Part 14

Out of Carlyle's fierce and rampant individualism come his grasp of character and his power of human portraiture. It is, perhaps, not too much to say, that in all literature there is not another such a master portrait-painter, such a limner and interpreter of historical figures and physiognomies. That power of the old artists to paint or to carve a man, to body him forth, almost re-create him, so rare in the moderns, Carlyle had in a preëminent degree. As an artist it is his distinguishing gift, and puts him on a par with Rembrandt, Angelo, Reynolds, and with the antique masters of sculpture. He could put his finger upon the weak point and upon the strong point of a man as unerringly as fate. He knew a man as a jockey knows a horse. His pictures of Johnson, of Boswell, of Voltaire, of Mirabeau, what masterpieces! His portrait of Coleridge will doubtless survive all others, inadequate as it is in many ways; one fears, also that poor Lamb has been stamped to last. None of Carlyle's characterizations have excited more ill-feeling than this same one of Lamb. But it was plain from the outset that Carlyle could not like such a verbal acrobat as Lamb. He doubtless had him or his kind in view when he wrote this passage in "Past and Present:" "His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me,--perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsy-turvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning insanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter as I do sunlight, but not dishonest; most kinds of dancing, too, but the St. Vitus kind, not at all!"

If Carlyle had taken to the brush instead of to the pen, he would probably have left a gallery of portraits such as this century has not seen. In his letters, journals, reminiscences, etc., for him to mention a man is to describe his face, and with what graphic pen-and-ink sketches they abound! Let me extract a few of them. Here is Rousseau's face, from "Heroes and Hero Worship:" "A high but narrow-contracted intensity in it; bony brows; deep, straight-set eyes, in which there is something bewildered-looking,--bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness; a face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of an antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian, there, redeemed only by intensity; the face of what is called a fanatic,--a sadly contracted hero!" Here a glimpse of Danton: "Through whose black brows and rude, flattened face there looks a waste energy as of Hercules." Camille Desmoulins: "With the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a naphtha lamp burned in it." Through Mirabeau's "shaggy, beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face there look natural ugliness, smallpox, incontinence, bankruptcy, and burning fire of genius; like comet fire, glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions."

On first meeting with John Stuart Mill he describes him to his wife as "a slender, rather tall, and elegant youth, with small, clear, Roman-nosed face, two small, earnestly smiling eyes; modest, remarkably gifted with precision of utterance; enthusiastic, yet lucid, calm; not a great, yet distinctly a gifted and amiable youth."

A London editor, whom he met about the same time, he describes as "a tall, loose, lank-haired, wrinkly, wintry, vehement-looking flail of a man." He goes into the House of Commons on one of his early visits to London: "Althorp spoke, a thick, large, broad-whiskered, farmer-looking man; Hume also, a powdered, clean, burly fellow; and Wetherell, a beetle-browed, sagacious, quizzical old gentleman; then Davies, a Roman-nosed dandy," etc. He must touch off the portrait of every man he sees. De Quincey "is one of the smallest men you ever in your life beheld; but with a most gentle and sensible face, only that the teeth are destroyed by opium, and the little bit of an under lip projects like a shelf." Leigh Hunt: "Dark complexion (a trace of the African, I believe); copious, clean, strong black hair, beautifully shaped head, fine, beaming, serious hazel eyes; seriousness and intellect the main expression of the face (to our surprise at first)."

Here is his sketch of Tennyson: "A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy, who swings outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and then when he does emerge,--a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man."

Here we have Dickens in 1840: "Clear blue intelligent eyes; eyebrows that he arches amazingly; large, protrusive, rather loose mouth; a face of most extreme mobility, which he shuttles about--eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and all--in a very singular manner while speaking. Surmount this with a loose coil of common-colored hair, and set it on a small compact figure, very small, and dressed à la D'Orsay rather than well,--this is Pickwick."

