 It will, of course, be necessary to confine our 
 observation to England. Supposing the question of 
 competency to be satisfactorily solved, we should 
 exceed all reasonable limits if we examined the 
 conditions of foreign countries with care sufficient to 
 warrant the probability of any conclusions we might 
 158 Sartor, p. 155. 
 
1 66 Thomas Carlylc and John Stuart MilL 
 
 draw. And Mr. Matthew Arnold has warned us 
 against supposing that the Hghts of our small firma- 
 ment are discerned in the greater heaven of Con- 
 tinental thought. Carlyle is undoubtedly known in 
 Germany, as a historian and something more. Our 
 friend Meyer, in the last edition of his invaluable 
 little Hand-Lexikon, speaks of him as. — ^^ Em Autor 
 von origincUcm Charakter, eifriger Apostel des Evan- 
 gel in dis dcr Arbeit, als Hisiorikcr An hanger des 
 Heroenknltus ; seine Sprache geistvoll nnd ivitzig, aher 
 oft diinkel nnd barocky^^'^ (It will be observed that 
 the good Meyer is not exact in his discernment of 
 the apostolic functions, as we have been.) And in 
 the still later edition of his Konversation^ s-Lcxikon he 
 will so far commit himself as to say that — " Ohnc 
 jenials ini vidgarcnt Sinn des Worts popular zu sein, 
 hat doch kein nenerer Schriftsteller anf die Litteratur, 
 vielleicht auf die ganze geistige Entivickelung seines 
 Vaterlandes so sehr eingewirkt ivie Carlyle ^ ^*'*' We 
 may also remember with pride the letter and Order 
 of Merit from Prince Bismarck, and the birthday 
 address from German professors, who are assuredly 
 not apt to over-estimate the merits of English writers, 
 even when the latter have written German histories. 
 In truth Carlyle's Fricdrich is a work of European 
 reputation, and were it not that we were here con- 
 cerned with him rather as a direct teacher than as 
 a historian, we might make great capital out of the 
 fact that even to German readers Carlyle transcends 
 
 '•■^^ Meyer's Hand-lexikon, subtit. " Carlyle'' 
 160 Meyer's Koiiversat ion's Lcxikon., ibid. 
 
TJic Poller s Clay. 167 
 
 the ideal of thoroughness. Of Mill too we may 
 affirm that he is known, both in France and Germany, 
 as a philosopher who has had his day. His works 
 have been translated, and M. Littrd has written upon 
 the English reflection of the true Comtian sun. 
 
 But it is with England that we must concern 
 ourselves. Mere Mill's theory of tilings certainly 
 appears at first sight to be in the ascendant. When 
 he died, he was, in almost all cases, the ultimate 
 appeal of the Radical party, who by their superior 
 energy have since made the history of Parliamentary 
 politics. His reforms have been carried out, or at 
 least attempts made towards thcmi. His policy has 
 been embodied in the Irisli Land Acts of 1 870 and 
 1 88 1, and has been extended to England by the 
 Agricultural Holdings Act. His advocacy of the 
 claims of women has resulted in the tlu-ee Married 
 Women's Property Acts and the separation clauses 
 of the Divorce Acts. A small instalment even in the 
 direction of the representation of minorities was paid 
 by the Reform Act of 1867, which introduced '' three- 
 cornered " constituencies. And if the Radicals have 
 been deaf to Mill's arguments against the maintenance 
 of the ballot, it is not for want of evidence to support 
 them. The inquiry of i88r ought to have dissipated 
 all theories of the purity of the ballot for ever. Mill's 
 advocacy of the cause of Political Economy has led 
 to the more enlightened teaching of the subject. 
 Chairs of Political Economy have been established 
 at the Universities. America is taking up the study 
 with interest, and all the professors of the science 
 
1 68 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuarl Mill. 
 
 look to Mill as the first of the moderns. The 
 famous sixth book of the Logic has done that which 
 its great prototype, the Treatise of Human Nature^ 
 failed to do, and we have had a succession of thinkers, 
 such as Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Bagehot, Mr. 
 Buckle, and Professor Seeley, who, if they do not 
 owe their ideas to the Logic ^ at least work upon the 
 same lines as those which it suggests. Finally, 
 Mill's school of thought has been represented on 
 its most attractive side by one who divides with 
 Thackeray the supreme honours of the m.odern world 
 of fiction. As Comte had his Balzac, so Mill and 
 the scientific school have had their George Eliot, 
 who has poetized their discoveries and done much 
 to make them popular. And if the Radicals claim 
 Mr. Swinburne, as a republican poet, for their ranks, 
 the claim cannot perhaps be denied ; though Mr. 
 Swinburne's republics differ as widely from the 
 Radical ideal of universal suffrage and a single 
 representative chamber as do Walt Whitman's 
 theories of democracy from those on which his 
 own presidential Government is based. 
 
 There is often no better way of testing the effect 
 which a man's life has produced than by considering 
 the characters of his children. We see there how 
 the paternal influence survives amid the new cir- 
 cumstances of a younger generation, modified and 
 coloured by them, but retaining its old expression. 
 The place which in i860 was occupied by Mill is 
 now filled by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Our scientific 
 young men now look up to the author of the Data of 
 
The Potter s Clay. 169 
 
 Ethics as the scientific young men of i860 looked 
 up to the author of Liberty. Never was a clearer 
 case of philosophic inheritance. The high priesthood 
 of the temple of science has descended from Mill to 
 Spencer. If we look for a moment at the latter's 
 Confession of Faith, we shall be able to see what 
 modifications of the older creed time has brought 
 vvith it. 
 
 The leading idea of Mr. Herbert Spencer's philo- 
 sophy is the unity of life and its development by 
 evolution. This is a supreme, unalterable law, and 
 by it all things stand or fall. '' The wages of sin is 
 death," Mr. Herbert Spencer has understood to mean 
 " whatever tends to produce death is sin." The 
 perfect state is that in which the conditions are 
 completely adapted to the full development of life, 
 and the test of conduct is its tendency to produce 
 that state. Now that which most surely tends to 
 promote and enlarge life is pleasure of all kinds, and, 
 on the contrary, all kinds of pain result in different 
 degrees of injury to the development of life. There- 
 fore the supreme test of conduct is also its tendency 
 to produce pleasure or pain. The absolutely right 
 action is that which results in unmixed pleasure, the 
 relatively right that which on the whole produces 
 more pleasure than pain ; the absolutely wrong, that 
 of which the results are wholly painful, and the 
 relatively wrong that from which there results a 
 surplus of pain over pleasure.^^^ 
 
 So far at least we can trace the genesis clearly. 
 ^^^ Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, passim. 
 
170 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 Mill must have had a presentiment of the doctrine 
 so earnestly preached by Mr. Herbert Spencer, — the 
 doctrine that the laws of the physical and spiritual 
 worlds work in harmony by the same methods, 
 making life one whole, — or he would hardly have 
 insisted so strongly on the application of physical 
 methods to the study of moral sciences. It is true 
 that the evolution theory is not fully avowed in his 
 writings ; but the laws of association, as applied to 
 the mental conditions by the school of psychologists 
 to which he owned allegiance, bring us very near to 
 the same idea. The maxim of Von Humboldt, prefixed 
 to the essay On Liberty, might serve without much 
 criticism as the watchword of the Data of Ethics. It 
 does not do to attempt too close definitions of the 
 positions of philosophers ; no one really understands 
 them but themselves, and outsiders get into trouble 
 if they meddle with such mysteries. Yet one might 
 almost feel tempted to frame the proposition, that as 
 Comte is to Mill, so is Mill to Mr. Herbert Spencer. 
 For the agreement does not stop at speculation. 
 Mr. Spencer is also a champion of Representative 
 Government. It is true that he has done rather a 
 rash thing in defence of it. It may be said that for 
 a man of eminent critical ability to begin his defence 
 of an institution by collecting all the weapons he 
 can lay hands on to put into his adversary's grasp, 
 is more generous, perhaps, than wise. The eye of 
 the critic is like the eye of the hunter. He begins to 
 knock down a few head of game, just by way of trial, 
 and then the instinct grows upon him, and he becomes 
 
The Potters Clay. 171 
 
 more deadly with each shot, and he cannot leave off 
 till the forest is cleared and the dead He in heaps 
 around him. And such a course, if the forest hap- 
 pens to be his own hunting-ground, is apt to lead 
 to awkward consequences. Mr. Herbert Spencer has 
 unmasked a terrible battery of guns against Repre- 
 sentative Government, and has succeeded in flatly 
 demolishing all the proud towers thereof. He shows 
 irresistibly that under a ruling body composed of 
 many units harmonious government is not to be 
 expected ; that such bodies do hot attract men of 
 intelligence and character; that, on the contrary, their 
 ranks are filled by schemers of all kinds, who have 
 their personal advantages, often inconsistent with 
 those of the community, principally in view ; that 
 such governments tend almost irresistibly to become 
 extravagant ; that their ignorance is generally 
 extreme. So far all goes smoothly enough ; except 
 that the believer in Representative Government must 
 begin to think this a strange kind of champion. But 
 when the other side of the question is to be presented, 
 and Mr. Herbert Spencer has to show that this dis- 
 mantled castle is still a very good comfortable man- 
 sion, suited to modern requirements, then he is not 
 quite so effective. He talks a good deal about the 
 iniquities of tyrants (rather a juvenile theme); indulges 
 in a tirade against '' hero-worship," — from which it 
 appears that in Mr. Spencer's view anybody may be 
 recognized as a " hero " if he be strong enough ; and 
 proceeds finally to assert that representative govern- 
 ment would be a very good government if it would 
 
172 Thomas Carlyle and John Shear t Mill. 
 
 only confine itself to what Mr. Spencer regards as 
 its proper limits, — a moderation of which, as he him- 
 self woefully admits, it never appears to be capable.^^^ 
 Still Mr. Herbert Spencer must be reckoned a follower 
 of Mill in his advocacy of representative government, 
 and, practically, a follower on the same path. 
 
 In his adherence to individualism and insistence 
 on laissez-faire f Mr. Herbert Spencer even outstrips 
 his predecessor. His individualism is that of Godwin 
 rather than that of Mill. He will have government 
 do nothing but administer justice, i.e., protect its sub- 
 jects from external and internal aggression. This is 
 the only task for which government is fitted in an 
 advanced state of society, and in proportion as social 
 conditions become more complex, the more hopeless 
 it will be for a government to attempt to do anything 
 more. " Increasing ability to perform its true duty 
 involves increasing inability to perform all other kinds 
 of action." ^^^ This is a law of that progress which 
 results in the specialization of functions, of which the 
 physiological division of labour is an example. 
 
 We have seen that Mr. Herbert Spencer regards 
 the tendency to produce happiness as the ultimate 
 test of conduct. In this view he may seem to come 
 very near to utilitarianism as Mill understood it, and 
 were it not that he has subjected the utilitarian theory 
 to what is perhaps the severest criticism it has ever 
 undergone,^*^* we might have fallen into the error of 
 
 ^^^ Represe7itative Government^ "Essays,"' vol. ii., p. 163. 
 
 i«3 Ibid., p. 208. 
 
 ^^^ Data of Ethics, pp. 220 — 237. 
 
The Potters Clay. 173 
 
 regarding him as a subscriber to its truth. Clearly 
 he has shown that the distribution of happiness is 
 impossible, in the ordinary sense of the word. Hap- 
 piness is not " something that can be cut up into 
 parts and handed round." ^'^'' But the utilitarian idea 
 is not only the distribution of happiness, but the pro- 
 duction of happiness. And Mr. Spencer seems to 
 have supposed that Mill recommended the pursuit of 
 the general happiness as a practical rule of conduct, 
 while, as we have seen, Mill abandoned that view before 
 he wrote the Utilitarianism. In fact, the whole of the 
 criticism seems to be actuated by a fear that the 
 adoption of utilitarian doctrines would lead eventually 
 to ascetic altruism, a result which is the special object 
 of Mr. Spencer's aversion. No wonder that Mill, in 
 whose lifetime some of these criticisms were published, 
 should have failed to find the reason for them, and 
 that Mr. Spencer himself should '' object to being 
 considered an opponent of Utilitarianism." ^^^ 
 
 It is in his views upon the subject of intuition that 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer really differs most from Mill. 
 The latter, as we have seen, regarded with abhorrence 
 " the notion that truths external to the mind may be 
 known by intuition or consciousness." And it has 
 also been pointed out that Mr. Spencer, accepting the 
 doctrine of association of ideas, even pushing it still 
 farther by his application of the principle of evolution, 
 on that very ground gives to intuitions, as the in- 
 herited results of ages of observation and experience, 
 
 ^'^^ Data of Ethics^ p. 222. 
 
 ^^^ Utilitarianism ^ p. 93, note. 
 
174 Thomas Carlyle and John Sttiart Mill. 
 
 a very high place in the armoury of scientific dis- 
 covery. In fact, he argues that observation would 
 be impossible if the truth of consciousness were not 
 postulated. " The testimony of experience is given 
 only through memory ; and its worth depends wholly 
 on the trustworthiness of memory. Is it, then, that 
 the trustworthiness of memory is less open to doubt 
 than the immediate consciousness that two quantities 
 must be unequal if they differ from a third quantity 
 in unequal degrees ? This can scarcely be alleged." ^°'' 
 But for all this difference, the conclusions of the 
 two thinkers mainly agree. Mill rejects the testimony 
 of consciousness, supposing it to conflict with the 
 testimony of experience ; Mr. Spencer admits it as 
 the only rational foundation on which the testimony 
 of experience can be accepted. '' It is in the interests 
 of the Experience-Hypothesis that Mr. Mill opposes 
 the alleged criterion of truth ; while it is as har- 
 monising with the Experience-Hypothesis, and re- 
 conciling it with all the facts, that I defend this 
 criterion." '^^^ And certainly, if we compare the net 
 results of Mr. Spencer's ethical teaching with what 
 we have seen of Mill's, we shall be tempted to regard 
 the differences as not very substantial. '' Hence, 
 recognising in due degrees all the various ethical 
 theories, conduct in its highest form will take as 
 guides innate perceptions of right duly enlightened 
 and made precise by an anal3'tic intelligence ; while 
 conscious that these guides are proximately supreme 
 
 ^^^ J//// versus Hamilton^ "Essays," vol. ii., p. 411. 
 1^ Ibid.^ p. 413. 
 
