s:^»a^9^^i^^^s«^Nt^»«l v;.:;.:sj^^^^s iiiK^. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.' Chap. ..^R^A'^ Shelf .B-^5 d< \%Zl Vt UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, i) ;):;/2c^£g ^ ':! ^ g^Q:^c;' ^ £ g3QgJ :^^gc^'a^g L* IN UNIFORM STYLE. THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Selected, with the author's sanction, by Edward Barrett. i2mo, THE MILTON ANTHOLOGY. Selected from the Prose Writings. l2mo, $2.00. THE SACRED ANTHOLOGY. (Oi-iental.) A Book of Ethnical Scrip- tures. Collected and edited by M. D. Conway. i2mo, $2.00. THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY 1 SELECTED AND ARRANGED WITH THE author's SANCTION BY EDWARD BARRETT SECOND EDITION. NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1881 3 3^ Copyright, 1876, w HENRY HOLT. T F Trow & Son, Printers, B. Hermon Smith, Stereotyper, aos-ais E. 12th St., New York. Ithaca N. Y. THE AUTHOR TO THE EDITOR. * * / can Jiinie little or no doubt bttt the book of selections which you have done me the favor to make is faithfully a?id judiciously excuted and will be a creditable and more or less useful little book ; so that my distinct attswer is, and must be, go on with it, as you yourself judge best. * * T. CARLYLE. CONTENTS. I. LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. The Sphinx, Influences, . . - Self-Development, Know Thyself, Work, - Laborare est Orare, Wages, - Reward, ... ' Tools and the Man,' - Nobility, .' . . Happiness, Unhappiness, The Problem Solved, The Everlasting Yea, Consume your own Smoke, INIanhood, - - - The Ideal, Silence and Speech, The Unknown Great, The Silent Men, The Real Man, - The World's Judgment of Men of Good and Evil, ... Hero and Valet, Faults, .... Misunderstandings, Evil Resisted, - Impossible, The Goose, ... Perseverance, The Dunce, ... The Gifted Man, - The Conditions of Knowledge, The Fox, Stupidity, The Enemy, The Foolishest Man in the Earth, " Genius<- 9 9 II 12 12 12 13 13 13 14 14 15 \l 17 18 19 19 20 20 20 20 21 21 22 22 22 CONTENTS. Marirund and Sheep, ... Society, -••••• Companionship, - . - . Biographic Interest in Art, ... Gossip, _ - - - . « The Sentimentalist, .... Senlimentalism, , . . . The Quack, - . . . - Guliibihty a Blessing, . . - Conscience, - . . . . A Shifty Woman, .... Herr Teufelsdrockh on the Necessity of Cloth, Gentlemen, .... Politeness, ..... The Vulgar, .... Riches and Gigmen, . . . - Ennui, - . . - . Half and Halfness, .... Herr Teufelsdrockh's Rejected Epitaph, - Man's Life a Poem, .... A Place in History, - . - Dr. Peasemeal on Ballet-Girls, The Public Speaker, ... Dandies, ..... Professor Teufelsdr5ckh on the Dandaical Sect, Laughter, ..... Ridicule, ..... Ridicule the Test of Truth, ... Nil Admirari, .... Hero-Worship, ..... The Age of Romance, ... Romance in Reality, .... Nothing Insignificant, ... Custom, ..... The Results of Man's Activity and Attainment, The Brotherhood of Mankind, ... The Generations of Mankind, Past, Present and Future, ... Beginnings, .... Life a Dream, ..... The Passage of Mankind, ... Childhood, Death. ..... 23 25 27 27 29 29 29 30 31 31 31 32 33 34 35 36 38 39 40 41 42 42 43 45 48 48 49 SO 5° 51 52 53 53 54 55 55 55 56 56 57 57 58 II. PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. Great Men, Dante, His Intensity, 64 65 CONTENTS, Dante and Shakspeare, Shakspeare — His Supremacy, - His Universality, His Tranquillity and Mirthfulness, His Catholic Spirit, Luther, - - . . » Luther's Portrait, . . - John Knox, - - . . George Fox, ... Mahomet, .... His Sincerity, His Way of Life, Cromwell, Hampden, Eliot, Pym, Oliver Cromvi^ell in 1652, Laud, .... Frederich Wilhelm, Father of Frederick the Great, Frederick the Great, Frederick and Napoleon, August the Strong, King of Poland, Marechal de Saxe, ... Napoleon, - - - . Mirabeau, .... Danton, .... Camille Desmoulins, . - . Robespierre, - - » Cagliostro, .... Voltaire, .... Rousseau, .... Goethe, .... Equanimity, ... His Character, • • Schiller, .... Richter, .... Lessing, .... Dr. Johnson, ... His Affectionate Nature, Boswell, .... Byron, ..... Cervantes and Byron, . • Byron and Burns, • • . Burns, - • . ^ Sir Walter Scott, - • . Coleridge, .... His Talk, His Character, 67 68 69 69 71 71 72 73 74 77 78 79 80 81 82 f3 87 89 91 93 94 94 100 102 103 103 104 106 108 108 no III 112 "3 114 115 1x8 123 123 123 124 126 129 131 133 III. LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. Literature, The Power of Literature, 137 CONTENTS. The Anarchy of Literature, The Chaotic Condition of Literature, The Art of Writing, Books and Universities, Boolis and the Church, - Literature and Government, Phases of Literature, - • - Soldiers of Literature, ... Organisation, .... The Poverty of Literary Men, Society^Money, Poverty, - ■ - , - Courage, .... The Poet's Life, .... Poet and Prophet, ... Definition of Poetry, Music, Rhythm and Melody, . . - Conditions of Poetry, ... Unconsciousness of Genius, Easy Writing, .... Some Very Ready Writers, A Great Discovery to be Made in Literature, Origin of Poetry, . - - Progress of Poetry, ... Taste, - . . . - Reading, ..... Two Ways of Reviewing, The Critic Fly, .... The Faults of a Work of Art, - The Study of Poetry, ... Judgment of a Foreign Work, • Scientific Criticism, ... Derivation of Poetic Beauty, Affectation in Literature — Byron, - What is Affectation ? - Singularity, .... The Beaten Paths, . . - Fame, True and False, ... An Example, .... The Love of Fame, . . - The Vanity of Fame, . . - History and Biography, ... How History is Written, Dignity of History, ... What a Biography should be, - Humour and Sensibility, ... True Humour, .... The Humourists, .... J^ Talent for Description, View-bunting, .... Novel Writing, .... The Nibelungen Lied, ... CONTENTS. The Koran, ..... The Book of Job, - . . - . The Divine Comedy, .... Burns's Poetry, . . - . . Tarn O'Shanter, .... The Jolly Beggars, - - - . - Burns's Songs, - - - . - Scott's Poetry, ..... The Latter Half of the XVIIIth Century— Werter, Goethe's Werter, ..... Schiller's Poetry, .... His Want of Humour, . . - His Greatness, .... Goethe and Schiller, .... Mephistopheles, .... Faust, - - - . - • . 193 195 196 197 igS 199 200 202 204 209 210 213 214 216 217 218 IV. RELIGION. Religion, Paganism,^ . - . . Theories about Paganism, Origin of Paganism, Scandinavian Anthology, The Tree Igdrasil, - - . Odin, .... The Soul of Norse Belief, . Islam, .... Growth of Mahometanism, Mediaeval Catholicism — Dante, Shakspeare's Religion, Reformation, ... The Diet of Worms, Protestantism, ... "No Popery," . . . The Reformation and the Nations, Revival of Romanism, Formulas, ... Forms, . . . . Voltaire and Superstition, Religion in Danger, Movement and Change, Voltaire against Christianity, Christianity and Greek Philosophy, Stoicism, - - . . Origin of Christianity, - Denial, . . . . Free-Thinker, ... The Disease of Metaphysics, Speculative Metaphysics, 225 226 227 229 233 23s 236 237 238 240 242 243 243 246 247 247 248 250 251 252 252 253 254 256 257 258 258 258 259 259 26c CONTENTS. Belief, ..... State of Religion — Unbelief, Teaching Religion, ... A New Clergy, - - . - Church of England, ... Creeds and Forms, ... Roman Augurs Outdone, ... Gospel of Mammonism — The English Hell, The Gospel of Dillettantism — The Dead-Sea Soul, ..... Morrison's Pill, .... Methodism, . . . . Religions and New Religions, Religion, .... Creeds, ..... Worship, .... Apes, V. POLITICS, Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight, Democracy in 1848, Republics, . • . Governing, . . - Governors, - ' - How do Men Rise in Your Society Talent, ... Bad Government, Vox Populi, Voting, .... Premier, - - ' - Blockhead in Office, Reform, ... Hints to Good Government, Reform begins at Home, - From Within Outward, Cromwell's Statue, - Public Statues in England, Modern Peerages, - Modern Prisons, Capital Punishment, Sentimental Benevolence, The Benevolent Platform Fever, False Benevolence, The Danger, War, .... A Nation's History, Modern Wars, ... Parliamentary Debates, Justice, .... CONTENTS. Education, - The Uneducated Poor, Await the Issue, VI. HISTORICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS. 313 315 315 Death of Louis XV, Taking of the Bastille, As in the Age of Gold, - The Swiss, ... Charlotte Corday, Death of Marie Antoinette, Death of Madame Roland, The End of Robespierre, - Sansculottism, - Arabia and the Arabs, Warlburg, Sunset in the Mountains, - "On the High Table-Land," An Arctic Sunset, - Overlooking a Town, - Glimpses, • - . 319 321 333 345 352 359 360 361 369 372 373 27 i 375 376 376 377 ABBREVIATIONS. In marking the source of each selection, the following abreviations have been used : C. for Cromwell's Letters and Speeches. Ch. " Chartism. M. " The Miscellaneous Essays. J^. " Frederick the Great. F. R. " The French Revolution. If. " Lectures on Heroes. Z. Z>. p. " Latter-Day Pamphlets. F. &= F. " Past and Present, S. F. •* Sartor Resartus. St. " Life of John Sterling. Where both Roman and Arabic numerals are given, the Roman ntt« merals refer to the 'Book,' the Arabic to the 'Chapter,' {S. F., II. 8— Sartor Resartus, Book II., Chap. VIII). Where the Chapter only is marked, Roman numerals alone are used. {Ch. X. — Chartism, Chap. X). Selections from the 'Miscellaneous' are marked with an M. fol- lowed by the Title of the Essay in Italics, (^/. Burns.) I. LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. THE SPHINX, How true is that old Fable of the Sphinx, who sat by the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers, which if they could not answer she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx is this Life of ours, to all men and so- cieties of men. Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and tenderness; the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws and the body of a lioness. There is in her a celestial beauty, — which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal. She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned; one still half imprisoned, — the articulate, lovely still encased in the inarticulate, chaotic. How true! And does she not propound her riddles to us? Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet with a terrible significance, " Knowest thou the meaning of this Day? What thou canst do To-day; wisely attempt to do." Nature, Uni- verse, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand unnamable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who can discern her behests and do them; a destroying fiend to them who cannot. Answer her riddle, it is well with thee. Answer it not, 3 4 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself; the solu- tion for thee is a thing of teeth and claws; Nature is a dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring. Thou art not now her victorious bridegroom; thou art her mangled victim, scattered on the precipices, as a slave found treacherous, recreant, ought to be and must. —P. Cf P. I. 2. INFLUENCES. We know not what we are, any more than what we shall be. It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has had a commencement, will never through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end! What is done is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever-living, ever-working Universe, and will also work there for good or for evil, openly or secretly, throughout all time. —M. Voltaire. SELF-DE VELOPMENT. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to speak by this necessity it feels. — H. VI. Cromwell. KNOW THYSELF. The painfullest feeling is that of your own Feebleness; ever, as Milton says, to be weak is the true misery. And yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feel- ing, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Between vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us, which enly our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. r Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Knoxv thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at. —s. R. ii. 7. The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself —S. R. II. 7. WORIC. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it and will follow it! How% as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows; — draining off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small ! Labour is Life : from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Farce, the sacred celestial Life- essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, — to all knowledge, 'self-knowledge' and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hy- pothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic- vortices, till we try it and fix it. 'Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone.' — P. &' P. III. 11. LABORARE EST ORARE. All true Work is sacred ; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the brow ; and up from that to sweat of the 6 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. brain, sweat of the heart ; which indudes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms, — -up to that 'Agony of bloody sweat,' which all men have called divine ! O brother, if this is not 'worship,' then I say, the more pity for worship ; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil ? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother ; see thy fellow Workmen there, in God's Eternity ; surviving there, they alone surviv- ing ; sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Body- guard of the Empire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods ; they alone surviving ; peopling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes of Time ! To thee Heaven though severe, is not unkind ; Heaven is kind, — as a noble Mother ; as that Spartan Mother, saying while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!" Thou too shalt return home, in honour; doubt it not, — if in the battle thou keep thy shield ! Thou, in the Eternities and deepest Death-Kingdoms art not an alien ; thou everywhere art a denizen ! Com- plain not ; the very Spartans did not couiplam. ~P. &' F. III. 12. WAGES. Fair day's- wages for fair day's- work ! exclaims a sarcastic man : Alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on it, was that ever realized? The day's-wages of John Milton's day's-work, named Paradise Lost and Milton's Woj'ks, were Ten Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death on the gallows. Consider that: it is no rhetor^ ical flourish; it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact, — emblematic, quietly documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history began. Oliver Crom- well quitted his farming; undertook a Hercules' Labour and life-long wrestle with that Lernean Hydra-coil, LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 7 wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its thou- sand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quack-heads; and he did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have heard of; and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from it; — and his wages, as I understand, were burial under the gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his head on the gable of Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed cursing and ridicule from all manner of men. His dust lies under the Edgeware Road, near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour; and his memory is — Nay, what matters what his memory is? His memory, at bottom, is or yet shall be as that of a god: a terror and horror to all quacks and cowards and insincere persons; an everlast- ing encouragement, new memento, battleword, and pledge of victory to all the brave. It is the natural course and history of the Godlike, in every place, in every time. What god ever carried it with the Tenpound Franchisers; in Open Vestry, or with any Sanhedrim of considerable standing? When was a god found 'agreeable' to everybody? The regular way is to hang, kill, crucify your gods, and execrate and trample them under your stupid hoofs for a century or two; till you discover that they are gods, — and then take to bray- ing over them, still in a very long-eared manner! — So speaks the sarcastic man; in his wild way, very mourn- ful truths. —P. & P. I. 3. PEWAPD. The 'wages' of every noble Work do yet lie in Heaven or else Nowhere. — Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward? Was it thy aim and life-purpose to be filled with good things for thy heroism; to have a hfe of pomp and case, and be what men call 'happy,' 8 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. in this world, or in any other world? I answer for thee deliberately, No. My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away. Give it, I advise thee; — thou dost not expect to sell thy Life in an adequate manner ? What price, for example, would content thee ? The just price of thy Life to thee, — why, God's entire Creation to thy- self, the whole Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold : that is the price which would content thee ; that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that ! It is thy all ; and for it thou wouldst have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal ; — or rather thou art a poor infinite mortal, who in thy narrow clay-prison here, seemest so unreasonable ! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price be Nothing: thou hast then, in a certain sense, got All for it! The heroic man, — and is not every man, God be thanked, a potential^ hero? — has to do so, in all times and circumstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an age when so much was unmelodious: "By Heaven, they shall either be invaluable or of no value; I do not need your guineas for them ! " It is an element which should, and must, enter deeply into all settlements of wages here below. They never will be ' satisfactory ' otherwise ; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they never can ! Money for my little piece of work 'to the extent that will allow me to keep working'; yes, this, — unless you mean that I shall go my ways before the work is all taken out of me: but as to 'wages' — ! —P. &^F. in. 12, 'TOOLS AND THE MAN: The proper Epic of this world is not now 'Arms and the Man'; how much less, 'Shirt-frills and the Man': LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. g no, it is now 'Tools and the Man': that, henceforth to all time is now our Epic. —P. &^P. in. 12. NOBILITY. In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful mak- ing others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men; fronting the peril which frightens back all others; which, if it be not vanquished, will devour the others. Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns. —P. &= P. ill. 8. HAPPINESS. All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble: be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner, too, all dignity is painful; a life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god. The life of all gods figures itself to us as a Sublime Sadness, — earnestness of Infinite Battle against Infinite Labour. Our highest religion is named the 'Worship of Sorrow.' — Does not the whole wretchedness, the whole Atheism as I call it, of man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be what he calls 'happy'? Every pitifuUest whipster that walks within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all hu- man and divine laws ought to be, 'happy.' His wishes, the pitifuUest whipster's, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifuUest whipster's, are to flow on in ever- gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things? — A gifted Byron rises in his wrath; and feeling too surely that he for his part is not 'happy', declares the same in very violent language, as a piece of news that may be interesting. It evidently has surprised him lO THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. much. One dislikes to see a man and a poet reduced to proclaim on the streets such tidings: but on the whole as matters go, that is not the most dislikable. Byron speaks the truth in this matter. Byron's large audience indicates how true it is felt to be. 'Happy', my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not ! To-day becomes Yesterday so fast, all To-morrows become Yesterdays ; and then there is no question whatever of the 'happi- ness', but quite another question. Nay, thou hast such a sacred pity left at least for thyself, thy very pains once gone over into Yesterday, become joys to thee! Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly blessedness and indispensable sanative virtue was in them; thou Shalt only know it after many days, when thiu art wiser!— A benevolent old Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen sick by gourmandizino- whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's judamenT been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals contmued to break in on our discourse, which rather prt)mised to take a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appetite," said he, objurgatively, with a tone of irri- tated pathos ; " I have no appetite ; I can't eat ! " " My dear fellow," answered the Doctor in mildest tone "it isn't of the slightest consequence ; "—and continued his philosophical discoursings with us ! Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron Misanthrope? The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern parts, were thrown into the fearfullest alarm by indubitable symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even the partition-wall ! Ever at a certain hour, with preternat- ural gnarring, growling and screeching, which attended as running bass, there began, in a horrid, semi-articu- late, unearthly voice, this song: "Once I wa.- hap-hap- happy, but now Pm meeserahlel Clack-clack-clack gnarr-r-r, whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy, but LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. n now I'm mecs-erahlel" — Rest, rest, perturbed spirit; — or indeed, as the good old Doctor said : My dear fellow, it isn't of the slightest consequence ! But no ; the perturbed spirit could not rest; and to the neighbours, fretted, affrighted, or at least insufferably bored by him, it was of such consequence that they had to go and ex- amine in his haunted chamber. In his haunted cham- ber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an unfortunate Imitator of Byron ? No, it is an unfortunate rusty Meat- jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work ; and this, in Scottish dialect, is its Byronian musical Life- philosophy, sung according to ability ! —P. &' P. III. 4. UNHAPPINESS. Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Great- ness ; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Uphol- sterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack happy? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two ; for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach ; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allot- ment, no more and no less : God's infinite Universe al- together to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like that of Ophinchus : speak not of them ; to the infinite Shoeblack they are as nothing. No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrel- ing with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine : it is even, as I said, the Shadoip of Ourselves. —S. R. II. 9. 12 THE CARLVLE ANTHOLOGY. THE PROBLEM SOLVED. The Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Ninncrator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then ; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write: "It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin." —S. R. //. 9. THE EVERLASTLNG YEA. There is in man a higher than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness ! Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times have spoken and suffered ; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the God- like that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom ? Which God-inspired Doctrine art thou also honoured to be taught ; O Heavens ! and broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even until thou become contrite, and learn it ! O thank thy Des- tiny for these ; thankfully bear what yet remain : thou hast need of them ; the Self in thee needed to be annihi- lated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seated chronic Disease, and triumphs over Death. On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure ; love God. This is the Everlast- ing Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved ; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him. —S. R. IL. 9. CONSUME YOUR OWN SMOKE. To consume your own choler, as some chimneys con- sume their own smoke ; to keep a whole Satanic School spouting, if it must spout, inaudibly, is a- negative yet no slight virtue. — ^. R. LI. 6. LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 13 The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming ! —H. V. Rousseau. MANHOOD. Manhood begins when we have in any .way made truce with Necessity ; begins even when we have sur- rendered to Necessity, as the most part only do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have rec- onciled ourselves to Necessity ; and thus in reality, tri- umphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free. — M. Bunts. THE IDEAL. May we not say that the hour of Spiritual Enfran- chisement is even this : When your Ideal World, where- in the whole man has been dimly struggling and inex- pressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough, like the Lothario in Wilhelin Meister, that your " Amer- ica is here or nowhere " ? The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even, now standest, here or no- where is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and work- ing, believe, live, be free. Fool ! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and cri- est bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, " here or nowhere," couldst thou only see ! —S. R. 11. 9. SILENCE AND SPEECH. The benignant efficacies of Concealment, who shall speak or sing ? SILENCE and SECRECY ! Altars might 14 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day : on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out ! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought ; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprechen ist silberji, Shweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern. Silence is golden) ; or as I might rather express it : Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity, —s. R. III. 3. THE UNKNOWN GREAT. Indeed, who, after lifelong* inspection, can say what is in any man ? The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion ; he himself never knows it. much less do others. Give him room, give him impulse ; he reaches down to the Infinite with that so straitly- imprisoned soul of his; and can do miracles if need bei It is one of the comfortablest truths that great men abound, though in the unknown state. Nay, as above hinted, our greatest, being also by nature our quietest, are perhaps those that remain unknown ! — M. Scott. THE SILENT MEN. Ah yes, I will say again : The great silettt men ! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE, 15 words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department ; silently thinking, silently working ; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth, A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots ; which had all turned into leaves and boughs; — which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can shozv, or speak. — H. VI. Cromwell. THE REAL MAN. What are your historical Facts; still more your bio- graphical ? . Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Man- kind, by stringing together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts ? The man is the spirit he worked in ; not what he did, but what he became. Facts are en- graved Hierograms, for which the fewest have the key, —s. n. II. 10. THE WORLD'S JUDGMENT OF MEN OF GENIUS. The world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men ; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance : It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes ; and not positively but nega- tively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily meas- ured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured : and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that o*f the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them ! Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousscaus, which one 1 6 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot is blameworthy ; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful : but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, oi only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. — M. Bums. GOOD AND EVIL. Moral reflection first : That, in these centuries men are not born demi-gods and perfect characters, but im- perfect ones, and mere blamable men ; men, namely, environed with such short-coming and confusion of their own, and then with such adscititious scandal and misjudgment (got into the work they did), that they resemble less demi-gods than a sort of god-devils, — very imperfect characters indeed. The demi-god ar- rangement were the one which, at first sight, this reviewer might be inclined to prefer. Moral reflection second, however: That probably men were never born demi-gods in any century, but precisely god-devils as we see ; certain of whom do become a kind of demi-gods ! How many are the men, not censured, misjudged, calumniated only, but tortured, crucified, hung on gibbets, — not as god-devils even, but as devils proper; who have nevertheless grown to seem respectable, or infinitely respectable ! For the thing which was not they, which was not any- thing, has fallen away piecemeal; and become avowedly babble and confused shadow, and no-thing; the thing which was they, remains. Depend on it, Harmodius and Aristogiton, as clear as they now look, had illegal plottings, conclaves at the Jacobins' Church of Athens; and very intemperate things were spoken, and also done. Thus too, Marcus Brutus and the elder Junius, are they not palpable Heroes? Their praise is in all Debating Societies; but didst thou read what the Morn- ing Papers said of those transactions of theirs, the LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 17 week after? Nay, Old Noll, whose bones were dug- up and hung in chains here at home, as the just emblem of himself and his deserts, the offal of creation at that time, — has' not he too got to be a very respectable grim bronze-figure, though it is yet only a century and a half since ; of whom England seems proud rather than otherwise ? — M. Mirabeau. HERO AND VALET. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet; and this is probably true ; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbour of John-a-Combe's, had snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life of Shakspeare ! What dissertations should we not have had, — not on Havilct and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws; and how the Poacher became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities ! — Af. Burns. FAULTS. On the whole, we make too much of faults ; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults ? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there ' the man ac- cording to God's own heart ' ? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough ; blackest crimes ; there was no want of sins. And therefore the unbe- lievers sneer and ask. Is this your man according to God's heart ? The sneer, I must say, seems to rae but 2 1 8 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. a shallow one. What are faults, what are the outward details of a life ; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ending struggle of it be forgotten ? * It is not in man th'at walketh to direct his steps.' Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentttnce the most divine ? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin ; — that is death ; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and fact ; is dead ; it is ' pure ' as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls will ever dis- cern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. . Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck ; yet a struggle never ended ; ever, with tears, repentance, true uncon- querable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature ! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: *a suc- cession of falls ' ? Man can do no other. In this wild element of Life, he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased ; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle be a faithful uncon- querable one : that is the question of questions. We will put up with many sad details, if the soul of it were true. Details by themselves will never teach us what it is. —ff. n. MISUNDERSTANDINGS. So, however, are men made. Creatures who live in confusion ; who, once thrown together, can readily fall into that confusion of confusions which quarrel is, sim- ply because their confusions differ from one another; still more because they seem to differ ! Men's words are a poor exponent of their thought; nay their thought it- self is a poor exponent of the inward unnamed Mystery, wherefrom both thought and action have their birth. LIFE,- AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. jg No man can explain himself, can get himself explained ; men see not one another, but distorted phantasms which they call one another ; which they hate and go to bat- tle with : for all battle is well said to be misimderstand- in^. —F. R. Part III. B. Hi. 2. EVIL RESISTED. Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil ; there i? generous battle-hope in place of dead passive misery ; the evil itself has become a kind of good. — Ch. X. IMPOSSIBLE. It is not a lucky word this same impossible : no good comes of those that have it so often in their mouth. Who is he that says always, There is a lion in the way ? Sluggard, thou must slay the lion then; the way has to be travelled ! In Art, in Practice, innumerable critics will demonstrate that most things are henceforth impos- sible ; that we are got, once for all, into the region of perennial commonplace, and must contentedly con- tinue there. Let such critics demonstrate ; it is the nature of them : what harm is in it ? Poetry once well demonstrated to be impossible, arises the Burns, arises the Goethe. Unheroic commonplace being now clear- ly all we have to look for, comes the Napoleon, comes the conquest of the world. It was proved by fluxion- ary calculus, that steamships could never get across from the farthest point of Ireland to the nearest of Newfoundland : impelling force, resisting force, max- imum here, minimum there ; by law of Nature, and geometric demonstration : — what could be done ? The Great Western could weigh anchor from Bristol Port ; that could be done. The Great Western bounding safe through the gullets of the Hudson, threw her cable out on the capstan of New York, and left our still moist paper-demonstration to dry itself at leisure. " Impos- sible ? " cried Mirabeau to his secretary, " Ne mc dites jamais ce bete de mot. Never name to me that blockhead of a word ! " —Ch. X. 20 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. THE GOOSE. * Impossible ' : of a certain two-legged animal with feathers it is said, if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he sits imprisoned, as if girt with the iron ring of Fate ; and will die there, though within sight of victuals, — or sit in sick misery there, and be fatted to death. The name of this poor two-legged animal is — Goose ; and they make of him, when well fattened, Pate de foie gras, much prized by some ! —P. &' P. III. 2. PERSE VERANCE. The ' tendency to persevere,' to persist in spite of hin- drances, discouragements and ' impossibilities ' : it is this that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak. —P. 6- P. IV. 5. THE DUNCE. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, " But are you sure he's not a dunce ? " Why really one might ask the same thing in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful : Are you sure he's not a dunce ? There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person. — H. III. Shakespeare. THE GIFTED MAN. The gifted man is he who sees the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty that he discern the true likeness, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of anything ; ' the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing ! ' To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust the signifi- cance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him. — //. ///. Dante. LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 21 THE CONDITIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. The real quantity of our insight — how justly and thor- oughly we shall comprehend the nature of a thing, es- pecially of a human being — depends on our patience, our fairness, lovingness, what strength soever we have : intellect comes from the whole man, as it is the light that enlightens the whole man. —M. Mirabeau. To know a thing, what we call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it: that is be virtu- ously related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely. — H. III. Shakspeare. THE FOX. But does not the very Fox know something of nature? Exactly so: it knows where the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine -morality, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he spent his time in splenetic, atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth; and had not courage, prompt- itude, practicability, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine life! — These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts with manifold very baleful per- 22 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. version, in this time: what Hmitations, modifications they require, your own candor will supply. —H. III. Shakspeare, STUPIDITY. Pure Stupidity, indeed, is of a quiet nature, and con- tent to be merely stupid. But seldom do we find it pure; seldom unadulterated with some tincture of am- bition, which drives it into new and strange metamor- phoses. Here it has assumed a contemptuous trench- ant air, intended to represent superior tact, and a sort of all- wisdom ; there a truculent atrabilious scowl, which is to stand for passionate strength: now we have an outpouring of tumid fervour; now a fruitless, asthmatic hunting after wit and humour. Grave or gay, enthusi- astic or derisive, admiring or despising, the dull man would be something which he is not and cannot be. — M. German Literalitre. THE ENEMY. For the one enemy we have in this Universe is Stu- pidity, Darkness of Mind; of which darkness, again, there are many sources, every siii a source, and proba- bly self-conceit the chief source. Darkness of mind, in every kind and variety, does to a really tragic extent abound: but of all the kinds of darkness, surely the Pedant darkness, which asserts and believes itself to be light, is the most formidable to mankind! For em- pires or for individuals there is but one class of men to be trembled at; and that is the Stupid Class, the class that cannot see, who alas are they mainly that will not see. — Z. D. P. III. THE FOOLISHEST MAN IN THE EARTH. No known Head so wooden, but there might be other he^ds to which it were a genius and Friar Bacon's Ora- cle. — For, observe, though there is a greatest Fool, as a superlative in every kind; and the most foolish man in LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 23 the Earth is now indubitably living and breathing, and did this morning or lately eat breakfast, and is even now digesting the same; and looks out on the world, with his dim horn-eyes, and inwardly forms some un- speakable theory thereof; yet where shall the authen- tically Existing be personally met with! Can one of us, otherwise than by guess, know that we have got sight of him, have orally communed with him! To take even the narrower sphere of this our English Me- tropolis, can any one confidently say to himself, that he has conversed with the identical, individual Stupidest man now extant in London ? No one. Deep as we dive in the Profound, there is ever a new depth opens: where the ultimate bottom may lie, through what new scenes of being we must pass before reaching it (except that we know it does lie somewhere, and might by hu- man faculty and opportunity be reached), is altogether a mystery to us. Strange, tantalising pursuit! We have the fullest assurance, not only that there is a Stupidest of London men actually resident, with bed and board of some kind, in London; but that several persons have been or perhaps are now speaking face to face with him: while for us, chase it as we may, such scientific blessedness will too probably be forever denied! —M. Biography. MANKIND AND SHEEP. The servile imitancy, and yet also a nobler relationship and mysterious union to one another which lies in such imitancy, of Mankind might be illustrated under the fig- ure, itself nowise original, of a Flock of Sheep. Sheep go in flocks for three reasons: First, because they are of a gregarious temper, and love to be together: Sec- ondly, because of their cowardice; they are afraid to be left alone: Thirdly, because the common run of them are dull of sight, to a proverb, and can have no choice of roads; sheep can in fact see nothing; in a celestial 24 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Luminary, and a scoured pewter Tankard, would dis- cern only that botli dazzled them, and were of unspeak- able glory. How like their fellow creatures of the hu- man species! Men too, as was from the first maintain- ed here, are gregarious; then surely faint-hearted enough, trembling to be left by themselves; above all, dull-sighted, down to the verge of utter blindness. Thus are we seen ever running in torrents, and mobs, if we run at all; and after what foolish scoured Tank- ards, mistaking them for Suns! Foolish Turnip-lan- terns likewise, to all appearance supernatural, keep whole nations quaking, their hair on end. Neither know we, except by blind habit, where the good past- ures lie: solely when the sweet grass is between our teeth, we know it, and chew it; also when grass is bit- ter and scant, we know it, — and bleat and butt : these last two facts we know of a truth and in very deed. Thus do Men and Sheep play their parts on this Nether Earth; wandering restlessly in large masses, they know not whither; for most part, each following his neighbour and his own nose. Nevertheless, not always; look better, you shall find certain that do, in some small degree, knozv whither. Sheep have their Bell-wether; some ram of the folds, endued with more valour, with clearer vision than other sheep; he leads them through the wolds, by height and hollow, to the woods and water-courses, for covert or for pleasant provender; courageously marching, and if need be leaping, and with hoof and horn doing battle, in the van: him they courageously and with assured heart follow. Touching it is, as every herdsman will inform you, with what chivalrous devotedness these wooly Hosts adhere to their Wether; and rush after him, through good report and through bad report, were it into safe shelters and green thymy nooks, or into as- phaltic lakes and the jaws of devouring lions. Ever also must we recall that fact which we owe Jean Paul'-s LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 25 quick eye : ' If you hold a stick before the Wether, so that he, by necessity, leaps in passing you, and then withdraw your stick, the Flock will nevertheless all leap as he did; and the thousandth sheep shall be found im- petuously vaulting over air, as the first did over an otherwise impassable barrier.' Reader, wouldst thou un- derstand Society, ponder well those ovine proceedings; thou wilt find them all curiously significant. —M. Bonvell. SOCIETY. To understand man we must look beyond the individ- ual man and his actions or interests, and view him in combination with his fellows. It is in Society that man first feels what he is; first becomes what he can be. In Society an altogether new set of spiritual activities are evolved in him, and the old immeasurably quickened and strengthened. Society is the genial element wherein his nature first lives and grows; the solitary man were but a small portion of himself, and must con- tinue forever folded in, stunted and only half alive. ' Al- ready' says a deep Thinker, with more meaning than will disclose itself at once, 'my opinion, my conviction, gains infinitely in strength and sureness, the moment a second mind has adopted it.' Such, even in its sim- plest form, is association; so wondrous the communion of soul with soul as directed to the mere act of Know- ing! In other higher acts, the wonder is still more manifest ; as in that portion of our being which we name the Moral: for properly, indeed, all communion is of a moral sort, whereof such intellectual communion (in the act of knowing) is itself an example. But with regard to Morals strictly so called, it is in Society, we might almost say, that Morality begins ; here at least it takes an altogether new form, and on every side, as in living growth, expands itself The Duties of Man to himself, to what is Highest in himself, make but the First Table of the Law : to the First Table is now super- 26 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. added a Second, with the Duties of Man to his Nei^rh- bour; whereby also the significance of the First n'^ow assumes its true importance. Man has joined himself with man ; soul acts and reacts on soul ; a mystic mi- raculous unfathomable Union establishes itself; Life in all its elements, has become intensated, consecrated The lightning-spark of Thought, generated, or say rather heaven-kmdled, in the solitary mind, awakens its ex- press likeness in another mind, in a thousand other mmds, and all blaze up together in combined fire ; re- verberated from mind to mind, fed also with fresh' fuel in each, it acquires incalculable new light as Thought, mcalculable new heat as converted into Action. ^By and by a common store of Thought can accumulate, and be transmitted as an everlasting possession: Literature whether as preserved in the memory of Bards, in Runes and Hieroglyphs engraved on stone, or in Books of written or printed paper, comes into existence, and be- gms to play its wondrous part. Politics are formed ; the week submitting to the strong; with a willing loy- alty, giving obedience that he may receive guidance : or say rather, in honour of our nature, the ignorant sub- mitting to the wise; for so it is in all even the rudest communities, man never yields himself wholly to brute Force, but always to moral Greatness; thus the uni- versal title of respect, from the Oriental Sheik, from the Sachem of the red Indians, down to our English Sir, impHes only that he whom we mean to honSur is our Senior. Last, as the crown and all-supporting keystone of the fabric, Religion arises. The devout meditation of the isolated man, which flitted through his soul, like a transient tone of Love and Awe from unknown lands, acquires certainty, continuance, when it is shared-in by his brother men. 'Where two or three are gathered to- gether ' in the name of the Highest, there first does the Highest, as it is written, ' appear among them to bless them'; there first does an Altar and act of united Wor- LIFE, AND HIE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 27 ship open a way from Earth to Heaven ; whereon, were it but a simple Jacob's-laclder, the heavenly Mes- sengers will travel, with glad tidings and unspeakable gifts for men. Such is SOCIETY, the vital articulation of many individuals into a new collective individual: greatly the most important of man's attainments on this earth ; that in which, and by virtue of which, all his other attainments and attempts find their arena, and have their value. Considered well, Society is the stand- ing wonder of our existence ; a true region of the Su- pernatural; as it were, a second all-embracing Life, wherein our first individual Life becomes doubly and trebly alive, and whatever of Infinitude was in us bodies itself forth, and becomes visible and active. — M. Charac- teristics. CO MP A NIONSHIP. It is only in the sentiment of companionship that men feel safe and assured: to all doubts and mysteriou^' 'questionings of destiny,' their sole satisfying answer is^ Others do and suffer the like. Were it not for this, the dullest day-drudge of Mammon might think himself into unspeakable abysses of despair ; for he too is ' fear- fully and wonderfully made ; ' Lifinitude and Incom- prehensibility surround him on this hand and that ; and the vague spectre Death, silent and sure as Time, is ad- vancing at all moments to sweep him away forever. But he answers, Others do and sujfcr the like ; and plods along without misgivings. Were there but One Man in the world, he would be a terror to himself; and the highest man not less so than the lowest. — M. Goeihc's Helena. BIOGRA PHIC INTEREST IN ART, Man's sociality of nature evinces itself, in spite of all that can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Biography. It is written, ' The proper study of mankind is man;' to which study, let us candidly 28 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. admit, he, by true or by false methods, appHes himself, nothing loath. ' Man is perennially interesting to man ; nay, if we look strictly to it, there is nothing else inter- esting.' — Even in the highest works of Art, our interest, as the critics complain, is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of a Biographic sort. In the Art, we can nowise forget the Artist : while looking on the Transfiguration, while studying the Iliad, we ever strive to figure to ourselves what spirit dwelt in Raphael ; what a head was that of Homer, wherein, woven of Elysian light and Tartar- ean gloom, that old world fashioned itself together, of which these written Greek characters are but a feeble though perennial copy. The Painter and the Singer are present to us ; we partially and for the time be- come the very Painter and the very Singer, while we enjoy the Picture and the Song. Perhaps too, let the critic say what he will, this is the highest enjoyment, the clearest recognition, we can have of these. Art in- deed is Art; yet Man also is Man. Had the Transfig- uration been painted without human hand ; had it grown merely on the canvas, say by atmospheric in- fluences, as lichen-pictures do on rocks, — it were a grand Picture doubtless ; yet nothing like so grand as the Picture, which, on opening our eyes, we everywhere in Heaven and in Earth see. painted; and everywhere pass over with indifference, — because the Painter was not a Man. Think of this ; much lies in it. The Vat- ican is great ; yet poor to Chimborazo or the Peak of Tenerifife : its Dome is but a foolish Big-endian or Lit- tle-endian chip of an egg-shell, compared with that star-fretted Dome where Arcturus and Orion glance forever; which latter, notwithstanding, who