Here is a glimpse of Grote, the historian of Greece: "A man with straight upper lip, large chin, and open mouth (spout mouth); for the rest, a tall man, with dull, thoughtful brow and lank, disheveled hair, greatly the look of a prosperous Dissenting minister."

In telling Emerson whom he shall see in London, he says: "Southey's complexion is still healthy mahogany brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at full gallop; old Rogers, with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as snow, with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic shelf chin."

In another letter he draws this portrait of Webster: "As a logic-fencer, advocate, or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him, at first sight, against all the extant world. The tanned complexion; that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff-mouth accurately closed: I have not traced as much of silent Berserker rage, that I remember of, in any other man." In writing his histories Carlyle valued, above almost anything else, a good portrait of his hero, and searched far and wide for such. He roamed through endless picture-galleries in Germany searching for a genuine portrait of Frederick the Great, and at last, chiefly by good luck, hit upon the thing he was in quest of. "If one would buy an indisputably authentic old shoe of William Wallace for hundreds of pounds, and run to look at it from all ends of Scotland, what would one give for an authentic visible shadow of his face, could such, by art natural or art magic, now be had!" "Often I have found a Portrait superior in real instruction to half a dozen written 'Biographies,' as Biographies are written; or, rather, let me say, I have found that the Portrait was a small lighted candle by which the Biographies could for the first time be read, and some human interpretation be made of them."

Carlyle stands at all times, at all places, for the hero, for power of will, authority of character, adequacy, and obligation of personal force. He offsets completely, and with the emphasis of a clap of thunder, the modern leveling impersonal tendencies, the "manifest destinies," the blind mass movements, the merging of the one in the many, the rule of majorities, the no-government, no-leadership, laissez-faire principle. Unless there was evidence of a potent, supreme, human will guiding affairs, he had no faith in the issue; unless the hero was in the saddle, and the dumb blind forces well bitted and curbed beneath him, he took no interest in the venture. The cause of the North, in the War of the Rebellion, failed to enlist him or touch him. It was a people's war; the hand of the strong man was not conspicuous; it was a conflict of ideas, rather than of personalities; there was no central and dominating figure around which events revolved. He missed his Cromwell, his Frederick. So far as his interest was aroused at all, it was with the South, because he had heard of the Southern slave-driver; he knew Cuffee had a master, and the crack of his whip was sweeter music to him than the crack of antislavery rifles, behind which he recognized only a vague, misdirected philanthropy.

Carlyle did not see things in their relation, or as a philosopher; he saw them detached, and hence more or less in conflict and opposition. We accuse him of wrong-headedness, but it is rather inflexibleness of mind and temper. He is not a brook that flows, but a torrent that plunges and plows. He tried poetry, he tried novel-writing in his younger days, but he had not the flexibility of spirit to succeed in these things; his moral vehemence, his fury of conviction, were too great.

Great is the power of reaction in the human body; great is the power of reaction and recoil in all organic nature. But apparently there was no power of reaction in Carlyle's mind; he never reacts from his own extreme views; never looks for the compensations, never seeks to place himself at the point of equilibrium, or adjusts his view to other related facts. He saw the value of the hero, the able man, and he precipitated himself upon this fact with such violence, so detached it and magnified it, that it fits with no modern system of things. He was apparently entirely honest in his conviction that modern governments and social organizations were rushing swiftly to chaos and ruin, because the hero, the natural leader, was not at the head of affairs,--overlooking entirely the many checks and compensations, and ignoring the fact that, under a popular government especially, nations are neither made nor unmade by the wisdom or folly of their rulers, but by the character for wisdom and virtue of the mass of their citizens. "Where the great mass of men is tolerably right," he himself says, "all is right; where they are not right, all is wrong." What difference can it make to America, for instance, to the real growth and prosperity of the nation, whether the ablest man goes to Congress or fills the Presidency or the second or third ablest? The most that we can expect, in ordinary times at least, is that the machinery of universal suffrage will yield us a fair sample of the leading public man,--a man who fairly represents the average ability and average honesty of the better class of the citizens. In extraordinary times, in times of national peril, when there is a real strain upon the state, and the instinct of self-preservation comes into play, then fate itself brings forward the ablest men. The great crisis makes or discovers the great man,--discovers Cromwell, Frederick, Washington, Lincoln. Carlyle leaves out of his count entirely the competitive principle that operates everywhere in nature,--in your field and garden as well as in political states and amid teeming populations,--natural selection, the survival of the fittest. Under artificial conditions the operation of this law is more or less checked; but amid the struggles and parturition throes of a people, artificial conditions disappear, and we touch real ground at last. What a sorting and sifting process went on in our army during the secession war, till the real captains, the real leaders, were found; not Fredericks, or Wellingtons, perhaps, but the best the land afforded!