The Potter s Clay. 175 
 
 solely because they lead to the ultimately supreme 
 end, happiness special and general." ^'^^ And in order 
 to show how modern criticism has modified Mill's 
 views on the subject of intuition, we may quote one 
 more passage, this time from another influential 
 thinker of the same school, Professor Huxley. '' In 
 whichever way we look at the matter, morality is 
 based on feeling, not on reason. . . . The moral law, 
 like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long 
 run upon instinctive intuitions, and is neither more 
 nor less * innate ' and ' necessary ' than they are." ^^^ 
 We mxay venture to conclude then, on the whole, that 
 the most modern scientific thought has, on the subject 
 of ethics at least, not proceeded very far beyond the 
 stage at which Mill left it. His theory of association 
 has been greatly broadened by its expansion into 
 the full current of Darwinian speculation. And an 
 important amendment has been made in his testing 
 process, an amendment, however, more apparent in 
 the machinery of work than in the results which it 
 produces. But otherwise there is not much change 
 to show. 
 
 We have seen now how Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 resembles Mill in his wisdom. It may perhaps be 
 admissible to point out that there is also trace of 
 an hereditary weakness in the later thinker. It will 
 be remembered that we accused Mill of a shade of 
 pedantry in his objections to Caesar and his enthu- 
 siasm for the analogy between the "infinitesimal. 
 
 ^^^ Data of Ethics, pp. 172, 173. 
 
 170 Hume, English Men of Letters Series, p. 207. 
 
176 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 calculus " and " the corpuscular hypothesis in 
 physics." This same tendency, which very learned 
 scientific men are apt to betray, is to be found in 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer's writings. A single instance 
 will be sufficient to indicate it. 
 
 "It is strange," says Mr. Spencer, " that a notion so abstract 
 as that of perfection, or a certain ideal completeness of nature, 
 should ever have been thought one from which a system of 
 guidance can be evolved ; as it was in a general way by Plato, 
 and JHore distinctly by Jonatlian Edwa?'ds.'"^'^^ 
 
 Not to have seen the bathos of thus coupling 
 together the great Athenian philosopher and the 
 New England Calvinist divine argues a strange 
 want of humour in the composition of Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer's mind. But it is time that we turn to 
 a hasty glance at the other disciples of Mill's 
 school. 
 
 It almost seemed, at one time, as if the brilliant 
 author of The English Constitution would eclipse the 
 fame of his predecessor. Written only a few years 
 after Mill's Representative Government saw the light, 
 Mr. Bagehot's work manifested a scientific skill equal 
 to that of the older writer, together with a delicate 
 perception of facts and feelings which is hardly found 
 in the pages of Mill. It substituted in the minds 
 of Englishmen, and, to some extent, of Europeans, 
 for the theories of Montesquieu, Delolme, and 
 Blackstone, the true theory of the actual working 
 constitution. It does not, of course, occupy the high 
 ethical ground of the Representative Government, 
 
 ^" Data of Ethics, p. 32. 
 
The Potter s Clay. 177 
 
 neither does it take so wide a sweep. But it puts 
 before us the facts as they are, with a vividness 
 which enables us to see clearly the safeguards and 
 the dangers. Since Bagehot wrote, we have heard 
 little of the equally balanced powers, whose equili- 
 brium must be preserved at the risk of political 
 slavery. No government could possibly work so, 
 any more than an army could conquer which had 
 two independent and equally authoritative generals. 
 The English constitution worked in 1867 because the 
 country delegated supreme power for an indefinite 
 period to a small committee of managers, whose 
 decisions were practically absolute. But Bagehot 
 was true at heart to representative government ; 
 he endeavoured to improve it ; he saw some of its 
 weaknesses, but he was as staunch as Mill himself 
 to the institution. " The practical choice of first-rate 
 nations is between the Presidential Government and 
 the Parliamentary ; no State can be first-rate which 
 has not a Government by discussion, and those are 
 the only two existing species of that Government." ^''^ 
 This is the sentiment of a true positivist, and a 
 positivist Bagehot undoubtedly was. As has been 
 hinted, he came near to eclipsing Mill himself. He 
 wrote on Political Economy, and his productions, 
 fragmentary as they are, bear evidences of the 
 highest order of scientific thought. He wrote a 
 book on the application of physical principles to 
 political societies, in which much of what has since 
 been done in that direction is suggested. We have 
 ^''^ Bagehot, Essays o?i Parliamentary Reform^ 1883, p. 248. 
 
 12 
 
178 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 every reason to judge, from the work he actually 
 accomplished, that in the department of pure mental 
 science he would have been exceptionally success- 
 ful. Unfortunately for his reputation as a scientific 
 thinker, he had also brilliant literary ability. His 
 Literary Studies are some of the most delicious read- 
 ing in the whole of English criticism. He stands 
 indeed on the very border line between Philistia and 
 Judoea, and it is with regret we find that in his heart 
 of hearts he appears to have enshrined the gods of 
 heathendom. A comfortable fortune, an environment 
 blessed by all the discoveries of science, and an 
 agreeable philosophy of social conventions, seem to 
 him, after all, better worth a man's life than a 
 Quixotic devotion to ideals. But it is just for this 
 reason that he falls inevitably into the ranks of the 
 army of science. 
 
 If an early death robbed the world of the fruit 
 which the works of Bagehot had foreshadowed, a 
 similar fate befell the promise of Thomas Buckle. 
 From him we might have expected a complete 
 philosophy of history on positivist lines. He did 
 enough to show in what direction his thoughts lay, 
 and the precocity of his talent led to the hope that 
 time might be given him to succeed in an enterprise 
 which demanded an almost Herculean amount of 
 labour. 
 
 Mr. Buckle's death has left the field to another 
 teacher. In suggesting Professor Seeley as a con- 
 tinuer of Mill's work, I do not of course mean to 
 imply that Professor Seeley's views on ethical and 
 
The Potter'' s Clay, 179 
 
 political subjects agree with those of Mill. But it 
 does appear that in his philosophy of history Pro- 
 fessor Secley is working out some of the suggestions 
 contained in the sixth book of the Logic. It is 
 true that the key to history is found by Professor 
 Seeley to be not, as Comte suggested and Mill 
 approved, the state of the speculative faculties of 
 mankind from age to age, but the development of 
 the political forms under which they live. This is 
 certainly not the point at which Mill and Professor 
 Seeley touch. But in the application by the latter 
 of the physical method to the study of history, in 
 his favourite illustration of vegetable physiology as 
 the model for the construction of a science of state- 
 forms, we seem to see a strong grasp and deter- 
 mined adaptation of the ideas suggested by the 
 author of the Logic. 
 
 So far then it appears that, on the speculative 
 side, at least, the tidal wave of thought upon which 
 Mill rode triumphant is showing no signs of reflux. 
 But we must look at the practical side. 
 
 Here also, at first sight, we seem to see all things 
 dominated by the same ideas. The extension of 
 the franchise has given a larger circumference than 
 ever to the circle of practical politics. Great news- 
 papers still exist to report the proceedings of 
 " Imperial Parliament," and to spread the light of 
 political knowledge by means of the temperate argu- 
 ments of leader-writers. It was a happy day for 
 journalism when it was discovered that the exigen- 
 cies of the party system might be made to serve the 
 
I So Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 interests of the press ; that by virtue of the pleasing 
 theory that what one party proposes the other must 
 necessarily oppose, two newspapers might be made 
 to grow where only one grew before. The same 
 theory of course simplifies immensely the difficulty 
 which otherwise presents itself as to the production 
 of so much literary matter. The news-columns may 
 be supplied from the Central Press Agency with 
 perfect impartiality ; but it will not do to have all 
 the leaders alike. Mappily it is only necessary to 
 remember this one cardinal maxim : That whatever 
 is proposed by a member of the other party, that 
 you must abuse. So the good Radical editor must 
 find in every Conservative proposal a plot to aggran- 
 dize the aristocracy at the expense of the people, 
 and the staunch Conservative must discover in every 
 Liberal measure a reckless desire of change, and 
 an unwortliy itcliing to meddle with established 
 rights. 
 
 All this works with a great deal of noise, and we 
 have vacation campaigns, with mass-meetings, tre- 
 mendous oratory, and great applause, ever increasing 
 as the time of dissolution draws nigh. And party- 
 principles extend themselves to municipal and even 
 social affairs, and result in Prinnose Leagues, and 
 Reform Clubs, and picnics, and pilgrimages, and 
 the earth seems covered with the machinery of 
 representative government ; and all these things 
 make a very great noise indeed. 
 
 But it is necessary to look a little deeper than 
 this. Is representative government really as firmly 
 
The Potter s Clay. i8i 
 
 fixed as it was twenty years ago? Now the stability 
 of institutions may be guessed from their results, 
 perhaps even better than from their appearance. 
 How then does representative government actually 
 work ? 
 
 It is surely one of the first requisites of a repre- 
 sentative system that it should produce a good 
 representative House. A House of Commons, 
 framed in accordance with English theories, might 
 be said to be good if it possessed either of two 
 important qualities. If it succeeded in attracting 
 the wisest and noblest men in the nation it would 
 be good, as affording a guarantee that the highest 
 skill and probity were applied to the guidance of 
 national affairs. Or again, if it succeeded in faith- 
 fully reflecting the shades and currents of real 
 feelings throughout the country, it would be good, 
 as offering an invaluable fund of knowledge to 
 those whose actual business it was to rule the 
 nation, were they themselves members of Parliament 
 or not. The House of Commons which combined 
 these two virtues would, of course, be ideally good ; 
 for it would prove that the standard of excellence 
 was universal. But such a House is necessarily 
 only ideal ; for if all were equally wise and noble, 
 there could be no wisest and noblest. 
 
 Does the present House of Commons possess 
 either of these good qualities ? The first it can 
 hardly lay claim to. With singularly few excep- 
 tions, men of light and leading are not to be found 
 within its walls. How is it possible that they 
 
1 82 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mitl, 
 
 should be ? Will a man of ability and character 
 place himself at the disposal of a Caucus Committee, 
 speak as they bid him, talk platitudes night after 
 night to mass-meetings, swallow all kinds of anti- 
 quated formulas, perform all kinds of indirect 
 bribery, to gain a seat from which the first inde- 
 pendent speech he makes, the first independent vote 
 he gives, is doomed to hurl him ? Will he strive 
 so hardly to enter a scene in which his real know- 
 ledge will be despised and refused a hearing, while 
 he is condemned to sit and listen to hours of vapid 
 commonplace applauded to the roof? Is his time of 
 such little value that he should waste it in midnight 
 sittings, while one irreconcilable after another essays 
 the task of carrying brutality to the utmost degree 
 consistent with non-ejectment ? And all this with 
 the knowledge that his presence is futile, that 
 nothing is really started in Parliament, that no idea 
 has had its birth there for many years, that for all 
 practical purposes Parliament does little more than 
 register the decisions of public opinion, upon which 
 his influence might be far greater from another 
 standpoint ? It is true that some men of ability 
 and character do get into Parliament, just as it is 
 true that there are some such men who come to 
 grief in other ways. But the chances are against it. 
 And so the enlightened turn away in disgust, and 
 leave the House of Commons to men who are 
 neither enlightened nor commonly honest. The 
 House of Commons becomes accessible to anyone 
 who lives in a London suburb, has inherited a 
 
The Potter s Clay, 183 
 
 brewery, and has a scheming wife. Young men 
 make ParHament a stepping-stone to some employ- 
 ment, or a means of filling up the time which 
 elapses before they can get professional employ- 
 ment. Men who have made fortunes in some 
 '' ungenteel " way buy themselves into the House 
 of Commons with a view, as they think, to increase 
 their social importance. The House becomes less 
 and less what it once was, — a body of men accus- 
 tomed in their daily lives to some degree of ac- 
 quaintance with public affairs, and to whom the 
 business of government came, to a certain extent, 
 naturally. 
 
 But if representative government does not 
 succeed in filling the House of Commons with the 
 best men in the land, still less does it provide a 
 House which reflects the feelings and wishes of 
 the nation. A man really represents, not the con- 
 stituency which votes him into his place, but the 
 class of society with which he is identified in spirit 
 and tendencies. Who can say that England is 
 represented in this sense ? The aristocracy, which 
 has already a House of its own, is represented to 
 any extent by the hundred and more landowners 
 and younger sons who sit in the Lower House. 
 The professions are over-represented by the retired 
 military and naval officers, by the medical men, and 
 by the barristers, who compose another large sec- 
 tion of the Commons, and the clergy are represented 
 by the bishops in the House of Lords. The 
 wealthy manufacturers are represented well enough. 
 
184 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 But when we have come so far, we have left unre- 
 presented at least five-sixths of the nation. Who 
 represent the feelings and aspirations of the large 
 class of shopkeepers ? By whom is the ever- 
 increasing army of clerks of all grades represented ? 
 Or the huge class of agricultural labourers ? Or 
 the still huger classes of artizans, mechanics, and 
 unskilled workers ? If we make an ample deduc- 
 tion for the few so-called '' Labour " 'candidates, 
 some of whom are emphatically disowned by the 
 great mass of the labouring men, we still have an 
 overwhelming deficit to make up. Is it said that 
 these classes are represented by their superiors, 
 whom they elect to represent them ? Consider the 
 case of an eloquent young barrister who goes down 
 to canvass a small country town. He has been 
 supplied by the '' Carlton " or the '' Reform." His 
 life has been spent at a public school, at an English 
 University, in travelling abroad, and in the streets 
 of London. What does he know about life in a 
 country town ? How can he represent the feelings 
 of his constituency, who consist, under the new 
 arrangements, probably of a few country gentle- 
 men, a few professional men, a few farmers, and a 
 very great many small tradesmen and agricultural 
 labourers ? Supposing him to endeavour to enter 
 into the life of the place, and really to wish to catch 
 something of the spirit of the locality, how is it 
 possible in the time at his disposal ? The private 
 borough system was hardly more fallacious as an 
 attempt at representation than is the carpet-bagging 
 
The Potter s Clay, 185 
 
 system, for often the private borough went to a 
 relative of its owner, who had local interests and 
 local knowledge. 
 
 Is it a surprising thing that with such a com- 
 position the House should fail to do its work ? For 
 the last few years it has seemed that it cannot 
 perform even the preliminary task of keeping itself 
 in order. The party-system has divided it into a 
 suicidal pair of combatants, whose insane attempts 
 to cut each other's throats have allowed a third party 
 of irreconcilables to establish themselves in the 
 position of balance-holders. To check the tendency 
 towards anarchy the House has had, by means not 
 the most constitutional, to place in the hands of its 
 own servant arbitrary powers of government, — in 
 other words, in the very heart of the representative 
 system a strong application of despotism has become 
 necessary. Even with this desperate remedy, work 
 can hardly proceed. Every session is prolonged 
 beyond its normal limits, the government of the 
 day is dependent for all hope it has of progress on 
 the forbearance of avowed opponents. 
 
