that now is,

never the men who have said, Up to thy work, O man, for next year finishes you, and without sharp scratching you will leave but a sorry mark to show for it! These have been wet-blankets to mankind; they have not had true and healthful earthliness about them; their shout has seemed to come from consumptive lungs, and has never passed for genuine enthusiasm for ten years running. The man who believes that the law of the universe is just and good is always the man who is most sensitive to present evil. He feels most deeply the antinomy between the actual and the ideal, the phenomenal and the true real. "The children of Israel," said Elijah, discouraged, not pessimistic, "have forsaken thy covenant and slain thy prophets. I only am left, jealous for the Lord." Carlyle never drew the line so fine as that in England. Jesus found absolutely nothing to approve in the organized life of his time. His references to teachers and preachers were all denunciations, one long line of Woes! The house of prayer had become, to his severe and single eye, a den of thieves. Scholars, priests, and lawyers were to him all whited sepulchres, shams, all "galvanized." Hypocrisy was at the altar, and a "fox" upon the throne. The great cities would appear worse than Sodom and Gomorrah at the day of judgment, and the generation altogether was wicked and adulterTo use Carlyle's words concerning modern England, — the Judean world was to Jesus a world

ous.

CARLYLE vs. SCHOPENHAUER.

39

in which men had closed their eyes to the eternal substance of things, and opened them only to the shows and shams of things, in which men cared only about the profit and loss in the universe, the pudding and praise of it. These instances, because they are the commonest and tritest of all. Jesus certainly was no pessimist, although some of the Germans have tried to prove him one.1 The difference between the fault-finding of Schopenhauer, for instance, and that of Carlyle, even when Carlyle is as discouraged as ever Elijah was, is that the one recognizes the hard and hateful as the dominant and bottom law of the universe, to which we must adapt our minds, to which, at any rate, we must succumb, while the other sees it as something to be overcome by square fighting, and defies it. < The one fills us with dismay and makes us weak ; the other, for the most part, fills us with indignation and strength. Schopenhauer's universe swallows us up; we close Carlyle, and are "Athanasius against the world." Whether the fault-finder be a pessimist lies quite outside his fault-finding. Fichte, the purest idealist and optimist of modern times, abuses the times quite as sweepingly as Carlyle. The Characteristics of the Present Age paints a picture every whit as black as Past and Present or Latter-Day Pamphlets. Fichte will not adopt the tone

1 There is, however, real insight in the characterization of Christianity, by some German, as a union of "realistic pessimism and idealistic optimism."

of satire or of lamentation: "It is unmanly," he said, "to waste in lamentation over existing evil the time which would be more wisely applied in striving, so far as in us lies, to create the good and the beautiful." But he would nevertheless have it distinctly understood that he regarded the age in which he lived as" the age of absolute indifference towards all truth, and of entire and unrestrained licentiousness, -the state of completed sinfulness."

The idealist and Carlyle is strictly such — is ever in danger of forgetting, in the immediate power and pain of the contrast between the ideal and the present, the law and facts of history. Carlyle has done this. The age needed the birch badly enough—every age does; only let the age have credit for the good that is in it, which is very much, very much more, I think, than in most ages. Carlyle has not called it the worst age in the world, by any manner of means. France, before the Revolution, and the England of Johnson's time, were much worse, according to him, the eighteenth century altogether. Carlyle's worship of sincerity ought to have opened his eyes better to the vast superiority of the English society and politics of the time of Peel and Cobden to those of the times of Fox and Newcastle; and, indeed, I cannot help thinking that during these last dozen years he has had a greater patience with democracy, and a greater willingness to let it work itself out than in

OPINIONS AND PHILOSOPHY.

4I

the period just before. Be this as it may, his opinions about the present condition of the world are one thing, and his philosophy is another. Temperament, culture, position, determine the relations and proportions which things assume to us. We determine a man's philosophy by seeing how he disposes of the impressions which he gets, such as they are. If our own view of the characteristics of the present is brighter than Carlyle's, and we make our view the criterion, then we will plus or minus his observations according to the appropriate law of personal equation.1

Only in saying that Carlyle cries too hoarsely about the evils of the time, and in our own paans to the spirit of the age, we will not forget that, hoarse or not, the two evils to which almost all barring the materialism and mammonism—that he finds fault with in our society may be reduced, are real evils, and great and dangerous ones.

Ir

1 The distinction between a philosopher's philosophy and his opinions is in general very insufficiently recognized. The application of principles must vary with the varying data which research and criticism yield. Plato's principles are not invalidated, nor Moses' conception of a spiritual genesis, when Copernicus makes shipwreck of their cosmogonies. Hegel held a different religious creed, and especially a different creed about government, from that in which most thinkers today, true as himself to the principles of his philosophy of religion and of politics, believe that these find their most adequate realization; - and this distinction might be illustrated ad infinitum.

reverence always does threaten democracy; and we are in danger of inordinately magnifying the office of our new machinery, our ballot-box and legislature, as the old time was superstitious about its crowns, triple and other, in danger of thinking that these fine institutions have a life of their own, independent of us; that they have one leg of their own at least, and can go alone somewhat, and save us work; in one word, that they are more than such amount of genuine conviction and resolution and reliable knowledge as we put into them. We think we can legislate out drunkenness, and legislate in brotherly love, and a thousand a year to each man, with the key-hole stopped to anxiety. We cannot legislate them in. We can think in the kingdom of heaven, and it is a slow process. Legislation can do something, give distinctness and coherency chiefly. But being legislators, or being legislated about, goes a very little way in settling our social questions, much less the problem of our life. The problem of duty and growth, and happiness too, lies mainly within very narrow limits. We have to settle it in ourselves for ourselves, just as Abbot Samson did, and as Goethe found it. In reiterating this in so many violent ways, Carlyle reiterates the truth. The pulling down of the Bastile and the Declaration of Independence did not essentially change the main currents of human nature. Our problems and duties remain the same, at bottom, as Socrates and Plato found, or King Ar