Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 2: Carlyle — John Shaqi
Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 2: CarlyleMorley, John
General
Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 2: Carlyle
Morley, John
Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881
This renewal of moral energy by spiritual contact with the mass of men,
and by meditation on the destinies of mankind, is the very reverse of
Mr. Carlyle's method. With him, it is good to leave the mass, and fall
down before the individual, and be saved by him. The victorious hero is
the true Paraclete. 'Nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.' And this
is really the kernel of the Carlylean doctrine. The whole human race
toils and moils, straining and energising, doing and suffering things
multitudinous and unspeakable under the sun, in order that like the
aloe-tree it may once in a hundred years produce a flower. It is this
hero that age offers to age, and the wisest worship him. Time and nature
once and again distil from out of the lees and froth of common humanity
some wondrous character, of a potent and reviving property hardly short
of miraculous. This the man who knows his own good cherishes in his
inmost soul as a sacred thing, an elixir of moral life. The Great Man is
'the light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the
world; a flowing light fountain, in whose radiance all souls feel that
it is well with them.' This is only another form of the anthropomorphic
conceptions of deity. The divinity of the ordinary hierophant is clothed
in the minds of the worshippers with the highest human qualities they
happen to be capable of conceiving, and this is the self-acting
machinery by which worship refreshes and recruits what is best in man.
Mr. Carlyle has another way. He carries the process a step further,
giving back to the great man what had been taken for beings greater than
any man, and summoning us to trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of
heroic chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many mansions, the
boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond polytheism. But each altar is
individual and apart, and the reaction of this isolation upon the
egotistic instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident. It is
good for us to build temples to great names which recall special
transfigurations of humanity; but it is better still, it gives a firmer
nerve to purpose and adds a finer holiness to the ethical sense, to
carry ever with us the unmarked, yet living tradition of the voiceless
unconscious effort of unnumbered millions of souls, flitting lightly
away like showers of thin leaves, yet ever augmenting the elements of
perfectness in man, and exalting the eternal contest.
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