 To add to the confusion, the House of Commons 
 has begun to claim functions which no thinking 
 advocate of representative government ever dreamed 
 of assigning to it. It insists on controlling, question- 
 ing, and obstructing every act of the executive. It 
 requires every detail of policy to be laid before it, 
 and canvassed and emasculated till all the life is gone 
 from the plan. Every crotchet of a nuisance-hunter 
 is made the basis of an attack on the administration^ 
 
1 86 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 by which some one hopes to raise himself into notice. 
 In its eagerness to undertake a task for which it 
 is wholly unfitted, the House of Commons gives up 
 its true functions of legislation and taxation. The 
 legislation, the really important legislation of the 
 session, is prepared by a committee of the executive 
 government, and the House can do little more than 
 make small amendments. Similarly with taxation. 
 Not only are the estimates framed by the executive, 
 which is perhaps necessary, but the means of raising 
 the required sums are practically also determined in 
 the same way. A Prime Minister whose Budget was 
 altered by the House in an important point would 
 probably resign. And then the House would have 
 to vote the Budget of another Prime Minister. In 
 these circumstances, it is not wonderful that the very 
 minimum of real w^ork is produced. The net result 
 was neatly summed up the other day by an observant 
 foreigner, whose other expressions showed that he 
 could appreciate the real conditions of English affairs 
 perhaps better than the English themselves. It 
 seemed to him ^^ que le mecanisme legislatif anglais 
 fait beaucoup plus de bruit et beaucoup moins de besogne 
 qu^ autrefois y ^'^ The House of Commons has even 
 ceased to be a satisfactory place for the redress of 
 grievances. When the working-classes want to 
 make their complaints known, they demonstrate in 
 Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square. Probably to every 
 observant person, except its own members, the House 
 
 i''^ Journal des Econo7nistes, August 1887. Le Mouvement 
 Kconomiqtie en Angleterre, p. 242. 
 
The Potte7'^ s Clay. 187 
 
 of Commons has ceased to appear an important 
 body. 
 
 But outside parliament representative government 
 does not fare much better. There is no evidence 
 that the tone of political morality is higher than it 
 was when Carlyle thundered against the sins of 
 electors in the Latter Day Pamphlets. Indeed, it 
 would seem from the enquiry of 1881 that things are 
 worse instead of better. The appalling amount of 
 immorality disclosed on that occasion put into the 
 shade, merely by reason of its superior magnitude, 
 the old horrors of Grampound and Gatton ; while, 
 for unblushing avowal of political dishonesty, nothing 
 can equal the calmness with which the Corporaticn 
 of the City of London claims to employ municipal 
 funds for the purpose of influencing elections. And 
 if tangible bribery has not actually increased, 
 intangible bribery was never so great as now. 
 It is the rarest thing to find a candidate who 
 attempts to guide his constituency ; platform-orators 
 generally say whatever they think will please 
 their audiences best. The speech of an average 
 candidate is a sound to weep over ; if he knows 
 the falsehood of what he is saying, he must be 
 an unblushing liar, if he does not, he must be a 
 pitiable sham. 
 
 Of the inconsistency and general absurdity of 
 the party-system outside the walls of the House of 
 Commons, it were hardly necessary to speak, except 
 that the persistent exposure of abuses is the best 
 way of getting rid of them. When was ever such 
 
1 88 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 a strange phenomenon seen in human history? One 
 half the world has engaged to look at everything 
 through red spectacles, the other half has made a 
 similar engagement to wear blue. A boy of fifteen 
 is scouted amongst his companions if he has not 
 adopted a juvenile pair of coloured glasses. The 
 mania extends to women, who are thus abdicating 
 the privilege which their aloofness from the mud of 
 politics has bestowed upon them, the privilege of 
 seeing things as they really are. Any person who 
 ventures on such a course is considered dangerous. 
 If it be true, as Sir James Stephen tells us, that 
 legal madness is deviation from a norm, the position 
 of a non-party man may ultimately prove very 
 unpleasant. 
 
 It is an easy task to show that any reality which 
 the party-system may have once had has long 
 disappeared. If the party-system is to be real, it 
 must be a system of beliefs, not of caprices. In the 
 days when men believed in their parties the wheel of 
 political fortune did not revolve in the way in which 
 it does now. The Whigs ruled the country from 
 1714 to the end of the century ; the Tories ruled it 
 from the beginning of the new century till the death 
 of George IV. And yet the Septennial Act had been 
 in force all the time. But within the last fifty years 
 the country has changed its governors no less than 
 seven times, that is to say, if party-allegiance be 
 a matter of belief, the beliefs of the nation have 
 undergone seven revolutions within the space of fifty 
 years. The conclusion we have drawn is the more 
 
The Potter s Clay. 189 
 
 merciful of the two. Doubtless the party-system 
 is an admirable safety-valve for the conduct of re- 
 volutions, but that does not alter the fact that 
 revolutions are undesirable things. 
 
 Happily we are not required to take such a gloomy 
 view. It is unreasonable to expect people to believe 
 in* a band of leaders which is ever changing and 
 dissolving, or in a creed which does not exist. Can 
 any philosopher discover what are the distinctive 
 features of the two, or three, or four parties which 
 now divide the nation ? It is simply a battle of 
 the Ins and the Outs, with a few faded flags to 
 keep up a semblance of historical traditions ; and 
 the only relief from the interminable contest occurs 
 when the spectators interfere and insist on a certain 
 movement. 
 
 It is hardly surprising to note that, in these 
 circumstances, the respect for law and order which 
 was once so distinguishing a mark of the Englishman 
 is passing away. London has been for some hours 
 powerless in the hands of a mob. The Home-Rule 
 agitation, which, curiously enough, dates from the 
 very days in which the Irish Land Bill of 1870 was 
 before Parliament, sets at defiance the authority of 
 every Government, its leaders relying with perfect 
 confidence on the Opposition to prevent effective 
 measures. The Tithe-Agitation advocates open 
 resistance to the administration of the law, being 
 unable to make itself effectively heard in a repre- 
 sentative Parliament. The crofters of Skye have 
 to be dragooned into order. It hardly seems that 
 
I go Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 enlightened self-interest tends always in the direction 
 of harmony. 
 
 On the other hand, signs are not wanting of a 
 revolt from the school of thought which has played 
 so large a part in the history of the last half-century. 
 The philosophic defenders of positivism and repre- 
 sentative government are becoming few in number. 
 Bagehot is dead, Fawcett is dead, Mr. Thorold 
 Rogers and Mr. Goldwin Smith are not the figures 
 they were twenty years ago. Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 has told his tale. The younger school of cultivated 
 Radicals, Mr. Bryce, Mr. Courtney, Sir Charles 
 Dilke, Sir George Trevelyan, do not produce any 
 philosophic justification of their creed. The burden 
 and heat of the day is borne by Mr. John Morley 
 almost alone. 
 
 And from the xDther side the attack grov/s formid- 
 able. It is part of the creed of the Radical school to 
 despise poetry, — surely a very great mistake if the 
 influence which poetry has exerted on politics in all 
 ages be considered. But we will venture to quote 
 a stanza from Mr. Tennyson (the title ivill hang 
 fire) which seems to express something of what the 
 world is now looking for, in spite of Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer's warnings : — 
 
 Ah God ! for a man with heart, head, hand, 
 Like some of the simple great ones gone 
 For ever and ever by, 
 One strong still man in a blatant land, 
 Whatever they call him. what care I ? 
 Aristocrat, democrat, antocrat — one 
 Who can rule and dare not lie.^''"^ 
 
 ^''^ Maud, part i., X., v. 
 
The Potters Clay. 191 
 
 And this thought is expanded into fuller expression 
 in the succeeding Idylls of the King, where it is the 
 king's presence and rule that can alone bring peace 
 to a troubled land ; while in his latest utterances 
 Tennyson has broken still more with the philosopliy 
 whose teachings he once reflected, as he reflects 
 with faithful accuracy each phase of national thought. 
 The very quality which impairs Tennyson's value as 
 a poet renders him invaluable as an index to his age. 
 We should scarcely find a truer picture of English 
 popular thought than that unfolded by a chrono- 
 logical study of his works. 
 
 But if Tennyson plays the humbler part of chorus 
 to the English national tragedy, there is one who 
 dominates the stage like the voice of a Cassandra 
 prophesying woe. If the mantle of Mill has fallen 
 upon Mr. Herbert Spencer, the garment of Carlyle 
 has descended upon the shoulders of Mr. Ruskin. 
 With less of grandeur and prophetic imagination than 
 his great predecessor, the author of Unto this Last 
 and Fors Clavigera is enabled by the surpassing 
 beauty of his words to bring his message more 
 cjuickly home to his hearers, and to spread it abroad 
 with wider acceptance. By his unrivalled mastery 
 in the criticism of art, Mr. Ruskin has earned a 
 position which he turns to noble use, by showing 
 tiiat the foundation of all true art is a grand 
 morality, a nature high and pure. And his words 
 reach to the ends of the land. No one would 
 question the assertion that by the upper classes 
 Mr. Ruskin's works are eagerly read. But it is 
 
192 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 no less true that amongst the very humblest he is 
 a power. It is a fact with which Mr. John Morley 
 and his friends must reckon, that Mr. Ruskin's 
 name would draw a larger and more enthusiastic 
 audience in the east end of London than any that 
 they could bring forward, and this whatever were 
 the subject to be discussed, politics though it were. 
 Mr. Ruskin has never laid himself out to attract 
 popularity. He began life as a member of the 
 Opposition, and he has ever remained an Ishmaelite. 
 Nevertheless there are times when men feel drawn 
 rather to the wilderness than to the hustings or 
 the forum. And if we ask to whom it is that 
 Mr. Ruskin looks as his teacher in political and 
 social wisdom, no honest reader of his works can 
 give any other answer than the name of Thomxas 
 Carlyle. For evil and for good Mr. Ruskin has been 
 influenced by Carlyle ; for evil, as when the molten 
 lava, which poured with such majestic fitness from 
 the mouth of the volcanic prophet, is reproduced 
 in the angry flame which sometimes plays about 
 the flower-like beauty of the artist's words ; for 
 good, in the stern sense of righteousness, the 
 sympathy with human suffering, the simplicity of 
 life and thought, which have redeemed from all 
 suspicion of artistic sensuousness or selfishness the 
 work of John Ruskin. To be the most eagerly 
 read of all serious writers in any age is to wield 
 a mighty power, and all the more if the writer's 
 message be one of defiance. 
 
 To the same effect, but in far other language, 
 
The Potters Clay, 193 
 
 does another writer take up the challenge against 
 the scientific school. There are some men who 
 work with sledge-hammers, others who use vinegar 
 to split the rocks. Mr. Matthew Arnold ^^^ does 
 not heap terrific denunciations of wrath upon 
 Philistinism, but his attack is none the less deadly. 
 Very quietly, and with a meaning smile on his face, 
 he picks out the weak places in the too conspicuous 
 armour of his foe, and plants in them little stinging 
 darts of sarcasm and ridicule that rankle and fester 
 when a sword thrust would have healed. He does 
 not paint in glowing terms the miseries resulting 
 from an abuse or a fallacy, but he takes the evil 
 thing, strips it quietly of its gaudy clothing, and 
 leaves it, naked and ashamed, to slink out of 
 sight. He does not disavow the name of Liberal 
 which he once professed, but he terms himself 
 " a Liberal tempered by experience." It is one 
 of the surest signs of success to be abused by 
 one's enemies, and this sign has been abundantly 
 vouchsafed to Mr. Matthew Arnold. He does not 
 write in such a bold hand as Mr. Ruskin, he can 
 only be read by those whose sight is comparatively 
 keen. But it is the keen-sighted people at whom 
 he aims. He knows that the flock has bell- 
 wethers, and that if he can move them the rest 
 will follow. 
 
 And Mr. Matthew Arnold too, though he may 
 not freely admit the fact, is indebted to Carlyle. 
 
 ^''^ These pages were written before the lamented death of 
 the author of Literature and Dugina. 
 
 13 
 
194 Thomas Carlylc and John Stnai^t Mill. 
 
 What is liis Culture and Anarchy but a sermon 
 on the text of the Latter Day PantpJiIcts, though 
 the remedy it suggests may not be such as 
 Carlyle would have approved ? Nothing can be 
 more unUke than the style of the two men. Yet 
 v^ith the very smallest allowance for this difference, 
 cannot we fancy these words of the younger 
 writer almost an echo of the Sartor? — "To walk 
 staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict 
 and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number 
 of those who say and do not, to be in earnest 
 — this is the discipline by which alone man is 
 enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the 
 passing moment and to his bodily senses, to en- 
 noble it, and to make it eternal."^"" The pessimism 
 of Mr. Matthew Arnold's poetic 3'ears has left him 
 shy oi all appearance of enthusiasm, yet we feel 
 that under his polished exterior there is a tenacity 
 of purpose which bears some likeness to the vivid 
 energy of the old prophet. And is not his *^ poiver 
 tvhicli makes for rig/iteous/iess^^ something very near 
 to Carlyle's idea oi^ the Divine force by whose 
 ordering Right is also ultimately made Might ? 
 Carl3'le defines prayer as " the aspiration of our 
 poor struggling, heav3^-laden soul towards its 
 Eternal Father;"^"' and Mr. Matthew Arnold, in an 
 edition of one of his works published two years 
 after this definition oi' Carlyle's was given to the 
 world, speaks of prayer as " at bottom nothing else 
 
 *"'' Culture and AnarehVy 3rd edit., Preface, p. xlviii. 
 *" Carlyle, First Forty, vol. ii., p. 22. 
 
The Pollers Clay. 195 
 
 than an energy of aspiration towards the eternal 
 iiol ourselves that makes for righteousness."^^'* 
 
 But if we arc not .satisfied with the evidence of 
 poets and men of letters, we can turn to testimony 
 against which no charge of levity can be brought 
 by the severest Benthamite. The author of Ancient 
 TLaiv ''" is a writer well qualified by the hardest 
 scientific training to understand tlie tendencies of 
 modern politics. That work was one of the earliest 
 and most successful attempts towards the application 
 of Darwinian principles to mental science. Mill 
 himself spoke of the book with enthusiasm/^'' and 
 the works which have since come from the same pen 
 are sufficient to convince even Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 that here is one who is not speaking on social 
 questions without a previous study of the laws of 
 the social organism. And when an author of such 
 ripe wisdom and practical experience as Sir Henry 
 Maine arrays against a popular institution such a 
 formidable series of charges as those advanced 
 by his latest work, it is time that the supporters 
 of the institution should look to their defences. 
 Democracy has thrown down a challenge which has 
 not as yet been seriously accepted. It is an attack 
 on representative government with the weapons on 
 the use of which it is most apt to pride itself. 
 
