Historical and Political Essays

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This is a long catalogue of defects, but in spite of them Buckle
opened out wider horizons than any previous writer in the field of
history. No other English historian had sketched his plan with so bold
a hand, or had shown so clearly the transcendent importance of
studying not merely the actions of soldiers, politicians, and
diplomatists, but also those great connected evolutions of
intellectual, social, and industrial life on which the type of each
succeeding age mainly depends. To not a few of his contemporaries he
imparted an altogether new interest in history, and his admirable
literary talent, the vast range of topics which he illuminated with a
fresh significance, and the noble enthusiasm for knowledge and for
freedom that pervades his work, made its appearance an epoch in the
lives of many who have passed far from its definite conclusions. The
task which he had undertaken was almost too vast for the longest life,
and when he died at Damascus, in 1862, he had not yet completed his
fortieth year, and his judgment was probably still far from its full
maturity. A few lines of Pliny which I wrote on the title-page of his
history, will suffice to show the feelings with which I heard of his
death:

'Mihi autem videtur acerba semper et immatura mors eorum qui immortale
aliquid parant. Nam qui voluptatibus dediti quasi in diem vivunt,
vivendi causas quotidie finiunt; qui vero posteros cogitant et
memoriam sui operibus extendunt, his nulla mors non repentina est, ut
quae semper inchoatum aliquid abrumpat.'

I do not purpose to pursue these recollections further. I had drifted
far from my Cork living and very decisively into the ways of
literature, and after I left the university I spent about four years
on the Continent. I read much in foreign libraries, and I also derived
great profit as well as keen pleasure from the study of Italian art,
which throws an invaluable light on the branches of history I was then
investigating. In its earlier phase especially, before the sense of
beauty dominates over the idea, art represents with a singular
fidelity not only the religious beliefs of men, but also the far more
delicate and evanescent shades of their realisations, ideals, and
emotions.

The result of those years of study was my 'History of the Spirit of
Rationalism in Europe,' which appeared in the early part of 1865. With
many defects, it had at least the merit of describing with great
sincerity the process by which the opinions of its author had been
formed, and to this sincerity it probably owed no small part of its
success.

CARLYLE'S MESSAGE TO HIS AGE.

When Carlyle came to London in 1831, bringing with him the 'Sartor
Resartus,' which is now perhaps the most famous of all his works, it
is well known that he applied in turn to three of the principal
publishers in London, and that each of them, after due deliberation,
positively refused to print his manuscript. When at last, with great
difficulty, he procured its admission into 'Fraser's Magazine,'
Carlyle was accustomed to say that he only knew of two men who found
anything to admire in it. One of them was the great American writer,
Emerson, who afterwards superintended its publication in America. The
other was a priest from Cork, who wrote to say that he wished to take
in 'Fraser's Magazine' as long as anything by this writer appeared in
it. On the other hand, several persons told Fraser that they would
stop taking in the magazine if any more of such nonsense appeared in
it. The editor wrote to Carlyle that the work had been received with
'unqualified disapprobation.' Five years elapsed before it was
reprinted as a separate book, and in order that it should be reprinted
it was found necessary for a number of Carlyle's private friends to
club together and guarantee the publisher from loss by engaging to
take three hundred copies. But when, a few years before his death, a
cheap edition of Carlyle's works was published, 'Sartor Resartus' had
acquired such a popularity that thirty thousand copies were almost
immediately sold, and since his death it has been reprinted in a
sixpenny form; it has penetrated far and wide through all classes, and
it is now, I suppose, one of the most popular and most influential of
the books that were published in England in the second quarter of the
century.

Such a contrast between the first reception and the later judgment of
a book is very remarkable, and it applies more or less to all
Carlyle's earlier writings. It is a memorable fact in the literary
history of the nineteenth century that one of the greatest and most
industrious writers in England lived for many years in such poverty
that he often thought of abandoning literature and emigrating to the
colonies, and he would probably have done so if he had not found in
public lecturing a means of supplying his frugal wants. The cause of
this long-continued neglect is partly, no doubt, to be found in his
style, for, like Browning, Carlyle wrote an English which was so
contorted and sometimes so obscure that his readers had to be slowly
educated into understanding, or at least enjoying, it. But there are
other and deeper causes which I propose to devote the short time at my
disposal to indicating.

