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ages of heroism are not ages of moral philosophy; " "the disease of metaphysics." "The trouble with our own age," says Carlyle in this essay, "can best be summed up by saying that it is a self-conscious age. The fact that intellect now turns round at every stride and cries, See you what a stride I have taken! is the proof that the march of intellect is "of the spavined kind, what the jockeys call 'all action and no go."" As opposed to this, Carlyle glorifies a sincere past, the " ages of faith." "Intellect did not awaken for the first time yesterday," he says, "but has been under way from Noah's flood downwards; greatly her best progress, moreover, was in the old times when she said nothing about it. In those same dark ages,' intellect (metaphorically as well as literally) could invent glass, which now she has enough to do to grind into spectacles. Intellect built not only churches, but a Church, the Church, based on this firm earth, yet reaching up, and leading up, as high as heaven ; and now it is all she can do to keep its doors bolted, that there be no tearing of the surplices, no robbery of the alms-box. She built a Senate-house likewise, glorious in its kind; and now it costs her a well-nigh mortal effort to sweep it clear of vermin, and get the roof made rain-tight."

When Carlyle says, "the healthy know not of their health, but only the sick," he does not, of course, mean to say that we are not conscious of pleasures, but only of pains. Pessimism has indeed

UNCONSCIOUSNESS.

89

labored to maintain a proposition very like that, or at least that our pleasurable sensations are only negatives or reliefs. It is a very sick and disordered man who finds any measure of truth in that. The normal person has no doubt that the sensations awakened by the Ninth Symphony are as positive as those awakened by "an infant crying in the night," and that it is as genuine a thing for the student to meet his girl in the horse-car as for the tutor to meet his mother-in-law. And as to the secondary consciousness, which is what Carlyle is talking about, Emerson somewhere says that even in crossing a sloppy country common, in a drizzly winter twilight, he has, in mere physical well-being, been glad to be alive and in the body. Who walks across Boston Common in the bright snap and sparkle of a January noon, sniffing the air, without blessings on the body which is the medium of so varied and exhilarating delights? There is no doubt that pain forces the body to become the centre of consciousness as pleasure does not; but the evil here is, as John Sterling pointed out, in that famous review which Carlyle pronounced the first generous recognition of the worth of his own work in the world, that "the supremacy of the mind is thus suspended by the intrusion of sensations, which, in the sane and normal state of man, are the servants, not the masters of his reasonable will." The confusion arises, as Sterling so well said, "from the use of 'consciousness' in a vague, un

steady sense, for the thing itself and for all the maladies to which it is liable, and the sorrows and absurdities which these produce; as if a man should call digestion the great standing grievance of the human body, meaning thereby indigestion." "The truth involved in the doctrine," continues Sterling, "appears to be, that the mind which is perpetually looking at and listening to its own private and particular associations, tastes, talents, and history is wasting and corrupting its capacities, reducing itself to worthlessness, perpetually rehearsing the same paltry drama before the same beggarly audience. Let so much be granted, nay, zealously maintained."

Sterling's whole discussion of Characteristics is so admirable, that I regret that I must limit my quotations from it almost exclusively to the passage in which he opposes Carlyle's proposition that the strong man does not know his strength, and that genius is ever a secret to itself. "There would be

far more of truth," says Sterling, "in the opinion

man of genius who did There is no man mem

that there never yet was a not know his own powers. orable in literature for the highest talents who cannot be shown to have well known that he possessed them." Shakespeare, Carlyle had said, takes no airs for writing Hamlet and the Tempest. Whether he took airs or not, we know nothing about, answers Sterling; but "doubtless he was too thoroughly aware of his own greatness to be vain of it.

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He had better work to do than taking airs for Hamlet, namely, taking pains for Othello." His sonnets prove that he was perfectly acquainted with his own genius, and could speak of it when there was occasion for it. "As to all the other men most memorable in Christian literature, the case is clear. No one can overlook the proud, even fierce, self-consciousness of Dante, and the distinct praises which he fearlessly bestows on his own labors. . . . No less plain is the selfgratulation of Cervantes, and his avowed preference of his own writings to those of his contemporaries. . . . . Milton's grandest, as well as his most trivial writings, are undisguised fragments and glimpses of Milton's individual self. . . . . Of Goethe it need here only be said that a graceful and easy, but most assured sense of his own worth circulates through every fibre of his creations, and no writer ever existed in whom one finds more of direct self-observation." Finally, says Sterling, "it may be observed that, of the men who have arisen to public view as thinkers in England during the last twenty years," - this was in 1839,"the one of the most fervid, sincere, far-reaching genius is also the one of the keenest and deepest self-consciousness. We will not do him the injustice of pointing him out to Mr. Carlyle's abhorrence."

....

Mazzini has discussed this phase of the subject in the same spirit as Sterling. His observations are peculiarly penetrating and profound, and the

true philosophy of consciousness could scarcely be indicated better than in the lines which I have italicized in the following passage:—

"Genius is not, generally speaking, unconscious of what it experiences or of what it is capable. It is not the suspended harp which sounds (as the statue of Memnon in the desert sounds in the sun), at the changing, unforeseen breath of wind that sweeps across its strings ; it is the conscious power of the soul of a man, rising from amidst his fellowmen, believing and calling himself a son of God, an apostle of eternal truth and beauty upon the earth, the privileged worshiper of an ideal as yet concealed from the majority. He is almost always sufficiently tormented by his contemporaries to need the consolation of this faith in himself and this communion in spirit with the generations to come. Cæsar, Christopher Columbus, were not unconscious; Dante, when, at the opening of the twenty-fifth chapter of the Paradiso he hurled at his enemies that sublime menace which commentators without heart and without head have mistaken for a cry of supplication; Kepler, when he wrote, 'My book will await its reader; has not God waited six thousand years before He created a man to contemplate His works?' Shakespeare himself, when he wrote

And nothing stands. . . .

And yet, to times in hope, my verse shall stand'

these men were not unconscious. But even had