 And finally, if it be objected to Mr. Ruskin that 
 
 ^''^ Litci'aiurc and Dogvia., 3r(l (popular) edit., 1884, p. 32, 
 note ; and cf. " A force which is not wc," JJcrocs, \). 8. 
 
 '^" We are passing over new graves. Sir Henry Maine lias 
 also gone. 
 
 iw Dissertations, \o\. iv., p. 130. 
 
196 Thomas Carlyle and John S heart Mill, 
 
 he is a poet, to Mr. Matthew Arnold that he is a 
 man of letters, to Sir Henry Maine that he is an 
 academic politician, there is still another enemy of 
 representative government against whom all such 
 charges fail. Sir James Stephen is of all men 
 least given to academic crotchets, and he has had 
 unrivalled opportunities of judging of the working of 
 government, considered in some of its most practical 
 aspects. Yet he has written a considerable book 
 with the avowed object of combating certain well- 
 known political maxims which are really the guiding 
 principles of the school to which Mill belonged, 
 Libeiiy, Equality, and Fraternity is the deliberate 
 attack of an eminently practical man upon a tone 
 of thought which characterizes the whole policy of 
 the Radical school, and its appearance is the 
 more remarkable that upon more than one funda- 
 mental conclusion of speculative philosophy its 
 author is at one with the leaders of the Mill 
 cult. Probably no serious critic would accuse 
 Sir James Stephen of vagueness or sentimentalism, 
 and his objections to the political philosophy of 
 the scientific school certainly do not arise from 
 inability to comprehend its methods. The truth is 
 that Sir James Stephen possesses a knowledge of 
 average human nature which seems to be superior, 
 for practical use, to the generalizations of psy- 
 chology. Sir James Stephen, be it remarked, is 
 an avowed admirer of Carlyle. 
 
 And if we are asked where, in practical affairs, 
 is the recoil from laissez-faire and the tendencies 
 
The Potters Clay. 197 
 
 of the Radical school, we may point simply to two 
 very significant facts, the one significant because 
 it is the direct reversal of ideas which were 
 once successfully advocated by some of the most 
 distinguished teachers of that school, the other 
 because it was a decision given against the most 
 popular political chief of modern times, in the full 
 flush of his popularity, just after the achievement 
 of a brilliant success. One fact is the total change 
 of national feeling with regard to the separation of 
 the colonies from the mother-country. The other 
 is the flat refusal of the nation to sanction the 
 disintegration of the United Kingdom. Both these 
 facts are of first-rate importance. 
 
 But this is, after all, only the negative side of 
 the new movement. If the old order is to vanish 
 we must have something in its place. Are there 
 any signs that a creative force is at work ? 
 
 Certainly in one direction, at least, we have done 
 something to carry out Carlyle's teaching. We 
 have practically given up laissez-faire. We have 
 made more than one effort to cure the evil of 
 bribery. We have undertaken the education of 
 the whole people. We have attempted to secure 
 decent dwellings for the poor, and have provided an 
 army of officials to watch over the public health. 
 We have made employers responsible to their work- 
 men for the negligence of those whom the employers 
 have selected to work with them. We have made 
 some attempt to guard against the building of rotten 
 ships and rotten houses. We have declined to 
 
198 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 allow manufacturers to grind the lives out of their 
 workmen simply because the latter are too foolish 
 or too weak to care for their own interests. We 
 have said that the future of the nation shall not 
 be imperilled by the overworking of women and 
 children. We have provided recreation-grounds 
 for the poor, and have done something to make 
 cleanliness a possibility to every child of Adam in 
 the land. We have appointed a Public Prosecutor, 
 to put a stop to the scandal of unpunished crimes, 
 and we have made some effort to guide and guard 
 the helpless flock of emigrants who year by year 
 leave our shores in search of a land where work 
 and bread shall be possible for all. This is little 
 enough to boast of, but it hardly falls within the 
 limits of laissez-faire. We have ceased to take 
 as our ideal " Anarchy plus a street-constable " ; 
 we have begun to think of leading men in the way 
 of righteousness. We have done enough to rouse 
 the wrath and despair of Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
 who complains that he is left, like a pelican in the 
 wilderness, to mourn over the time when every man 
 did that which was right in his own eyes. 
 
 But if the chaos is to become cosmos, there must 
 be development as well as order. Are there any 
 signs from the huge masses of men and women 
 which a century of mechanical advance has gathered 
 in the land, that these masses are settling down into 
 an harmonious nation, into a civilization in which 
 each man shall have his part, and no human 
 strength be wasted ? Is there reason to believe 
 
The Potte^^'s Clay. 199 
 
 that, to borrow a scientific phrase, the social 
 blastema will become an organism ? If this is ever 
 to be, it must be possible for us to detect some 
 traces of incipient organs in the undeveloped mass. 
 
 Everywhere there are signs, small perhaps, but 
 significant, that a beginning has been made. There 
 iif one phenomenon, which has in other countries 
 played a large part in history, and which is destined 
 to have a future in England — the working men's 
 club. The list of these institutions in England and 
 Wales is a document which may well startle those 
 who have a nervous horror of any manifestation of 
 life among the lower classes. These clubs are no 
 hothouse offspring of amiable philanthropy ; there 
 are societies and "guilds" enough of that kind. 
 But the really important thing is a club which is 
 supported and governed solely by those for whose 
 interests it exists, and the fidelity with which the 
 working-man adheres to his connection with it, the 
 indisputable signs of vigour which it manifests, the 
 evident determination of its supporters to turn it to 
 good account, are amongst the most hopeful, as well 
 as the most ominous signs for the future of society. 
 All these clubs have a common character, and many 
 of them are actually bound together by a definite 
 connection. 7'he word which describes the common 
 character of these bodies is a word which is often 
 misunderstood ; it is a word which, like so many 
 other words, is inseparably bound up with a host 
 of major and minor prejudices, yet it is a word 
 representing an idea without which no permanent 
 
200 Tko7nas Carlyle and John Shtart Mill, 
 
 settlement of a community can be possible. The 
 common characteristic of these bodies is that they 
 are socialistic. 
 
 But the incipient organization does not stop with 
 its lowest form. Above the small body united for 
 social purposes we have larger bodies united for 
 economic purposes, and above these again still 
 larger organizations for legislative and defensive 
 purposes. The experiment which was tried forty 
 years ago at Rochdale proved successful, and now 
 in many cases the economic wants of the working- 
 man are supplied by societies which own no alle- 
 giance to capitalist or employer of labour. Much 
 experience has been dearly purchased, and the new 
 birth has not been achieved without sore pangs, 
 but now it stands delivered and ready to grow. 
 And in place of the old craft-guilds which the new 
 conditions of labour swept away, we have Trades- 
 Unions to regulate the relations of labour and 
 capital, to weld together the skill and strength of 
 scattered masses into an effective power. Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer may rail as he likes at Trades- 
 Unions, and employers may unite to put them down, 
 but it will be in vain. The peril which threatened 
 England when a selfish and short-sighted legislation 
 attempted to forbid to labouring men what the law 
 allowed to all other classes has happily passed away, 
 and a wiser spirit prevails. Stretching hands down 
 to the single workman in the great factory, and up to 
 the vast masses of skilled labour in foreign lands, 
 Trades-Unions have become a power in the earth. 
 
The Potter'' s Clay, 201 
 
 Other causes are co-operating to bring about a 
 feeling of unity among the working classes. Im- 
 provement in the means of communication renders 
 united action possible in a way which could not have 
 been imagined in the last century. The collection 
 of kindred spirits in the vast model dwellings of 
 ISrge towns is leading to a greater homogeneity of 
 thought in the artizan world. Even the extension 
 of the franchise, lamentably as it fails to correct 
 the evil tendencies of political institutions, effects 
 a quickening of consciousness through the sense of 
 common privileges. The freer speech and thought 
 of many who return from the colonies to end their 
 days in the old home are a revelation to those 
 nursed in old traditions. Looking at the great 
 marks of social division in the nation, and excluding 
 merely professional organizations, it may be doubted 
 whether any class possesses such abundant materials 
 for future development as this artizan class. The 
 aristocracy has still the remnants of its old tradi- 
 tions and instincts, but these have been rudely 
 treated in the last fifty years. The great middle- 
 class has scarcely anything that can be called a 
 rallying-point. Its members are, for the most part, 
 ashamed of their station, and eager to climb into 
 the ranks of the class above them. 
 
 Is there no application in the teaching of Carlyle 
 to these new conditions ? We may be very sure 
 that the nascent organism will develop, but it may 
 not be so certain that it will develop into a healthy 
 and well-toned body. A man who has grown up in 
 
202 Thomas Carlyle mid John Stuart Mill. 
 
 the midst of opposition and ungenerous criticism, 
 who has fought his way, inch by inch, against 
 grinding hostility, will prove a sturdy and eminently 
 capable character, but he may also turn out to be 
 not a little sour and harsh. For want of a little 
 sympathy, a little kindly help, the new order may 
 grow up hard-hearted and fierce. For want of a 
 little knowledge, it may prove bigoted and reac- 
 tionary. For want of noble examples and worthy 
 objects of worship, it may come to be sordid in 
 its aspirations and mean in its achievements. For 
 want of a little spiritual enlightenment, it may fail 
 to catch the true meaning, the awful wonder and 
 significance, the infinite capabilities of life. Laissez- 
 faire will not teach these things ; it has had its day, 
 and is about to depart. Happily, as yet, an union 
 between the old world and the new has not become 
 impossible. There may be a little contempt in the 
 eyes which the new creation turns upon the dying 
 dispensation, perhaps a shade of bitterness ; but, 
 happily, as yet, no irreconcilable hatred. But who 
 knows when the change may come ? It is not with 
 futile attempts at repression, not with disdainful 
 standing aloof, not with supercilious interference, 
 that the departing age must welcome the struggles 
 towards the light of the coming order. But by true 
 sympathy, by unaffected sharing of the stores of 
 the past amongst those whose strength lies in the 
 future, by the pointing to great ideals, by the 
 example in word and deed of a true reverence for 
 all men noble and all things worthy, that the new 
 
The Potter s Clay. • 203 
 
 crisis must be brought to end in victory. Without 
 selfish regret for its own departed glories, with no 
 unworthy craving for the prizes of the new epoch, 
 but with an earnest desire for the perpetual triumph 
 of truth and justice, with true brotherly and loyal 
 affection, must the dying monarch welcome the 
 steps of his successor. It is the common lot. 
 Why should he repine ? Now, as it has ever 
 been — 
 
 The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the Vx^orld. 
 
 Of the nature and qualities of the new age we 
 need not attempt to prophesy too^ minutely. But of 
 one thing all omens assure us. The genius of the 
 new world will not be glory, nor beauty, nor even 
 knowledge, but work. Glory and beauty and know- 
 ledge will be there, but they will be grouped around 
 the central figure ; on the banner of the nation will 
 be inscribed this device, '* Work, for the night cometh,^^ 
 and in place of spear and sword will be seen the 
 mason's hammer and the student's pen. Men have 
 found out that the reward of labour is inexhaustible ; 
 that the bottom of each mine of discovery opens into 
 a still lower depth of riches. But the work will be 
 for its own sake, not for the rewards which it brings ; 
 it will be duty, not covetousness, which nerves the 
 worker's arm. And as all faiths must have their 
 prophets, so long as the souls of men can be stirred 
 by the voice of one who sees clearly what they feel 
 dimly, who has stood in the Holy of Holies while 
 
204 Thomas Carlyle and John S heart Mill, 
 
 they have been waiting in the outer court, who has 
 dimbed the mount and been hidden in the storm, so 
 long will the Gospel of Work have its prophets and 
 heroes. And when we look around for the prophets 
 of the new faith, whom shall we find more fitted to 
 bear aloft the sacred banner than him who raised it 
 amid the jeers and contempt of a generation brought 
 up in Egyptian slavery, who refused to bow the knee 
 to the gods of the heathen when all around him were 
 prostrate in adoration, who has sung the marching 
 music of the new era in tones that vibrate to the 
 very hearts of those who hear them — whom with 
 higher claims than Thomas Carlyle ? 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 PARERGA. 
 
 A FEW words will suffice to add to our former 
 accounts of Carlyle and Mill a short notice of 
 the works which they produced beyond those already 
 referred to. There is, of course, no logical distinction 
 between the productions before discussed and those 
 which we have now to consider. The minds of both 
 Carlyle and Mill were distinctly ^' of a piece "; when 
 we have once grasped the idea of each there is no 
 difficulty in seeing how all their achievements are 
 the natural results of its working. But the diffidence 
 of an inferior critic prefers to deal with the spirit 
 and principal figures of his picture as themselves the 
 primary subjects of his task, rather than, by attempt- 
 ing to include the whole canvas in one description, 
 to run the risk of losing his coherency in a multitude 
 of details. 
 
 There are, again, some events in the history of the 
 two men of which it is evidently impossible for an 
 ordinary writer to give any account. Mill was for 
 thirty-five years in the service of the East India 
 Company, and though we may be perfectly sure that 
 
2o6 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 in this capacity his conduct was influenced by the 
 same admirable quaHties as those which distinguished 
 his pubUc life, we naturally find little record of his 
 labours beyond the general testimony of his official 
 superiors to his worth. His employment in the 
 India Office is, however, interesting on two grounds. 
 In the first place it is an illustration of the fact that 
 a large amount of varied and valuable intellectual 
 work may be produced by men who are obliged by 
 the force of circumstances to do routine duty. It 
 does not appear that Mill went so far as Coleridge 
 and Lamb in recommending some sublunary pursuit 
 as a positive help towards higher culture, although 
 he " found office duties an actual rest from other 
 mental occupations." ^^^ The perpetually recurring 
 claims of routine work must necessarily limit the 
 amount of observation and reading which an inductive 
 philosopher ought to do, and the mental rest required 
 by the severe labours of classification and formula- 
 tion of laws may very well be obtained from the 
 latter source, or from the still better occupation of 
 out-door exercise. It is fairly certain that Gibbon 
 would never have written his great history had his 
 means not allowed him to make it his sole task for 
 many years. And we may be sure that Spinoza 
 would not have taken to grinding lenses had not the 
 necessities of his position compelled him. The great 
 advantage of an independent occupation is that it 
 enables an author to be perfectly unbiassed by 
 sordid motives in his writings. And if a man whose 
 ^^1 Autobiography, p. 83. 
 