looks at, save perhaps some necessitous stargazer bent to make Almanacs ; some thick-quilted watchman, to see what weather it will prove ? The Biographic interest is wantinsf: no Michael Angelo was He who built that LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 30 * Temple of Immensity ; ' therefore do we, pitiful Little- nesses as we are, turn rather to wonder and to worship in the Httle toybox of a Temple built by our like. — M. Biography. GOSSIP. Even gossip, springing free and cheery from a human heart, this too is a kind of veracity and .y/^^<:>^ / much preferable to pedantry and inane gray haze ! —P. &'P. II. 2. THE SENTIMENTALIST. The barrenest of all mortals is the Sentimentalist. Granting even that he were sincere, and did not wilfully deceive us, or without first deceiving himself, what^good is in him ? Does he not lie there as a perpetual lesson of despair, and type of bedrid valetudinarian impotence? His is emphatically a Virtue that has become, through every fibre, conscious of itself; it is all sick, and feels as if it were made of glass, and durst not touch or be touched : in the shape of work it can do nothing ; at the utmost, by incessant nursing and caudling, keep it- self alive. As the last stage of all, when Virtue, prop- erly so called, has ceased to be practised, and become extinct, and a mere remembrance, we have the era of Sophists, descanting of its existence, proving it, deny- ing it, mechanically ' accounting ' for it ; — as dissectors and demonstrators cannot operate till once the body be dead. — M. Characteristics. SENTIMENTALISM. Man is not what one calls a happy animal ; his appe- tite for sweet victual is so enormous. How, in this wild Universe, which storms-in on him, infinite, vague-men- acing, shall poor man find, say not happiness, but ex- istence, and footing to stand on, if it be not by girding himself together for continual endeavour and endurance? Wo, if in his heart there dwelt no devout Faith ; if the word Duty had lost its meaning for him ! For as to OQ THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. this of Sentimentalism, so useful for weeping with over romances and on pathetic occasions, it otherwise verily will avail nothing; nay less. The healthy heart that said to itself, " How healthy am I ! " was already fallen into the fatallest sort of disease. Is not Sentimentalism twin-sister to Cant, if not one and the same with it ? Is not Cant the materia prima of the Devil ; from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations body them- selves; from which no true thing can come ? For Cant is itself properly a double-distilled Lie ; the second-power of a Lie. —F. R., P. /., B. Ii. 7. THE QUACK. The impostor is false ; but neither are his dupes alto- gether true : is not his first grand dupe the falsest of all, — himself namely ? Sincere men, of never so limited intellect, have an instinct for discriminating sincerity. The cunningest Mephistopheles cannot deceive a simple Margaret of honest heart; 'it stands written on his brow.' Masses of people capable of being led away by quacks are themselves of partially untrue spirit. —Ch. V. Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and under of the self-same substance ; con- vertible personages ; turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack ; there is in him the due prurient insincerity, open vorac- ity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds are made. — P. dato\ ; POSTREMUM [sub dato] —S. R. II. 4. ■ MAN'S II FE A POEM. The life of every man, says our friend Herr Sauerteig, the life even of the meanest man, it were good to re- member, is a Poem ; perfect in all manner of Aristotelean requisites ; with beginning, middle and end ; with per- plexities and solutions ; with its Will-strength ( Willen- kraft) and warfare against Fate, its elegy and battle- singing, courage marred by crime, everywhere the two tragic elements of Pity and Fear ; above all, with super- natural machinery enough, — for was not the man born out of Nonenity ; did he not die, and miraculously van- ishing return thither ? The most indubitable Poem ! Nay, whoso will, may he not name it a Prophecy, or whatever else is highest in his vocabulary ; since only in Reality lies the essence and foundation of all that was ever fabled, visioned, sung, spoken, or babbled by the human species ; and the actual Life of Man includes in it all Revelations, true and false, that have been, are, or are to be. Man ! I say therefore, reverence thy felloiv- inan. He too issued from Above; is mystical and su- pernatural (as thou namest it) : this know thou of a truth. Seeing also that we ourselves are of so high Authorship, is not that, in very deed, 'the highest Reverence,' and most needful for us : ' Reverence for oneself ? ' LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 4r Thus, to my view, is every Life, more properly is every Man that has hfe to lead, a small strophe, or oc- casional verse, composed by the Supernal Powers ; and published, in such type and shape, with such embellish- ments, emblematic head-piece and tail-piece as thou seest, to the thinking or unthinking universe. Heroic strophes some few are ; full of force and a sacred fire, so that to latest ages the hearts of those that read therein are made to tingle. Jeremiads others seem ; mere weep- ing laments, harmonious or disharmonious Remon- strances against Destiny ; whereat we too may sometimes profitably weep. Again, have we not flesh-and-blood strophes of the idyllic sort, — though in these days rarely, owing to Poor-Laws, Game- Laws, Population- Theories and the like ! Farther, of the comic laughter- loving sort ; yet ever with an unfathomable earnestness, as is fit, lying underneath : for, bethink thee, what is the mirthfullest grinning face of any Grimaldi, but a trans- itory mask, behind which quite otherwise grins — the most indubitable DcatJis-Jicad! However, I say far- ther, there are strophes of the pastoral sort (as in Ettric, Afghanistan and elsewhere) ; of the farcic-tragic, mel- odramatic, of all named and a thousand unnamable sorts there are poetic strophes, written, as was said, in Heaven, printed on Earth, and published (bound in woollen cloth, or clothes) for the use of the studious. Finally, a small number seem utter Pasquils, mere ribald libels on Hu- manity : these too, however, are at times worth read- ing. — M. CagUostro. A PLACE IN HIS TOR V. Treating of those enormous habiliments, that were not only slashed and galooned, but artificially swollen- out on the broader parts of the body, by introduction of Bran, — our Professor fails not to comment on that luck- less Courtier, who having seated himself on a chair with some projecting nail on it, and therefrom rising, to pay ^2 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. his devoir on the entrance of Majesty, instantaneously emitted several pecks of dry wheat-dust : and stood there diminished to a spindle, his galoons and slashes dangling sorrowful and flabby round him. Where- upon the Professor publishes this reflection : ' By what strange chances do we live in History ? Erostratus by a torch ; Milo by a bullock ; Henry Darnley, an un- fledged booby and bustard, by his hmbs ; most Kings and Queens by being born under such and such a bed- tester; Boileau Despreaux (according to Helvetius) by the peck of a turkey; and this ill-starred individual by a rent in his breeches, — for no Memoirist of Kaiser Otto's Court omits him. Vain was the prayer of The- mistocles for a talent of Forgetting : my Friends, yield cheerfully to Destiny, and read since it is written.' —s. R. I. 7. DR. PEASEMEAL ON BALLET-GIRLS. The very ballet-girls with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of miraculous ; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right great-toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety degrees, — as if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jump- ing and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open blades, and stand still, in the Devil's name ! —M. The Opera. THE PUBLIC SPEAKER. Was it never thy hard fortune, good Reader, to attend any Meeting convened for Public purposes ; any Bible- Society, Reform, Conservative, Thatched-Tavern, Hogg Dinner, or other such Meeting ? Thou hast seen some full-fed Long-ear, by free determination, or on sweet con- straint, start to his legs, and give voice. Well aware wert thou that there was not, had not been, could not LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 43 be, in that entire ass-cranium of his any fraction of an idea : nevertheless mark him. If at first an ominous haze flit round, and nothing, not even nonsense, dwell in his recollection, — heed it not ; let him but plunge desperately on, the spell is broken. Commonplaces enough are at hand : ' labour of love,' 'rights of suffer- ing millions,' * throne and altar,' 'divine gift of song,' or what else it may be ; the Meeting by its very name, has environed itself in a given element of Commonplace. But anon, behold how his talking-organs get heated, and the friction vanishes; cheers, applauses, with the previous dinner and strong drink, raise him to height of noblest temper. And now, as for your vociferous Dullard is easiest of all, let him keep on the soft, safe parallel course ; parallel to Truth, or nearly so ; for Heaven's sake, not in cojitact with it : no obstacle will meet him ; on the favouring given element of Common- place he triumphantly careers. He is as the ass, whom you took and cast headlong into the water : the water at first threatens to swallow him ; but he finds, to his astonishment, that he can sivtJii therein, that it is buoy- ant and bears him along. One sole condition is indis- pensable : audacity, vulgarly called impudence. Our ass must commit himself to his watery ' element ; ' in free daring, strike forth his four limbs from him: then shall he not drown and sink, but shoot gloriously for- ward, and swim, to the admiration of bystanders. The ass, safe landed on the other bank, shakes his rough hide, wonder-struck himself at the faculty that lay in him, and waves joyfully his long ears : so too the pub- lic speaker. — M. Cagliostro. DANDIES. Touching Dandies, let us consider, with some scien- tific strictness, what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every 44 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well : so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of Clothes, which a Ger- man Professor, of unequalled learning and acumen, writes his enormous Volume to demonstrate, has sprung-up in the intellect of the Dandy, without effort,, like an instinct of genius ; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth. What Teufclsdrockh would call a 'Di- vine Idea of Cloth ' is born with him ; and this, like other such Ideas, will express itself outwardly, or wring his heart asunder with unutterable throes. But, like a generous, creative enthusiast, he fearlessly makes his Idea an Action ; shows himself in peculiar guise to mankind ; walks forth, a witness and living Martyr to the eternal Worth of Clothes. We called him a Poet : is not his body the (stuffed) parchment-skin whereon he writes, with cunning Huddersfield dyes, a Sonnet to his mistress' eyebrow ? Say, rather, an Epos, and Clotha Viriwique cmio, to the whole world, in Macaronic ver- ses, which he that runs may read. Nay, if you grant, what seems to be admissible, that the Dandy had a Thinking-principle in him, and some notions of Time and Space, is there not in the Life-devotedness to Cloth, in this so willing sacrifice of the Immortal to the Per- ishable, something (though in reverse order) of that blending and identification of Eternity with Time, which, as we have seen, constitutes the Prophetic character? And now, for all this perennial Martyrdom, and Poesy, and even Prophecy, what is it that the Dandy asks in return? Solely, we may say, that you would recognise his existence ; would admit him to be a living object ; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing that will reflect rays of light. Your silver or your gold (beyond what the niggardly Law has already secured him) he so- licits not ; simply the glance of your eyes. Under- stand his mystic significance, or altogether miss and LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. ^i; misinterpret it ; do but look at him and he is contented. May we not well cry shame on an ungrateful world, which refuses even this poor boon ; which will waste its optic faculty on dried Crocodiles, and Siamese Twins; and over the domestic wonderful wonder of wonders, a live Dandy, glance with hasty indifference, and a scarcely concealed contempt ! Him no Zoologist classes among the Mammalia, no Anatomist dissects with care : when did we see any injected Preparation of the Dandy in our Museums ; any specimen of him preserved in spirits ? Lord Herringbone may dress himself in a snuff-brown suit, with snuff-brown shirt and shoes : it skills not; the undiscerning public, occupied with grosser wants, passes by regardless on the other side. —S. R. III. 10. PROFESSOR TEUFELSDROCKII ON THE DANDIACAL SECT. In these distracted times, writes he, when the Religious Principle, driven-out of most Churches, either Hes unseen in the hearts of good men, looking and longing and silently working there towards some new Revelation ; or else wanders homeless over the world, like a disem- bodied soul seeking its terrestrial organisation, — into how many strange shapes, of Superstition and Fanat- icism, does it not tentatively and errantly cast itself! The higher Enthusiasm of man's nature is for the while without Exponent ; yet does it continue indestructible, unweariedly active, and work blindly in the great cha- otic deep : thus Sect after Sect, and Church after Church, bodies itself forth, and melts again into new metamorphosis. Chiefly is this observable in England, which, as the wealthiest and worst-instructed of European nations, offers precisely the elements (of Heat, namely, and of Darkness), in which such moon-calves and monstrosi- ties are best generated. Among the newer Sects of that country, one of the most notable, and closely con- 46 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. nected with our present subject, is that of the Dandies; concerning which, what httle information I have been able to procure may fitly stand here. It is true, certain of the English Journalists, men gen- erally without sense for the Religious Principle, or judgment for its manifestations, speak, in their brief enigmatic notices, as if this were perhaps rather a Secular Sect, and not a Religious one ; nevertheless, to the psychologic eye its devotional and even sacrificial character plainly enough reveals itself Whether it be- longs to the class of Fetish- worships or Hero-worships or Polytheisms, or to what other class, may in the present state of our intelligence remain undecided {schwebeii). A certain touch of Manicheism, not indeed in the Gnostic shape, is discernible enough : also (for human Error v/alks in a cycle, and reappears at intervals) a not-in- considerable resemblance to that Superstition of the Athos Monks, who by fasting from all nourishment, and looking intensely for a length of time into their own navels, came to discern therein the true Apocalypse of Nature and Heaven unveiled. To my own surmise, it appears as if this Dandiacal Sect were but a new modi- fication, adapted to the new time, of that primeval Su- perstition, Sc//- Worship ; which Zerdusht, Quangfout- chee, Mohamed, and others, strove rather to subordi- nate and restrain than to eradicate ; and which only in the purer forms of Religion has been altogether rejected. Wherefore, if any one choses to name it revived Ahri- manism, or a new figure of Demon-Worship, I have, so far as is yet visible, no objection. For the rest, these people, animated with the zeal of a new Sect, display courage and perseverance, and what force there is in man's nature, though never so en- slaved. They affect great purity and separatism ; dis- tinguish themselves by a particular costume, (whereof some notices were given in the earlier part of this Vol- ume) ; likewise, so far as possible, by a particular speech, LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 47 (apparently some broken Lingua-franca, or English- French) ; and, on the whole, strive to maintain a true Nazarene deportment, and keep themselves unspotted from the world. They have their Temples, whereof the chief, as the Jewish Temple did, stands in their metropolis ; and is named Almack's, a word of uncertain Etymology, They worship principally by night ; and have their Highpriests and Highpriestesses, who, however, do not continue for life. The rites, by some supposed to be of the Menadic sort, or perhaps with an Eleusinian or Cabiric character, are held strictly secret. Nor are Sacred Books wanting to the Sect ; these they call Fashionable Novels ; however the Canon is not com- pleted, and some are canonical and others not. Of such Sacred Books I, not without expense, pro- cured myself some samples ; and in hope of true in- sight, and with the zeal which beseems an Inquirer into Clothes, set to interpret and study them. But wholly to no purpose : that tough faculty of reading, for which the world will not refuse me credit, was here for the first time foiled and set at nought. In vain that I summoned my whole energies (mich weidlich anstrc7igte), and did my very utmost ; at the end of some short space, I was uniformly seized with not so much what I can call a drumming in my ears, as a kind of infinite, unsufferable, Jew's-harping and scrannel- piping; to which the frightfuUest species of Magnetic Sleep soon supervened. And if I strove to shake this away, and absolutely would not yield, there came a hitherto unfelt sensation, as of Delirium Tremens, and a melting into total deliquium : till at last, by order of the Doctor, dreading ruin to my whole intellectual and 1)odily faculties, and a general breaking-up of the con- stitution, I reluctantly but determinedly forebore. Was there some miracle at work here ; like those Fire-balls, and supernal and infernal prodigies, which, in the case 48 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. of the Jewish Mysteries, have also more than once scared back the AUen ? Be this as it may, such failure on my part, after best efforts, must excuse the imper- fection of this sketch ; altogether incomplete, yet the completest I could give of a Sect too singular to be omitted. —S. R. III. lo. LA UGHTER. How much lies in Laughter : the cipher-key, where- with we decipher the whole man ! