The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (35 page)

The desperate search for the true past and its clues to the future led ingenious thinkers to turn from the unintelligible to the unknowable. In the early nineteenth century there was overwhelming evidence of the power of groups and impersonal forces. The community of French Enlightenment philosophers revealed what seemed the inevitable march of civilization. The baffling momentum of the Paris mob in the French Revolution of 1789 and what Carlyle called “the new omnipotence of the Steam-engine” led believers in the power of the human spirit to seek reassurance in the autonomy of the individual person.

For centuries, Plutarch’s
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
had shone in the classical canon. A lively style and vivid detail had made Plutarch (c. 46-c. 120) the popular interpreter of the ancient past. His “lives of the greatest men,” Plutarch explained, marked the farthest reach of our knowledge of the past. “Beyond these there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther.” “Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history.” A latter-day Greek, troubled by what he saw as Roman decadence, Plutarch was less interested in how men shaped history than in their moral strength or weakness. They would provide lessons for an age when faith in old gods was declining.

In the early nineteenth century, two antithetic personalities were challenged by the threats of impersonal forces to give a role to the individual person. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) from Scotland and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) from America drew quite opposite historical lessons from their views of past and present. Each saw a different kind of charisma or divine favor in the “great man,” who seemed to dominate history. The overshadowing historical figure in their time was Napoleon (1769-1821). He was Carlyle’s “last great man.” Emerson too found him among the eminent men of the nineteenth century, “far the best known and the most powerful.”

Carlyle, who had a way of making a mystery of all experience, was not discouraged by translating the simplicities of history into the mysteries of biography. “History is the essence of innumerable Biographies,” he wrote, “but if one Biography, nay our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us; how much more must these million, the very facts of which, to say nothing of the purport of them, we know not, and cannot know!” Emerson in his own way would agree that “there is properly no history, only biography.” And Thoreau, the American individualist, went on to the logical extreme: “Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography.”

Carlyle’s own early life in Ecclefechan, a village in southern Scotland, was a parable of his view of the focus of history. The family was governed by his father, James Carlyle, a stonemason and small farmer. “I call him a natural man; singularly free from all manner of affectation; he was among the last of the true men, which Scotland (on the old system) produced, or can produce; a man healthy in body and in mind. . . . He was never visited with Doubt; the old Theorem of the Universe was sufficient for him, and he worked well in it, and in all senses successfully and wisely as few now can do.” “He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath. Yet passion never mastered him; it rather inspired him with new vehemence of insight, and more piercing emphasis of wisdom.”

Perhaps then and there young Thomas Carlyle learned “that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him.” For his father was a committed and explicit Calvinist. “Man’s chief end, my father could have answered from the depths of his soul, ‘is to glorify God and
enjoy Him
for ever.’ By this light he walked, choosing his path, fitting prudence to principle with wonderful skill and manliness—through ‘the ruins of a falling Era; not once missing his footing.’ ” “This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: that man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.”

It was no wonder, then, that Carlyle was impatient with parliaments and detested democracy: “Man is sent hither not to question, but to work: ‘The end of men,’ it was long ago written ‘is an Action, not a Thought.’ ” Nor surprising that he saw the world shaped by Heroes who saved their worshipers the pains of reflection. In society and individuals, he insisted, “the sign of health is Unconsciousness. . . . Never since the beginning of Time was there . . . so intensely self-conscious a Society.” In Carlyle’s time, the “dyspepsia” of self-consciousness appeared everywhere. For example, in the “diseased self-conscious state of Literature disclosed in . . . the prevalence of Reviewing. . . . All Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review . . . Thus does Literature also, like a sick thing, superabundantly ‘listen to itself.’ ” Unreflective worship of the Hero could cure all. So, against the American antislavery writer Elizur Wright he insisted that “men ought to be thankful to get themselves governed, if it is only done in a strong and resolute way.”

Carlyle gave his views classic explosive statement in a series of popular lectures (published 1841),
Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History.
Worship of a hero, he said, was the test of human nobility. “I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of Admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life.” Carlyle’s hero had many shapes—Divinity (Odin), Prophet (Mahomet), Poet (Dante, Shakespeare), Priest (Luther, Reformation; Knox, Puritanism), Man of Letters (Johnson, Rousseau, Burns), King (Cromwell, Napoleon).

Before offering his dogma of the “Great Man,” Carlyle had made his reputation with a work of history. His
French Revolution
(1837) also became a literary legend and an object lesson to authors. For comment and criticism he had lent the unique manuscript of the first volume to John Stuart Mill, in whose house it was accidentally destroyed. Doggedly, Carlyle simply rewrote it. When published in three volumes in 1837 it was an enormous success in the bookstores, ending his struggle for money and public notice. Lecture invitations now brought the financial support he sorely needed.

Though praised more often as poetry and rhetoric than as history, the work has its peculiar virtues. Perhaps it justifies G. M. Trevelyan’s claim that Carlyle was “in his own strange way, a great historian.” For Carlyle somehow captures the Paris mob, to whom he is surprisingly sympathetic. He also gives poignant insights into Danton, Robespierre, and other leaders. Finally, the book is an epic of the overwhelming power of grand forces. Carlyle sees the fate of the aristocracy as retribution for centuries of foolish misgoverning—another chapter in the text of Carlyle’s “History as Divine Scripture.”