Parerga. 207 
 
 routine duties demand a large share of his daily life 
 have sufficient energy to turn steadily to intellectual 
 pursuits as an addition to his occupations, it may be 
 assumed with some probability that the work he 
 produces in the latter sphere will not be without 
 merit. But if a man has not the moral strength to 
 iTeep himself from anarchy or idleness without the 
 perpetual corrective of a bread-winning occupation, 
 he is hardly worthy to aspire to the ranks of litera- 
 ture or science. And, however small the pittance 
 be, if a man has wherewith to pay his way, he had 
 better avoid altogether the maelstrom of Mammon- 
 worship, in which so many noble intellects have 
 perished. 
 
 But Mill's connection with the India Office is also 
 interesting as the probable cause of an important 
 chapter of his political philosophy. Whilst he held 
 the absolute suitability of the representative system 
 to nearly all European countries, and to all the 
 English-speaking colonies and dependencies, he 
 denied that it was applicable to oriental countries, 
 such as India, or that such possessions could be 
 advantageously administered by a Parliamentary 
 Government at all. The most scientific persons are 
 liable to bias, and just as we refuse to accept as 
 objective truth Mill's estimate of his wife's intellectual 
 qualities, so do we refuse to assume the fundamental 
 distinction in point of civilization between the 
 Australian Bush colonists and the native Indian 
 nationalities which Mill saw. Undoubtedly it is 
 true that the virtue of a form of government depends, 
 
2o8 Thomas Carlyle and Jo hi Stuart Mill, 
 
 not on an absolute ideal standard, but on the condi- 
 tion of the people to whom it is to be applied. And 
 undoubtedly it is true that Mill has made out a very 
 strong case for the merits of representative govern- 
 ment under certain conditions. But the point in 
 which he seems to fail is the proof that in her pre- 
 sent condition of development England is really fit 
 for representative government. And a very strong 
 reason for requiring this proof is to be found in 
 the passage in which he combats the application of 
 Representative principles to India.^^"^ It need hardly 
 be pointed out that, although Mill spoke on Indian 
 affairs with great knowledge, yet he is obliged in his 
 argument to resort at least once to mere dogma. 
 " The government of a people by itself has a meaning 
 and a reality ; but such a thing as government of 
 one people by another does not and cannot exist." ^^^ 
 To a mind unacquainted with the peculiar form of 
 reasoning by which the advocates of a representa- 
 tive system satisfy themselves that a man can be 
 both governor and governed, this statement will seem 
 to need complete reversal. 
 
 Of Mill's appearance in the House of Commons 
 we have already spoken. All the circumstances 
 connected with it were eminently honourable to him, 
 and it cannot be doubted that his example in such 
 an atmosphere must have done good. Neverthe- 
 less, it may well be questioned whether he did any- 
 thing in Parliament which he could not as well, or 
 
 ^s- Rep7^esentative Govenmient^ pp. 325 — 340. 
 1S3 Ibid., p. 325. 
 
Parei'ga. 209 
 
 better, have done outside it. He already commanded 
 a wider public than that of the House of Commons ; 
 it is doubtful whether even the reports of his speeches 
 extended his influence. And he certainly was never 
 born to sway an audience by the power of his 
 oratory. Had he been re-elected, his strong sense 
 Cf duty would probably have led him to waste his 
 matured powers in committees and other processes, 
 capable of being dealt with by far inferior men. His 
 appearance is a noteworthy testimony to the fact 
 that a popular constituenc}^ could in the year 1865 
 elect a man of high moral and intellectual worth as 
 its representative. But it deserves also to be remem- 
 bered that, upon the enlargement of the constituency 
 by an Act of Parliament which he had himself 
 supported, Mill was rejected. 
 
 Under the head of parerga come naturally to be 
 considered the minor writings of an author who has 
 produced also systematic works. Besides the editions 
 of Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence and James 
 Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mindy 
 both works of first-rate scientific importance, Mill 
 wrote a great number of articles for the various 
 periodicals with which he was connected. Four 
 volumes of these contributions were collected and 
 published by their author under the title of Disserta- 
 tions and Discussions, and now remain as evidence 
 of his industry and the scope of his learning. Of 
 these essays it may fairly be said that, while they 
 must have been excellent as magazine articles, they 
 are hardly calculated to be of permanent value as 
 
 14 
 
2IO Thomas Carlyle and John Shiart Mill. 
 
 isolated works. In the first-place they do not, as 
 a rule, deal with subjects of first-rate importance. 
 Students who are sufficiently interested in scientific 
 pursuits to be desirous of knowing about the topics 
 of which they treat will naturally go to the originals 
 for their knowledge, while the casual reader^ will 
 hardly be sufficiently interested by the subjects to 
 attack Mill's articles. Michelet, and De Tocqueville, 
 and Whewell, and Bain, and Carrel, and Guizot, are 
 all men whose works are known to students, but the 
 world at large will not care very much about them ; 
 they were none of them epoch-making men in any 
 large sense of the term. 
 
 And again, Mill's way of dealing with his subjects 
 is much more suited to the exigencies of an ephemeral 
 publication than to the needs of permanent works. 
 H'e very rarely gives his matter a human interest by 
 introducing into it a biographical sketch. In the 
 essay on Berkeley's works, for example, where he 
 has a truly great figure to deal with, he mentions 
 only one fact in his author's history, and that in 
 a merely detached way. In such a place a critic like 
 Bagehot would have given us a lively portrait of a 
 man who is really far less known than he deserves 
 to be. Those who are acquainted with Bagehot's 
 essay on another great episcopal figure. Bishop 
 Butler, will at once appreciate the superiority of 
 the later production regarded as a permanent work. 
 Mill's object appears to be so exclusively directed 
 towards making known the merits of a particular 
 publication, that there is almost a suspicion of book- 
 
Pa7^erga, 2 1 1 
 
 seller about his criticism. He is anxious that the 
 work under review shall sell, and so he brings 
 out the most attractive portions of it ; or else he 
 deals with the subject polemically, and the matter 
 becomes one of scientific argument, in which the 
 public can hardly be expected to take much interest. 
 Where an author feels himself strong enough for the 
 task, there is much to be said in favour of Macaulay's 
 celebrated method of dealing with the biographer of 
 Warren Hastings. When we turn over the pages 
 of a volume of collected essays, a gallery of complete 
 portraits should pass before us ; if in the gallery we 
 find strange faces, and especially strange faces which 
 recall well-known names, so much the better. We 
 have added to our stock of knowledge, and the com- 
 fortable conceit of our judgments has received a shock; 
 each of which occurrences is very good for us. But 
 it is a trifle wearisome to behold an author going 
 through a series of embraces or duels, in most of 
 vv^hich the other party to the engagement is hidden 
 from view. 
 
 We have said that the Dissertations are principally 
 concerned with scientific subjects, and this is evident 
 at a glance. Even the essay on Coleridge cannot 
 be excepted from this criticism. But there are two 
 articles which are especially interesting, as being 
 almost the sole surviving attempts of their author in 
 the province of pure literature. It will be remem- 
 bered that, after abandoning his first out-and-out 
 Benthamism, Mill turned with some success to the 
 study of poetry, and ever afterwards insisted on the 
 
2 1 2 Tho7nas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 value of it as a mental stimulus. Unfortunately, it 
 is quite clear, from a perusal of these two essays, 
 that he had no real appreciation of poetry. In the 
 first, that entitled Thoughts on Poetry audits Varieties y 
 he does undoubtedly say one fine thing, though 
 possibly the thought is finer than its appropriateness. 
 " Eloquence is heard, poetry is o^^rheard." ^^* If by 
 this aphorism Mill means to imply that true poetry 
 is never concerned with producing an immediate 
 impression, then undoubtedly nothing could be truer 
 or more apt than his criticism. But apparently he 
 means more than this. For he everywhere insists, 
 throughout the essays, on the subjectiveness of poetry. 
 '' The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the 
 scientific truth itself, but in the state of mind in 
 which the one and the other maybe contemplated." ^^^ 
 This is the real groundwork of all Mill's theory, and 
 it leads him to strange results. It makes him deny 
 spontaneousness and lyrical power to Wordsworth, 
 the author of The Highland Reaper] it makes him 
 regard the poet as the essential opposite of the 
 man of action, whereas the ver}'' greatest poets, 
 Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Milton, Goethe, 
 have been eminently men of action ; it leads him 
 to the paradox that '^ one may write genuine poetry, 
 and not be a poet,"^^'' and it finally brings him to the 
 thoroughly characteristic conclusion that Nascitur 
 Poeta is an antiquated prejudice. He does not 
 
 ^^^ Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i., p. 71- 
 185 Ibid., p. 69. 
 18^ Ibid.^ p. 79. 
 
Parerga. 2 1 3 
 
 actually affirm that a poet may be produced by 
 a suitable system of education, but he throws out 
 strong hints in that direction.^^^ It is quite clear that 
 whatever Mill may have thought of the attractiveness 
 or the utility of poetry, he did not believe in its 
 truth, in any high sense of the word. He expressly 
 ' denies that poetry addresses itself to the belief.^'^ In 
 fact, he sums up his definition "in Hmiting poetry to 
 the delineation of the states of feeling, and denying 
 the name where nothing is deUneated but outward 
 objects." ^^^ If Mill had applied his own philosophy 
 of induction to the subject of poetry, he would have 
 found that while the feature which he predicates as 
 the poetic essential is indeed painfully prominent in 
 a certain school of poets which was in the ascendant 
 when he wrote, the characteristic is entirely hidden 
 in those whom the world has agreed to call its 
 master-singers. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that, in assigning to 
 poetry a subjective character, Mill meant to bring in 
 the whole of philosophic speculation by a side wind. 
 He spoke merely of mental altitudes as ordinarily 
 understood. Whether an objective world exists or 
 not, it is certain that the great poets write as though 
 they believed it did. And so we may usefully 
 contrast with Mill's view of poetry the definition 
 given by Carlyle, also without any metaphysical 
 intent. ''The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies; 
 
 157 Dissertations and Discussions^ vol. i., p. 88. 
 
 188 Ibid., p. 64. 
 
 189 Ibid'., p. 68. 
 
214 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of 
 Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances 
 was perfect music. Poetry therefore we will call 
 musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that 
 manner. At bottom it turns still on power of in- 
 tellect ; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision 
 that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you 
 see music ; the heart of Nature being everywhere 
 music, if you can only reach it." ^^° The contrast 
 is plain; with Mill poetry is subjective, individual 
 truth: with Carlyle, it is objective, universal truth. 
 And it is not a little wonderful that Carlyle's 
 view of music, which seems so defiantly tran- 
 scendental, has already been strengthened as a 
 scientific theory by Wagner's celebrated essay on 
 Beethoven. 
 
 Those who desire to see Mill's theory brought 
 into practical use as the groundwork of criticism, 
 may read his essay on the Writings of Alfred de 
 Vigny, where the actual poet is accounted for in the 
 most satisfactory way, and where the ideal poet is 
 represented as sitting down to ask himself, before he 
 writes, ''whether it were for the good of humanity 
 at the particular era that Conservative or Radical 
 feeling should most predominate." ^^^ Evidently Mill 
 did not grasp the truth that a real poet has no choice 
 in what he produces, and looks only to his work and 
 not to its effects. 
 
 190 Heroes, p. 78. 
 
 191 Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i., p. 294. 
 
Parerga. 2 1 5 
 
 Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt, 
 Der in den Zweigen vvohnet ; 
 Das Lied, das aus der Kehle dringt, 
 1st Lohn, der reichlich lohnet. 
 
 Or as Tennyson has it — 
 
 I do but sing because I must, 
 * And pipe but as the linnets sing. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we turn to Carlyle's minor 
 productions, we find a body of work not merely of 
 sterling merit, but of perpetual interest. The Life 
 of Schiller, the Wilhelm Meister, and the essays on 
 various branches of German literature, with the short 
 translations from the Romance writers, form an early 
 cycle of Carlyle's productions which accomplished 
 the important task of making English readers 
 acquainted with the treasures of German literature. 
 Everybody now learns German, and can afford to 
 despise translations. But how much of this happy 
 result is due to Carlyle ? In the early days of the 
 century all people who desired to be thought accom- 
 plished professed an acquaintance with French. If 
 the long war had done nothing else, it had at least 
 made French almost an essential for thousands of 
 people. But to know German was a rare accom- 
 plishment, and one which was occasionally looked 
 upon with suspicion. Shortly before Carlyle began 
 to write, Hannah More had lifted up the apron of 
 virtuous alarm against the threatened '' irruption 
 of those swarms of publications now daily issuing 
 from the banks of the Danube, which, like their 
 ravaging predecessors of the darker ages, though 
 
2 1 6 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 with far other and more fatal arms, are overrunning 
 civilized society." Hannah More's enthusiasm for 
 moral virtue has more than once led her into strange 
 positions, but surely the authoress of The Shepherd 
 of Salisbury Plain hardly ever appears in a stranger 
 light than when holding back w^ith one mighty arm 
 the invasion of a Schiller, a Richter, and a Novalis, 
 while with the other she welcomes the correct 
 classical writers of the French school. 
 
 Like most persons who can see beyond the limited 
 range of ordinary human vision, Carlyle had to bear 
 w4th strong opposition from self-constituted advisers. 
 Jeffrey, then the presiding genius of the great critical 
 organ of the day, laughed his German divinities to 
 scorn, and prophesied fearlessly that no one would 
 ever care to believe in them. De Quincey spoke of 
 Goethe, Carlyle's great inspirer, in terms too coarse 
 to be repeated. All the Benthamite school, scarcely 
 even excepting Mill himself, despised German philo- 
 sophy and German literature as '' mystical." Yet 
 Carlyle persevered, with the result that, mainly 
 owing to his efforts, Faust, and Wallenstein, and 
 Minna von Barnhelm are now familiar in translations 
 or originals to every member of the reading public. 
 Had he done nothing else, Carlyle would have been 
 entitled to an honourable place in English literature 
 as the revealer of the treasures of Germany. 
 
