lished in the land, and knew that bad logic would not pass,
and that the most severe exaction was to be made on all who
enter these lists. Now, if a man can write a paragraph for
a newspaper, next year he writes what he calls a history,
and reckons himself a classic incontinently, nor will his con-
temporaries in critical Journal or Review question his claims.
It is very easy to reach the degree of culture that prevails
around us; very hard to pass it, and Doctor Channing, had
he found Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge and Lamb around
him, would as easily have been severe with himself and risen
a degree higher as he has stood where he is. I mean, of
course, a genuine intellectual tribunal, not a literary junto
of Edinburgh wits, or dull conventions of Quarterly or Gen-
tleman's Reviews. Somebody offers to teach me mathematics.
I would fain learn. The man is right. I wish that the
writers of this country would begin where they now end
their culture. 41
41 Journal XXXII., Journals of, etc., Vol. VI., p. 105.
32 EDUCATION
In many paragraphs and pages, as I liave inti-
mated, the great educationist seeks to interpret the
manifold processes of education. Throughout the
volumes allusions abound as to the value and to the
general results of education. But interpretation
still more specific is fitting.
The intellect as standing for education gives
freedom. Emerson agrees with Saint Paul and
with Jesus Christ in the belief that truth makes
free. No hard and fast decree rests upon the edu-
cated man.
Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing
about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mis-
taking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declara-
tion of Independence or the statute right to vote, by those
who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is wholesome
to man to look not at Fate, but the other way : the practical
view is the other. His sound relation to these facts is to
use and command, not to cringe to them. 42
The trained mind has also imagination.
For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose
men by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose
those who can, without aid from the eyes or any other sense,
proceed to truth and to being. ' ' Foremost among these activi-
ties are the summersaults, spells and resurrections wrought
u "The Conduct of Life: Fate," Complete Works, etc., Vol. VI.,
p. 23.
ACCORDING TO EMERSON 33
by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to mul-
tiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the
delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires an auda-
cious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gun-
powder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in
conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are
bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the
Pit. And this benefit is real because we are entitled to these
enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never
again be quite the miserable pedants we were. 48
The intellect, moreover, is the consoler of man.
The intellect is a consoler, which delights in detaching or
putting an interval between a man and his fortune, and so
converts the sufferer into a spectator and his pain into
poetry. It yields the joys of conversation, of letters and of
science. Hence also the torments of life become tuneful trag-
edy, solemn and soft with music, and garnished with rich
dark pictures. 4 *
The intellect represents one element of the essen-
tial greatness of humanity. In a noble passage on
greatness, he says :
It is easy to draw traits from Napoleon, who was not gen-
erous nor just, but was intellectual and knew the law of
things. Napoleon commands our respect by his enormous self-
trust, the habit of seeing with his own eyes, never the surface,
tt ' ' Representative Men : Uses of Great Men, ' ' Complete Works, etc.,
Vol. IV., p. 17.
"Papers from the Dial: "The Tragic," Complete Works, etc., Vol.
XII., p. 416.
34 EDUCATION
but to the heart of the matter, whether it was a road, a can-
non, a character, an officer, or a king, and by the speed and
security of his action in the premises, always new. He has
left a library of manuscripts, a multitude of sayings, every
one of widest application. He was a man who always fell
on his feet. When one of his favorite schemes missed, he had
the faculty of taking up his genius, as he said, and of carry-
ing it somewhere else. "Whatever they may tell you, believe
that one fights with cannon as with fists; when once the fire
is begun, the least want of ammunition renders what you
have done already useless." I find it easy to translate all
his technics into all of mine, and his official advices are to
me more literary and philosophical than the memoirs of the
Academy. His advice to his brother, King Joseph of Spain,
was: " I have only one counsel for you, Be Master." Depth
of intellect relieves even the ink of crime with a fringe of
light. 46
The value of the higher education, Mr. Emerson
says, is in certain ways imaginary and in others
real. One seldom meets a great man who has not
gone to college who does not lament what he has
missed, and one seldom meets a great man who has
been in college who is not inclined to depreciate the
worth of what the college was to him. Both ideas
are equally true and equally false. The college
ought to have made the college man abler, not mak-
ing him less human ; and not going to college, if it
has served to bring out the natural forces of the
*" Greatness," Complete Works, etc., Vol. VIII., p. 314.
ACCORDING TO EMERSON 35
other man, might also have brought them out in
unfitting ways and unto unworthy results. Mr.
