(From the Spectator.)
THE DARK SIDE.
Mr. CARLYLE, with his peculiar views as to liberty and government, is not the only man of our generation who is troubled with melancholy forebodings for humanity. Amidst the universal clack of progress, there are plenty of indications of a bitter feeling that progress in knowledge and the mechanical arts, and even in the wide diffusion of the education which has given birth to that progress, is no guarantee for progress in what men hold to be highest of all,—that strength and depth and nobility of character which have so little necessary connection with either wide knowledge or multiplied enjoyments. Is there not lurking in thousands of minds a fear that the sciences and arts may prove to be too strong for man almost precisely in the sense in which we say that the vitality of Nature as seen in the tropical vegetation of the Amazon is too strong for man?—that knowledge may prove power indeed, but in some sense a power too great for the strength of those who wield it,—a power by the side of which moral power will lose its head, feel itself bewildered, paralyzed, without compass and, worse still, without nerve? There are those who are already beginning to say in their heart "There is no God," not because they know so little, but because they know so much of their own little knowledge. They are, perhaps, as the Psalmist calls them, in one sense fools, but certainly they are not fools for want of education, or of all sorts of accomplishments. It is rather that, seeing the threads of scientific investigation branching out in so many different directions, and knowing that they can never grasp one hundredth part even of the conclusions arrived at, the sense of utter helplessness, of incapacity to know anything but the smallest fraction of this labyrinth of universal laws, fosters in their minds a keen sense of the uncertainty not only of all except demonstrative evidence, but of all mental and moral impressions, however deep, not supported by this kind of evidence,—a sense of uncertainty from which the springs of faith never again recover. Even those who feel most deeply the truth of God's personal love and providence, and of His revelation of Himself in Christ, are not without a vehement and almost passionate feeling that this age needs a new incarnation, if only to tell us how the Light of the World would reconcile this new flood of intellectual processes with the personal life in the Father which He revealed. There is the profoundest danger of the collapse of that highest personal life the glory of which has been shown us, before the confusion of the half lights and half shadows of the new era. Complexity of every kind is the great condition of the new life, shades of thought too complex to yield up definite opinions,—shades of moral obligation too complex to yield up definite axioms of duty, —shades of insight too various to yield up definite sentences of approval or condemnation for the actions of others. On all subjects not strictly scientific, on all those mental, and moral questions which determine conduct and action, the growing sense of complexity and difficulty is rapidly producing a relaxing effect upon the force of individual character. In some sense men are blinded by excess of light. The simple old moral law, " Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal," " Thou shalt not commit adultery," " Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods," is apt to lose half its meaning before multitudes of distinctions which gradually shade off forbidden acts into the most praiseworthy and delicate sentiments, and leave you wondering where the spirit of the law ends and the letter begins. Still more difficult does it seem to reconcile the old divine liberty of life in God with the new human liberty of life in science—the spiritual attitudes of mind which recognise that every wave in a storm, every waste shot from a gun that strikes a passing bird, is the direct issue of a Father's will, with the laws of tides and air currents, of atmospheric rarefaction and condensation with which modern science is every day familiarising us more. Harmonise as we will, under our present lights the personal life in God which our Lord revealed fits very awkwardly into the grooves of the scientific conception of order ; and every generation, as it accumulates fresh illustrations of the scientific method, is more and more embarrassed how to piece them in with that far grander and nobler personal discipline of the soul which hears in every circumstance of life some new word of command from the living God. We do not affirm, we do not in the least believe, the two modes of apprehension to be inconsistent. We do say that to help us in reconciling them we seem to need some new act of revelation—that he who taught the old personal unscientific world how to live in God, should yet reconcile for us the floods of new light. He has poured upon our understandings and outward life, with the greatest of His lessons taught to a very different age by the shores of Galilee and in the darkness of Gethsemane. If "progress " go on as heretofore, without any new light from the divine side, the old, strong, simple, ethical, and spiritual conception of life may die away, and there may grow up in its place a spurious compound of misty science and feeble sentiment out of which no strength can come. Compare the old Catholic saints, or the old Puritan saints, it matters little which, with the modern " religious man;" compare Luther with streaming eyes praying for the Church, and telling God with the familiarity of Abraham or Elijah that, if He will have a Church at all, He must look after it Himself, "for we cannot look after it, and if we could we should be the proudest asses under heaven," with our modern Bishops sending forth a soft encyclical almost destitute of meaning—the highest praise falsely awarded to which has been that there was no harm in it,— to "the faithful in Christ Jesus." To the faithful indeed! They meant "to those who made no difficulties in Christ Jesus." Yet the difference is not merely and simply in the men. Luther had re-discovered pure and unalloyed the possibility of free, simple, personal life with Christ. The Bishops have inherited a world of intellectual compromises, and doctrinal subtleties, and scientific discussions which stand between the soul and this straight-forward life. The spirit of the age is complicated with truths (as well as falsehoods), which are bewildering and distracting to this attitude of mind, and which yet insist on recognition. The mere development of the existing law of progress, as it is usually understood, so far from securing all that is expected of it, cannot fail, we think, to do more in relaxing the highest inward life of man, than even in beautifying and humanising its external features.