 But he did a very great deal more. The three 
 latter volumes of the Miscellanies are a cabinet of 
 the most brilliant jewels, each complete in itself. 
 Carlyle never assumes knowledge in his readers, 
 
Pai'erga. 217 
 
 though he never insults them by forcing upon their 
 notice things which they already know. He has a 
 rare gift of steering clear between patronage and 
 flattery. And what a perfect string of cameos he 
 has given us in Boswell, and Mirabeau, and Dr. 
 Francia^ and Heyne, and Count Cagliostro, and 
 'Voltaire. Each figure stands out before us clear 
 and complete, birth, parents, fortune, circumstances, 
 all distinctly legible, outlined against the most 
 delightful setting of anecdote and observation. 
 Sometimes his subjects are well-known names, and 
 then Carlyle has to combat old prejudices, nearly 
 always succeeding in proving to his reader that 
 they are prejudices. In other cases he is dealing 
 with figures less familiar to the public eye, and then 
 he is careful to create a distinct and living portrait. 
 When he has a story to tell, he is absolutely 
 unrivalled. In the opening pages of The Diamond 
 Necklace he implicitly undertakes to show that truth 
 is more interesting than fiction, and amply does he 
 redeem his promise. The wildest of Hans Andersen's 
 tales does not surpass in daring this historical sketch 
 of events which actually happened just a hundred 
 years ago. The same gift of dramatic power, for 
 such it really is, may be seen too in the story from 
 German history. The Prinzenraub. From Mexico to 
 Russia his mind seems to travel with perfect ease ; 
 he reads the characters of men as clearly when they 
 are engaged in quelling one revolution in Paraguay, 
 as when they are busy fomenting another in 
 St. Petersburg. 
 
2 1 8 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 The crowning triumph of Carlyle's minor works 
 is, and will remain, his Life of Sterling. His subject 
 was one of great difficulty. Sterling was a man 
 endeared to all who knew him by an indefinable 
 sweetness of character, and an equally indefinable 
 halo of promise. The permanent work which he did 
 amounted to practically nothing. His biographer 
 had to delineate a character entirely spiritual, never 
 reduced into form by concrete action. All men who 
 knew Sterling loved him, and all were convinced 
 that he had great things in him. Unfortunately he, 
 like Clough and Amiel, died before his possibilities 
 became performances. There was no room here 
 for the mere compiling biographer, the Boswell or 
 the Forster. Such men are useful as dictionaries 
 to the lives of long-lived and completed geniuses, 
 such as Johnson and Landor, but they would find 
 no scope in the case of a man like Sterling. From 
 their works the reader has to create the portrait for 
 himself, and, unfortunately, the materials of Sterling's 
 life were only recognizable by those who actually 
 knew him. He needed for his biographer a man 
 of genius, and may be regarded as supremely 
 fortunate in finding him. It is entirely certain that, 
 but for Carlyle's book, the memory of Sterling would 
 have been completely lost by this time. There is 
 nothing of him that would survive in dictionaries. 
 Author o^ Strafford \s all that could be said about him 
 in such compilations, and who now reads Strafford ? 
 It is a common remark that the men who really make 
 life pleasant and noble for us are soon lost to fame, 
 
Parerga. 219 
 
 while the memories which survive are those whose 
 influence we do not recognize. Carlyle has arrested 
 one of these human figures in its flight towards the 
 land of darkness, and made it immortal. 
 
 Before passing on to the last item in our list we 
 may just cast a passing glance at another benefit for 
 Which, if Mr. Froude's account be correct, we are 
 indebted to Carlyle. This is the institution known 
 as " The London Library," in St. James's Square. 
 In 1840 there was no reading-room at the British 
 Museum and no Guildhall Free Library, while the 
 ordinary *' circulating libraries " could hardly be 
 expected to satisfy the wants of serious readers. 
 Even to this day the " London Library," as a 
 storehouse of good books which can be borrowed 
 and taken away, is a great boon ; in the days when 
 it was first started it must have been of priceless 
 value. And, if we are to believe Mr. Froude, its 
 foundation was . due to the energy of Carlyle. 
 Unfortunately, his biographer does not produce any 
 testimony to the truth of his assertion, and it is not, 
 perhaps, surprising that the credit of the enterprise 
 should be given, in the popular estimation, to the 
 chairman of the meeting at which the plan was finally 
 determined on. At the same time, no one who has 
 studied Carlyle's character with any care will say 
 that this was a thing beyond his powers. Trans- 
 cendental and imaginative as he was, no man of the 
 world ever managed his business affairs with more 
 shrewdness and success, of course within the lines 
 peremptorily drawn by his sense of right and wrong. 
 
2 20 Tho7nas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 Where he could satisfy himself that the object was 
 entirely worthy, few men could achieve it wdth more 
 complete certainty than Carlyle. 
 
 It now remains only to speak of one very large 
 item of work which Carlyle accomplished, in addition 
 to the labours already touched upon. This is, of 
 course, his historical productions. And as it is by 
 these, perhaps even more than by his other writings, 
 that he is known to the greater world of European 
 thought, it may be worth while to ascertain the view 
 which he took of the province of the historian. And 
 this is the more necessary that Mill also took a very 
 decided interest in the subject, and, as we have seen, 
 has left some interesting thoughts about it, though 
 he never achieved anything as an illustration of his 
 views. 
 
 Carlyle's ideal of history was the history which 
 appears in the Old Testament. The historical books 
 of the Bible were written by men who saw in the 
 events which befell individuals and nations the 
 workings of a Divine Providence, rewarding the 
 good and punishing the evil. 
 
 " In the three and twentieth year of Joash the son of 
 Ahaziah King of Judah, Jehoahaz the son of Jehu began to 
 reign over Israel in Samaria, and reigned seventeen years. 
 
 " And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, 
 and followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which 
 made Israel to sin ; he departed not therefrom. 
 
 "And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, 
 and He delivered them into the hand of Hazael King of 
 Syria, and into the hand of Ben-hadad the son of Hazael, 
 all their days.''^^^ 
 
 192 
 
 2 Kings xiii. 1-3. 
 
Pai^erga. 221 
 
 This is an example of the way in which history 
 presented itself to the Hebrew prophets, and this 
 was the view Carlyle took of it. The simple '' did 
 evil in the sight of the Lord/' which satisfied the 
 minds of primitive men, would have, of course, to be 
 expanded into a narrative of greater detail. But in 
 the ethical tone of the Bible history Carlyle found 
 what he sought in vain in other records of the past. 
 , In the view that he took, the history of Israel was 
 only more valuable than the history of any other 
 nation, by virtue of the fact that it was incomparably 
 better written. For Carlyle, the God who ruled in 
 Palestine ruled also in England, and by the same 
 laws of justice. Consequently, the events of English 
 history were just as truly evidences of the working 
 of Divine justice as the events of Jewish history, 
 and they would be, if properly interpreted, far more 
 impressive to English minds, as being naturally more 
 interesting and familiar. 
 
 But the important fact was that whereas the history 
 of Israel was written by a Moses and a Samuel, men 
 whose whole souls were filled with the overpowering 
 sense of the nearness and majesty of God, who judged 
 every event by its relationship with the laws of 
 righteousness, who were gifted with piercing insight 
 and absorbing enthusiasm for their subject, who were^ 
 in a word, inspired, — the history of England was 
 written by men like Hume and Macaulay, who saw 
 only in the fate of nations the proof or disproof of 
 certain small political theories, or by mere chroniclers 
 like Stow and Holinshed. 
 
2 2 2 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 The true function of the historian then is, 
 ''interpreting the mysterious ways of Divine Pro- 
 vidence in this Universe," ^^^ or turning over the 
 pages of the " grand sacred Epos, or Bible of World- 
 History ; infinite in meaning as the Divine Mind it 
 emblems ; wherein he is wise that can read here a 
 line and there a line." ^^* 
 
 Of course it will readily be objected that this is 
 a task the complete fulfilment of which is beyond 
 human powers. And Carlyle was not the man to 
 shirk this obvious difficulty. He points it out very 
 forcibly in several passages, from one of which we 
 may extract a line or two. 
 
 " The most gifted man can observe, still more can record, 
 only the series of his own impressions ; his observation, 
 therefore, to say nothing of its other imperfections, must be 
 successive, while the things done were often si??ttiltaneotcs ; 
 the things done were not a series, but a group. . . . Narrative 
 is linea?% Action is solid. . . . Truly if History is Philosophy 
 teaching by Experience, the writer fitted to compose History 
 is hitherto an unknown man. The Experience itself would 
 require All-Knowledge to record it, — were the All-wisdom 
 needful for such Philosophy as would interpret it to be had 
 for the asking." ^^^ 
 
 It is evident then that Carlyle saw, as clearly as 
 his scientific contemporaries, the impossibility of 
 dealing, en masse, with the infinity of circumstances 
 of which the shortest period of history is really 
 composed, and equally clear that he saw the necessity 
 of finding central points upon which the web of 
 history could be hung. 
 
 193 Friediich, vol. i., p. 143. 
 
 ^^^ Cagliostro, " Miscellanies," vol. v., p. 65. 
 
 ^^^ O/i History, "Miscellanies, '"vol. iv., pp. 257, 258. 
 
Parerga. 223 
 
 But he differed entirely from the scientific school 
 in his choice of these points. We have seen that 
 Mill took for his guide " the state of the intellectual 
 faculties of mankind," as being ''the main determining 
 cause of the social progress." ^'^^ Carlyle preferred to 
 leave the doubtful theory implied in the word progress 
 0iit of sight altogether. As a transcendentalist he 
 recognised the existence of an internal as well as an 
 external world, and it seemed to him that the record 
 of the internal world, as translated by the actions of 
 great men, was a surer guide than scientific specula- 
 tion to the mysteries of the. universe. Great men 
 appeared to him to be the dominating influences by 
 which the colour was given to a period, of all the 
 forces at work infinitely the most powerful, and, 
 what was practically important, infinitely the most 
 evident and describable. Whatever might be the 
 ulterior influences acting on man himself, every act 
 and every thought which had shaped the current of 
 the world's history had come finally from the hand 
 or brain of a human being, and further than this, in 
 the way of scientific enquiry, it did not seem to him 
 possible to go. This had been his earliest faith. 
 " Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) 
 texts of that Divine Book of Revelations, whereof 
 a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by 
 some named History." ^'^^ And he still clung to it as 
 time went on. " What is the Bible of a nation, the 
 practically-credited God's message to a nation ? Is 
 
 ^^^ Logic, book vi., cap. x., § 7. Atite, p. 154. 
 ^^^ Sartor, p. 122. 
 
2 24 Thomas Carlyle and JoJm Stttart Mill. 
 
 it not, beyond all else, the authentic Biography of its 
 Heroic Souls ? " ^^^ It seemed to him that the Stuarts 
 came back not because the reign of Puritanism had 
 reached the limit of its capabilities, but because 
 Cromwell was dead and there was no one to take 
 his place ; that the disastrous collapse of Prussia at 
 the end of the eighteenth century was the natural 
 result of the change from Fried rich the Great to 
 Friedrich Wilhelm II., and its subsequent revival due 
 to the devoted efforts of such men as the Humboldts, 
 Hardenberg, and Stein. And so history came to 
 mean to him '^ the essence of innumerable biogra- 
 phies." ^'^ 
 
 This method of writing history gave scope to 
 one of Carlyle's most conspicuous gifts, his power of 
 imagination. The view which Mill regarded as the 
 highest aspect of historical writing, in which " the 
 whole of the events which have befallen the human 
 race, and the states through which it has passed, 
 are regarded as a series of phenomena, produced 
 by causes, and susceptible of explanation," "^"^ affords 
 little scope for the peculiar gift of imaginative genius. 
 And accordingly we find Mill placing the Carlylese 
 method in the second rank only,^^^ and inclining to 
 doubt the value of Michelet's historical imagination. ^'^^ 
 But in dealing with other men of genius the man of 
 
 13^ Latter Day Pamphlets, p. 239. 
 i'« On History, "Miscellanies," vol. ii., p. 255. 
 2«" Mlclielefs History of France ^ "Dissertations and Discus- 
 sions," vol. ii., p. 129. 
 2«i Ibid., p. 128. 
 2"3 Ibid., p. 142. ^ 
 
Parerga. 225 
 
 genius finds himself in the society of those whom 
 he understands and reahzes. Where the records are 
 deficient, he can fill up the blanks from his own con- 
 viction of what the hero's mind mual have been, he can 
 detect inconsistencies in the accounts of great men 
 written by small men who. are entirely incapable of 
 appreciating their greatness, he can give his narrative 
 a life and reasonableness which make it differ from 
 the scraggy collections of mere compilers, as the full 
 action of the stage differs from the ghastly rigidity of 
 the property-room. Instead of showing why things 
 happened, or what, things ought to have happened, 
 he draws a living picture of what actually ^/^ happen ; 
 he plays the part, not of the anatomist, but of the 
 creator, by whose breath the dry bones are made 
 to live. 
 
 But just as the great artist derives strength and 
 certainty from his studies of anatomy and the laws 
 of perspective, so does the literary historian guard 
 against error by a most assiduous study of the driest 
 records. It would be a fatal mistake to suppose thc.t 
 Carlyle substituted imagination for industry in his 
 historical work. " Faithful Genius at the top and 
 faithful Industry at the bottom " ^"'^ was his idea of a 
 preparation for the writing of history. And he had 
 himself to supply both qualities, for, unhappily, he 
 found no decent industry in the records he had to 
 deal with. It is of course competent for no one who 
 has not been over the same ground to pronounce 
 decidedly whether Carlyle has actually examined 
 203 Frieda ich^ vol. i., p. 17. 
 
 15 
 
2 26 Thomas Carlyle and John Shear t Mill. 
 
 every nook and corner of it, but so far as we can 
 judge by results, he was not one to shrink from the 
 most exhausting labour. In the French Revolution the 
 traces of the spade and pickaxe are not so numerous 
 as in Cromwell and Friedrich, but in the latter Carlyle 
 appears to have known everything that was generally 
 known in his time, and to have discovered or guessed 
 much that has since been brought to light. The very 
 criticism that is now made in Germany on Friedrich 
 is, that it is so loaded with evidences of detailed 
 knowledge as to put almost too great a strain upon 
 the minds of its careful readers. 
 
 These ideas Carlyle carried out in his historical 
 writings. Everywhere it is the figures of men 
 around which the action groups itself; men are 
 the links in the chain of causation which binds the 
 drama together. Even in the most famous incidents 
 it is the actors that claim the chief share of our 
 attention. 
 
 And what a wonderful result it is. The French 
 Revolution is a thing absolutely unique. We read it 
 again and again, and find that here is the thing going 
 on before our eyes. There is very little theory in 
 the book beyond the one great theory that Heaven 
 is taking vengeance for the sins of centuries, that 
 a society rotten to the very heart must eventually 
 fall with a crash. For the rest, Carlyle seems too 
 entirely absorbed in the dramatic interest of the 
 scene to be anxious about doctrines. He is dealing 
 with men whom he thoroughly understands, and 
 seems no more desirous of showing why such events 
 
Parerga. 227 
 
 happened than he would be of discussing the causes 
 of hunger. The boolc achieves Carlyle's own highest 
 ambition, the reconcilement of the ideal and the 
 actual. With all the fascination of a romance, it has 
 all the literalness of a police-court record. 
 
