Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850

LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS. 1

It is nothing unusual, in this wayward world of ours, to find men denouncing, with apparent sincerity, that very fault which is most conspicuous in themselves. How often do we detect the most quarrelsome fellow of our acquaintance, the Hotspur of his immediate circle, uttering a grave homily against intemperance of speech, and rebuking for some casual testiness a friend, whose general demeanour and bearing give token of a lily-liver? What more common than to hear the habitual drunkard railing at the sin of inebriety, and delivering affecting testimony against the crying iniquity of the ginshop? We have listened to discourses on the comeliness of honesty, and the degrading tendencies of mammon-worship, from gentlemen who, a few hours before, had given private instructions to their brokers to rig the market, and who looked upon George Hudson as the greatest ornament of the age. Cobden mounts the platform to propose a motion in favour of universal peace and brotherhood, and, by way of argument, suggests the propriety of crumpling up the empire of the Russias, like the sheet of white paper which trembles in his omnipotent hand. He is seconded by a Quaker.

Mr Thomas Carlyle has, of late years, devoted a good deal of his leisure time to the denunciation of shams. The term, in his mouth, has a most extended significance indeed – he uses it with Catholic application. Loyalty, sovereignty, nobility, the church, the constitution, kings, nobles, priests, the House of Commons, ministers, Courts of Justice, laws, and lawgivers, are all alike, in the eyes of Mr Carlyle, shams. Nor does he consider the system as of purely modern growth. England, he thinks, has been shamming Isaac for several hundred years. Before the Commonwealth it was overridden by the frightful Incubus of Flunkeyism; since then, it has been suffering under Horsehair and Redtapism, two awful monsters that present themselves to Mr Carlyle's diseased imagination, chained at the entrances of Westminster Hall and Downing Street. Cromwell, perhaps, was not a sham, for in the burly regicide brewer Mr Carlyle discerns certain grand inarticulate strivings, which elevate him to the heroic rank. The gentlemen of the present age, however, are all either shams or shamming. The honourable Felix Parvulus, and the right honourable Felicissimus Zero, mounted respectively upon "desperate Sleswick thunder-horses" – M'Crowdy the political economist – Bobus – Flimnap, Sec. Foreign Department – the Right Honourable Minimus, and various other allegorical personages, intended, we presume, to typify carnal realities, are condemned as Solemn Shams, Supreme Quacks, Phantasm Captains, the Elixir of the Infatuated, and Able-Editor's Nobles.

It is natural to suppose that an individual who habitually deals in such wholesale denunciation, and whose avowed wish is to regenerate and reform society upon some entirely novel principle, must be a man of immense practical ability. The exposer of shams and quackeries should be, in his own person, very far indeed above suspicion of resembling those whom he describes, or tries to describe, in language more or less intelligible. If otherwise, he stands in imminent danger of being treated by the rest of the world as an impertinent and egregious impostor. Now, Mr Thomas Carlyle is anything but a man of practical ability. Setting aside his style for the present, let us see whether he has ever, in the course of his life, thrown out a single hint which could be useful to his own generation, or profitable to those who may come after. If he could originate any such hint, he does not possess the power of embodying it in distinct language. He has written a history of the French Revolution, a pamphlet on Chartism, a work on Heroes and Hero-worship, and a sort of political treatise entitled Past and Present. Can any living man point to a single practical passage in any of these volumes? If not, what is the real value of Mr Carlyle's writings? What is Mr Carlyle himself but a Phantasm of the species which he is pleased to denounce?

We have known, ere now, in England, political writers who, single-handed, have waged war with Ministers, and denounced the methods of government. But they were men of strong masculine understanding, capable of comprehending principles, and of exhibiting them in detail. They never attempted to write upon subjects which they did not understand: consequently, what they did write was well worthy of perusal, more especially as their sentiments were conveyed in clear idiomatic English. Perhaps the most remarkable man of this class was the late William Cobbett. Shrewd and practical, a master of figures, and an utter scorner of generalisation, he went at once in whatever he undertook to the root of the matter, and, right or wrong, demonstrated what he thought to be the evil, and what he conceived to be the remedy. There was no slip-slop, burlesque, or indistinctness about William Cobbett. Mr Carlyle, on the other hand, can never stir one inch beyond the merest vague generality. If he were a doctor, and you came to him with a cut finger, he would regale you with a lecture on the heroical qualities of Avicenna, or commence proving that Dr Abernethy was simply a Phantasm-Leech, instead of whipping out his pocket-book, and applying a plaster to the wound. Put him into the House of Commons, and ask him to make a speech on the budget. No baby ever possessed a more indefinite idea of the difference between pounds, shillings, and pence. He would go on maundering about Teufelsdrökh, Sauerteig, and Dryasdust, Sir Jabez Windbag, Fire-horses, Marsh-jötuns, and vulturous Choctaws, until he was coughed down as remorselessly as ever was Sir Joshua Walmsley. And yet this is the gentleman who has the temerity to volunteer his services as a public instructor, and who is now issuing a series of monthly tracts, for the purpose of shedding a new light upon the most intricate and knotty points of the general policy of Great Britain!