It is another aspect of the same tendency that, with the new flow of sciences and arts into the world, the tendency to indifference on almost all great non-scientific subjects, politics and theology alike, has so much increased, especially among the young, and that the highest culture has scarcely taught anything beyond that despair of complete truth, and consequent disposition to deprecate severe struggles for it, which was so remarkable a feature of the Roman world at the beginning of our era, and which always probably leads the majority to the doctrine, " Enjoy what you can while you can, for all remote spiritual attitudes are unsuited to the constitution of such beings as we are in such a world as the present." There is, at all events, an immense growth of this spirit, not amongst those who have most hardship and suffering, but who have least,—amongst those who have chiefly reaped the advantages of the new sciences and arts in easy life, pleasant tastes, languid hopes, and feeble faiths. The fear is, that if civilisation succeeds,—and we trust it will succeed, —in raising the mass of men to the same level of comparatively satisfied material and intellectual wants, there will be the same disposition to subside into the limited life of small attain- able enjoyments, and to let alone the struggles for perfect freedom and perfect life in God. There can be no doubt that what we call our middle class, as a whole, and especially the younger members of it, have lost greatly in sympathy with these struggles among other peoples. Mr. Carlyle's teaching about slavery—earnest in its own immoral kind —has not truly convinced half as many as it has given an excuse for refusing to interest themselves on the side of the victim,—for insisting on judging of the American War, for example, by canons of mere taste. That there is nothing of the heart in middle class politics that there was a generation ago, the history of the recent Reform Act would alone prove. The languid desire of all parties not to be bored with the question any longer, did infinitely more to ensure its passing than any conviction. Indeed, the party which passed it have, in their newspaper press, been busy ever since in crying down, just after the old fashion, the very class whom they have enthroned. " We will give you power over us, if you please, for it is too much trouble to resist longer, and the Whigs would do it if we didn't, but nothing shall induce us to like you, or to think you anything but low fellows," is the general Tory verdict on what has happened. And the younger men turn away from politics, with which they profess themselves disgusted, to the easy study of technical pursuits and the indulgence of more or less refined amusements. They smile languidly at the "fuss " about politics, and only become earnest in discussing what is Philistine in taste, and whether Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Carlyle has exploded the larger number of antiquated prejudices on political subjects and "the Semitic principle." It is the same with religious life. Some of the younger generation profess a passive scepticism, not an eager, anxious prosecution of doubt, and some lean to the aesthetic practices of the High Church school. But the main point is that in both classes alike the dim, vague faculty called Taste has assumed so much importance in late years, not by reason of its own growth, but through the undermining of all surer, deeper, and more laborious passages to truth. We seem to be rapidly approaching in the middle class,—and will the working class, when it has gained as easy a hold of life, save us from going further in the same road ? —to that condition of things, that attenuated faith, those petty momentary interests, that hopeless vision of the excessive complexity of truth on all high topics, which drove the Roman world into despair at the beginning of our era,—a despair from which a simple belief in a simple revelation of divine acts alone saved it. Mr. Arnold has finely said of it:—
" Like ours it looked in outward air,
Its head was clear and true,
Sumptuous its clothing, rich its fare,
No pause its action knew.
