Often in matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog.
This remarkable modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion,
politics, and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for
opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is
a thing which existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon
and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were
melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of
to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him
dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a
good supper convulse him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly
possessed with this mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take
the same view of the wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at
Donnybrook Fair. It was this species of insane logic which led him into
his chief errors, never his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example.
Carlyle's defence of slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak
alike in argument and in moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took
it up from the passion for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence
of aristocracy. He blundered, of course, because he did not see that
slavery has nothing in the world to do with aristocracy, that it is,
indeed, almost its opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its
thoughtful defenders have made for aristocracy was that a few persons
could more rapidly and firmly decide public affairs in the interests of
the people. But slavery is not even supposed to be a government for the
good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for
the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service
of the weak; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is
no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed
he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a
child--for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very
type of spiritual existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute