to create an edifice of order and good. Ever must pain urge us to labor; and only in free effort can any blessedness be imagined for us." "Nay, if we look well to it, what is all derangement, and necessity of great change, in itself such an evil, but the product simply of increased resources, which the old methods can no longer administer?" And he gives the finishing stroke to pessimism as a philosophy, so far as he himself is concerned, when he declares that "the difficulty lies not in nature, but in artifice."

VIII.

Mr. Morley has called Carlyle "the Rousseau of these times for English-speaking nations." He recognizes that an apology is almost needed for thus uniting two men who are very antipodes in so much; but "community of method," he says, "like misery, makes men acquainted with strange bed-fellows." Characteristics, in its main line of thought, expanded in so much of Carlyle's later writing, is Mr. Morley's justification. Its denunciation of the science and art and literature of the time, its vilification almost of consciousness and of conscience, and its glorification almost of an unconscious and conscienceless Eden, all tend in the same direction as Rousseau's plea for a state of nature, and are not adequately atoned for in the essay itself, although the atonement does lie in the general drift of Carlyle's thought. The "state of

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nature" is the state of tooth and talon, the state in which might is right, ten times more than it was in France even in the days of Louis XV.; and the man who is chiefly inspired by visions of Eden is pretty sure to come in time to the politics of the forest. There is another path out of the misery of our curse than that backward into nature, which is indeed not a way out at all, — namely, that forward, by painful and eternal endeavor, to the divine commonwealth. The state of nature is the reign of terror, and Robespierre is the quite natural disciple of Rousseau. Yet Rousseau himself could never have become Robespierre, and a state of nature was not what he really wanted at all, had he known himself. Much less is it necessary to say this of Carlyle. What both are really protesting against is artificiality and sham, the deflection, deformity, and falsehood of existing institutions. "There are unhappy times in the world's history," says Carlyle and Rousseau wrote in such a time "when he that is the least educated will chiefly have to say that he is the least perverted, and, with the multitude of false eye-glasses, convex, concave, green, even yellow, has not lost the natural use of his eyes; . . . . when, if you take two men of genius, and put the one between the handles of a plow, and mount the other between the painted coronets of a coach-and-four, and bid them both move along, the former shall arrive a Burns, the latter a Byron : two men of talent, and put the one into a printer's

....

chapel, full of lamp-black, tyrannous usage, and hard toil, and the other into Oxford universities, with lexicons and libraries, and hired, expositors and sumptuous endowments, the former shall come out a Dr. Franklin, the latter a Dr. Parr!"

ties,

66

But complaint of artificiality and falsehood, the corruption of institutions, is one thing, and rejection of institutions themselves and a real return to the state of nature is quite another. Teufelsdröckh, though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite; and much, perhaps, as he might wish to go forth before this degenerate age as a sign,' would nowise wish to do it, as those old Adamites did, in a state of nakedness. The utility of clothes is altogether apparent to him: nay, perhaps he has an insight into their more recondite and almost mystic quali- what we might call the omnipotent virtue such as was never before vouchsafed The brutal pamphlet on The Nigger Question is itself the most emphatic assertion possible of the superiority of the institutional to the Adamic. If Eden be the thing wanted, why not let the "niggers" rest in Jamaica? I suppose they led a very Adamic and Evic life there among the bananas. But no. "The state wants sugar from those islands, and means to have it. The islands are good withal for pepper, for sago, arrow-root, for coffee, perhaps for cinnamon, and precious spices. The gods wish, besides pumpkins, that spices and valuable products be grown there; thus much they

of clothes,

to any man."

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have declared in so making the West Indies. Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little less ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other methods avail not, will be compelled to work." "You may lift the pressure from the free man's shoulders," wrote Carlyle, with half truth, twenty years before The Nigger Question, "and bid him go forth rejoicing; but lift the slave's burden, he will only wallow the more composedly in his sloth." Through work comes emancipation, and work is glorified, idolized almost, by Carlyle as by nobody else. He is the chiefest apostle of the Gospel of Work, - surely no very natural rôle for an Adamite. He preaches it savagely. "Vagrant Jack-alls," says the "Chief Governor of England," whom he raised up in Latter Day Pamphlets, to address "the floods of Irish and other beggars," "self-government is not for emancipated horses. Ask me not for Indian-meal. You shall be compelled to earn it first. Here is work for you. Strike into it with manlike, soldier-like obedience, heartiness, according to the methods here prescribed. Wages follow for you. . . . and at length emancipation itself follows. Refuse to strike into it, shirk the heavy labor, disobey the rules, I will endeavor to incite you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you, and make God's earth- - the forlorn hope in God's bat

tle-free of you."

For my own part, I count the defense of Carlyle against the charge of holding any sort of Eden philosophy a quite superfluous task; yet so much has been said on the point, and the mischiefs begotten of a blind and one-sided development of Rousseauism are so great, that it were improper to pass it by.

IX.

What saved Rousseau, and made him the great inspirer of Kant and the Germans, was his clear consciousness of freedom and of the infinite worth of the individual; and it is the immediate consciousness of freedom by which Carlyle is always kept from any fatalistic or pessimistic philosophy. His ethics is through and through transcendental; the moral imperative is categorical and as immediate as sense perception. Utilitarian ethics is, if possible, a more permanent object of his hostility than even an empirical psychology. Bentham's theory of man and man's life, he says, is the most beggarly of theories. "Not that one would mean offense against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-andhalf manner, was tending to be. Let us have a crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. It seems to me all deniers of Godhood, and all lip