" Steel was its arm, each pulse and bone
Seemed puissant and alive,
But, ah ! its heart, its heart was stone,
And so it could not thrive."
If it were true that with the beating back of great physical wants, the deepest hunger of human nature is to be laid to sleep, and life to be frittered away in small enjoyments, no one could look upon human destiny without a sigh.
Perhaps it may be thought almost an answer to this fear to point out that with the growth of the self-indulgent spirit there is very apt to grow also a very strong feeling of the worthlessness of life,—a feeling that nothing enjoyed is worth the cost of obtaining it, that life itself is a doubtful good, that,"the spring and elasticity of youth once over, and the sense of duty smothered in a sea of speculative doubt, it is rather from indolence than from love of life, that men prolong the dreary monotony of unsolved problems and ungranted prayers. That high culture has led many of the highest minds of our age to the very verge of a despondency that is little short of despair, we scarcely needed that grand expression of this feeling in incomparably the finest poem of our own day, Mr. Clough's Easter Sunday soliloquy at Naples, to tell us. It will be said that the very sense of utter weariness and nothingness which life without faith carries into the highest minds, is itself the surest proof that we need not fear any real collapse of society into atoms of individual self-indulgence. And we believe this because we believe in God. But, judging by the merely human symptoms of the day, one would say that the collapse of faith which brings the highest minds nearly to despair, brings ordinary minds to weary satiety, indifference, ennui,—that condition, in which no end of life is thought worth earnest exertion, and yet for want of earnest exertion no higher estimate of the ends of life can be formed.
To sum up, then, those influences which, inhering as they do in the very grain of civilisation, seem to us to threaten far more evil in the future than the more or less removable mass of physical misery, ignorance, and want, with which politicians are wisely making war, there is, first, a tendency in the very accumulation of the intellectual sciences to perplex and relax the fibres of moral and intellectual conviction, a tendency, in fact, to drown purpose and volition in the flood of intellectual alternatives which are proposed to our thought. Again, the very growth of the arts in staving off the ultimate necessities of man, and multiplying immensely the small enjoyments of life, has a great tendency to increase, and has increased, the spirit of petty indulgence, of small self-gratification, of indifference to all great and grave struggles. Finally, this predominance of small and brilliant certainties amid the growth of great and vague doubts, while it makes the highest minds pine passionately for more light, fosters in common minds the tendency to cry, " Who will show us any good?" and to doubt secretly whether any attainable end in life is worth the trouble of attaining it—a state of mind which has been common in the stationary East for centuries, and will grow even in the progressive West just as rapidly if the faith in Christ could ever die out.
THE BRIGHT SIDE.
