Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 2: CarlyleMorley, John
General
Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 2: Carlyle
Morley, John
Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881
One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty
years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his
own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in
the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in
progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and
haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully
visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become
equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no
countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with
hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of
institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of
poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it
could be regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has
boldly and often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting
the objects which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applying with
energetic spirit to the task of preparing a sounder state for our
successors. The relations between master and servant, between capitalist
and labourer, between landlord and tenant, between governing race and
subject race, between the feelings and intelligence of the legislature
and the feelings and intelligence of the nation, between the spiritual
power, literary and ecclesiastical, and those who are under it--the
anarchy that prevails in all these, and the extreme danger of it, have
been with Mr. Carlyle a never-ending theme. What seems to many of us the
extreme inefficiency or worse of his solutions, still allows us to feel
grateful for the vigour and perspicacity with which he has pressed on
the world the urgency of the problem.
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