It has been truly said that there are two great classes among writers.
There are those who are echoes and there are those who are voices.
There are some writers who represent faithfully and express strongly
the dominant tendencies, opinions, habits, characteristics of their
age, collecting as in a focus the half-formed thoughts that are
prevailing around them, giving them an articulate voice, and by the
force of their advocacy greatly strengthening them. There are others
who either start new ways of thinking for which the public around
them are still unprepared, or who throw themselves in opposition to
the dominant tendencies of their times, pointing out the evils and
dangers connected with them, and dwelling specially on neglected
truths. It is not surprising that the first class are by far the most
popular. The public is much like Narcissus in the fable, who fell in
love with his own reflection in the water. All men like to find their
own opinions expressed with a power and eloquence they cannot
themselves attain, and most men dislike a writer who, in the first
flush of a great enthusiasm, points out all that can be said on the
other side. But when the first enthusiasm is over--when the prevailing
tendency has fully triumphed and the evils and defects connected with
it are disclosed--the words of this unpopular or neglected teacher
will begin to gather weight. It will be found that although he may not
have been wiser than those who advocated the other side, yet his words
contained exactly that kind of truth which was most needed or most
generally forgotten, and his reputation will steadily rise.

This appears to me to have been very much the position which Carlyle
occupied towards the chief questions of his day, and it explains, I
think, in a great degree the growth of his influence. It is
remarkable, indeed, how many things there are in his writings which
appeared paradoxes when he wrote, and which now seem almost truisms.
Thus at a time when the political and intellectual ascendency of
France over the Continent was at its height, Carlyle was one of the
few men who clearly recognised the essential greatness that lay hid in
Germany, and especially in Prussia--a greatness which after the wars
of 1866 and 1870 became very evident to the world. He was one of the
first men in England to recognise the importance of German
literature, and especially the supreme greatness of Goethe. His
translation of 'Wilhelm Meister' was published in 1824, and his noble
essay on Goethe in 1832; but at first it seemed to find scarcely any
echo. The editor for whom he wrote it reported that all the opinions
he could gather about this essay were 'eminently unfavourable.' De
Quincey, who of all English critics was believed to know Germany best,
and Jeffrey, who exercised the greatest influence on English literary
opinion, combined to depreciate or ridicule Goethe. But there is now
no educated man who disputes that Carlyle in this matter was
essentially right, and that his critics were wholly wrong. And to turn
to subjects more directly connected with England, Carlyle wrote at a
time when the whole school of what was called advanced thought rested
upon the theory that the province of Government ought to be made as
small as possible, and that all the relations of classes should be
reduced to simple, temporary contracts founded on mutual interest.
According to this theory, it was the one duty of Government to keep
order. For the rest it should stand aside, and not attempt to meddle
in social or industrial questions. The most complete liberty of
thought and action should be established, and everything should be
left to unrestricted competition--to the free play of unprivileged,
untrammelled, unguided social forces. This was the theory which was
called orthodox political economy--the _laisser-faire_ system--the
philosophy of competition or supply and demand, and it was incessantly
denounced by Carlyle as Mammon worship, as 'devil take the hindmost,'
as 'pure egoism'; 'the shabbiest gospel that had been taught among
men.' He declared that in the long run no society could flourish, or
even permanently cohere, if the only relation between man and man was
a mere money tie. He maintained that what he called the condition of
England question, or, in other words, the great mass of struggling,
anarchical poverty that was growing up in the chief centres of
population, was a question which imperiously demanded the most
strenuous Government intervention--which was, in fact, far more
important than any of the purely political questions. The whole system
of factory legislation, the whole system of legislation about working
men's dwellings, which has taken place in this century, has been a
realisation of the ideas of Carlyle. When Carlyle first wrote, it was
the received opinion that the education of the people was a matter in
which the Government should in no degree interfere, and that it ought
to be left altogether to individuals, or Churches, or societies. In
his work on Chartism, which was published as early as 1834, Carlyle
argued that the 'universal education of the people' was an
indispensable duty of the Government. It was not until about twenty
years ago that this duty was fully recognised in England. In the same
work he maintained that State-aided, State-organised, State-directed
emigration must one day be undertaken on a large scale, as the only
efficient agent in coping with the great masses of growing pauperism.
In his 'Past and Present,' which was published in 1843, he threw out
another idea which has proved very prolific, and which is probably
destined to become still more so. It is that it may become both
possible and needful for the master worker 'to grant his workers
permanent interest in his enterprise and theirs.'

