CHAPTER LXVIII

THE GOSPEL OF SILENCE

Ogi has been wandering about the cave with a discontented expression on his face, showing a disposition to growl at whatever gets in his way. Mrs. Ogi, whose job is to notice domestic weather-signs, inquires: “What is the matter with you?”

Says Ogi: “I have to write an uninteresting chapter.”

“Why don’t you skip it?”

“I can’t, because it deals with an interesting man.” As she cannot guess that riddle, he goes on to complain: “If only I had been writing this book twenty-five years ago, when I thought ‘Sartor Resartus’ the most delightful book ever penned! But I went on, and got an overdose of Carlyle. I read almost all that Gospel of Silence in forty volumes; and now I sit and ask: what did I learn from it? Some facts, of course: history and biography. But did I get a single valid idea, one sound conclusion about life?”

“Explain it quickly, and pass on,” says Mrs. Ogi.

“I explain the human race, blocked from the future by a sheet-steel door. We need the acetylene torch of spiritual fervor; also we need the engineering brain, to say: “Put it here, and here, and cut the hinges.” In the face of this task, some of the wielders of the torch go off and get drunk. Others fall down on their knees and pray. Others forbid us to touch the door, because God made it and it is His will. Others write noble verses with perfect rhymes, to the effect that man is born to trouble, and great art teaches us to endure discomfort with dignity. Others take fire with zeal, and proceed to butt the door down with their heads. They butt and butt, until their heads ache. I realize how undignified it is to describe a great master of English prose as a ‘sorehead’; yet there happens to be no other word in the language that so tells the story of Thomas Carlyle.”

He was the son of a carpenter in Scotland, and suffered from poverty and neglect, and through a long life from indigestion. He complained pathetically that Emerson ate pie and was well, while he ate plain oatmeal and was miserable. He was irritable, and hard to get along with--we are privileged to know about this, because both he and his wife wrote endless letters to their friends, detailing their domestic troubles, and these letters are published in many volumes, and we can read both sides and take our choice. Tennyson refused assent to the proposition that the Carlyles should have married elsewhere; because then there would have been four miserable people instead of two.

Carlyle made himself, and also his literary style; he was a hack writer, biographer and translator, and struggled along with a dissatisfied young wife in a lonely country cottage. “Sartor Resartus” was written at the age of thirty-five, and sketches the philosophy of an imaginary German professor, whose name translated means “Devil’s Dung”; this professor’s philosophy being based upon the discovery that everything in civilization is merely clothes, the outside of things, the shams and pretensions and conventions. It is funny to imagine our statesmen and diplomats and prominent society personages stripped, not merely of their medals and ribbons, but also of their shirts and trousers; very few of them would look imposing--and the same applies to civilization with its proprieties, moralities and religions. This work of uproarious mischief fell absolutely flat in well-dressed and well-mannered England, and Emerson and a few people in far-off Boston had to inform the British cultured classes that they had a new prophet among them.

The teaching of “Sartor Resartus” is entirely negative; and when you ask what Carlyle had to contribute to constructive thinking about our hateful social system, the answer is: nonsense. He saw the evils, and scolded at them--and scolded equally hard at the forces which are to remedy the evils. Carlyle had contempt for the people, out of whose lap he had sprung; he despised democracy and the whole machinery of popular consent. He repaid America for discovering him by ridiculing the Union cause; he denounced the reform bill of 1867 as “Shooting Niagara.”

Carlyle’s way to set the world right is revealed to us in a book called “Hero-Worship.” First we have to find the Great Man; and then we have to obey him. “Obedience is the primary duty of man”--meaning, of course, the man like you and me, who is spelled with a little m. The one who is spelled with a capital letter is the Autocrat, who makes us do what we ought to do. “A nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants never came to much in the world.”

Our Great Tyrant sets us all hard at work. He makes us build houses and cultivate farms--but no machinery or railroads, because these constitute Industrialism, which is a Mammon-Monster. If we do our work by machinery we have leisure, and that is dangerous; we must have Work, and then more Work, our one safe Deliverance from Devil-Mischief--you see how one picks up the style of the “Gospel of Silence”!

Having got the houses built, what next? Why then, to save us from the Idleness-Imp we set to work knocking the houses down with cannon-balls. I don’t mean that Carlyle always advocated war; what he did was to glorify systems of government which historically have resulted and psychologically must result in war. At the age of fifty-eight, having surveyed the whole of history, our Scotch hero-worshipper selected the greatest of human heroes to become the subject of a grand state biography in six volumes: and whom do you suppose this hero turns out to be? Frederick of Prussia, who stole Silesia from his cousin, and seized Poland and divided it up among Austria, Russia and himself; Jonathan Wild the Great, founder of the Hohenzollern Heroism, and great-great-grandfather of our World War!

I dutifully read those six large volumes, and studied the series of charts in which the strategy of Frederick’s military campaigns is set forth. I learned a fascinating parlor game, which consists in moving here and there little black and white oblongs representing regiments and brigades and divisions and other military formations of human beings. The white oblongs represent your own human beings, and the black oblongs represent the human beings you propose to destroy; you pound them to pieces with artillery, you sweep them with volleys of musketry, you charge them with cavalry and chop them with sabres--and then you move up other oblongs, called reserves, and continue the procedure. It is safer to play this game on paper, because when you get through, you can throw the paper into the waste-basket, and do not have some tens of thousands of dead and mutilated men and horses decaying all over your back yard.

A pitiful ending for a Prophet and Preacher who aspires to the Remaking of Mankind in Capital Letters! Just a poor, bewildered old dotard, dyspeptic and crotchety, helpless and blundering, aspiring to a certain end and working to the opposite end.

“But why should anyone consider such a man great?” asks Mrs. Ogi.

“I have been trying to formulate that to myself. It is because he had the grace to be unhappy about our modern world. He did not get drunk on moonshine; he did not tell himself that God was going to do what it was obviously the business of men to do. He didn’t persuade himself that Evolution was going to do it, or that Time was going to do it, or that Faith was going to do it. He didn’t prattle about one increasing purpose running through the ages, or about one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves. He didn’t decide to dream his dream and hold it true, or to have moments when he felt he could not die. He didn’t tell us that Love will conquer at the last, or that his faith was large in Time--”

“This appears to be a transition,” says Mrs. Ogi.

“Precisely. We are about to begin a new chapter: The Lullaby Laureate, or Queen Victoria’s Super-Soothing Syrup.”

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