The object of popular government is no more to find and elevate the hero, the man of special and exceptional endowment, into power, than the object of agriculture is to take the prizes at the agricultural fairs. It is one of the things to be hoped for and aspired to, but not one of the indispensables. The success of free government is attained when it has made the people independent of special leaders, and secured the free and full expression of the popular will and conscience. Any view of American politics, based upon the failure of the suffrage always, or even generally, to lift into power the ablest men, is partial and unscientific. We can stand, and have stood, any amount of mediocrity in our appointed rulers; and perhaps in the ordinary course of events mediocrity is the safest and best. We could no longer surrender ourselves to great leaders, if we wanted to. Indeed, there is no longer a call for great leaders; with the appearance of the people upon the scene, the hero must await his orders. How often in this country have the people checked and corrected the folly and wrong-headedness of their rulers! It is probably true, as Carlyle says, that "the smallest item of human Slavery is the oppression of man by his Mock-Superiors;" but shall we accept the other side of the proposition, that the grand problem is to find government by our Real Superiors? The grand problem is rather to be superior to all government, and to possess a nationality that finally rests upon principles quite beyond the fluctuations of ordinary politics. A people possessed of the gift of Empire, like the English stock, both in Europe and in America, are in our day beholden very little to their chosen rulers. Otherwise the English nation would have been extinct long ago.

"Human virtue," Carlyle wrote in 1850, "if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun." This may well offset his more pessimistic statement, that "there are fools, cowards, knaves, and gluttonous traitors, true only to their own appetite, in immense majority in every rank of life; and there is nothing frightfuller than to see these voting and deciding." If we "went down to the roots of it," this statement is simply untrue. "Democracy," he says, "is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business, and gives, in the long run, a net result of zero."

Because the law of gravitation is uncompromising, things are not, therefore, crushed in a wild rush to the centre of attraction. The very traits that make Carlyle so entertaining and effective as a historian and biographer, namely, his fierce, man-devouring eyes, make him impracticable in the sphere of practical politics.

Let me quote a long and characteristic passage from Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets, one of dozens of others, illustrating his misconception of universal suffrage:--

"Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious, exquisitely constitutional manner; the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for and fixed with adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get around the Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councilors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic 'admonition;' you will be flung half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councilors and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get around Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship;--yes, indeed, the ship's crew may be very unanimous, which, doubtless, for the time being, will be very comfortable to the ship's crew and to their Phantasm Captain, if they have one; but if the tack they unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the belly of the Abyss, it will not profit them much! Ships, accordingly, do not use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species of Captain. One wishes much some other Entities--since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws--could be brought to show as much wisdom and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of nature. Phantasm Captains with unanimous votings,--this is considered to be all the law and all the prophets at present."

