waking life given up to idleness or recreation. His appointment in 1823 to the examiner's office at the India House gave him a profession which allowed him ample leisure for his own work. From thirty-five to forty he owned and practically edited the London Review, soon incorporated with the Westminster Review, where he became the prophet of the philosophical Radicals. His System of Logic was published in 1842, and five years later appeared The Principles of Political Economy. Both volumes were epoch-making, and both remain classics, even though philosophy has not moved in the direction he anticipated. It was Mill's peculiar distinction that, though severely scientific, he was always human and popular. He was animated by a genuine desire for the public good, and his later years were devoted to social service and political reform. Writings like Liberty (1859), Representative Government (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869) were in effect topical pamphlets; but in many ways they are the most perfect in form of his productions. Mill's was a mind of superlative honesty and of a conscientiousness which became a sort of ardour. Few writers have treated of topics so dry and of dogma so cold with anything approaching his sensitive freshness and glowing humanity. The periodical attacks of depression from which he suffered never clouded his work, and his austere rationalism cannot hide his tenderness towards mankind. Darwin. Charles Robert Darwin (1809-92), who was one of the greatest of all scientists, is included in a history of literature because of the profound effect of his writings, rather than for their intrinsic literary value. His mental and moral stature is so great that it would dignify writings of far less artistic worth. His first book, The Journal of the Voyage in the "Beagle" (1839), is a brilliant series of travel pictures. Twenty years later he published The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man followed in 1871, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. His style aims at only one merit-lucidity, and in consequence he is rarely obscure; but the intense concentration of his thought makes him frequently crabbed. Nevertheless he has many passages full of a sober grace. Spencer. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) is the most widely known of the many writers who popularized the doctrine of evolution. Early in life he conceived the grandiose scheme of his Synthetic Philosophy, on which he faithfully laboured to the end. His aim was to provide a complete systematization of the sciences, and he had all the self-confidence and optimism of the mid-Victorian scientist. His Social Statics appeared in 1850, and five years later the first edition of his Principles of Psychology. First Principles came in 1862; followed by Principles of Biology (1864-7); Principles of Psychology (1870-2); Principles of Sociology (1876–96); and Ethics (1879-93). He also edited the huge encyclopædia known as Descriptive Sociology. Other works are Education (1861) and The Study of Sociology (1872). The difficulty of compiling an encyclopædic philosophy in modern times is the huge field which it must cover. For system it was necessary to have one guiding conception, and he found this in "evolution." His style rarely rises above the commonplace, and it is painfully monotonous; but on the whole it is lucid, and the arrangement is uniformly excellent. Spencer's mind is, indeed, more interesting than his actual system. A bleak cheerfulness sustained him, and, oddly enough for a naturalist, he had an abiding sense of religion, and the older he grew the more inclined was he to enlarge his sphere of the Unknowable. His reach, as was inevitable in a cosmic philosophy, exceeded his grasp; but there is a real grandeur about the largeness of his aims and the faithfulness with which he toiled at them. Huxley. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) is from the point of view of pure literature the most distinguished of the Victorian evolutionists. His chief works are Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863); Lay Sermons (1870); Critiques and Addresses (1873); Science and Culture (1881); and Essays on Some Controverted Questions (1892). A collected edition of his essays was published in nine volumes in 1893. He also issued in 1878 an excellent study of Hume. Huxley had nearly all the literary graces-clarity and grace of style, wit, imagination, and urbanity. He is the model controversialist, and his statement of problems can hardly be bettered. Like Spencer, he had only one aim, to be lucid; but in the attainment of this literary grace nearly all the others were added unto him. Green.-Thomas Hill Green (1836-82) is the chief of that other school of the later century which sought its inspiration in the great German metaphysicians. He was a tutor at Balliol, and founded a school which for long set the tone of speculation at Oxford. His chief works were an edition of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (1874-5) and his Prolegomena to Ethics (1883). He waged a war on empiricism, which was on the whole successful; and before he died his methods of thought were the most fashionable in England. He was a man of the highest and purest character; but, though a better scholar, he wrote no better than Herbert Spencer, and his close argumentation, impressive as it is, is scarcely literature. Caird. His pupil, Edward Caird (1835-1908), who succeeded Jowett as Master of Balliol, had for long a great influence in Scotland, and expounded the new Hegelianism with much more charm and persuasiveness. Caird, however, wrote less to convince than to fortify in the faith, and his strongest characteristic is the religious ardour which he succeeded in importing into metaphysics. Bradley. Of the many English Hegelians by far the most original mind is that of Francis Herbert Bradley (born 1846). His Ethical Studies (1876), Principles of Logic (1883; new ed. 1922), and Appearance and Reality (1893) reveal an intellect