WAS CARLYLE TO BLAME?

Otago Witness, Issue 3205, 18 August 1915, Page 71

WAS CARLYLE TO BLAME?

By William Archer, in T.P.’s Weekly. Thomas Carlyle enjoyed the doubtful honour of being the one modern Briton of whom the truculent Von Treitsehke spoke with respect—the one just man amid a nation of pirates, counter-jumpers, and poltroons. _ It is easy to see how he had earned this exemption from the general ban. For one thing, he had come forward as an uncompromising pro-German during the war of 1870, But this was a detail—his great and superlative merit lay in his ardent championship of the House of Hobenzollern. Frederick the Great, as interpreted by Carlyle, was not only a hero himself, but the cause of heroism in others —that is to say, he ennobled, in Chinese fashion, all his ancestors, so that there was never a Kurfurst or Markgraf in the whole line but proved, on scrutiny, to possess high and shining virtues. This was intensely agreeable to Von Treitsehke, who had constituted himself (Saxon-Pole though he was) the high-priest of Hohenzollern worship. Moreover, Carlyle’s disposition to interpret might as an infallible symptom of right was entirely, consonant with the Treitschkean philosophy. The historian of Frederick the Great was, in short, almost worthy to be a German, and Treitsehke magnanimously overlooked (as in the parallel case of Shakespeare) the unfortunate accident that he happened to write in English. Even his English, for that matter, was not without a tinge of Teutonism. Had Carlyle, then, any influence on Treitsehke? Is he in any degree responsible for that spirit of pedantic egoism which the Berlin professor so persistently inculcated, and which is so largely to blame for the present world-catastrophe? I think that, on examination, Carlyle must stand acquitted, Treitsehke, it seems to me, would have been precisely what he was if Carlyle had never existed; and

Carlyle would have shrunk in disgust from the doctrine of “might is right,” as interpreted under the influence of Treitschke (among others) in modern Germany. Take, for instance, the theory of the beneficence of war, formulated by Treitschke in the famous phrase: “God will see to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race.” Did the professor borroAV this deadly doctrine from Carlyle ? Or find in his Avritings any support for it? I think not. It is hard to proA'o a negative, and in the long array of Carlyle’s Avorks there may be some chance expression that might be quoted on the Treitschke side. But neither memory nor research recalls it to me; and, on the other hand, I find many passages to prove that the aspect of war habitually present to Carlyle's mind Avas not, indeed, its cruelty, hut its senselessness, its insanity. The “locus classicus” is to be found, of course, in Teufekdrockh’s reflections oh the field of Wagram, quoted by Ruskin (to no A T ei'v good purpose) in “The Crown of Wild Olive.” Here it is, in a condensed form ; What is the net purport and upshot of war? To my oavh knoAvledge, for example, there thvell and toil, in the British A’illage of Dumdrudge, usually some 500 souls. From these, by certain “natural enemies” of the French, there are successively selected during the French war, say, 30 able-bodied men. . . . One can Aveave, another build, another hammer, and the Aveakest can stand under 50st a Avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped a-Avay, at the public charge ... to the South of Spain. And iioav to that same spot are 30 similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner Avending; till at length . , . Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each Avith a gun in his hand. Straightway the Avord “Fire!” is given: and they bIoAV the souls out of one another; and in place of 60 brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has 60 dead carcases, which it must bury and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel ? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! Not much encouragement here for Avar-at-any-price historians! Not much faith in the virtues of war as a “drastic medicine” for the human race! It is almost surprising that Carlyle should not have fallen into this fallacy. It seems, at first sight, by no means uncongenial to his general tone of thought. But “Sartor Resartus,” it may be said, Avas a work of bis comparative youth. Perhaps, Avith ripening age, he attained to sterner and more Treitschkean sentiments! In “Chartism,” which dates from some 10 years later, there is little sign of such illumination. Here he tells us that;—• All battle is misunderstanding; did the parties know one another the battle would cease. No man at bottom means injustice ; it is always for some obscure, distorted image of a right that he contends : an obscure image, diffracted, exaggerated, in the Avonderfnlest way, by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length‘it becomes all but irrecognisable; A'et still the image of a right. There is here a manifest incompleteness of thought. _ The argument is left at a loose end, since no proAusion is made for the certainly conceiA’able case in which right should be on the one side and might on the other. The practical upshot of the passage is to reduce right to a mere factor or psychological element in might; since the opinion of right enhances might, Avhile the conviction of wrong tends to impair it. This is, indeed, the conclusion to Avhich reason leads; and Carlyle probably shrank from formulating it because it could scarcely have been reconciled with his fundamental doctrine of the supremacy of divine justice in human affairs. But be this as it mav, the passage slioavs no trace of a deification of Avar. Carlyle sees it only as an unspeakably clumsy and stupid expedient for arriving at decisions Avhich might be reached by methods of reason and humanity if men Avere not such a breed of inveterate blockheads. He is quite untouched bv the romantic illusion of_ Avar as a school of heroism, magnanimity, and all the A'irtues. Treitschke, who overfloAvs Avith this sentimentah’tA’, certainly did not learn it from Carlyle! That AA-ar has its great moments, and brings out some fine elements of character, the historian of Crorenvell and Frederick would certainly not have denied. But he did not lose his sense of proportion and forget or minimise its gigantic evils. He did not silence the commonsense Avhich told him that there was no commonsense in organised slaughter as a method of argument. Nor did 6A r eri the intensive study of the Hohenzollerns. necessitated by his plunge into “the valley of the shadoAV of Friedrich,” make Carlyle any more of a theoretical Avar-Avorshipper. Here is a characteristic passage in the first chapter of the thirteenth book of “Frederick the Great” : Nations that go to Avar Avit'hout business there, are sure of getting business as they proceed ; and if the beginnings were phantasms—especially phantasms of the hoping, self-conceited kind—the results for them are apt to be extremely real! Nations, again, may be driven upon Avar by phantasm terrors, and go into it in sorroAV of heart, not gaiety of heart; and that is a shade better. And one always pities a poor Nation in stich case—as the very Destinies rather do, and judge it more mercifully. Ahvays, you perceive, it is the waste fulness, the mad extraA-agance of the thing —not, of course, in money alone —that stands in the forefront of Carlyle’s vision of Avar. He can hi nowise be accused of taking a sentimental-humanitarian vieAV of the matter. It is not the horrors and cruelties of battle that haunt his imagination. What he principally dwells Upon is the utter unredeemed stupidity of the Avhole proceeding—how it attains its ends

(in so far as it attains them at all) at “a hundred or a hundred thousand times the natural expense.” And of war as a heaven-prescribed medicament for the ailing human spirit we find not a single word. Carlyle's theology was crude and inconsistent enough, but he did not lay the responsibility for the insensate barbarism of war directly at the door of God. He knew that, if we insist on going behind the proximate causes—to wit, human blindness and folly—we must look to the Powers of Darkness rather than the Powers of Light to supply the supernatural machinery. .