This has the real crushing Carlylean wit and picturesqueness of statement, but is it the case of democracy, of universal suffrage fairly put? The eternal verities appear again, as they appear everywhere in our author in connection with this subject. They recur in his pages like "minute-guns," as if deciding, by the count of heads, whether Jones or Smith should go to Parliament or to Congress was equivalent to sitting in judgment upon the law of gravitation. What the ship in doubling Cape Horn would very likely do, if it found itself officerless, would be to choose, by some method more or less approaching a count of heads, a captain, an ablest man to take command, and put the vessel through. If none were able, then indeed the case were desperate; with or without the ballot-box, the abyss would be pretty sure of a victim. In any case there would perhaps be as little voting to annul the storms, or change the ocean currents, as there is in democracies to settle ethical or scientific principles by an appeal to universal suffrage. But Carlyle was fated to see the abyss lurking under, and the eternities presiding over, every act of life. He saw everything in fearful gigantic perspective. It is true that one cannot loosen the latchet of his shoe without bending to forces that are cosmical, sidereal; but whether he bends or not, or this way or that, he passes no verdict upon them. The temporary, the expedient,--all those devices and adjustments that are of the nature of scaffolding, and that enter so largely into the administration of the coarser affairs of this world,--were with Carlyle equivalent to the false, the sham, the phantasmal, and he would none of them. As the ages seem to have settled themselves for the present and the future, in all civilized countries,--and especially in America,--politics is little more than scaffolding; it certainly is not the house we live in, but an appurtenance or necessity of the house. A government, in the long run, can never be better or worse than the people governed. In voting for Jones for constable, am I voting for or against the unalterable laws of the universe,--an act wherein the consequences of a mistake are so appalling that voting had better be dispensed with, and the selection of constables be left to the evolutionary principle of the solar system?

Carlyle was not a reconciler. When he saw a fact, he saw it with such intense and magnifying eyes, as I have already said, that it became at once irreconcilable with other facts. He could not and would not reconcile popular government, the rule of majorities, with what he knew and what we all know to be popular follies, or the proneness of the multitude to run after humbugs. How easy for fallacies, speciosities, quackeries, etc., to become current! That a thing is popular makes a wise man look upon it with suspicion. Are the greatest or best books the most read books? Have not the great principles, the great reforms, begun in minorities and fought their way against the masses? Does not the multitude generally greet its saviors with "Crucify him, crucify him"? Who have been the martyrs and the persecuted in all ages? Where does the broad road lead to, and which is the Narrow Way? "Can it be proved that, since the beginning of the world, there was ever given a universal vote in favor of the worthiest man or thing? I have always understood that true worth, in any department, was difficult to recognize; that the worthiest, if he appealed to universal suffrage, would have but a poor chance."

Upon these facts Carlyle planted himself, and the gulf which he saw open between them and the beauties of universal suffrage was simply immense. Without disputing the facts here, we may ask if they really bear upon the question of popular government, of a free ballot? If so, then the ground is clean shot away from under it. The world is really governed and led by minorities, and always will be. The many, sooner or later, follow the one. We have all become abolitionists in this country, some of us much to our surprise and bewilderment; we hardly know yet how it happened; but the time was when abolitionists were hunted by the multitude. Marvelous to relate, also, civil service reform has become popular among our politicians. Something has happened; the tide has risen while we slept, or while we mocked and laughed, and away we all go on the current. Yet it is equally true that, under any form of government, nothing short of events themselves, nothing short of that combination of circumstances which we name fate or fortune, can place that exceptional man, the hero, at the head of affairs. If there are no heroes, then woe to the people who have lost the secret of producing great men.

The worthiest man usually has other work to do, and avoids politics. Carlyle himself could not be induced to stand for Parliament. "Who would govern," he says, "that can get along without governing? He that is fittest for it is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained." But constrained he cannot be, yet he is our only hope. What shall we do? A government by the fittest can alone save mankind, yet the fittest is not forthcoming. We do not know him; he does not know himself. The case is desperate. Hence the despair of Carlyle in his view of modern politics.