Emerson says:
We are full of superstitions. Each class fixes its eyes on
the advantages it has not; the refined, on rude strength; the
democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a
college education is to show the boy its little avail. I knew a
leading man in a leading city, who, having set his heart on
an education at the university and missed it, could never
quite feel himself the equal of his own brothers who had
gone thither. His easy superiority to multitudes of pro-
fessional men could never quite countervail to him this imag-
inary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties and billiards pass to
a poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are
not; and a free admission to them on an equal footing, if
it were possible, only once or twice, would be worth ten
times its cost, by undeceiving him. 48
In his essay on " Spiritual Laws," he also writes :
My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they
now take. The regular course of studies, the years of aca-
demical and professional education have not yielded me bet-
ter facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin
School. What we do not call education is more precious than
that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of re-
ceiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education
often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this
natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it. 47
48 ' ' The Conduct of Life : Culture, ' ' Complete Works, etc., Vol. VI.,
p. 144.
41 ' ' Spiritual Laws, ' ' Complete Works, etc., Vol. II., p. 133.
36 EDUCATION
But, when all is said and done, the argument as
to value rests in favor of the college. The college
may not do much for the genius ; but for the com-
mon man its worth is tremendous. Genius is shy,
hard to catch, does not easily lend itself to associa-
tion. The college represents a collection, an assem-
bly, of men each drawn to the other, each in a
sense educating the other. The college may not
train genius, but it can adorn genius and adorn it
with beauty.
This, then, is the theory of Education, the happy meeting
of the young soul, filled with the desire, with the living teacher
who has already made the passage from the centre forth,
step by step, along the intellectual roads to the theory and
practice of special science. Now if there be genius in the
scholar, that is, a delicate sensibility to the laws of the
world, and the power to express them again in some new
form, he is made to find his own way. He will greet joy-
fully the wise teacher, but colleges and teachers are no wise
essential to him; he will find teachers everywhere. 48
In summing up the advantages and disadvan-
tages of the college in Mr. Emerson's judgment,
one cannot do better than to quote the concluding
passage from English Traits on the Universities.
It is said :
""The Celebration of Intellect," Complete Works, etc., Vol. XII.,
p. 128.
ACCORDING TO EMERSON 37
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, see-
ing ami using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as
churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints. Yet we
all send our sons to college, and though he be a genius, the
youth must take his chance. The university must be retro-
spective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all
its towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is a library, and
the professors must be librarians. And I should as soon think
of quarrelling with the janitor for not magnifying his office
by hostile sallies into the street, like the Governor of Kertch
or Kinburn, as of quarrelling with the professors for not
admiring the young neologiste who pluck the beards of Euclid
and Aristotle, or for not attempting themselves to fill their
vacant shelves as original writers.
It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if we will
wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also,
but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of
Commons. It is rare, precarious, eccentric and darkling.
England is the land of mixture and surprise, and when you
have settled it that the universities are moribund, out comes
a poetic influence from the heart of Oxford, to mould the
opinions of cities, to build their houses as simply as birds
their nests, to give veracity to art and charm mankind, as
an appeal to moral order always must. But besides this
restorative genius, the best poetry of England of this age, in
the old forms, comes from two graduates at Cambridge. 49
""English Traits, Universities," Complete Works, etc., Vol. V., p.
212.
II
EDUCATION ACCORDING TO CARLYLE
CARLYLE was a great spirit. His books are
the chief or only exponents of his greatness
and spirituality. Like many other great souls he
was a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions.
He was at once a pessimist and an optimist ; in his
tastes a democrat, in his theories an aristocrat;
commending silence, but giving us monologues in
many volumes ; an incarnation of great power, in-
tellectual and emotional, but irritated by the com-
mon pains and penalties of life ; a Scotchman who
most strenuously promoted the doctrine of the real,
the great, the good. The strong man, the hero,
whether in literature or in history, represented his
supreme human idol.
Carlyle's thoughts about education, scattered
throughout the eight thousand pages of his twenty
volumes, are, however, far more consistent and
more free from contradictions, in a realm of
thought where consistency and freedom from con-
tradiction are seldom found, than one would be in-
clined to believe.
38
ACCORDING TO CARLYLE 39
The subject of education is man. And who and
what is man? He is not, according to Carlyle's in-
terpretation, a worm of the dust, nor is he a but-
terfly of beautiful existence ; rather he is the child
of God, a creature born into an infinite universe
and destined for an eternal existence. For him the
centuries have labored, through him all the past is
given to the future, and to him all the future is
bound in behalf of its worthy creatures yet to be.
No prize is too high for his struggle, and no train-
ing is too severe for this child of the gods, this
brother of the immortals. For him too, this crea-
ture of origin so noble, of destiny so sublime, no
education is too enriching. With Platonic mys-
ticism, Carlyle interprets the subject of education.
"To the eye of vulgar Logic," says he, "what is man?