Something of this kind we have already witnessed in a neighbouring country, but never in the like degree. France has had her Flocons and her Louis Blancs, small, pert, presumptuous animals, chalking out schemes of social regeneration, organised labour, industrial regiments, and the like. We do not intend to insinuate that either of these scribes is entitled to be ranked, for parity of intellect, with Mr Carlyle, because by doing so we might involve ourselves in a squabble with some of his benighted admirers. But we say, with perfect sincerity, that so far as regards political attainments and information, clear views, and we shall even add common sense, (distant as that attribute is from any of the parties above named,) MM. Flocon and Blanc are at least as capable guides as Mr Carlyle can pretend to be. Something tangible there is, however pernicious to society, in the propositions of the former – the latter does not favour us with propositions at all; he contents himself with abusing men and matters in a barbarous, conceited, uncouth, and mystical dialect.

One peculiarity there is about the Latterday Pamphlets, as contradistinguished from their author's previous lucubrations, which has amused us not a little. Mr Carlyle has hitherto been understood to favour the cause of self-styled Liberalism. His mania, or rather his maunderings, on the subject of the Protector gained him the applause of many who are little less than theoretical republicans, and who regard as a glorious deed the regicide of the unfortunate Charles. Moreover, certain passages in his History of the French Revolution tended to strengthen this idea; he had a kindly side for Danton, and saw evident marks of heroism in the loathsome miscreant whom, in his usual absurd jargon, he styles "the pale sea-green Incorruptible," Robespierre. On this ground, his works were received with approbation by a section of the public press; and we used to hear him lauded and commended as a writer of the profoundest stamp, as a deep original thinker, a thorough-paced philanthropist, the champion of genuine greatness, and the unflinching enemy of delusions. Now, however, things are altered. Mr Carlyle has got a new crochet into his head, and to the utter discomfiture of his former admirers, he manifests a truculent and ultra-tyrannical spirit, abuses the political economists, wants to have a strong coercive government, indicates a decided leaning to the whip and the musket as effectual modes of reasoning, and, in short, abjures democracy! The sensation caused by this extraordinary change of sentiment has been as great as if Joe Hume had declared himself a spendthrift. Only think of such a document as the following, addressed to the sovereign people!

"Speech of the British Prime Minister to the floods of Irish and other Beggars, the able-bodied Lackalls, nomadic or stationary, and the general assembly, outdoor and indoor, of the Pauper Populations of these Realms.

"Vagrant Lackalls! foolish most of you, criminal many of you, miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. What to do with you I know not; long have I been meditating, and it is hard to tell. Here are some three millions of you, as I count; so many of you fallen sheer over into the abysses of open Beggary; and, fearful to think, every new unit that falls is loading so much more the chain that drags the other over. On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1200 a-day. They hang there on the giddy edge, poor souls, crumping themselves down, holding on with all their strength, but falling, falling one after another; and the chain is getting heavy, so that ever more fall; and who at last will stand! What to do with you? The question, what to do with you? especially since the potato died, is like to break my heart!

"One thing, after much meditating, I have at last discovered, and now know for some time back: That you cannot be left to roam abroad in this unguided manner, stumbling over the precipices, and loading ever heavier the fatal chain upon those who might be able to stand; that this of locking you up in temporary Idle Workhouses, when you stumble, and subsisting you on Indian meal, till you can sally forth again on fresh roamings, and fresh stumblings, and ultimate descent to the devil; – that this is not the plan; and that it never was, or could out of England have been supposed to be, much as I have prided myself upon it!