It is evident how much less strange those ideas appear now than they
did when they were first put out some fifty years ago. One of the
most remarkable changes that has taken place during the lives of men
who are still of middle age has been in the opinion of advanced
thinkers about the function of Government. In the early days of
Carlyle the whole set, or lie, of opinion in England was towards
cutting in all directions the bands of Government control, diminishing
as much as possible the sphere of Government functions or
interference. It was a revolt against the old Tory system of paternal
Government, against the system of Guilds, against the State
regulations which once prevailed in all departments of industrial
life. In the present generation it is not too much to say that the
current has been absolutely reversed. The constantly increasing
tendency, whenever any abuse of any kind is discovered, is to call
upon Parliament to make a law to remedy it. Every year the network of
regulation is strengthened; every year there is an increasing
disposition to enlarge and multiply the functions, powers, and
responsibilities of Government. I should not be dealing sincerely with
you if I did not express my own opinion that this tendency carries
with it dangers even more serious than those of the opposite
exaggerations of a past century: dangers to character by sapping the
spirit of self-reliance and independence; dangers to liberty by
accustoming men to the constant interference of authority, and
abridging in innumerable ways the freedom of action and choice. I wish
I could persuade those who form their estimate of the province of
Government from Carlyle's 'Past and Present' and 'Latter-day
Pamphlets' to study also the admirable little treatise of Herbert
Spencer, called 'The Man and the State,' in which the opposite side is
argued. What I have said however, is sufficient to show how
remarkably Carlyle, in some of the parts of his teaching that were
once the most unpopular, anticipated tendencies which only became very
apparent in practical politics when he was an old man or after his
death.

The main and fundamental part of his teaching is the supreme sanctity
of work; the duty imposed on every human being, be he rich or be he
poor, to find a life-purpose and to follow it out strenuously and
honestly. 'All true work,' he said, 'is religion'; and the essence of
every sound religion is, 'Know thy work and do it.' In his conception
of life all true dignity and nobility grows out of the honest
discharge of practical duty. He had always a strong sympathy with the
feudal system which annexed indissolubly the idea of public function
with the possession of property. The great landlord who is wisely
governing large districts and using all his influence to diffuse
order, comfort, education, and civilisation among his tenantry; the
captain of industry who is faithfully and honestly organising the
labour of thousands, and regarding his task as a moral duty; the rich
man who, with all the means of enjoyment at his feet, devotes his
energies 'to make some nook of God's creation a little fruitfuller,
better, more worthy of God--to make some human hearts a little wiser,
manfuller, happier, more blessed,' always received his admiration and
applause. No one, on the other hand, spoke with more contempt of a
governing class which had ceased to govern; of titles which had lost
their original meaning, and no longer implied or expressed duties
performed; of wealth that was employed solely or mainly in selfish
enjoyment or in idle show. It was Carlyle's deep conviction that the
best test of the moral worth of every nation, class, and individual,
is to be found in their standard of work and in their dislike to a
useless and idle life. As is well known, he had no sympathy with the
prevailing political ideas. He believed that men were not only not
equal, but were profoundly unequal; that it was the first interest of
society that the wisest men should be selected as its leaders, and
that the popular methods of finding the wisest were by no means those
which were most likely to succeed. 'No British man,' he complained,
'can attain to be a statesman or chief of workers till he has first
proved himself a chief of talkers.' 'The two greatest nations in the
world, the English and American, are all going to wind and tongue.' He
believed much more than his contemporaries did that there was need and
room in our modern English life for strong Government organisation,
guidance, discipline, reverence, obedience, and control. 'Wise
command, wise obedience,' he wrote in one of his 'Latter-day
Pamphlets,' 'the capability of these two is the best measure of
culture and human virtue in every man.'