An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of
Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Ap-
parition. Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under all
those wool-rags, a garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contex-
tured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to
his like, and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and
sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with azure Starry
Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden is he
under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colors and
Forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably over-shrouded :
yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not
thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eterni-
40 EDUCATION
ties? He feels; power has been given him to know, to be-
lieve; nay does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial
primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look
through? Well said Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of gold,
'the true SHEKINAH is Man:' where else is the GOD'S-PRES-
ENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as
in our fellow-man ? " 1
Such is Carlyle's perception, according to his
autobiography, " Sartor Resartus," of the man who
is to be educated. Man is thus made only a little
lower than the gods and is crowned with glory and
honor.
In man the chief though not the only power to be
educated is the intellect. The intellect is the fount
and origin of other forces and excellences. It is
that part of man which is capable of the highest
improvement. At birth it is the weakest faculty in
/
man, weaker than it is in the animal. It grows
apace, develops, and becomes united with the will,
the ruler of the created world. Man's capabilities,
the root of which is intellect, are infinite. Instinct
has no like capacity for ini]te#vement. It is as per-
fect at birth as in age. Intellect is intrinsically the
noblest part of man's being. Of this man of intel-
lect Carlyle says :
1 ' ' Sartor Kesartus, ' ' Edition de Luxe, Estes & Lauriat, Vol. I., p. 50.
ACCORDING TO CARLYLE 41
... A man of Intellect, of real and not sham Intellect, is
by the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness,
a man of courage, rectitude, pious strength; who, even be-
cause he is and has been loyal to the Laws of this Universe,
is initiated into discernment of the same; to this hour a
Missioned of Heaven; whom if men follow, it will be well
with them; whom if men do not follow, it will not be well.
Human Intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary
of Human Worth; and the essence of all worth-ships and wor-
ships is reverence for that same. 2
The lack of this element of intellect produces
grievous evils, and of these are many kinds; per-
haps the chief of them being a lack of wisdom.
But education acting upon the intellect serves to
correct this primary quality and element. It cre-
ates wisdom.
Wisdom has been defined by Burke as the ap-
plication of knowledge to affairs. Solomon also
has given many definitions still well worth consid-
ering. Of this superb quality and of the man who
embodies it Carlyle says :
The wise man ; the man with the gift of method, of faith-
fulness and valor, all o^which are of the basis of wisdom;
who has insight into whar is what, into what will follow out
of what, the eye to see and the hand to do; who is fit to
administer, to direct, and guidingly command: he is the
*" Latter-Day Pamphlets," Edition de Luxe, Estes & Lauriat, Vol.
II., p. 358.
42 EDUCATION
strong man. His muscles and bones are no stronger than
ours; but his soul is stronger, his soul is wiser, clearer, is
better and nobler, for that is, has been and ever will be the
root of all clearness worthy of such a name. Beautiful it is,
and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the
destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect is in the first
place moral; what a world were this otherwise! But it
is the heart always that sees, before the head can see : let us
know that; and know therefore that the Good alone is death-
less and victorious, that Hope is sure and steadfast, in all
phases of this "Place of Hope." 3
It was many years after Carlyle wrote the essay
on "Chartism" from which this quotation is taken
that he was chosen rector of the University of
Edinburgh. At the time of his installation he gave
the most famous of all his addresses and his ad-
dresses were few, be it said which teems with
advice to the students to whom he spoke. At this
time, too, he referred to wisdom.
You are ever to bear in mind that there lies behind that
the acquisition of what may be called wisdom; namely,
sound appreciation and just decision as to all the objects that
come round you, and the habit of behaving with justice, can-
dor, clear insight and loyal adherence to fact. Great is wis-
dom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exag-
gerated; it is the highest achievement of man: "Blessed is
he that getteth understanding. ' ' *
"Chartism," Edition de Luxe, Estes & Lauriat, Vol. XVI., p. 63.
*" Inaugural Address," Edition de Luxe, Estes & Lauriat, Ibid.,
404.
ACCORDING TO CARLYLE 43
The wisdom to which the master refers is wisdom
in the sense of Solomon. It refers to excellence
both intellectual and moral. It stands for an in-
tellect which sees truth clearly, accurately, largely,
comprehensively and in its symmetry. It also re-
fers to a heart of which the emotions are pure and
to a will of which the choices are right. It repre-
sents the Greek ideal of the true, the good, and the
beautiful. The Greek, the Hebrew and the Scotch
meet in the interpretation and commendation of
the great virtue.
For securing this most excellent thing, two meth-
ods at least are specially provided. The first is the
university. But in the quest of wisdom it may
itself fail. Of such failure there is no lack of con-
viction in the pages of Carlyle, and especially in
"Sartor Resartus." He is indeed free in cursing
and heaping ridicule upon the university. He
makes the writer of the " Volume on Clothes" say:
"The hungry young . . . looked up to their spiritual
Nurses; and, for food, were bidden eat the east- wind. What
vain jargon of controversial Metaphysic, Etymology, and me-
chanical Manipulation falsely named Science, was current
there, I indeed learned, better perhaps than the most. Among
eleven hundred Christian youths, there will not be wanting
some eleven eager to learn. By collision with such, a certain
warmth, a certain polish was communicated; by instinct and
44 EDUCATION
happy accident, I took less to rioting (renommireri) , than
to thinking and reading, which latter also I was free to do.