 Still more do the Letters and Speeches of Cromwell 
 Constitute the study of a great man. Here the 
 author's place is reduced to that of an editor and 
 commentator, and in this department Carlyle has 
 proved himself admirable. The subject was one 
 which excited great interest throughout the countr}^, 
 and there was every opportunity for criticism. The 
 descendants of the men among whom Cromwell lived 
 and moved were still, in many cases, living in the 
 homes of their ancestors, with unbroken traditions of 
 the past, and ample ability to ferret out documentary 
 evidence. Yet, as Carlyle could say with pardonable 
 pride in later editions, nothing was produced which 
 could in the least alter the main outlines of his 
 picture, nor, in fact, anything that demanded material 
 alteration in the original work. The book turned 
 the already wavering current into a new channel. 
 People had begun to suspect that this man Cromwell, 
 who rose from the position of a small country squire 
 to rule the three kingdoms, under whose government 
 England was glorious in peace and successful in war, 
 who laid the foundation of her commercial greatness, 
 and who never lost a battle in which he commanded, 
 could not quite be the shallow hypocrite which the 
 Restoration histories made him out to be. Carlyle's 
 Lectures on Heroes had been a word in season, and 
 
228 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 now this book, with its first-hand evidence and its 
 careful commentary, put the finishing stroke to the 
 work, and estabHshed Cromwell in his true position. 
 A great deal of the labour which the editor had to 
 perform hardly appears in his pages. It consisted 
 in collecting, from the various sources in which they 
 were imbedded, the documents which formed the 
 substance of the work, in comparing discrepant 
 reports and copies, and in testing the genuineness 
 of doubtful cases In this book Carlyle keeps him- 
 self more in the background than is usual with him. 
 He worked with a sincere admiration for the great 
 man whose words he was recording, and he took a 
 disinterested delight in the success of his efforts. 
 As a real key to the position of affairs in a period 
 which has been so frequently distorted by party 
 prejudice, the Letters and Speeches of Cromwell is 
 invaluable. 
 
 But it is on his Friedrick of Prussia that Carlyle's 
 fame as a historian will ultimately rest. It is 
 difficult to trace exactly the attraction which led him 
 to the subject, except it were the conspicuous part 
 played by Friedrich in European affairs. For the 
 Great King had been deaf to the claims of German 
 Literature, he had none of the enthusiasm for 
 righteousness which had drawn Carlyle towards 
 Cromwell, he was not, in the highest sense of the 
 word, a hero, nor does Carlyle ever treat him as such. 
 The subject too was fraught with almost insurmount- 
 able difficulties for an English author. Nearly all 
 the authorities were in a most repulsive condition, 
 
Pa7^erga. 229 
 
 oceans of official German prolixity. It was necessary 
 for Carlyle, who hated travelling, to visit per- 
 sonally the scenes of battles, and there was no 
 particular reason to suppose that the people of 
 England would be very anxious to hear about 
 » man who belonged to a departed era, and 
 about whom Englishmen had never been specially 
 enthusiastic. Chatham had been the one English 
 statesman who had seen Friedrich's merit, and 
 his support had been given in the face of much 
 opposition. 
 
 Nevertheless Carlyle did begin the work, and did 
 also complete it, in ten substantial volumes. The 
 reserve of power which could carry through such a 
 task as this without sign of flagging, must have been 
 enormous. For whatever else may be said of the 
 book, it is indisputable that the interest never wavers 
 from beginning to end. With all its length there is 
 no suspicion of padding, everything that appears is 
 necessary for the development of the story, or at least 
 hangs naturally by it. Many a man who has taken 
 up the first volume, with the intention of reading no 
 farther, has found himself unable to lay the book aside. 
 Like all good story-tellers, Carlyle " begins at the 
 beginning," and carries us forward by huge strides, 
 but always stopping at the right places, from the cap- 
 ture of Brannibor by Henry the Fowler in the tenth 
 century to the beginning of the reign of Friedrich 
 Wilhelm the First. There he becomes more minute, 
 evidently considering that the work of so forcible a 
 mind as that of Friedrich Wilhelm was of first-rate 
 
230 T/iomas Car/yh and John Stuart l\TilL 
 
 importance in shaping tlu> (MwiromiuMit til" his snr- 
 cessoi". Thr poftrail (»!" l''ri(*(h'irh W'iUu Im !>; one 
 of tht' u\(>st vivitl historical skctclus rxlaul. '\\\v 
 pictuit" of the vi^ofous, prartioal, aiul conscientious, 
 but si>nu^\vhat uniMtt^llt^ctunl niul choltM'ic king, will 
 never he ror<;ot((M» hy lh(»S(* who have studied it. 
 'J'he (l»stription oi' {"'riediich Wilhehu's l\\ba^h\ lU" 
 itdorm.il council, is a n\ar\< Ihuis elVort ^^^ lunuorous 
 iuiagination. We have (irumkow, and Seiktndorf, 
 and tlu* PcssautM', \.\\\k\ other uld-world hnt onc(* 
 iuipoitani lic,ures, e«>n|nied into lile aj;.iin, tni;<lhrr 
 with siicli ;dto!;(lh(r minor piippd'. .r. ( luntlling and 
 Fassiuann. 
 
 When he comes to his actual sid>ject the anlhnr 
 still u\aintains his hi};h level ol' e\C(>llenct\ Who 
 cls(* has .so ilt.nly and succinc^tlv slated the lamons 
 case of tlie (|naii«ls hetween I'Viedrich and X'oltairc? 
 Whore is \\\v history of a soldier's rdgn written with 
 as much insij;ht ami eorn^tness as in the account of 
 Frieihich's campaigns ? It is especially to he notic(Ml 
 that CarlyK^ never falls into the inviting erroi- of 
 describing a battle hy raphiK-;. In <"\'ery CJist* W(> aic 
 shown th(- exact plan loinicd, (he .';ncc(\ss or failure 
 of the man(eu\re, and we lake .1 .iMrtaloTs inlcK^st 
 in the drama befon" us. Inil (Ikk is nolhini; of the 
 newspai^er correspondent in th(> de^;cI iplion. We 
 are at Hrst perusal inclined to tiiiid; iliat ih(« battles 
 
 OCCUj^y t(>t» nnuh of the wcik, tliat too httic loom irt 
 \v{{. for th(Mnon' peaceful clost> <»!" k'l iedi i( ii's icicji. 
 r>nl a little considtM'ation shows that this ti'eatment 
 v^ leally in accordance with artistic truth. I'Viediich 
 
Parer^a, 23 r 
 
 tkl^, a^ 1)1^ rath/T \\'4i\ hfttw mt HAmlniiiirdUfr, And 
 HH w^ h«v#r tj^^n )ri th/r acfJtHuihi VtMrUiSi Wilh^lm 
 
 no nmtd to go Hi kn^ih Into th/t «am<^ ^abj^r^t »gafn. 
 4/l<frttov(ir, tb^ rt^sntr^ of Kwro|)#*ftn ^ffalrft wft« pft««jr>|/ 
 fliwfty from IVufe^la to Vram'^ for mnm yftarn Mort* 
 VrMritU% <\t-M\h H^ no longer h/^W th/^ SmWur^- of 
 pow*rr, rior ftttj i<i lu-f i t|j/^ *ry^« o/ tb*: wovUi, t^v^nt* 
 v^t^rt^. |>r^|j^ring vv^t^t of tb*? f<bJn<? wbkb wttm to 
 tbrow tbe rJitej>Mt^s> b^tw^r^n Aufctrk ftn4 Prufe^l^ into 
 tbft ^bfl4*f. 
 
 But |)^rb«p4^ tb^ mo«t r^^markabk f<efttur<^ of tb« 
 wbol^ v/^rk j« tb^ almotit rf*Mk\fm 4a»b^«of bumour 
 M\(\ \un v/birb tb^ Autbor ^MUivn ov^r k« |>ag^tj, 
 U i« »lmo»t imj>o««>jbk to YmW^wa that tbis; Indignant 
 propb^t of tb^ LaUcr Day l*amphlHti, wlio pour* out 
 bl» *^Hil bi ft<?r<2ft 4<&nunclati/>n« of wo<e, i« tb^ «am4? 
 n>^n wbo now, v^^rgbig t/^^wardt* bl« ^^v^nti^tb )ifHVf 
 invfcnti? tiKr mofct bidi^^rou^^pjfb^t^ for bl^dij^f " •^"- 
 I'o t^kfc A fif^w «t fM(4om ; w^ bav^ tb*r 'Mm t » 
 
 mMi^%% Unck'V^* Wobgang WJUi^^lm ''the B^ 
 feb'ippfcd ", *"* the '' ba<^>n-an4-grfeen§ " con^^l^n^^^^ of 
 i'VMrl^'b V/ilb^bn/'^'^ tb«? '' ^upplism^ntary XwimsV^ 
 (\)ofi Cm\(,^),^" i\\tz HaronmH vor) B^^ck^ndorf* 
 "feplrbual rlr#rMmatij*m'V'^'* ^^'^ ''rapt Kurojx^an publw 
 ("ivbilbng gallery ^t^pfccially)/' an4 tli^ "4/^>tbab4Uj 
 feblp^ " wUU\t " w<f^rft rapidly got butt^^iwi4 to- 
 
 *"< I'rhulrkfi, vol.. i,, p, z'^/'/. ''^^ IhUl.^ p, (03, 
 
 »"^' ///M, su\, »,, p, «9, '"'*' I hid,, ^,\n, 
 
232 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 gether."^^^ Friedrich is described as scattering ''a 
 few commas and dashes, as if they were shaken out 
 of a pepper-box, upon his page." ^^^ The famous 
 Double Marriage project is represented as '' Murky- 
 Nothingness put on to boil." ^^^ In the war of the 
 Spanish Succession all Europe is seen '' changing 
 colour seven times, like a lobster boiling." ^^^ The 
 Byronic school of poetry is happily put as a ''me- 
 lodious informing of the public what dreadful 
 emotions you labour under," ^^^ and of the Battle of 
 Prag Carlyle says, ''the very emblem of which, 
 done on the piano by females of energy, scatters 
 mankind to flight who love their ears." ^" Finally, it 
 may be suggested that no better English equivalent 
 could well be found for the common French expression 
 infdme canaille, than Carlyle's "Ugly Doggery." ^^^ 
 
 After all, the judgment which each man pronounces 
 upon Carlyle's historical work will probably depend 
 largely upon his notion of what history ought to be. 
 If it be the duty of the historian merely to delineate 
 one side of human life, the religious, the political, 
 the speculative, then Carlyle will not be accounted 
 a great historian. If it be to trace the successive 
 links in an abstracted chain of events moving onwards 
 by virtue of the laws of causation, neither in that 
 case will Carlyle be deemed great. But if history 
 be really an attempt at a picture of life, and suc- 
 
 209 Friedrich, vol. viii., p. 181. ^is jj)id,^ p. 265. 
 
 210 Ibid., vol. il, p. 50. 214 Jbid., vol. vii., p. 112. 
 2'i Ibid., p. 54. 215 jfji^^ vol. iii., p. 222. 
 212 Ibid.^ p. J']. 
 
Parerga. 233 
 
 cessful as it approaches this ideal, then the verdict 
 will be changed. For life is not all science, nor all 
 politics, nor all speculation, nor is it all grave, nor all 
 gay, but something which contains all these and 
 more, which can be looked at from many standpoints, 
 which appears in different lights to different men. 
 And Carlyle, as a historian whose range of vision 
 sweeps over the whole field of life, who thinks 
 nothing too small to be noticed in its place, who can 
 be fervid with a Cromwell, reckless with a Mirabeau, 
 cool and cynical with a Friedrich, who has a firm 
 grasp of the spiritual, but yet never forgets the 
 material, — Carlyle, as a painter of life, has rarely 
 been surpassed by any artist, and still more rarely 
 by any artist calling himself a historian. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GLEANINGS. 
 
 SYSTEM is a good thing, but it is not everything. 
 Hitherto we have endeavoured to keep the 
 furrows straight, and to work by a rule. Now it 
 will be pleasant to look abroad over the fields, and 
 wander carelessly up and down for a few moments 
 in search of scattered ears. Let us be purposely 
 unsystematic. 
 
 Perhaps the fact most widely known, by mere 
 count of heads, about Carlyle, is that he wrote in a 
 very singular style. And in this instance the popular 
 impression is correct — it ts a very singular style. 
 The matter-of-fact reader finds Carlyle as puzzling 
 as Mr. Browning, and is indignant that a mere prose 
 writer should usurp the privilege accorded from time 
 immemorial to those who cut their matter into lengths. 
 " Who on earth is Smelfiingus ? " exclaims the be- 
 wildered reader ; ^' and Sauerteig, and Professor Teu- 
 felsdrockh, who are they ? No Lexikon, German or 
 English, mentions their names. The town of IVeiss- 
 nichtwo is not to be discovered on any atlas." And 
 then he picks out some such passage as that which 
 scared the critic of the Sun in 1834, making that 
 
Gleanings. 235 
 
 bewildered luminary positively wink with amazement, 
 and asks, in a tone of injured reproach, what, in the 
 name of heaven, can be made out of that. 
 
 The proper answer to such an objection is that the 
 average person cannot understand a man of genius 
 T)y simply looking at the back of one of his hands, 
 still less by merely seeing his hat lying on the table. 
 He must enquire a little farther. 
 