"Vagrant Lackalls! I at last perceive, all this that has been sung and spoken, for a long while, about enfranchisement, emancipation, freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over the world, is little other than sad temporary jargon, brought upon us by a stern necessity, – but now ordered by a sterner to take itself away again a little. Sad temporary jargon, I say; made up of sense and nonsense, – sense in small quantities, and nonsense in very large; – and, if taken for the whole or permanent truth of human things, it is no better than fatal infinite nonsense eternally untrue. All men, I think, will soon have to quit this, to consider this as a thing pretty well achieved; and to look out towards another thing much more needing achievement at the time that now is."

Flat burglary as ever was committed! O villain! thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this – so say the political Dogberrys to the gentleman whom they used to applaud. We are not surprised at their wrath. It is rather hard to be told at this time of day that ballot-boxes and extension of the suffrage are included in Mr Carlyle's catalogue of Shams, and that Messrs Thompson, Fox, and Co., must even submit to the charge of talking unveracities and owlism. Surely there is some mistake here. Not a whit of it. Mr Carlyle is in grim earnest, and lays about him like a man. He has not studied the records of the French Revolution for nothing; and he is not able to discern in the late Continental revolts any ground for general congratulation on the improved prospects of mankind. Such language as the following must sound as a strange rebuke in the ears of divers organs of the public press, who, not long ago, were flinging up their caps in ecstasies at the fall of constitutions, backing up Garibaldi against the Pope, Charles Albert against Radetsky, the Sicilian insurgents against their Sovereign of Naples, Kossuth against the Emperor, Von Gagern against Federalism, Ledru Rollin against Civilisation, and Lamartine against Common-sense.

"Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to arrest the attention of all men simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come. Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty – O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody from the universal human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same. The front-wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends and coherency of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty nails and wormeaten dovetailings give way: – but is it cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind?"

Sham-kings may and do exist, thinks Mr Carlyle, but the greatest unveracity of all is this same Democracy, which people were lately so very willing to applaud. It must be admitted that our author is perfectly impartial in the distribution of his strokes. He has no love for Kings, or Metternichs, or Redtape, or any other fiction or figure of speech whereby he typifies existing governments: he disposes of them in a wholesale manner of Impostors and Impostures. But no more does he regard with affection Chartist Parliament, Force of Public Opinion, or "M'Crowdy the Seraphic Doctor with his last evangel of Political Economy." M'Culloch is, in his eyes, as odious as the First Lord in Waiting, whoever that functionary may be. Clenching both his fists, he delivers a facer to the Trojan on the right, and to the Tyrian on the left. Big with the conviction that all Governments are wrong, as presently or lately constituted, he can see no merit, but the reverse, in any of the schemes of progress, or reform, or financial change, which have yet been devised. Here follow some of his notions with regard to the most popularly prescribed remedies: —

"A divine message, or eternal regulation of the Universe, there verily is, in regard to every conceivable procedure and affair of man: faithfully following this, said procedure or affair will prosper, and have the whole universe to second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating contradictions, towards a victorious goal; not following this, mistaking this, disregarding this, destruction and wreck are certain for every affair. How find it? All the world answers me, 'Count heads'; ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-boxes, and that will tell! Universal Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well, – I perceive we have got into strange spiritual latitudes indeed. Within the last half century or so, either the Universe or else the heads of men must have altered very much. Half a century ago, and down from Father Adam's time till then, the Universe, wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of somewhat abstruse nature; by no means carrying its secret written on its face, legible to every passer-by; on the contrary, obstinately hiding its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere persons, and partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was not the majority in my time! – Or perhaps the chief end of man being now, in these improved epochs, to make money and spend it, his interests in the Universe have become amazingly simplified of late; capable of being voted on with effect by almost anybody? 'To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest:' truly if that is the summary of his social duties, and the final divine message he has to follow, we may trust him extensively to vote upon that. But if it is not, and never was, or can be? If the Universe will not carry on its divine bosom any commonwealth of mortals that have no higher aim, – being still 'a Temple and Hall of Doom! not a mere Weaving-shop and Cattle-pen? If the unfathomable Universe has decided to reject Human Beavers pretending to be Men; and will abolish, pretty rapidly perhaps, in hideous mud-deluges, their 'markets' and them, unless they think of it? – In that case, it were better to think of it; and the Democracies and Universal Suffrages, I can observe, will require to modify themselves a good deal!"