Nay from the chaos of that Library, I succeeded in fishing
up more books perhaps than had been known to the very
keepers thereof. The foundation of a Literary Life was
hereby laid : I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently
in almost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and
sciences; farther, as man is ever the prime object to man,
already it was my favorite employment to read character in
speculation, and from the Writing to construe the Writer. A
certain groundplan of Human Nature and Life began to
fashion itself in me; wondrous enough, now when I look
back on it; for my whole Universe, physical and spiritual,
was as yet a Machine ! However, such a conscious, recognized
groundplan, the truest I had, was beginning to be there, and
by additional experiments might be corrected and indefinitely
extended. ' ' 5
This bit of autobiography bears on the subjec-
tivity of Carlyle's interpretation of the university
experience of his greatest personal hero, Goethe.
Concerning Goethe's life at Leipzig, he says:
Leipzig University has the honor of matriculating him. The
name of his "propitious mother" she may boast of, but not
of the reality: alas, in these days, the University of the
Universe is the only propitious mother of such; all other
propitious mothers are but unpropitious superannuated dry-
nurses fallen bedrid, from whom the famished nursling has
to steal even bread and water, if he will not die; whom for
most part he soon takes leave of, giving perhaps (as in Gib-
' ' * Sartor Besartus, ' ' Edition de Luxe, Estes & Lauriat, VoL I., p. 87.
ACCORDING TO CARLYLE 45
bon's case), for farewell thanks, some rough tweak of the
nose; and rushes desperate into the wide world an orphan.
The time is advancing, slower or faster, when the bedrid dry-
nurse will decease, and be succeeded by a walking and stir-
ring wet one. Goethe's employments and culture at Leipzig
lay in quite other groves than the academic: he listened to
the Ciceronian Ernesti with eagerness, but the life-giving
word flowed not from his mouth; to the sacerdotal, eclectic-
sentimental Gellert (the divinity of all tea-table moral-phi-
losophers of both sexes) ; witnessed "the pure soul, the genu-
ine will of the noble man," heard "his admonitions, warnings
and entreaties, uttered in a somewhat hollow and melancholy
tone;" and then the Frenchmen say to it all, "Lcvissez le
faire; \l nous forme des dupes." "In logic it seemed to
me very strange that I must now take up those spiritual opera-
tions which from of old I had executed with the utmost con-
venience, and tatter them asunder, insulate and as if destroy
them, that their right employment might become plain to
me. Of the Thing, of the World, of God, I fancied I knew
almost about as much as the Doctor himself; and he seemed
to me, in more than one place, to hobble dreadfully (gewaltig
zu hapem)."
This opinion of the worthlessness of universities
Carlyle expresses in diverse forms and ways. The
university represents, and it necessarily repre-
sents, a certain orderliness which was especially
repugnant to Carlyle. It represents a certain
amount of team-work which did not receive the
"Goethe's Works," Edition de Luxe, Estes & Lauriat, Vol. XV.,
p. 47.
46 EDUCATION
commendation of the great individualist. Still,
that in these two diatribes, one directed against
Leipzig, and the other, without doubt, referring to
Edinburgh, Carlyle did touch on great evils in
university administration, is not for one instant to
be doubted.
A second and still more important means for
securing this great result of wisdom is the book.
Throughout his volumes Carlyle refers to the worth
of the book. These allusions begin early and con-
tinue to the end. In the essay on the Hero as Man
of Letters, he says :
Do not Books still accomplish, miracles, as Runes were
fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest cir-
culating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in
remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical
weddings and households of those foolish girls. So "Celia"
felt, so "Clifford" acted: the foolish Theorem of Life,
stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Prac-
tice one day. Consider whether any Rune in the wildest
imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on
the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built
St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it
was that divine Hebrew BOOK, the word partly of the man
Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thou-
sand years ago, in the wilderness of Sinai ! It is the strangest
of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of
which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively
insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for man-
ACCORDING TO CARLYLE 47
kind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new contiguity
and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Pres-
ent in time and place ; all times and all places with this our
actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all
modes of important work of men : teaching, preaching, gov-
erning, and all else. 7
In his inaugural address Carlyle gives to the
students sound counsel also in reference to read-
ing:
Well, Gentlemen, whatever you may think of these histori-
cal points, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on
every one of you to be assiduous in your reading. Learn to
be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing
than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your read-
ing; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all
kinds of things which you have a real interest in, a real not
an imaginary, and which you find to be really fit for what you