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice : the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger from the throat outwards ; or at best, pro- duce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool : of none such comes good. The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils ; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem. —S. R. i. 4. RIDICULE. There are things in this world to be laughed at, as well as things to be admired ; and his is no complete mind that cannot give to each sort its due. Neverthe- less, contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one, if we habitually live in it. How, indeed, to take the lowest view of this matter, shall a man ac- complish great enterprises ; enduring all toil, resisting temptation, laying aside every weight, — unless he zeal- ously love what he pursues ? The faculty of love, of ad- miration, is to be regarded as the sign and the measure of high souls : unwisely directed, it leads to many evils ; but without it, there cannot be any good. . Ridicule, on the other hand, is indeed a faculty much prized by its possessors ; yet, intrinsically, it is a small faculty ; we may say, the smallest of all faculties that other men are at the pains to repay with any esteem. It is directly opposed to Thought, to Knowledge, properly so called; LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 49 its nourishment and essence is Denial, which hovers only on the surface, while Knowledge dwells far below. Moreover, it is by nature selfish and morally trivial ; it cherishes nothing but our Vanity, which may in gen- eral be left safely enough to shift for itself. Little ' dis- course of reason,' in any sense, is implied in Ridicule: a scoffing man is in no lofty mood, for the time ; shows more of the imp than of the angel. This too when his scoffing is what we call just, and has some foundation on truth : while again the laughter of fools, that vain sound said in Scripture to resemble the ' crackling of thorns under the pot' (which they cannot heat, but onl} soil and begrime), must be regarded, in these latter times, as a very serious addition to the sum of human wretchedness ; nor perhaps will it always, when the In- crease of Crime in the Metropolis comes to be debated, escape the vigilance of ParHament. — ^'/. Voltaire. RIDICULE THE TEST OF TRUTH. We have, oftener than once, endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which, however, we can find nowhere in his works, that Ridicule is the test of truth. But of all chimeras that ever advanced themselves in the shape of philosophical doctrines, this is to us the most formless and purely inconceivable. Did or could the unassisted human faculties ever understand it, much more believe it ? Surely, so far as the common mind can discern, laughter seems to depend not less on the laugher than on the laughee : and now, who gave laugh- ers a patent to be always just, and always omniscient ? If the philosophers of Nootka Sound were pleased to laugh at the manoeuvres of Cook's seamen, did that ren- der these manoeuvres useless ; and were the seamen to stand idle, or to take to leather canoes, till the laughter abated ? Let a discerning public judge. —M. Voltaire. 4 so THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. NIL ADMIRARl. The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he President of innumera- ble Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mecajiiqite Celeste and HegeV.s Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head, — is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful. —S. R. I. lo. It is the very joy of man's heart to admire, where he can ; nothing so lifts him from all his mean imprison- ments, were it but for moments, as true admiration. —P. dr' P. II. 3. HERO-WORSHIP. Hero-worship still continues; it is the only creed which never and nowhere grows or can grow obsolete. For always and everywhere this remains a true saying : II y a dans le cceiir hiunain ime fibre religieuse, Man al- ways worships something ; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite ; and indeed can and must so see it in a7iy finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon. — Remark, however, as illustrative of several things, that man does in strict speech always remain the clear- est symbol of the Divinity to man. Friend Novalis, the devoutest heart I know,* and of purest depth, has not scrupled to call man, what the Divine Man is called in Scripture, a "Revelation in the Flesh." "There is but one temple in the world," says he, "and that is the body of man. Bending before men is a reverence done to this revelation in the flesh. We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body." In which nota- ble words, a reader that meditates them may find such meaning and scientific accuracy as will surprise him. — J/. Goethe's Works. * This passage pretends to be a quotation from Teufelsdrockh. LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 5 I Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable ; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable ! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than him- self dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Re- ligions I find stand upon it ; not Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions, — all religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submis- sion, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man, — is not that the germ of Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One — whom we do not name here ! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter ; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle ex- tant throughout man's whole history on Earth. — //. /. Odin. THE AGE OF ROMANCE. Depend upon it, for one thing, good Reader, no age ever seemed the Age of Romance to itself. Charle- magne, let the Poets talk as they wnll, had his own provocations in the world : what with selling of his poultry and pot-herbs, what with wanton daughters carrying secretaries through the snow ; and, for in- stance, that hanging of the Saxons over the Weser- bridge (four thousand of them they say, at one bout), it seems to me that the Great Charles had his temper ruffled at times. Roland of Roncesvalles too, we see well in thinking of it, found rainy weather as well as sunny ; knew what it was to have hose need darning ; got tough beef to chew, or even went dinnerless ; was saddle-sick, calumniated, constipated (as his madness too clearly indicates) ; and oftenest felt, I doubt not, that this was a very Devil's world, and he, Roland him- self, one of the sorriest caitiffs there. Only in long subsequent days, when the tough beef, the constipation and calumny had clean vanished, did it all begin to seem Romantic, and your Turpins and Ariostos found 52 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. music in it. So I say is it ever ! And the more, as your true hero, your true Roland, is ever imconscioiis that he is a hero : this is a condition of all greatness. — M, Diamond Necklace, I. ROMANCE IN REALITY. In our own poor Nineteenth Century, the Writer of these lines has been fortunate enough to see not a few glimpses of Romance ; he imagines the Nineteenth is hardly a whit less romantic than that Ninth, or any other, since centuries began. Apart from Napoleon, and the Dantons, and Mirabeaus, whose fire-words of public speaking, and fire-whirlwinds of cannon and musketry, which for a season darkened the air, are per- haps at bottom but superficial phenomena, he has wit- nessed, in remotest places, much that could be called romantic, even miraculous. He has witnessed overhead the infinite Deep, with greater and lesser lights, bright- rolling, silent-beaming, hurled forth by, the Hand of God : around him and under his feet, the wonderfullest Earth, with her winter snow-storms and her summer spice-airs ; and unaccountablest of all, himself standing there. He stood in the lapse of Time ; he saw Eternity behind him, and before him. The all-encircling myste- rious tide of Force, thousandfold (for from force of Thought to force of Gravitation what an interval !) bil- lowed shoreless on; bore him too along with it, — he too was part of it. From its bosom rose and vanished, in perpetual change, the lordliest Real-Phantasmagory, which men name Being ; and ever anew rose and van- ished ; and ever that lordliest many-coloured scene was full, another yet the same. Oak-trees fell, young acorns sprang : Men too, new-sent from the Unknown, he met, of tiniest size, who waxed into stature, into strength of sinew, passionate fire and light; in other men the light was growing dim, the sinews all feeble ; then sank, mo- tionless, into ashes, into invisibility; returned baek to the Unknown, beckoning him their mute farewell. He LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 53 wanders still by the parting-spot; cannot hear them; they are far, how far ! — It was a sight for angels and archangels ; for, indeed, God himself had made it wholly. One many-glancing asbestos-thread in the Web of Universal-History, spirit- woven, it rustled there, as with the howl of mighty winds, through that ' wild- roaring Loom of Time.' Generation after generation, hundreds of them or thousands of them, from the un- known Beginning, so loud, so stormful-busy, rushed torrent-wise thundering down, down ; and fell all silent, — nothing but some feeble re-echo, which grew ever feebler, struggling up ; and Oblivion swallowed them all. Thousands more, to the unknown Ending, will fol- low : and thou here, of this present one, hangest as a drop, still sungilt, on the giddy edge ; one moment, while the Darkness has not yet engulfed thee. O Brother ! is tJiat what thou callest prosaic ; of small interest ? Of small interest and for thee ? —M. Diamotm Necklace, I. NOTHING INSIGNIFICANT. Detached, separated ! I say there is no such separa- tion : nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside ; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all ; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamor- phoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in in- verse order; else how could it I'otf Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or the litter from which the Earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant ; all objects are as win- dows, through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself —S. I^. I. ii. CUSTOM. Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is 54 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLO'GY. her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by this means we live ; for man must work as well as wonder: and herein is Custom so far a kind nurse, guiding him to his true benefit. But she is a fond fool- ish nurse, or rather we are false foolish nurselings, when, in our resting and reflecting hours, we prolong the same deception. Am I to view the Stupendous with stupid indifference, because I have seen it twice, or two hun- dred, or two million times? There is no reason in Nature or in Art why I should : unless, indeed, I am a mere Work- Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steam-engine ; a power whereby Cotton might be spun, and money and money's worth reahsed. —S. R. III. 8. THE RESUL TS OF MAN'S A CTIVITY AND A TTAINMENT. Of Man's Activity and Attainment the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in Tradition only : such are his Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest. on ; his Customs, or Fashions both of Cloth-Habits and of Soul-Habits ; much more his collective stocly of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired of manipulating Nature : all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock-and-key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impal- pable vehicles, from Father to Son ; if you demand sight of them, they are nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, ever from Cain and Tubalcain downwards ; but where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and other Manufacturing Skill lie warehoused? It trans- mits itself on the atmospheric air, on the sun's rays (by Hearing and by Vision) ; it is a thing aeriform, impal- pable, of quite spiritual sort. —S. R. II. 8. LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. ^^ THE BROTHERHOOD OF MANKIND. Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature were not. As palpable life-streams in that wondrous Individual Mankind, among so many life-streams that are not palpable, flow-on those main-currents of what we call Opinion ; as preserved in Institutions, Politics, Churches, above all in Books. Beautiful it is to understand and know that a Thought did never yet die ; that as thou, the originator thereof, hast gathered it and created it from the whole Past, so thou wilt transmit it to the whole Future. It is thus that the heroic Heart, the seeing Eye of the first times, still feels and sees in us of the latest ; that the wise man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses and brothers ; and there is a living, literal Comrminimi of Saints, wide as the World itself, and as the History of the World. —S. R. III. 7. THE GENERA TIONS OF MANKIND. Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind : Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the- Father has made, the Son can make and enjoy ; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax, and roll onwards ; Arts, Establishments, Opinions, nothing is completed, but ever completing. —S. R. III. 7. PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. The Past is a dim, indubitable fact : the Future too is one, only dimmer ; nay properly it is the same fact in new dress and development. For the Present holds in it both the whole Past and the whole Future; as the Life-tree Igdrasil, wide waving, many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-Kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its boughs reaches 56 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. always beyond the stars ; and in all times and places is one and the same Life- tree ! —P. 6^ P. i. 6. BEGINNINGS. Apart from all Transcendentalism, is it not a plain truth of sense, which the duller mind can even consider as a truism, that human things wholly are in continual movement, and action and reaction ; working continu- ally forward, phasis after phasis, by unalterable laws, towards prescribed issues ? How often must we say, and yet not rightly lay to heart : the seed that is sown, it will spring ! Given the summer's blossoming, then there is also given the autumnal withering: so is it or- dered not with seed-fields only, but with transactions, arrangements, philosophies, societies, French Revolu- tions, whatsoever man works with in this lower world. The Beginning holds in it the End, and all that leads thereto ; as the acorn does the oak and its fortunes. Solemn enough, did we think of it, — which unhappily, and also happily, we do not very much ! Thou there canst begin ; the Beginning is for thee, and there ; but where, and of what sort, and for whom will the End be ? —F. R., Part II., B. III. i. LIFE A DREAM. We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream- grotto ; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense ; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half- waking moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow ; but the Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows, as if they were sub- stances ; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake ! — This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on Earth call Life ; wherein the most indeed LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. ^7 undoubtingly wander, as if they knew right hand from left ; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing. —S. R. I. 8. THE PASSAGE OF MANKIND. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body ; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends : one grinding in the mill of In- dustry ; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science ; one madly dashed to pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow : — and then the Heaven-sent is recalled ; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, a God- created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane ; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth ; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage : can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive ? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped-in ; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the Earliest Van. But whence ? O Heaven, whither ? Sense knows not ; Faith knows not ; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God to God. "We are such stuff As Dreams are made of, and our little Life Is rounded with a sleep ! " —S. R. III. 8. CHILDHOOD. Happy season of Childhood ! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful Mother ; that visited the poor man's hut with auroral radiance ; and for thy Nursling hast provided a soft swathing of Love and infinite Hope, 58 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced-round by sweetest Dreams ! If the paternal Cottage still shuts us in, its roof still screens us ; with a Father we have as yet a prophet, priest and king, and an Obedience that makes us Free. The young spirit has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time ; as yet Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean ; years to the child are as ages : ah ! the secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or iquicker decay and ceaseless down -rushing of the universal World-fabric, from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown ; and in a motionless Uni- verse, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling Universe is forever denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand ! A little while, and thou too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles ; thou too, with old Arnauld, wilt have to say in stern pa- tience : " Rest ? Rest ? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in ? " Celestial Nepenthe ! though a Pyrrhus conquers empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee not ; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For as yet, sleep and waking are one : the fair Life- garden rustles infinite around, and every- where is dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope ; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stone-fruit, of which the fewest can find the kernel. —S. R. II. 2. DEA TH. I HAVE now pitched my tent under a Cypress-tree ; the Tomb is now my inexpugnable Fortress, ever close by the gate of which I look upon the hostile armaments, and pains and penalties of tyrannous Life placidly enou":h, and listen to its loudest threatenings with a still LIFE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 59 smile. O ye loved ones, that already sleep in the noise- less Bed of Rest, whom in life I could only weep for and never help ; and ye, who wide-scattered still toil lonely in the monster-bearing Desert, dyeing the flinty ground with your blood, — yet a little while, and we shall all meet THERE, and our Mother's bosom will screen us all ; and Oppression's harness, and Sorrow's fire- whip, and all the Gehenna Bailiffs that patrol and inhabit ever- vexed Time, cannot thenceforth harm us any more ! —s. R. II. 3. II. PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. GREA T MEN. Great men are the Fire-pillars in this dark pilgrimage of mankind ; they stand as heavenly Signs, everlasting witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what may still be, the revealed embodied Possibilities of hu- man nature ; which greatness he who has never seen, or rationally conceived of, and with his whole heart passionately loved and reverenced, is himself forever doomed to be little. How many weighty reasons, how many innocent allurements attract our curiosity to such men ! We would know them, see them visibly, even as we know and see our like : no hint, no notice that concerns them is superfluous or too small for us. Were Gulliver's Conjuror but here, to- recall and sensibly bring back the brave Past, that we might look into it, and scrutinise it at will ! But alas, in Nature there is no such conjuring : the great spirits that have gone be- fore us can survive only as disembodied Voices ; their form and distinctive aspect, outward and even in many respects inward, all whereby they were known as living, breathing men, has passed into another sphere ; from which only History, in scanty memorials, can evoke some faint resemblance of it. The more precious, in 64 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. spite of all imperfections, is such History, are such memorials, that still in some degree preserve what had otherwise been lost without recovery. —M. Schiller. DANTE. Many volumes have been written by way of commen- tary on Dante and his Book : yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it were, irrecov- erably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow- stricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived ; and the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After all com- mentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book ; — and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face : perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it ; the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless ; — significant of the whole history of Dante ! I think it is the mournfullest face that ever was painted from reality ; an altogether tragic, heart- affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child ; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul looking-out so stern, implacable, grim- trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice ! Withal it is a silent pain too ; a silent scornful one : the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain of the thing that is eating-out his heart, — as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to tor- ture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and life-long unsurrendering battle, against the world. Aflection all converted into indig- PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. g^ nation : an implacable indignation ; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god ! The eye too, it looks-out as in a kind oi surprise, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort ? This is Dante : so he looks, this ' voice of ten silent centuries,' and sings us 'his mystic unfath- omable song.* —H. III. HIS INTENSITY. ^ Perhaps one would say, intejisity, with the much that depends on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come before us as a large cath- olic mind ; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind : it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is world-wide, but be- cause he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know noth- ing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power of vis- ion ; seizes the very type of a thing ; presents that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of Dite : red pinnacle, redhot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom ; — so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and forever ! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him : Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed ; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word ; and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than woi^ds. It is strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter ; cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, col- lapses at Virgil's rebuke ; it is ' as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken.' Or that poor Brunette 5 55 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Latini, with the cotto aspetto, ' face baked,' parched brown and lean ; and the ' fiery snow ' that falls on them there, a ' fiery snow without wind,' slow, deliber- ate, never-ending ! Or the lids of those Tombs ; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment ; the lids laid open there ; they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eter- nity. And how Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls — at hearing of his son, and the past tense 'fue ! ' The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost es- sence of his genius this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the .man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent ' pale rages,' speaks itself in these things. — ^. ///. I//S TENDERNESS. Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everyway noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that ! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small flute- voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too : dclla bella persona, che mi fu tolta ; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never part from her ! Saddest trag- edy in these alti giiai. And the racking winds, in that aer bruno, whirl them away again, to wail forever ! — Strange ta think : Dante was the friend of this pf)or Francesca's father ; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigour of law: it is so Nat- ure is made ; it is so'Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his Divine Comedy's be- ing a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 67 on Earth ! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic, — sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, long- ing, pitying love ; like the wail of ^olean harps, soft, soft ; like a child's young heart ; — and then that stern, sore-saddened heart ! These longings of his towards his Beatrice ; their meeting together in the Paradiso ; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so far: — one likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul. —H. III. DANTE AND SHAKSPEARE. As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life ; so Shak- speare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece : so in Shak- speare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul ; Shak- speare, in a not less noble way, has given us the Prac- tice or body. This latter also we were to have ; a man was sent for it, the man Shakspeare. Just when that chivalry way of life had reached its last finish, and was on the p 3int of breaking down into slow or swift disso- lution, as we now see it everywhere, this other sov- ereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long- enduring record of it. Two fit men : Dante, deep, 58 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. fierce as the central fire of the world ; Shalc^peare, wide, placid, far-seeing as the Sun, the upper light of the world. Italy produced the one world-voice ; we En- glish have the honour of producing the other. —H. III. SHAKSPEARE. HIS SUPREMACY. Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is in fact the right one ; I think the best judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion. That Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto ; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought,' if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calm- ness of depth ; placid joyous strength ; all things im- aged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil, unfathomable sea ! It has been said that in the constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas there is, apart from all other ' faculties ' as they are called, an under- standing manifested, equal to that in Bacon's Novutn Orgamun. That is true ; and it is not a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakspeare's dramatic materials, we could fashion such a result ! The built house seems all so fit, — everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things, — we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we may call Shakspeare in this ; he discerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice ; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye ; a great intellect in short.— ^. ///. PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 69 HIS UNIVERSALITY. Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Por- trait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart, and generic secret : it dissolves it- self as in light before him, so that he discerns the per- fect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, W'hat is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently ? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shak- speare's morality, his valour, candour, tolerance, truth- fulness ; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph-over such obstacles, visible there too ? Great as the world ! No tiuisted, poor convex- concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own con- vexities and concavities ; a perfectly level mirror ; — that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes-in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus ; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness ; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Noviun Organitin, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order ; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. —H. ill. HIS TRANQUILLITY, AND MIRTHFULNESS. Withal the joyous tranquillity of this man is notable I will not blame Dante for his misery : it is as a battle without victory ; but true battle, — the first indispensa- ble thing. Yet I call Shakspeare great*er that Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sorrows : those Sonnets of his will even testify expressly in what deep watei^s he had waded, 70 THE CARLYLE ANTIIOLOGy. and swum struggling for his life ; — as what man like him ever failed to have to do ? It seems to me a heed- less notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the bough ; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles of other men. Not so ; with no man is it so. How could a man travel forward from rustic dear-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not fall in with sorrows by the way ? Or, still better, how could a man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Mac- beth, so many suffering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered ? And now, in contrast with all this, observe his mirth- fulness, his genuine overflowing love of laughter ! You would say, in no point does he exaggej'ate but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakspeare ; yet he is always in measure here ; never what Johnson would remark as a specially ' good. hater.' But. his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; , he heaps all manner of ridic- ulous nicknames on the butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts. of horse-play ; you would say, roars and laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poyerty ; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laugh- ter means sympathy ; good laughter is not ' the crack- ling of thorns under the pot.' Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakspeare does not laugh otherwise than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts ; and we dismiss them covered with explosions of laugh- ter : but we like the poor fellows only the better for our laughing ; and hope they will get on well there, and continue Presidents of the City- watch. Such laughter, like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me. —H. III. PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 71 HIS CA THOLIC SPIRIT. Shakspeare is no sectarian ; to all he deals with equit)^ and mercy ; because he knows all, and his heart is wide enough for all. In his mind the world is a whole ; he figures it as Providence governs it ; and to him it is not strange that the sun should be caused to shine on the evil and the good, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. —M. Goethe. LUTHER. RiCHTER says of Luther's words, ' his words are half- battles.' They may be called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could fight and conquer ; that he was a right piece of human Valour. No more valiant man, no mortal heart to be called braver, that one has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character is valour. His defiance of the * Devils ' in Worms was not a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's that there were Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many times, in his writings, this turns up ; and a most small sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall ; the strange memorial of one of these con- flicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms ; he was worn down with long labour, with sickness, absti- nence from food : there rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work; Luther started up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared ! The spot still remains there ; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition, in a sci- entific sense : but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before. 