of the first order of subtlety, which, while accepting generally the metaphysics of its school, gave them a new colour and application. As a controversialist he is (2,352) 18 most formidable, and throughout his all too few books are scattered passages and phrases full of a startling imaginative power and a brilliant wit. TEACHERS, ESSAYISTS, AND CRITICS CARLYLE Life. Thomas Carlyle (1795-81), the son of a stonemason, was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire. In after years it was his ambition to build as well as his father built, and his description of the old man's "bold flowing style" and his "words like arrows" exaggerated for the sake chiefly of humorous effect" reveals the origin of what many assumed to be affectations in his own writings. Much of his thought and most of his prejudices came to him direct from his early home and family circle. Educated at a school in Annan, he went to the University of Edinburgh, and then taught mathematics for some time at Annan and Kirkcaldy. He had been destined for the Kirk; at one period he studied law; but at the age of twenty-three he discovered his vocation in literature. In 1826 he married Jane Baillie Welsh and spent six years on her small property at Craigenputtock, in the moors of Dumfriesshire. It was a happy marriage, though full of tempests. The Carlyles came to London and settled in Cheyne Row in 1834. There he remained for the rest of his days, though he visited France and Germany more than once for the purposes of his books. Works. In this chapter we are concerned with Carlyle's miscellaneous writings, apart from his specific historical works. The Life of Schiller was published in 1823-4. Then followed a decade of journalism, including the famous Characteristics, till the issue of Sartor Resartus (1833-4). His career as an historian opened with The French Revolution in 1837. The Lectures on Heroes were delivered in 1840, in which year Chartism was published. Three years later came Past and Present, and in 1850 Latter-Day Pamphlets. In 1850-1 appeared The Life of John Sterling, the most successful of his lighter works. In addition, he produced a mass of miscellaneous articles and reviews, which are reprinted in his collected essays. Philosophy. It is easier to make phrases about Carlyle's teaching than to expound it, for it was essentially unsystematic and more like a series of cries extorted from a troubled soul than the orderly work of a sedate philosopher. He was dominated throughout by one or two conceptions. The chief was the conception of authority; he believed that Zeus governs and will always defeat Prometheus, and that in Zeus both might and right are united. Another was his hatred of logicchopping and the whole domain of what philosophers know as the "intelligence." He was in violent opposition to the age of reason" and the 18th century, and sought truth in revelation on the mystic side of life rather than in pure argument. The spirit and will were to him of far greater importance than the intellect. Again, he had something of Burke's belief in the past. "The true Past departs not, nothing that was worthy in the Past departs; no Truth or Goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die." He disliked new raw things which had no ancestry. Finally, he believed profoundly in the influence of great men, as opposed to the dull unconscious movement of masses, and had a Coriolanus-like bias against that "People" which the philosophic Radicals idealized. He was a democrat in so far as he emphasized the moral possibilities of every human soul; but he had no respect for Everyman's brains. His politics were a strange mixture of Tory and Jacobin, and in his later years he pinned his faith to a wise aristocracy. Such a creed inevitably led to violent and somewhat warped dogmas. In countering popular illusions he often established counter fallacies. Whatever his theme, the pivot or inspiration of Carlyle's philosophy was Force, mostly personified. He worshipped the Great Man. Virtue, for him, must always express itself in action. Turning his eye over the history of mankind he pounced upon the heroes of every age, flung over them the shining mantle of his imagination, and shouted for the world's applause. So eager was he to see the thing done and the world agape, that he appears almost indifferent to the manner of doing it. But there was no vulgarity in this hero worship. The rule of the masters of the world was mindrule; in some cases, like Cromwell and Frederick, the kingdom might be material also, but in others it was not of this world. If Carlyle could cheer lustily, he could also ban with a will. He hated shams, and was never weary of declaiming against the hypocrite, the slave of convention, the herd-man following the crowd, the gig-man with his regard for respectability. In all this, while there is often truth and justice, there is apt to be much noisy falsehood. But on the other hand he was a true seer and read human souls by a sort of joyous instinct. He had a strange power of divination, and his visions were often those of a poet, with a deeper truth than the prose of the scientist. He waged implacable war against the comfortable utilitarianism of his epoch, and on the whole the world has decided that he was right. He was a very great teacher of democracy, for he enabled it to realize its pitfalls. As Critic. Carlyle's style is dealt with in the section on his historical work (p. 517), but here we may note his performances as a critic of literature. In this sphere he is at his best and at his worst. If a man's temper was not in tune with his own he would have none of him, and few great writers have been guilty of more shallow judgments. His prejudices, in which he gloried, made him grossly unfair to men like Scott, Wordsworth, and Keats, and no critical verdict of his can be accepted without a rigorous examination. But the greatest writers, like Goethe and Shakespeare, he can praise with insight and felicity, and few have written more justly of Burns and of Johnson. |