 There are two styles in use among great writers, 
 the personal and the impersonal. The latter affords 
 no clue to the character of the writer, it is simply 
 the most convenient vehicle for the expression of his 
 thought. That is the style of Virgil, Shakspere, and 
 Goethe. If we fashion for ourselves any picture of 
 these authors, it is from the substance and not from 
 the form of their works that we take our material. 
 And by general consent this is allowed to be the 
 supreme perfection of style. But there is another 
 method, the personal, also adopted by great writers. 
 This conveys to us a striking likeness of the author 
 himself, and though it may be inferior to the other 
 from the point of view of artistic excellence, it is far 
 more interesting as a study. This is the style of 
 Horace, Dante, Milton, and Carlyle. Beneath the 
 transparent skin of their language we see the easy- 
 going, kindly man of the world, the stern, passionate 
 Florentine, the pure, scholarly, but slightly un- 
 sympathetic Puritan poet, and the fiery prophet of 
 Craigenputtock. The language of Carlyle is a picture 
 of Carlyle himself; the qualities we find in it are 
 human, not technical. He tells us that he picked it 
 
236 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 up in the home at Scotsbrig — that is to say, that 
 it is the natural acquirement of his native character. 
 It is abrupt, restless, vivid, varied, impetuous, elo- 
 quent, but occasionally obscure, as he himself was. 
 When it is dealing with spiritual conflict, it is 
 naturally mysterious and imaginative, for Carlyle 
 had no ''pet little hypothesis" of the universe. 
 When it is used to denounce imposture and sordid- 
 ness, it becomes fierce and impetuous. When it 
 tells of the life of a dead friend, it is gentle and full 
 of sad melody. A man is not always in one mood, 
 he would be a strangely uninteresting creature if he 
 were. If we are really anxious to understand and 
 appreciate a human being, we are not satisfied with 
 glancing at him for a single moment, it may be an 
 unfavourable one. Those who know only the 
 stormy figure of the Latter Day Pamphlets may well 
 be surprised to see the gentle form bending over the 
 lace-cushion of the poor worker at Ghent, or leading 
 beggars across the London streets. But as we 
 should pause before condemning an acquaintance 
 on the score of a chance glimpse, so we should 
 beware of accusing a writer of obscurity because we 
 find difficulties in a single work which we happen 
 to take up. I, for one, can quite certainly say that 
 there is not a single sentence in all Carlyle's pub- 
 lished writings that is not as clear as the noon-day 
 to me. But in order to understand Carlyle's works 
 you must know and appreciate the man himself. 
 
 It is quite certain that in the regular features of 
 style upon which authors pride themselves, Carlyle 
 
Gleanings. 237 
 
 was in no sense deficient. The gift of throwing into 
 a few very simple words a picture which haunts the 
 memory for ever afterwards is the prerogative of 
 only the very greatest writers, as the power of weav- 
 ing a massive melody out of the simplest materials is 
 fhe prerogative of the masters only of music. Yet 
 this power Carlyle certainly had. Everyone remem- 
 bers the words — " Coleridge sat on the brow of 
 Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on 
 London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped 
 from the inanity of life's battle." ^^® And there is 
 another passage, equally striking in a similar way, 
 which is only less widely remembered because 
 Friedrich is less widely read than the Life of 
 Sterling. '' Illuminated Berhn shone like noon all 
 that night (the beginning of a Gaudeamus which 
 lasted miscellaneously for weeks) — but the King 
 stole away to see a friend who was dying ; that poor 
 Duhan de Jaudun, his early schoolmaster, who had 
 suffered much for him, and whom he always much 
 loved." ^^'' This is not Carlyle's general way, of 
 course ; he oftener overpowers us by a torrent of 
 magnetic words, such as those in the famous pas- 
 sages of Sartor and the Pamphlets. But it is clear 
 that when he was sufficiently subdued in spirit to 
 allow scope to his gentler nature, he could be as 
 tender as Lamb himself, and as witty. Here is a 
 joke turned out with a neatness which professional 
 humorists have rarely surpassed. It is from the 
 
 2^^ Life of Sterling, p. 48. 
 2^^ Friedrich, vol. vi., p. 126. 
 
238 Thomas Carlyle and Jo/ui Stuart AJilL 
 
 account of his wanderings in Germany to gather 
 materials for Friedrich. '' Eckermann himself is at 
 Berhn — one day may very well suffice in Berlin." 
 Even Calverl}^ might have envied this. Nor could 
 anything be more mirth-provoking than Carlyle's 
 way of telling a story. Listen to his description of 
 what most men would have regarded as an ugly, 
 but perfectly commonplace incident. He had been 
 compelled to serve on a jury, not having the courage 
 to '' register himself as a Dissenting preacher." 
 After two long days of weary attendance, everything 
 had been done except the delivery of the verdict. 
 Carlyle and ten others of the twelve were completely 
 agreed. But one man made a point of standing out. 
 
 " Conceive our humour. Not a particle of dinner, nerves 
 worn out, etc. The refractory man — a thickset, llai-headed 
 sack — erected himself in his chair and- said, ' 1 am one of the 
 firmest-minded men in England. I know this room pretty 
 well. I have starved out three juries here already.' Reason- 
 ing, demonstration, was of no avail at all. They began to 
 suspect he had been bribed. He looked really at one time as 
 if he would keep us till half-past nine in the morning, and then 
 get us dismissed, the whole trial to begin again. One really 
 could not help laughing, though one had a notion to kill the 
 beast. ' Do not argue with him,' I said. ' Flatter him. Don't 
 you see he has the obstinacy of a boar, and little more sense 
 in that head of his than in a Swedish turnip ? ' It was a head 
 all cheeks, jaw, and no brow, of shape somewhat like a great 
 ball of putty dropped from a height. I set to work upon 
 him ; we all set to work, and in about an hour after our ' with- 
 drawal,' the Hash^ I pulling him by the arm, was got stirred 
 from his chair — one of the gladdest moments I had seen for a 
 month — and in a few instants more we were all rejoicing on 
 our road home."^^® 
 
 Irresistible also is the sketch, though merely a 
 2^^ Carlyle, Second Forty, vol. i., p. 206. 
 
Gleanings. 239 
 
 few scratches, of the interview which Carlyle had 
 with Baron Rothschild, when the latter came to ask 
 him to write a pamphlet in favour of the Jewish 
 Disabilities Bill. 
 
 " I had to tell him it couldn't be ; but I observed, too, that I 
 ^ould not conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed 
 to be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be seeking 
 seats in a Gentile legislature/' 
 
 When asked what Baron Rothschild had replied, 
 Carlyle went on — 
 
 " Why, he seemed to think that the coming of Shiloh was a 
 dubious business, and that meanwhile, etc., etc."^^'-* 
 
 Evidently this humour must have been rather 
 embarrassing at times. 
 
 Much has been said of the intolerance which 
 Carlyle showed in his criticisms of men with whom 
 he was brought into contact, and there is un- 
 doubtedly some foundation for the accusation. But 
 it must be remembered that the indifference to 
 blemish which proceeds from ignorance or cowardice 
 is a different thing from the tolerance which is the 
 outcome of a really noble and catholic spirit. 
 Carlyle's insight was too keen to allow him to be 
 blind to faults and weaknesses, and he was too 
 conscientious to pretend an admiration for talents 
 which did not exist. Moreover, he had not the 
 comfortable optimism which calmly accepts all the 
 evil and meanness of life as inevitable. And it must 
 also be remembered that, with scarcely an exception, 
 his verdicts have been confirmed by the court of 
 ^'^ Carlyle, Second Forty ^ p. 419. 
 
240 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 
 
 posterity. That gift, which is the rarest of all critical 
 gifts, the power of judging contemporaries as time 
 will eventually judge them, Carlyle possessed to a 
 remarkable degree. Hence his criticisms often 
 sound almost like the words of one gifted with 
 second sight. The only man who can really fore- 
 tell the future is the man who can actually read the 
 present, for the future is, with literal scientific truth, 
 in the present, and the true magician must look for 
 his inspiration not in the stars or in mystic runes, 
 but in the world of men around him. 
 
 And Carlyle was never guilty of the sin of keeping 
 one measure for his neighbour's faults and another 
 for his own. His letters and diaries show that he 
 judged himself unsparingly. But he knew that the 
 work he did was thorough, and having once done 
 his best he was not ashamed of it. PVom quite an 
 early period we find him quoting his own writings, 
 though he never attained to the sublimity of writing 
 a poem or essay upon himself. That audacity was 
 reserved for a child of the unconscious West. But 
 he felt that what he had written was true, and 
 would bear repetition. We laugh at Disraeli for 
 quoting his own epigrams in his Life of Lord George 
 Bentinck and his Endymion, but we laugh with 
 Carlyle when he recalls the extravagances of Herr 
 Sauerteig's Pig- Philosophy. 
 
 Nor, in fact, is it possible to read Carlyle's works 
 without becoming perfectly convinced of the thorough- 
 ness of the labour which entitled him to be thus con- 
 fident. Everywhere there are proofs that each date 
 
Gleanini^s. 241 
 
 and name, as it came to light, was followed up till its 
 accuracy and meaning were fully tested. To Carlyle 
 we owe the explosion of such historical fallacies as 
 the scene between Maria 'I hciresa and the Hungarian 
 Qiet, the conversation between the columns at 
 Fontenoy, and the dramatic fiction of the sinking of 
 the Vengeur. He discovered Chodowiecki long before 
 the artistic world of England began to take any interest 
 in him."'^''"' lie traces the regiments which went with 
 Braddock to America back to their appearance at 
 Prest3n-pans.^^^ Finding that there are two Fu( hs- 
 bergs and four Neisse rivers in various parts oi 
 Germany, he will not rest till he has made his reader 
 clearly understand the difference between each, though 
 many another writer would have passed the matter 
 by as unimportant.''^^^ He pounces on the misprint of 
 a single letter in the Reich's proclamation of 1759, 
 whereby an eilende (''speedy") army is made to 
 appear an cMmde (" miserable ") army.^^'^ He recog- 
 nizes Tobias Smollett on the Carthagena expedition 
 of 1741,''^^^ and even goes so far as to correct a 
 Hungarian oath on his own responsibility.^^'' 
 
 It is not easy to treat Mill in this erratic way. As 
 the attractiveness .of Carlyle arises largely from his 
 irregularity, so the worth of Mill hes principally in 
 his evenness. Through all his works there runs the 
 same high moral tone, with the same low emotional 
 note, rarely rising to anything above temperate. 'Hie 
 
 •m Jiyiedricli, vol. i., p. 317, and note. ^^'* Ihid., vol. vii., p. V^6. 
 -=*' Ihld., vol. vi., ['. 306. ^^•* Ibid., vol. iv., \). 279. 
 
 ^^^ Ibid., p. 55. sfa.--, iljid.^ vol. iii., jj. 171. 
 
 16 
 
2^2 'rJio}}uis Car/ylc and /o/ifi S/iiar/ Rlill. 
 
 ii;i(I('r nlways knows where to liiul Mill ; tiiere is no 
 dan/^ci of his being startled by sudden discoveries. 
 As a siicntific teaeher he is adniirabh^ for the very 
 reason that he never allows his leclings to iniluence 
 his int(He(>tnal perceptions. Hut for the same reason 
 he is (Idiciciil ;is a spiiiliial _L;uido. In this capacity 
 we ni'cd an cNidcut cut hiisiasm, a Schnuiriiirrri. Life 
 is in Mill's writings a great perhaps, and one cannot 
 help thinking that there must have beon some defect 
 in the personality of the man who could accej^t such 
 a condition. It was possibi*' loi- him to do this 
 becaus(i ho worked unremittingly in on(> i>rovince 
 of lif(\ rarely casting his eyes beyond it. Ilt^ was 
 like the dwt'ller on th(> sea-shore, to whom his 
 cottage and iit^lds are the t)idy realities, and who 
 has no soul foi the (>verlasting murnnu' of the ocean 
 which breaks at his (cet. 
 
 So w(^ will lea\(> Mill in his c(^mpleteness, as we 
 leave Carlyle in his ruggetlness, and (MkI our day's 
 labour by recalling one other feature by which these 
 two, so unlike in most things else, can be recognized 
 as brothers. 
 
 Each had {\\v instincts of a soldier. This is com- 
 mon enough with the heroes of the scientific school, 
 the logic of their uk thods disposes them to debate 
 and vvarfart\ Hut it is not so sure a thing to find the 
 soldii r in the Iranscendentalist. Swedenborg and tlu^ 
 German mystics stand aloof from the (juaifels of tiie 
 world, in calm disdain connuuning with the eternal 
 oracles. V,\r\\ in America, ICmerson is only " morti- 
 fied " by iiis countrymen's vice ; it is tluMr virtut^ their 
 
Gleanifif^s. 243 
 
 Rour and narrow virtue, that makes liim ashamed. I le 
 will enter into none of their philanthropies, and war 
 against none of tlieir creeds. '1 ii<jreau withdraws to 
 the solitude of Walden, to lead his perfect life out of 
 hiring of the voices and footfalls of men. And to 
 Walt Wliitman everything is and remains alike good. 
 But with Carlyle transcendentalism descends into 
 the market-place, and calls on all men to repent. It 
 is not content with speaking in an unknown tongue, 
 but must translate its meaning i/iio the common 
 speech, and deal with the commou tilings of life. 
 Emerson said of himself, " My whole philosophy 
 teaches acquiescence and optimism."'^-" Imagine this 
 as Carlyle's motto. Mr. John Morley has complained 
 of Emerson that '' he does almost as little as Carlyle 
 himself to fire men with faith jji social progress as 
 the crown of wise endeavour," ^-^ and this is, of course, 
 exactly the kind of remark that one expects from 
 Mr. John Morley, who rarely misses an opportunity 
 of mounting the stump. Hut we shall venture to 
 think that in awakening the minds of men to the fact 
 that there is a world above and beyoji<l the world 
 of dogmas and formulas, political or other, Carlyle 
 arrested a degradi/ig tendency in the lives of English- 
 men towards a grovelling faith in the complete 
 omnipotence of the almighty dollar, and a fetish- 
 worship of the infallibility of the odd man. The 
 very claim which the admirers of Carlyle make for 
 him is, tliat Ik^ lived closer to the facts of life than 
 
 ms Correspondence of Carlyle and Junerson, vol. i., p, 342. 
 "■'^^ Introdiirtioii to lufierson's Works, 1884, vol. i,, j*. lix. 
 
244 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 those who called him unpractical and vague, and 
 he himself was firmly convinced that the current 
 political doctrines of his day had as little foundation 
 in fact as the most airy speculations of gymno- 
 sophism. Before his critics take upon them to treat 
 his teaching as a thing remote from the region of 
 practical life, it were well that they should grapple 
 once for all with these distinct claims. It is not a 
 little curious that those from whose lips such de- 
 preciatory remarks so glibly fall, are in most cases 
 men who pride themselves on their liberality and 
 freedom from prejudice. As a matter of fact they are 
 the real obstructionists who refuse to accept teaching 
 unless it comes in the form of the old jingles which 
 they have learnt to talk almost in their sleep. 
 
 So, then, we leave these two, as soldiers whose 
 battles are over. In different ranks they fought, 
 but under the same banners — of Truth against False- 
 hood, of Light against Darkness. Far apart lie their 
 bones, those by the sunny waters of the south, these 
 under the cold snows of their northern biithplace. 
 But they, where are they ? Do they now look down 
 upon the battle-field where they fought so well in 
 the days that are past ? And can they feel for us, 
 who, with feebler steps, are pressing on the ways 
 which they have won ? 
 
 Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. 
 

 
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