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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 3
The Teachings of Carlyle
The Teachings of Carlyle.
When we gaze upon the beauty of the dying day, and watch the golden glory of the setting sun, what can enhance the charm of the summer twilight like the presence of life? If only the timid hare darts across our path, how, with instinctive interest, the eye pursues it to its shy retreat! Or if a weary gleaner pauses to rest upon the stile, or a ploughman passes by by his homeward road, what artist would hesitate to place their rustic figures
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in the foreground of the landscape as the one thing wanting to complete the scene? Nor is this less a truth in effect, than in reality. Are we not all aware that the heart responds with a deeper thrill to the presence of the living then to aught beside? Do we not know that if one cry arose from the depths of the passionate human heart beating beneath that rustic garb, the loveliness of the eventide would be at once forgotten, and we should listen absorbed and breathless for the explanation? Put back the veil of social mannerism, and outward appearances for one moment, and sympathy springs to life.
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
Could we see as God seeth, and look upon the heart, how different our estimate of our fellow man.
To slip aside the social mask, to penetrate the external shows, and reveal to us the man is the peculiar gift of Carlyle.
Other biographers tells us when and where such deeds were done, but he dwells chiefly on the how and why, and names with which we have long been familiar become revivified in his hands.
The false prophet of Arabia, but known to us through his followers,
"That saintly murderous brood,"
"To carnage and the Koran given,"
"Who think through unbelievers' blood "
"Lies their directest path to heaven,"
stands out on Carlyle's page as one of the Earth's noblest; a man who caught the slanting rays of truth, wafted by idle rumour from far Judea, and called his countrymen from the darkness of idolatary to the worship of the one God. Suffering and persecuted for the truth he would maintain, yet with one faithful heart by his side, believing all his utterances, and clinging to him with a woman's devotion, until amidst strife and confusion the light grew stronger, and the darkness waned.
What then, we would ask, are the results of this deeper insight, what the teachings of this nearer view? That the man is everything, and the outward surroundings, the appearances to the world, the shows of life, nothing. Call the external what you will, the soul's habiliments, a screen, a covering, it is valueless, and of the nature of a lie, if by it we think to form our opinions. Yet by this many continually pass judgment, both upon themselves and others, forgetting that no mendicity, be it in the life, or on the lip, can end in anything but ruin and confusion; nor hypocrisies and lies evoke order from chaos, for is not falsehood in work still more disastrous than falsehood in word?
An eye so blind that it cannot see the truth in the fact; a mind so superficial that it cannot recognise the reality beneath the surface unless it be blessed with a passivity equal to its opacity, must, if it work at all, become a curse where-ever it is found. It will heap up chaff instead of graip; it will gather together wood, hay, and stubble, to build the edifice it designs to withstand the testing fires of time, disregarding the stone that lies unhewn in the quarry, and passing over the iron, unrecognised in its drossy ore. To use Carlyle's own words, "When the general life element becomes so unspeakably phantasmal as under "Louis the fifteenth, it is difficult for any man to be real; to be other than a
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"play-actor, more or less eminent, and artistically dressed. Sad enough, surely, "when the truth of your relation to the universe, and the tragically earnest "meaning of your life is quite hid out of you by a world sunk in lies, and you "can with effort attain to nothing but to be a more or less splendid lie along "with it. Your very existence all become a vesture, a hypocrisy and hearsay "nothing left of you but this sad faculty of sowing chaff in the fashionable "manner.
"What is truth, falsity, human kingship, human swindlership? Are the ten "commandments only a figure of speech then? Questions might rise, had long "been rising—but now there was about enough; the Response to them was "falling due—was preparing.—It is now well-known as French Revolution or "Apotheosis of Sansculottism."
Could the seed sown produce other harvest? Could the firebrand flung among such fuel produce other than a general conflagration? Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap, is a law of our being immutable and inevitable as the law of gravitation itself, true for the nation as for the individual, Men stand not solitary in this world;—from all our deeds there is an after growth, a complete heritage for the coming generation.
a gift rarely appreciated to the full, outweighing taste and talent, and without which for helmsman the most richly freighted bark is apt to founder. This same good sense, were it simply left to grow unchoked and unencumbered, would prompt everyone of us to trace the relation between cause and effect, and reject the lie, acted and spoken; better still when that heroic something is present in the soul, making it long to comprehend the divine laws and inner harmonies of this universe. In plain words, the sense of difference between right and wrong, which becomes so sadly clouded in the perplexities of life, which, in fact, it is the very business of the spirit of evil to distort, confuse, and destroy; easy work, where minds dwell in such a chaotic state that the very light becomes darkness. It is in this misty twilight of the soul that evil passes for good, and good for evil, a very frequent condition in the present day, with its half beliefs, and never ending discussions; with its various views on all topics, and widespread suspicions that the forms and phrases of our fathers are becoming obsolete. No wonder, when we have hoarded the vesture, and let the spirit go. Where is the love of truth that animated England in the days of Cromwell? Then men said what they meant, and acted as they said, scorning and scouting the shallow and the hollow, which are never absent from life's stage. To mind our own business, that is—to look well that it is grain we give, and take, not husk and chair, for it is with the substance, and not with the semblance, we have to do, that which is within the man being the grand concern for us and him, not that which is without:—such in brief, is the underlying truth of all Carlyle's teaching; a truth which cannot be ignored and slighted without destruction to national and individual life."Good sense which only is the gift of heaven;"
"For the soul is dead that slumbers,
"And things are not what they seem."