There is another class of workers to which he himself belonged--the
men who are the teachers of mankind. He taught them by his example as
well as by his precepts. Whatever else may be said about Carlyle, no
one can question that he took his literary vocation most seriously. He
was for a long time a very poor man, but he never sought wealth by
advocating popular opinions, by pandering to common prejudices, or by
veiling most unpalatable beliefs. In the vast mass of literature which
he has bequeathed to us there is no scamped work, and every competent
judge has recognised the untiring and conscientious accuracy with
which he verified and sifted the minutest fact. His standard of
truthfulness was extremely high, and one of his great quarrels with
his age was that it was an age of half-beliefs and insincere
professions. He maintained that religious beliefs which had once been
living realities had too often degenerated into mere formulas, untruly
professed or mechanically repeated with the lips only, and without any
genuine or heartfelt conviction. He often repeated a saying of
Coleridge: 'They do not believe--they only believe that they believe.'
He used to speak of men who 'played false with their intellects'; or,
in other words, turned away their minds from unwelcome truths and by
allowing their wishes or interests to sway their judgments, persuaded
or half-persuaded themselves to believe whatever they wished. A firm
grasp of facts, he maintained, was the first characteristic of an
honest mind; the main element in all honest, intellectual work. His
own special talent was the gift of insight, the power of looking into
the heart of things, piercing to essential facts, discerning the real
characters of men, their true measure of genuine, solid worth. Creeds,
professions, opinions, circumstances, all these are the externals or
clothes of men. It is necessary to look behind them and beyond them if
we would reach the genuine human heart. One of the reasons why he
detested what he called stump oratory was because he believed it to be
a great school of insincerity. Its end was not truth, but
plausibility. It was the effort of interested men to throw opinions
into such forms as might most captivate uninstructed men; to keep back
every unpopular side; to magnify everything in them that was
seductive. He once said to me that two great curses seemed to him
eating away the heart and worth of the English people. One was drink.
The other was stump oratory, which accustomed men to say without
shame what they did not in their hearts believe to be true, and
accustomed their hearers to accept such a proceeding as perfectly
natural. And the same strong passion for veracity he carried into his
judgment of other forms of work. Rightly or wrongly, he believed that
the standard of conscientious work had been lowered in England through
the feverish competition of modern times, and under the system of what
he called 'cheap and nasty'; that English work had lost something of
its old solidity and worth, and was now made rather to captivate than
to wear. Carlyle saw in this much more than an industrial change. He
maintained that the love and pride of thorough work had long been a
pre-eminently English quality, that it was the very tap-root of the
moral worth of the English character, and that anything that tended to
weaken it was a grave moral evil.

It is worth while trying to understand what truth underlay those parts
of his teaching which seem most repulsive. The worship of force, which
is so apparent in many of his writings, is a striking example. He was
often accused of teaching that might is right. He always answered that
he had not done so--that what he taught was that right is might; that
by the providential constitution of the Universe truth in the long run
is sure to be stronger than falsehood; that good will prevail over
evil, and that right and might, though they differ widely in short
periods of time, would in long spaces prove to be identical. Nothing,
he was accustomed to say, seemed weaker than the Christian religion
when the disciples assembled in the upper room; yet it was in truth
the strongest thing in the world, and it accordingly prevailed. It was
one of his favourite sayings 'that the soul of the Universe is just,'
and he believed therefore that the ultimate fate of nations, whether
it be good or bad, was very much what they deserved. It is curious to
observe the analogy between this teaching and the doctrine of the
survival of the fittest, which a very different teacher--Charles
Darwin--has made so conspicuous.

He scandalised--and I think with a good deal of reason--most of his
contemporaries by the ridicule which he threw upon the career of
Howard, and upon the great movement for prison reform which was so
actively pursued in his time. Much of what he wrote on this subject
is, to me at least, very repulsive; but you will generally find in the
most extravagant utterances of Carlyle that there is some true meaning
at bottom. He maintained that the passion for reforming and improving
prisons and prison-life had been carried in England to such a point
that the lot of a convicted criminal was often much better than that
of an honest and struggling artisan. He believed that a just and wise
distribution of compassion is a most important element of national
well-being, and that the English people are very apt to be indifferent
to great masses of unobtrusive, struggling, honourable, unsensational
poverty at their very doors, while they fall into paroxysms of emotion
about the actors in some sensational crime, about some seductive
murderess, about the wrongs of some far-off and often half-savage
race. 'In one of these Lancashire weavers dying with hunger there is
more thought and heart, a greater arithmetical amount of misery and
desperation, than in whole gangs of Quashees.' He maintained, too,
that a strain of sentiment about criminals was very prevalent in his
day, which tended seriously to obliterate or diminish the real
difference between right and wrong. He hated with an intense hatred
that whole system of philosophy which denied that there was a deep,
essential, fundamental difference between right and wrong, and turned
the whole matter into a mere calculation of interests. He was
accustomed to say that one of the chief merits of Christianity was
that it taught that right and wrong were as far apart as Heaven and
Hell, and that no greater calamity can befall a nation than a
weakening of the righteous hatred of evil.