Carlyle’s later works documented his “Great Man” theory. Ever in his own strange way. For example, by impassioned editing of letters and speeches he offered “Elucidations” of his idol: “Poor Cromwell—great Cromwell! The inarticulate prophet; prophet who could not
speak.
” He found Cromwell a “greater” man than Napoleon. Later, Carlyle’s monumental six-volume life (1858-65) of another idol, Frederick the Great of Prussia, demonstrated the superiority of the decisive king over the “Anarchy (as I reckon it sadly to be) which is got by ‘Parliamentary eloquence,’ Free Press, and counting of heads.” Wherever Carlyle looked into the past he found what he was seeking. Even in the medieval monastery (despite his anti-Catholic obsession), in
Past and Present
(1843), he saw the “magnanimous” leadership of the Abbot Samson, in stark contrast to the democratized confusions of his own age.

What is most surprising in this devotee of “greatness” is Carlyle’s sympathy, grounded in his own early struggles, for the common people. This sympathy shows not only in his feeling for the abused masses of Paris in his
French Revolution
and in his depiction of life in the Abbot Samson’s monastery in the twelfth century. His clues to medieval craftsmanship were taken up by John Ruskin and William Morris and supplied their themes. And he offered a more realistic vision of medieval life than was found in Sir Walter Scott’s recent
Ivanhoe
(1819). His explosive laments on “The-Condition-of-England question” depicted the miseries of the new industrial working classes and inveighed against laissez-faire and the translation of human relations into cash. He saw the new evils of his England, but offered no new remedies. Nor did his catalog of Heroes suggest anyone who could lead the people out of the industrial wilderness.

Carlyle’s father intended him for the ministry, but Carlyle never felt the vocation for a particular church. His writings, it has been said, were all meant to be read aloud. He aimed somehow to make the world his congregation. The thirty volumes of his collected works—including even his Reminiscences—are, with few exceptions, written in a homiletic style, peppered with capital letters, question marks, and exclamation points. Inspired by Goethe and German idealist philosophy, dismayed by the English utilitarians’ pleasure-and-pain and the “profit-and-loss” Philosophy, Carlyle complained that “loss of religion is loss of everything. . . . Soul is not synonymous with Stomach.” Troubled by the pallor of the established Church in his time, he became the prophet of his own unorganized church. He preached from the text he himself composed from History—“the true epic poem and universal Divine Scripture, whose plenary inspiration no man out of Bedlam or in it shall bring in question.” And in a time when man’s inventive ingenuity had given a newly repetitive and mechanical cast to industry, he tried to make work itself a divine mission. Yeats called Carlyle “the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the ’eighties and early ’nineties.” But since the rise of Nazism and Fascism, Carlyle’s Hero has had an evil and ominous ring, from which he has been stigmatized as a prophet.

* * *

The same age carried a different message on the other side of the ocean. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), like Carlyle, was originally destined for the ministry. His father, pastor of the Second Church of Boston, descended from a long line of New England preachers, originating in the first minister of Concord in 1634. The young Emerson, after graduating from Harvard College, attended the Harvard Divinity School. While still a student he preached in pulpits around Boston. In 1829 he was ordained as assistant pastor of the church where his father had preached, and within a few weeks was put in full charge. His sermons were already freewheeling. He appealed to the younger members of the congregation by his plain untheological but ethical messages. Impatient with church dogmas, he wrote in his journal, “I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated.” In 1832 he announced that he could administer the Sacrament only if the bread and wine were left out, since he believed that Christ had not intended the ceremony be a regular observance. So he resigned his pulpit. But he never ceased to be a preacher, though he made his living as a lecturer.

The independence Emerson expressed by leaving his first pulpit was in the spirit of westward-moving America in his time. Like Carlyle, he was surrounded by piety in his early years. But not the dour Calvinism. His father, who died when Emerson was eight, had little influence on his life, and Emerson’s thoughts were shaped by the women in his family. His mother believed in Christianity, not as a theological path to salvation, but as a consolation. She urged her children to be kind “to all animals and insects.” His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, the dominant influence on his early years, was an incurable optimist with a mystic affinity for nature. Young Emerson saw in her letters “the best writer in Massachusetts.”

While Carlyle had made his debut with a grandiloquent saga of the turbulent Parisian mob, Emerson’s first book was the placid
Nature
(1836). When his family moved to the country outside Boston where he felt near to nature, his poem began “Goodbye, proud world! I’m going home.” His varied essays sought to describe that identity in the “Oversoul” that others concocted into a philosophic doctrine called Transcendentalism.

Emerson’s feeling of unity with nature meant something too for the relations of men to one another and to history. “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” So the relentless American leveler, Emerson merged each into all. While Carlyle idealized inequality, and measured men by their ability to worship “one higher than himself,” Emerson the Seeker saw “the uses of great men” in a series of “Representative Men.” Like Carlyle, he found Napoleon the “great man” of the century, and the idea for his “pantheon” grew out of his immersion in books about Napoleon. But while Carlyle saw Napoleon shaping history by his heroic charisma, Emerson’s Napoleon was “the Man of the World” who “owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men.”

Emerson goes overboard, denying originality even in the arts. “No great men are original.” “The greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattle-brain . . . but a heart in unison with his time and country.” So he asked, “What can Shakespeare tell in any way but to the Shakespeare in us?” And further to demonstrate that greatness is not a national but a common human quality, Emerson’s pantheon includes Plato (philosopher), Swedenborg (mystic), Montaigne (skeptic), Shakespeare (poet), Napoleon (man of the world), and Goethe (writer)—but no American.

Emerson the Seeker is less interested in the process than in the moral of history. His Representative Men command our interest not because they shape events but because they embody the common spirit, and help us feel it. “I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life and aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time. . . . Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original talent was oppressed under a load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and distracting variety of claims, taught man how to dispose of this mountainous miscellany and make it subservient.” For Emerson the flow of experience embodies the common spirit that “great men” express eloquently. So Goethe merits his highest praise because he “teaches courage and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by the darkest and deafest eras.”