[STEWART] THOMAS CARLYLE 19 



"complete Germanisation of Carlyle'smind" as shown not in Frederick 

 but in Sartor, and the charge that Carlyle misled the world as far back 

 as 1829 about the relative merits of German and French thought, are 

 capable of neither defence nor apology on any sound principle of liter- 

 ary criticism. In The French Revolution no doubt much unfairness 

 was shown to the philosophic pamphleteers of Encyclopsedism But 

 nothing else than the angry mood now prevalent, and rightly pre- 

 valent, towards the Germany of the present can explain the attempt 

 to argue that it was wrong to place the school of Goethe higher than 

 the school of Voltaire, to value the philosophy of Kant higher than the 

 philosophy of the Encyclopédie, to pour scorn upon the wretched 

 empiricists like Cabanis and exalt in their place the thinkers of the 

 type of Hegel. To speak of Sartor as evidence of a Germanised mind 

 in any sense which makes this a reproach is to forget how much 

 pregnant thinking by those English philosophers who came to their 

 own sixty years later was foreshadowed in that most remarkable work. 

 It is the same sort of appeal to transient prejudice which would 

 exclude German opera, discredit German physiological and chemical 

 research, even discourage the learning of the German language. In 

 this point, though in this alone, Mr. Courtney's method of attack is 

 not much better than Professor Sherman's. 



Both these critics are plainly under the influence of what we have 

 come to call "war psychosis." Singularly enough, the same mood has 

 spread itself over a few who cannot plead war psychosis at all. We 

 have too much reason to know, for example, that Mr. Bertrand 

 Russell preserves a philosophic calm amid the national tempests of 

 the hour. He at least can claim the credit given in Tennyson's 

 Princess to those who "leap the rotten walls of prejudice, disyoke 

 their necks from custom." But he seems to have been caught by 

 that popular stream against Carlyle which he has avoided with such 

 success when it was directed elsewhere. In a paragraph of his Prin- 

 ciples of Social Reconstruction Mr. Russell brings once more the old 

 charges of temperamental inhumanity, of repugnance towards almost 

 the whole human race, of adoration for tyrants, and a glorifying of 

 war. It makes no difference to him, apparently, that those who 

 knew the Chelsea prophet best in life formed a quite different estimate 

 of these personal feelings, or that Charles Kingsley and Charles 

 Dickens should be thought of as the last men by whom inhuman 

 callousness would have been condoned. 



