f being, could the
many-coloured picture of our Life paint itself and shine."

In such passages as these, there is far deeper pessimism than in
anything which Byron could experience or express. Scepticism is directed
by Carlyle, not against the natural elements of life--the mere sensuous
outworks, but against the citadel of thought itself. Self-consciousness,
or the reflecting interpretation by man of himself and his world, the
very activity that lifts him above animal existence and makes him man,
instead of being a divine endowment, is declared to be a disease, a
poisonous subjectivity destructive of all good. The discovery that man
is spirit and no vulture, which was due to Carlyle himself more than to
any other English writer of his age, seemed, after all, to be a great
calamity; for it led to the renunciation of happiness, and filled man
with yearnings after a better than happiness, but left him nothing
wherewith they might be satisfied, except "the duty next to hand." And
the duty next to hand, as interpreted by Carlyle, is a means of
suppressing by action, not idle speech only, but thought itself. But, if
this be true, the highest in man is set against itself. And what kind of
action remains possible to a "speck on the illimitable ocean, borne this
way and that way by its deep-swelling tides"? "Here on earth we are
soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of
the campaign, and have no need to understand it, seeing what is at our
hand to be done." But there is one element of still deeper gloom in this
blind fighting; it is fought for a foreign cause. It is God's cause and
not ours, or ours only in so far as it has been despotically imposed
upon us; and it is hard to discover from Carlyle what interest we can
have in the victory. Duty is to him a menace--like the duty of a slave,
were that possible. It lacks the element which alone can make it
imperative to a free being, namely, that it be recognized as _his_ good,
and that the outer law become his inner motive. The moral law is rarely
looked at by Carlyle as a beneficent revelation, and still more rarely
as the condition which, if fulfilled, will reconcile man with nature and
with God. And consequently, he can draw little strength from religion;
for it is only love that can cast out fear.

To sum up all in a word, Carlyle regarded evil as having penetrated into
the inmost recesses of man's being. Thought was disease; morality was
blind obe