Now, reader, what do you think of all this? We doubt not you are a good deal puzzled: and an admission to that effect would be no impeachment of your intellect. Well then, let us try to extract from these pamphlets of Mr Carlyle some tendency, if not distinct meaning, which may at least indicate the current of his hopes and aspirations. Putting foreign governments altogether out of the question, we gather that Mr Carlyle considers this realm of Britain as most scandalously misgoverned; that he looks upon Downing Street as an absolute sewer; that he decidedly yields to Mr Hawes in reverence for Lord John Russell; that he regards the Protectionists as humbugs; that he laughs at ballot-boxes, despises extension of the suffrage, and repudiates, as a rule of conduct, the maxim about the markets, which indeed, by this time, stinks in every British nostril as yet unplugged with calico; that he detests the modern brood of political economists with a cordiality which does him credit; and that he is firmly convinced that democracy is a thing forever impossible. This is a tolerably extensive creed, though as yet entirely a negative one – is there no one point upon which Mr Carlyle will condescend to be positive?

Yes, one there is; not apparent perhaps to the casual reader, but detectible by him who studies closely those pages of oracular thought – a point very important at the present moment, for this it is – that there is ONE MAN existing in her Majesty's dominions who could put everything to rights, if he were only allowed to do so. Who that man is we may possibly discover hereafter. At present we are hardly entitled to venture beyond the boundaries of dim conjecture. Nor is it very clear in what way the Unknown, or rather the Undeveloped, is to set about his exalted mission. Is he to be minister – or something more? Perhaps Mr Carlyle did not like to be altogether explicit on such a topic as this; but we may possibly gain a little light from indirect and suggestive passages. Take this for example:

"Alas, it is sad enough that anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here, – for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that shams of any kind, especially that Sham Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease. Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly, a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial, – what you in your iconoclast humour call shams, – all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honourable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue saleable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis? 'The greatest sham, I have always thought, is he that would destroy shams.'

"Even so. To such depth have I, the poor knowing person of this epoch, got; – almost below the level of lowest humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and oxhood! For never till in quite recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy quietly set forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature called man believe generally in his heart that this was the rule in this Earth; that in deliberate long-established lying could there be help or salvation for him, could there be at length other than hindrance and destruction for him."

We have been sorely tempted to mark with italics certain portions of the above extract, but on second thoughts we shall leave it intact. After applying ourselves most diligently to the text, with the view of eliciting its meaning, we have arrived at the conclusion, that it is either downright nonsense, or something a great deal worse. Observe what he says. It is to be prayed for by all men that Shams may cease – more especially Sham Kings. But certain solid Englishmen are not prepared for this. They have been "used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial, – what you in your iconoclast humour call shams." They thought no harm of them. "Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honourable members perorated," &c. And those who differ in their estimate of these things from Mr Carlyle are "almost below the level of lowest humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and oxhood: " – and their belief is a "scandalous blasphemy." So then, the Monarchy is a sham, and so are the laws, the Church, and the Constitution! They are all lies, and in deliberate long-established lying there can be no help or salvation for the subject! This may not be Mr Carlyle's meaning, and we are very willing to suppose so; but he has no title to be angry, were we to accept his words according to their evident sense. If men, through conceit or affectation, will write in this absurd and reckless fashion, they must be prepared to stand the consequences. The first impression on the mind of every one who peruses the above passage must be, that the author is opposed to the form of government which is unalterably established in these kingdoms. If this be so, we should like to know in what respect such doctrines differ from the pestilential revolutionary trash which has inundated France and Germany? What kind of overturn does Mr Carlyle contemplate, for overturn there must be, and that of the most extensive kind, if his views are ever destined to be realised? Is it not, perhaps, as melancholy a spectacle as may be, to find a man of some genius, and considerable learning, attempting to unsettle the minds of the young and enthusiastic, upon points distinctly identified with all that is great and glorious in our past history; and insinuating doctrines which are all the more dangerous on account of the oblique and uncertain language in which they are conveyed? Fear God and honour the King, are precepts not acknowledged by Mr Carlyle as the rudiment and foundation of his faith. He does not recognise them as inseparably linked together. He would set up instead some wretched phantom of his own imagination, framed out of the materials which he fondly supposes to be the attributes of the heroic character, and he would exalt that above all other authority, human and divine. He is, if we do not entirely misconstrue the tenor of these pamphlets, possessed at this moment with the notion of the advent of another Cromwell, the sole event which, as he thinks, can save England from being swallowed up by the evils which now beset her. What these evils are, we shall shortly endeavour to ascertain; in the mean time, let us keep our attention fixed on this primary matter of authority.