Were the preceding article a complete statement of the facts, civilisation would seem on the eve of stereotyping itself, and the destiny of man would appear to he sterile indeed, but it is not complete. There are facts to he recorded as bright as these are gloomy. Amid the decay of the creeds and the roar of petty conflicts, under the complex network of doubts which seem to shut in men, each to his little plot of obvious duty, as a few red threads will shut in a stag to a half-rood of grass, we seem to perceive at last the rise of new and tremendous forces which will once again retone the heart, rebrace the mind, and at last reinvigorate or, to speak even more frankly, re-create faith in the souls of men. Education does not only pulverise. Things are still in their germ, but we think we see one change, perhaps the greatest of all, coming over the spirits of civilised men, a thirst for truth by itself, a sovereign, driving faith in that, an utter indifference to and contempt of the results of that, which is absolutely new in history, and which of all the intellectual passions tends most to clear and strengthen the mental blood. The love and admiration of scientific processes, the hunger, sometimes almost brutal, for realism in art, and literature, and life, the weary carelessness for things which used to inflame mankind may be, certainly seem to this writer to be, mere symptoms of this new impulse, just as hunger, and peevishness, and a tumult of the blood are often the first symptoms of returning convalescence. No influence save faith alone tends so directly to strengthen the character as this single-eyed passion, none enables men to walk with so decided a step, and none frees them more rapidly from the bondage of the webs woven, as the preceding writer says, by the new consciousness men have of the complexity of all things. Once hold truth invaluable, and doubt loses its paralysing force. Moreover, the hunger for truth which in science, or history, or theology, always begins by killing faith, always ends by serving as a base for a new structure, would, we believe, re-animate Christianity—now supposed to be dying, because for the third time it is stripping itself to put on its new armour—even without another and yet stronger impulse now rising among men. This is the spirit which, for want of a better word, we must call Sympathy, the spirit Shakspeare called Mercy, and the author of " Ecce Homo" styles the " enthusiasm of humanity," a spirit born within the last hundred years, which has in it the capacity of becoming a motor, a fanaticism, even in certain exceptional situations a destroying force, a spirit which seventy years ago produced Robespierre, which in our own day has yielded John Brown and Mazzini, a spirit which is the secret force of that otherwise anarchical tendency we call Democracy, and the mainspring and sustenance of "the Revolution," which is already acting as the solvent of all old laws, institutions, and crystallisations of society. This sympathy with man as man, absolutely new, is becoming a mighty operative force. There are no fanatics like those who are possessed by it. There are no changes so vast as those which they suggest; no lives so arduous as those which they will lead. Force of character, quotha! Has it ever been shown more grandly than by the Abolitionists, infidels half of them, but men borne on by this new impulse to face torture, and contempt, and death, the scorn of wise men, and the hatred of worldly men, as the purest Christians alone have ever had force to do. Wherein was Cromwell so much stronger than John Brown, Huss than Garrison, Xavier than Howard, Wycliffe than many a man among us who, unable to bear the torment of his pity for the misery of men, of his sovereign sympathy with wretchedness, has, half mad, gone out from his old beliefs, stripped himself naked of ideas, and so, amidst the shocked scorn of friends, and families, and comrades, declared war to the knife on all that exists, but existing, does not remove his horror. He is wrong enough usually, but how weak ? And remember, as this passion of sympathy spreads, and deepens, and clears itself, as men grow to sympathise with humanity in all its misery, in its sinfulness as in its pain, as they come to war against moral as they now war on social suffering, so must the one figure, in whom and through whom alone their ideal is completed, regain its power over their imaginations, their hearts, their lives. In the Man-God alone is philanthropy, the love of man, seen perfect. Half the best warriors in the social war are "infidels," men who cannot bow down to the authority which has left the world to groan ; but to them, above all, will come first the conviction, that strain on as they will, they cannot love man as He loved, that their endurance is weak beside His, that their tolerance and mercy and pitifulness—things which are but names for the one quality of sympathy—are imperfect, lustreless, wanting in breadth, and depth, and coherence, beside the perfect fulness of His love. It is from the lower side, from the human side, from the long-delayed recognition of Christ as the completion of the highest ideal of man—recognition prevented for ages by the wicked theory of an averted vengeance—that we look for the second revival of that true and only Christianity which believes, as it believes in the axiomata of mathematics, that Christ, God and man, died for the human race. In men in whom the love of truth is as a flame, in whom sympathy is illimitable, and in whom faith has once more grown up from below, there will be no lack of force. That the character of the great men of the next generation will be like the character of the greatest in the past, we by no means affirm. Probably it will not. Out of that sense of the vast complexity of all things there should grow, will grow in the minds reillumined by faith, enlarged by sympathy, made single by love of truth, a mighty tolerance, a patience, a calm serenity, to which our greatest have often been strangers. The warrior element will not be so all-pervading, the uniform will be exchanged more often for the ermine. There will be serenity in these men, but serenity is not weak. We look as one of the blessings of the future for the recovery of the one lost blessing of the old Pagan world—the blessing which philosophers call unconsciousness, calm, capacity of enjoyment, and Christian childlikeness ; the nature we see dimly through the ages in the best of the Greeks, see plainly even now sometimes in a few old men and women, upon whom a living faith and a serene life have impressed that stamp of saintliness which, of all the aspects of human nature, has in it most of softness, and least of feebleness or indecision. Weakness of character! Imagine Calvin with Melanchthon's heart, and we are near the ideal to which the world tends, and which, be it what it may else, at least is not weak, not the character which subsides into a search for physical comfort. Men tell us who have studied Americans, Germans, and Europeans free of the tyranny of convention, that they see among their best specimens, among farmers in the West like Lincoln, among professors like Carl Ritter, among workmen—take Nadar— dim foreshadowings of men like this, men whose characters are of iron in their self-dependence, men like Jacobins in the strength of their convictions, yet with hearts absolutely irradiated with sympathy for man and faith in God's love men whom nothing resists successfully, yet who have recovered a power of childlike gladness, a capacity of serenity such as man in this century has sold,—the purchase-money for his victories over opposing Nature.