The parts of Carlyle's teaching on which I have dwelt to-day will be
chiefly found in his 'Past and Present,' his 'Heroes and Hero
Worship,' his 'Latter-day Pamphlets,' his 'Chartism,' and in the two
admirable essays called 'Signs of the Times' and 'Characteristics.' In
my own opinion, though Carlyle teaches much, his writings are most
valuable as a moral force. Very few great writers have maintained more
steadily that the moral element is the deepest and most important part
of our being, deeper and stronger than all intellectual
considerations. In his writings, amid much that has imperishable
value, there is, I think, much that is exaggerated, much that is
one-sided, much that is unwise. But no one can be imbued with his
teaching without finding it a great moral tonic, and deriving from it
a nobler, braver, and more unworldly conception of human life.

ISRAEL AMONG THE NATIONS[8]

Among the strange and unforeseen developments that have characterised
the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, few are likely to be
regarded by the future historian with a deeper or more melancholy
interest than the anti-Semite movement, which has swept with such a
portentous rapidity over a great part of Europe. It has produced in
Russia by far the most serious religious persecution of the century.
It has raged fiercely in Roumania, the other great centre of the
Oriental Jews. In enlightened Germany it has become a considerable
parliamentary force. In Austria it counts among its adherents men of
the highest social station. Even France, which from the days of the
Revolution has been specially distinguished for its liberality to the
Jews, has not escaped the contagion. General Boulanger found the
anti-Jewish sentiment sufficiently powerful to make an appeal to it
one of the articles of his programme, and the extraordinary popularity
of the writings of Drumont shows that Boulanger had not altogether
miscalculated its force.

It is this movement which has been the occasion of the very valuable
work of M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu on 'Israel among the Nations.' The
author, who is universally recognised as one of the greatest of living
political writers, has special qualifications for his task. With an
exceedingly wide knowledge of the literature relating to his subject
he combines much personal knowledge of the Jews in Palestine and in
many other countries, and especially in those countries where the
persecution has most furiously raged.

That persecution, he justly says, unites in different degrees three of
the most powerful elements that can move mankind--the spirit of
religious intolerance; the spirit of exclusive nationality; and the
jealousy which springs from trade or mercantile competition. Of these
elements M. Leroy-Beaulieu considers the first to be on the whole the
weakest. In that hideous Russian Persecution which 'the New Exodus' of
Frederic has made familiar to the English reader, the religious
element certainly occupies a very leading place. Pobedonosteff, who
shared with his master the chief guilt and infamy of this atrocious
crime, belonged to the same type as the Torquemadas of the past, and
the spirit that animated him has entered largely into the anti-Semite
movement in other lands. The 'Gloria' of Galdos, perhaps the most
powerful religious novel of our time, describes the conflict in modern
Spain of the fanaticism of Catholicism with the fanaticism of Judaism.
Even the old calumny that the Jews are accustomed at Easter to murder
Christian children in order to mix their blood with the passover
bread, is still living in many parts of Europe. M. Leroy-Beaulieu has
collected much curious evidence on the subject. It is a calumny which
appears first to have become popular about 1100 A.D. It is
embodied in a well-known tale of Chaucer. It is the subject of one of
the great frescoes that were painted around the Cathedral of Toledo to
commemorate the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Two Popes of the
thirteenth century, to their great honour, declared its falsehood,
and by the order of Benedict XIV. Ganganelli wrote a full memoir
examining and refuting it. But in spite of all condemnations, in spite
of many exposures in the law courts, it is still a popular belief in
Russia, Poland, Roumania, Hungary, and Bohemia, and even within the
last ten years it has been the direct cause of many outrages against
the Jews.

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