72 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. exists not on this Earth or under it. — Fearless enough! 'The Devil is aware,' writes he on one occasion, 'that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George,' of Leip- zig, a great enemy of his, ' Duke George is not equal to one Devil,' far short of a Devil ! ' If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke-Georges for nine days running.' What a reser- voir of Dukes to ride into ! —H. IV. LUTHER'S PORTRAIT. Luther's face is to me expressive of him ; in Kra- nach's best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude, plebeian face ; with its huge crag- like brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy ; at first, almost a repul- sive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow ; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections ; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was in this Luther, as we said ; but tears also were there. Tears also were appointed him ; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and^victories, he expresses himself heartily weary of living ; he considers that God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that per- haps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing: that God would release him from his labour, and let him depart and be at rest. They understand little of the man who cite this in ^wcredit of him ! — I will call this Luther a true Great Man ; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity ; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain, — so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting-up to be great at all ; there for quite another purpose than being great ! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and v/ide into the Heavens ; yet in the clefts of it fountains, PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 73 green beautiful valleys with flowers ! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven. —H. IV. JOHN KMOX. Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sin- cere, applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might be his other quali- ities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a sin- gular instinct he holds to the truth and fact ; the truth alone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and de- ceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only can he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire, whither Knox and others, after their Castle of St. Andrew's was taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves, — some officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image of the Virgin Mother, * requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. Mother ? Mother of God ? said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother of God : this is *a pented bi'cdd', — a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it ! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being worshipped, added Knox : and flung the thing into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there : but come of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was 2i pented bredd : worship it he would not. He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage ; the Cause they haci was the true one, and must and would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making ; it is alone strong. How many pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshipped ! — This Knox cannot live but by fact : he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff He is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic : it is 74 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good hon- est intellectual talent, no transcendent one; — a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther : but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might say, What equal he has ? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. " He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, " who never feared the face of man." He resem- bles more than any of the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid nar- row-looking adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth : an Old- Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for that ; not require him to be other. —H. IV. GEORGE FOX. Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modern His- tory, says Teufelsdrockh, is not the Diet of Worms, still less the Battle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other Battle ; but an incident passed carelessly over by most Historians, and treated with some degree of ridicule by others : namely, George Fox's making to himself a suit of Leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a Shoemaker, was one of those, to whom, under ruder or purer form, the Divine Idea of the Universe is pleased to manifest itself; and across all the hulls of Ignorance and Earthly Degradation, shine through, in unspeakable Awfulness, unspeakable Beauty, on their souls : who therefore are rightly ac- counted Prophets, God-possessed ; or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced. Sitting in his stall ; working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had nevertheless a Living Spirit belonging to him ; also an antique Inspired Volume, through which, as through a window, it could look upwards, PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 75 and discern its celestial Home. The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled even with some prospect of vict- uals, and an honourable Mastership in Cordwainery, and perhaps the part of Thirdborough in his Hundred, as the crown of long faithful sewing, — was nowise satisfac- tion enough to such a mind : but ever amid the boring and hammering came tones from that far off country, came Splendours and Terrors ; for this poor Cord- wainer, as we said, was a Man ; and the Temple of Im- mensity, wherein as Man he had been sent to minister, was full of holy mystery to him. The Clergy of the neighbourhood, the ordained Watchers and Interpreters of that same holy mystery, listened with unaffected tedium to his consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such doubts, to " drink beer and dance with the girls." Blind leaders of the blind ! For what end were their tithes levied and eaten : for what were their shovel-hats scooped-out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons girt-on ; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other racketing, held over that spot of God's Earth, — if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality ? Fox turned from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather- parings and his Bible. Mountains of encumbrance, higher than ^tna, had been heaped over that Spirit: but it was^ a Spirit, and would not lie buried there. Through long days and nights of silent agony, it strug- gled and wrestled, with a man's force, to be free : how its prison-mountains heaved and swayed tumultuously, as the giant spirit shook them to this hand and that, and emerged into the light of Heaven ! That Leicester shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican or Loretto-shrine. — "So bandaged, and hampered, and hemmed in," groaned he, " with thou- sand requisitions, obligations, straps, tatters, and tag- rags, I can neither see nor move : not my own am I, 76 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. but the World's ; and Time flies fast, and Heaven is high and Hell is deep : Man ! bethink thee, if thou hast power of Thought ! Why- not ; what binds me here ? Want, want ! — Ha, of what ? Will all the shoe- wages under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light ? Only Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God, I will to the woods : the hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild-berries will feed me ; and for Clothes, cannot I stitch myself one perennial suit of Leather ! " Historical Oil-painting, continues Teufelsdrockh, is one of the Arts I never practised ; therefore shall I not decide whether this subject were easy of execution on the canvas. Yet often has it seemed to me as if such first outflashing of man's Freewill, to lighten, more and more into Day, the chaotic Night that threatened to en- gulf him in its hinderances and its horrors, were properly the only grandeur there is in History. Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and understanding heart, picture George Fox on that morning, when he spread-out his cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cowhides by unwonted patterns, and stitches them to- gether into one continuous all-including Case, the fare- well service of his awl ! Stitch away, thou noble Fox: every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of Slavery, and World- worship, and the Mammon- god. Thy elbows jerk, as in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her Workhouse and Ragfair, into lands of true Liberty ; were the work done, there is in broad Europe one Free Man, and thou art he ! Thus from the lowest depth there is a path to the loftiest height ; and for the Poor also a Gospel has been published. Surely if, as D'Alembert asserts, my illus- trious namesake, Diogenes was the greatest man of Antiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then by stronger reason is George Fox the greatest of the Mod- erns; and greater than Diogenes himself: for he toe PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 77 stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood, casting aside all props and shoars ; yet not, in half-savage Pride, undervaluing the Earth ; valuing it rather, as a place to yield him warmth and food, he looks Heaven- ward from his Earth, and dwells in an element of Mercy and Worship, with a still Strength, such as the Cynic's Tub did nowise witness. Great, truly, was that Tub ; a temple from which man's dignity and divinity was scornfully preached abroad : but greater is the Leather Hull, for the same sermon was preached there, and not in scorn but in Love. —S. J?. III. i. MAHOMET. One other circumstance we must not forget : that he had no school-learning ; of the thing we call school- learning none at all. The art of writing was but just introduced into Arabia ; it seems to be the true opinion that Mahomet never could write ! Life in the Desert, with its experiences, was all his education. What of this infinite Universe he, from his dim place, with his own eyes and thoughts, could take-in, so much and no more of it was he to know. Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumour of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness ; has to grow up so, — alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man. His companions named him ' Al Amin,, The Faithful.' A man of truth and fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spake and thought. 78 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. They noticed that he always meant something. A man rather taciturn in speech ; silent when there was nothing to be said ; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak ; always throwing light on the matter. This is the only sort of speech ivorth speaking ! Through life we find him to have been regarded as an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere char- acter ; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even; — a good laugh in him withal : there are men whose laugh is as untrue as anything about them ; who cannot laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty : his fine sa- gacious honest face, brown florid complexion, beaming black eyes ; — I somehow like too that vein on the brow, which swelled-up black when he was in anger : like the ^horse-shoe vein' in Scott's Redgmintlct. It was a kind of feature in the Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow ; Mahomet had it prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true- meaning man ! Full of wild faculty, fire and light ; of wild worth, all uncultured, working-out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there. —H. il. HIS SINCERITY. I DO not assert Mahomet's continual sincerity : who is continually sincere ? But I confess I can make nothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit prepense ; of conscious deceit generally, or per- haps at all ; — still more of living in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writing this Koran as a forger and juggler would have done ! Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul ; rude, untutored, that cannot even read ; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell : for very multi- tude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 79 meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method or coher- ence ; — they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his: flung-out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. We said 'stu- pid : ' yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book ; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking ; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech. The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of bat- tle for life and salvation ; this is the mood he is in ! A headlong haste ; for very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself articulated into words. The suc- cessive utterances of a soul in that mood, coloured by the various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years ; now well uttered ; now worse : this is the Koran. —H. II. HIS WA Y OF LIFE. Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we con- sider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugallest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man ; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should say ; something better in him than hicn- ger of any sort, — or these wild Arab men, fighting and jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have reverenced him so ! They were wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity ; without rifrht worth and manhood, no man could have com- manded them. They called him Prophet, you say ? 3o THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Why, he stood there face to face with them ; bare, not enshrined in any mystery ; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them : they must have seen what kind of man he ivas, let him be called what you like ! No empepor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a tloak of his own clouting. During three-and- twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself —H. II. CROMWELL, HAMPDEN, ELIOT, PYM. For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinu- ate a word of disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Eliot, Pym ; whom I believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read diligently what books and documents about them I could come at ; — with the honestest wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes ; but I am sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with very indifferent suc- cess ! At bottom I found that it would not do. They are very noble men these ; step along in their stately way, with their measured euphuisms, philosophies, par- liamentary eloquences. Ship-moneys, Monarchies of Man; a most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But the heart remains cold before them ; the fancy alone endeavours to get-up some worship of them. What man's heart does, in reality, break-forth into any fire of brotherly love for these men ? They are become dreadfully dull men ! One breaks-down often enough in the constitutional eloquence of the ad- mirable Pym, with his 'seventhly and lastly.' You find that it may be the admirablest thing in the world, but that it is heavy, — heavy as lead, .barren as brick clay ; that, in a word, for you there is little or nothing now surviving there ! One leaves all these Nobilities stand' ing in their niches of honour : the rugged outcast Crom- well, he is the man of them all in whom one still finds PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. gl human stuff. The great savage Baresark : he could write no euphuistic Monarchy of Man ; did not speak, did not work with ghb regularity ; had no straight story to tell for himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased in euphuistic coat-of-mail ; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things ! That, after all, is the sort of man for one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabiliti£S not a few one finds, that are not good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work but with gloves on. — //. VI. OLIVER CROMWELL IN j6jj. ' His highness,' says Whitlocke, ' was in a rich but plain suit — black velvet, with cloak of the same ; about his hat a broad band of gold.' Does the reader see him ? A rather likely figure, I think. Stands some five feet ten or more ; a man of strong, soHd stature, and dignified, now partly military carriage : the ex- pression of him valour and devout intelligence — energy and delicacy on a basis of simplicity. Fifty-four years old, gone April last; brown hair and moustache are getting gray. A figure of sufficient impressiveness — not lovely to the man-milliner species, nor pretending to be so. Massive stature; big, massive head, of some- what leonine aspect ; wart above the right eyebrow ; nose of considerable blunt-aquiline proportions ; strict yet copious lips, full of all tremulous sensibilities, and also, if need were, of all fiercenesses and rigours ; deep, loving eyes — calf them grave, call them stern — looking from under those craggy brows as if in lifelong sorrow, and yet not thinking it sorrow, thinking it only labour and endeavour : on the whole, a right noble Hon-face and hero-face ; and to me royal enough. —C. Fart Vll. 191. 