And then, too, there is another force, almost new, also at work. We are about to say what will probably excite in half of our readers a sense of the ridiculous, but still it is to be said, if our conviction is to be fully expressed. Hope is becoming once more a motive power. It is a singular fact in the Christian psychology that hope, which the Apostles regarded as a virtue,—an executive force, a motive power, has ever since that time been degraded in men's ideas into a mere quality very lightly esteemed. A hopeful man is, in the parlance of to-day, a sort of fool. Hope, nevertheless, is once more regaining her power ; so completely regaining it as not unfrequently to be mistaken for her strong sister, Faith, is influencing the souls of men, is strengthening them to try unknown paths, untrodden ways, to work for ends which but for hope they would scarcely even desire. The passionate belief that Utopia maybe attained, that we may yet reach a land where all shall be free and instructed and good, where the human race shall "have its fair chance," is exciting men afresh, is stimulating them to endure, is helping them to dare. It was but a hope, a dream, a "utopia which sustained the North in its tremendous struggle, but then the force which sustained it is neither feeble nor worthy of contempt. Men as the old creeds vanish are ceasing to despair, and in morals as in politics courage is the essential basis of all vigorous or successful action. A good deal of the despairing indifference mentioned in the preceding article is the result of hope, of the new conviction or impression that higher things are not unattainable. If nothing but bread is attainable—one fights for bread, but if one clearly experiences the hope of meat ? We do not wish to push this argument too far, partly because hope at last is only a result of faith; but still the development of this faculty is to be reckoned among the brighter gleams in a picture which might otherwise be dark.
And finally—for we can neither hope to state, nor even to indicate, the infinite details of this side of the argument—it is necessary to adduce one negative argument. The crave for comfort has an aspect the pessimists never acknowledge it is one form of victory over the body. The highest thinkers of all ages have acknowledged that this victory must be gained, and as the Stoics held the road to it was contempt for the body, and the monks subjugation of the body, so the moderns hold unconsciously that the swiftest path is the silencing of the body. The modern thinker seats himself in an easy chair, not in order to enjoy the easy chair, but in order that the nobler part of him may be free from the consciousness of the inferior—may not be worried by its claims, disturbed by its remonstrances, fretted by its complaints. It is not luxury he is seeking, but mental freedom, the freedom the Stoic sought when he chatted in the rain as if the sun had shone, and held it beneath him to pay attention to the chill. The modern man is not less desirous of that liberty of scorn for the clouds, but to get it, instead of stripping, he invents a waterproof ; he silences the body by content, instead of by control, reigns as a Caesar instead of an ancient absolutist. We like neither regime, but it is not weakness of character, but misdirected power of character, which produces the second —a misdirected power which, more wisely used, may make the mind and the soul more genuinely free, and therefore more genuinely strong than they have been. The highest song of suffering ever sung was penned by a king, and fortitude, endurance, strength in all forms, are the qualities which, from the days of the Roman patrician, the aristocrats have not lacked. It is not in the luxurious, but in those who are hankering for luxury, that feebleness is found.
s.m.h. 27 January 1868,
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