Carlyle's Web

In “Signs of the Times” Carlyle targets Millites and Millenarians, nominally ideological opposites who close ranks in their predilection for prophesy. The Millenarians foresee the Second Coming of Christ while the Millites anticipate the first coming of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. But since the repeal of the Test Acts, the “rage of prophecy” has gone viral and is sweeping the land. Newspapers and periodicals print “the most lugubrious predictions” on a daily basis. But don’t worry, Carlyle says, Old England has survived many “frenzies and Panics” in the past. Over a century has “mostly passed without loss of men’s lives,” notwithstanding . . . ahem, “much other loss than that of reason.”

The Sage of Chelsea counsels, however, that things will become clearer if, “instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, [we] look calmly around us.” Perhaps then people will see that the real threat comes from the drift of the people’s inner spirit, a sure sign that the Mechanistic has overtaken the Dynamic as society’s driving force. It’s not that Carlyle is a Luddite; he just thinks that the Mechanistic has gone beyond the tipping point, and that there should be a balance between the two countervailing ethics. This is not unlike what Simmel advocates some 80 years later in his objective/subjective dichotomy. But by couching his binary in geographic determinism, Simmel adds a Lockean twist that would have made Carlyle cringe. Carlyle’s main idea is that we have the power to shape our destiny, and he uses every bit of his inimitable style and crushing passion to argue this. 

As Carlyle sees it, the core of the problem is that the machine has appropriated just about every corner of Victorian life—from science to literature to politics— through the emergence of royal societies, philosophic institutes, scientific boards, and scores of other leveling institutions governed by the dictate that “two, or at most ten, little minds must be stronger than one great mind.” What’s more, public opinion watches over the people like a policeman, nipping in the bud whatever Newton or Mozart may have been spontaneously geminating in the moors. True, political freedom has been won, but at the cost of more precious moral freedom. Witness the failure of democracy to produce any great leaders or poets. The age has gone from Burghley to Castlereagh, from Shakespeare to Beau Brummel. Genius has actually fared better under the sting of tyranny than under the wings of democracy.

Girding Carlyle’s argument is, of course, the romantic view that genius emanates from what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls “divine spark.” The modern view, on the other hand, demystifies genius. As Brooks wrote in a 2009 column, given the right circumstances, someone with above average talent and the drive to succeed and become a genius (1). Brooks cites a recent book that divulges that as a youth Mozart was only a “good musician” and “he would not even stand out among today’s top child-performers.” But Mozart had the same thing that Tiger Woods had, a father to mentor him and the ability to practice for long hours. They are geniuses not because of who they are but of what they do.

Thus in Brooks’ view, the man whose name Carlyle puns with the term Millite, his friend John Stuart Mill, is relevant today and Carlyle is passé. But if I had to choose one of them to be stranded on a deserted island with, I’d take the cranky iconoclast any day.

1. Brooks, David. “Genius—The Modern  View.” NY Times. 29 April, 2009.