Who that has read his history of Frederick has not at times felt that he would gladly be the subject of a real king like the great Prussian, a king who was indeed the father of his people; a sovereign man at the head of affairs with the reins of government all in his own hands; an imperial husbandman devoted to improving, extending, and building up his nation as the farmer his farm, and toiling as no husbandman ever toiled; a man to reverence, to love, to fear; who called all the women his daughters, and all the men his sons, and whom to see and to speak with was the event of a lifetime; a shepherd to his people, a lion to his enemies? Such a man gives head and character to a nation; he is the head and the people are the body; currents of influence and of power stream down from such a hero to the life of the humblest peasant; his spirit diffuses itself through the nation. It is the ideal state; it is captivating to the imagination; there is an artistic completeness about it. Probably this is why it so captivated Carlyle, inevitable artist that he was. But how impossible to us! how impossible to any English-speaking people by their own action and choice; not because we are unworthy such a man, but because an entirely new order of things has arrived, and arrived in due course of time, through the political and social evolution of man. The old world has passed away; the age of the hero, of the strong leader, is gone. The people have arrived, and sit in judgment upon all who would rule or lead them. Science has arrived, everything is upon trial; private judgment is supreme. Our only hope in this country, at least in the sphere of governments, is in the collective wisdom of the people; and, as extremes so often meet, perhaps this, if thoroughly realized, is as complete and artistic a plan as the others. The "collective folly" of the people, Carlyle would say, and perhaps during his whole life he never for a moment saw it otherwise; never saw that the wisdom of the majority could be other than the no-wisdom of blind masses of unguided men. He seemed to forget, or else not to know, that universal suffrage, as exemplified in America, was really a sorting and sifting process, a search for the wise, the truly representative man; that the vast masses were not asked who should rule over them, but were asked which of two candidates they preferred, in selecting which candidates what of wisdom and leadership there was available had had their due weight; in short, that democracy alone makes way for and offers a clear road to natural leadership. Under the pressure of opposing parties, all the political wisdom and integrity there is in the country stand between the people, the masses, and the men of their choice.

Undoubtedly popular government will, in the main, be like any other popular thing,--it will partake of the conditions of popularity; it will seldom elevate the greatest; it will never elevate the meanest; it is based upon the average virtue and intelligence of the people.

There have been great men in all countries and times who possessed the elements of popularity, and would have commanded the suffrage of the people; on the other hand, there have been men who possessed many elements of popularity, but few traits of true greatness; others with greatness, but no elements of popularity. These last are the reformers, the innovators, the starters, and their greatness is a discovery of after-times. Popular suffrage cannot elevate these men, and if, as between the two other types, it more frequently seizes upon the last, it is because the former is the more rare.

But there is a good deal of delusion about the proneness of the multitude to run after quacks and charlatans: a multitude runs, but a larger multitude does not run; and those that do run soon see their mistake. Real worth, real merit, alone wins the permanent suffrage of mankind. In every neighborhood and community the best men are held in highest regard by the most persons. The world over, the names most fondly cherished are those most worthy of being cherished. Yet this does not prevent that certain types of great men--men who are in advance of their times and announce new doctrines and faiths--will be rejected and denied by their contemporaries. This is the order of nature. Minorities lead and save the world, and the world knows them not till long afterward.

No man perhaps suspects how large and important the region of unconsciousness in him, what a vast, unknown territory lies there back of his conscious will and purpose, and which is really the controlling power of his life. Out of it things arise, and shape and define themselves to his consciousness and rule his career. Here the influence of environment works; here the elements of race, of family; here the Time-Spirit moulds him and he knows it not; here Nature, or Fate, as we sometimes name it, rules him and makes him what he is.

In every people or nation stretches this deep, unsuspected background. Here the great movements begin; here the deep processes go on; here the destiny of the race or nation really lies. In this soil the new ideas are sown; the new man, the despised leader, plants his seed here, and if they be vital they thrive, and in due time emerge and become the conscious possession of the community.

None knew better than Carlyle himself that, whoever be the ostensible potentates and lawmakers, the wise do virtually rule, the natural leaders do lead. Wisdom will out: it is the one thing in this world that cannot be suppressed or annulled. There is not a parish, township, or community, little or big, in this country or in England, that is not finally governed, shaped, directed, built up by what of wisdom there is in it. All the leading industries and enterprises gravitate naturally to the hands best able to control them. The wise furnish employment for the unwise, capital flows to capital hands as surely as water seeks water.