82 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. CHARLES I. It is now pretty generally admitted that the Parlia- ment, having vanquished Charles First, had no way of making any tenable arrangement with him. The large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the Independ- ents, were most anxious to do so ; anxious indeed as for their own existence ; but it could not be. The un- happy Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotia- tions, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of being de^lt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not understand : — whose thought did not in any measure represent to him the real fact of the matter ; nay worse, whose word did not at all represent his thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep pity rather : but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but the name of Kingship, he still, finding himself treated wi^h outward respect as a King, fancied that he might play off party against party, and smuggle himself into his old power of deceiving both. Alas, they both discovered that he was deceiving them. A man whose word will not inform you at all what he means or will do, is not a man you can bargain with. You must get out of that man's way, or put him out of yours ! The Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for believing Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. Not so Cromwell : " For all our fighting," says he, " we are to have a little bit of paper?" No ! — —H. VI. LAUD. Poor Laud seems to me to have b«een weak and ill- starred, not dishonest ; an unfortunate Pedant rather than anything worse. His ' Dreams ' and supersti- tions, at which they laugh so, have an affectionate, lov- able kind of character. He is like a College-Tutor whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose no- tion is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed suddenly, with that unalterable luckless PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 83 notion of his, at the head not of a College but of a Na- tion, to regulate the most complex deep-reaching in- terests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old decent regulations ; nay that their salvation will lie in extending and improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence towards his pur- pose ; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of pru- dence, no cry of pity : He will have his College-rules obeyed by his Collegians ; that first; and till that, noth- ing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would have it the world was a College of that kind, and the world zc^as not that. Alas, was not his doom stern enough ? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged on him ? —H. VI. FRIEDRICH WILHELM, FATHER OF FREDERICK THE GREA T. He was not tall of stature, this arbitrary King : a florid- complexioned, stout-built man ; of serious, sincere, au- thoritative face ; his attitudes and equipments very Spartan in type. Man of short firm stature.; stands (in Pesne's best Portraits of him) at his ease, and yet like a tower. Most solid ; " plumb and rather more ; " eyes steadfastly awake ; cheeks slightly compressed, too, which fling the mouth rather forward ; as if asking si- lently, "Anything astir, then ? All right here ?" Face, figure and bearing, all in him is expressive of robust insight, and direct determination ; of healthy energy, practicality, unquestioned authority, — a certain air of royalty reduced to its simplest form. The face, in Pict- ures by Pesne and others, is not beautiful or agreeable ; healthy, genuine, authoritative, is the best you can say of it. Yet it may have been, what it is described as being, originally handsome. High -enough arched brow, rather copious cheeks and jaws ; nose smallish, inclining to be stumpy ; large gray eyes, bright with steady fire and life, often enough gloomy and severe, 84 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. but capable of jolly laughter too. Eyes " naturally with a kind of laugh in them," says Pollnitz ; — which laugh can blaze-out into fearful thunderous rage, if you give him provocation. Especially if you lie to him ; for that he hates above all things. Look him straight in the face : he fancies he can see in your eyes, if there is an internal mendacity in you : wherefore you must look at him in speaking ; such is his standing order. His hair is flaxen, falling into the ashgray or darker ; fine copious flowing hair, while he wore it natural. But it soon got tied into clubs, in the military style ; and at length it was altogether cropped away, and replaced by brown, and at last by white, round wigs. Which latter also, though bad wigs, became him not amiss, under his cocked-hat and cockade, says Pollnitz. The voice, I guess, even when not loud, was of clangorous and pen- etrating, quasi-metallic nature ; and I learn expressly once, that it had a nasal quality in it. His Majesty spoke through the nose ; snuffled his speech, in an ear- nest ominously plangent manner. In angry moments, which were frequent, it must have been — unpleasant to listen to. For the rest, a handsome man of his inches ; conspicuously well-built in limbs and body, and delicately finished-off to the very extremities. His feet and legs, says Pollnitz, were very fine. The hands, if he would have taken care of them, were beautifully white ; fingers long and thin ; a hand at once nimble to grasp, delicate to feel, and strong to clutch and hold : what may be called a beautiful hand, because it is the usefullest. Nothing could exceed his Majesty's simplicity of hab- itudes. But one loves especially in him his scrupjlous attention to cleanliness of person and of environment. Pie washed like a very Mussulman, five times a day ; loved cleanliness in all things, to a superstitious extent ; which trait is pleasant in the rugged man, and indeed of a piece with the rest of his character. He is gradu- PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 85 ally changing all his silk and other cloth room -furniture; in his hatred of dust, he will not suffer a floor-carpet, even a stuffed chair ; but insists on having all of wood, where the dust may be prosecuted to destruction. Wife and womankind, and those that take after them, let such have stuffing and sofas : he, for his part, sits on mere wooden chairs ; — sits, and also thinks and acts, after the manner of a Hyperborean Spartan, which he was. He ate heartily, but as a rough farmer and hunter eats ; country messes, good roast and boiled ; despising the French Cook, as an entity without meaning for him. His favourite dish at dinner was bacon and greens, rightly dressed ; what could the French Cook do for such a man ? He ate with rapidity, almost with indis- criminate violence ; his object not quality but quantity. •He drank too, but did not get drunk ; at the Doctor's order he could abstain ; and had in later years abstained. Pollnitz praises his fineness of complexion, the originally eminent whiteness of his skin, which he had tanned and bronzed by hard riding and hunting, and otherwise worse discoloured by his manner of feeding and digest- ing : alas, at last his waistcoat came to measure, I am afraid to say how many Prussian ells, — a very consider- able diameter indeed ! For some years after his accession, he still appeared in "burgher dress," or unmilitary clothes; "brown English coat, yellow waistcoat" and the other indis- pensables. But this fashion became rarer with him every year; and ceased altogether (say Chronologists) about the year 17 19: after which he appeared always simply as Colonel of the Potsdam Guards (his own Life- guard Regiment) in simple Prussian uniform : close military coat ; blue, with red cuffs and collar, buff waist- coat and breeches, white linen gaiters to the knee. He girt his sword about the loins, well out of the mud ; walked always with a thick bamboo in his hand. Steady, not slow of step ; with his triangular hat, cream- g5 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. white round wig (in his older days), and face tending to purple, — the eyes looking-out mere investigation, sharp swift authority, and dangerous readiness to rebuke and set the cane in motion : — it was so he walked abroad in this earth ; and the common run of men rather fled his approach than courted it. For, in fact, he was dangerous ; and would ask in an alarming manner, " Who are you ? " Any fantastic, much more any suspicious-looking person, might fare the worse. An idle lounger at the street-corner he has been known to hit over the crown ; and peremptorily despatch: "Home, Sirrah, and take to some work!" That the apple-women be encouraged to knit, while waiting for custom ; — encouraged and quietly con- strained, and at length packed away, and their stalls taken from them, if unconstrainable, — there has, as we observed, an especial rescript been put forth ; very curi- ous to read. Dandiacal figures, nay people looking like French- man, idle flaunting women even, — better for them to be going. "Who are you?" and if you lied or prevari- cated [" Er blicke inich gerade an. Look me in the face, then !"), or even stumbled, hesitated, and gave suspicion of prevaricating, it might be worse for you. A soft answer is less effectual than a prompt clear one, to turn away wrath. "A Candidatiis TJicologice, your Majes- ty," answered a handfast threadbare youth one day, when questioned in this manner. — "Where from?" "Berlin, your Majesty." — "Hm, na, the Berliners are a good-for-nothing set." "Yes, truly, too many of them ; but there are exceptions; I know two." — "Two? which then?" "Your Majesty and myself!" — Majesty burst into a laugh : the Candidatus was got examined by the Consistoriums, and Authorities proper in that matter, and put into a chaplaincy. —F. IV. 4. PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 87 FREDERICK THE GREA T. About fourscore years ago,* there used to be seen sauntering on the terraces of Sans-Souci, for a short time in the afternoon, or you might have met him else- where at an earher hour, riding or driving in a rapid business manner, on the open roads or through the scraggy woods and avenues of that intricate amphibious Potsdam region, a highly interesting, lean, little old man, of alert though slightly stooping figure ; whose name among strangers was King Frederick the Second, or Frederick the Great of Prussia, and at home among the common people, who much loved and esteemed him, was Vater Fritz — Father Fred — a name of familiarity which had not bred contempt in that instance. He is a King every inch of him, though without the trappings of a King. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity of vesture : no crown, but an old military cocked-hat — generally old, or trampled and kneaded into absolute softness, if new ; no sceptre but one like Agamemnon's, a walking-stick cut from the woods, which serves also as a riding-stick (with which he hits the horse "between the ears," say authors) ; — and for royal robes, a mere soldier's blue coat with red facings, coat likely to be old, and sure to have a good deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it ; rest of the apparel dim, unobtrusive in colour or cut, ending in high over-knee mihtary boots, which may be brushed (and, I hope, kept soft with an underhand suspicion of oil), but are not permit- ted to be blackened or varnished ; Day and Martin with their soot-pots forbidden to approach. The man is not of god-Hke physiognomy, any more than of imposing stature or costume ; close-shut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose, receding brow, by no means of Olympian height ; head, however, is of long form, and has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beautiful man ; nor yet, by all appear- * Written in 1856. Frederick was born 24th Jany., 1712; he died 17th August, 1786. 88 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. ance, what is called a happy. On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, as they are termed, of much hard labour done in this world ; and seems to anticipate nothing but more still coming. Quiet stoicism, capable enough of what joy there were, but not expecting any worth mention ; great uncon- scious and some conscious pride, well tempered with 'a cheery mockery of humour, are written on that old face, which carries its chin well forward, in spite of the slight stoop about the neck ; snuffy nose, rather flung into the air, under its old cocked-hat, like an old snuffy lion on the watch ; and such a pair of eyes as no man, or lion, or lynx of that Century bore elsewhere, accord- ing to all the testimony we have. 'Those eyes,' says Mirabeau, 'which, at the bidding of his great soul, fasci- nated 5^ou with seduction or with terror {portaient au gre de son dtne heroiqiie, la seduction ou la terreiii'). Most excellent, potent, brilliant eyes, swift darting as the stars, steadfast as the sun ; gray, we said, of the azure gray colour ; large enough, not of glaring size ; the habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense, rapidity resting on depth. Which is an excellent combination ; and gives us the notion of a lambent outer radiance springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the man. The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy : clear, melodious and sonorous ; all tones are in it, from that of ingenious inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter, (rather prickly for most part), up to definite word of command, up to desolating word of rebuke and reprobation : a voice 'the clearest and most agreeable in conversation I ever heard,' says witty Dr. Moore. ' He speaks a great deal,' continues the Doctor; 'yet those who hear him, regret that he does not speak a good deal more. His observations are always lively, very often just ; and few men possess the talent for repartee in greater perfec- tion.' * * * PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 89 This was a man of infinite mark to his contempora- ries, who had witnessed surprising feats from him in the world ; very questionable notions and ways, which he had contrived to maintain against the world and its criticisms. As an original man has always to do ; much more an original ruler of men. The world, in fact, had tried hard to put him down, as it does, uncon- sciously or consciously, with all such ; and after the most conscious exertions, and at one time a dead-lift spasm of all its energies for Seven Years, had not been able. Principalities and powers, Imperial, Royal, Czar- ish. Papal enemies innumerable as the sea-sand, had risen against him, only one helper left among the world's Potentates (and that one only while there should be help rendered in return) ; and he led them all such a dance as had astonished mankind and them. —F. /. i. FREDERICK AND NAPOLEON: The French Revolution may be said to have for about half a century quite submerged Frederick, abolished him from the memories of men ; and now on coming to life again, he is found defaced under strange mud- incrustations, and the eyes of mankind look at him from a singularly changed, what we must call an oblique and perverse point of vision. This is one of the difficulties of dealing with his History ; — especially if you happen to believe both in the French Revolution and in him ; that is to say, both that real Kingship is eternally indis- pensable, and also that the Destruction of Sham King- ship (a frightful process) is occasionally so. On the breaking out of that formidable Explosion and Suicide of his Century, Frederick sank into com- parative obscurity ; eclipsed amid the ruins of that universal Earthquake, the very dust of which darkened all the air, and made of day a disastrous midnight. Black midnight, broken only by the blaze of conflagra- tions ; wherein, to our terrified imaginations, were seen, QQ THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. not men, French and other, but ghastly portents, stalk- ing wrathful, and shapes of avenging gods. It must be owned the figure of Napoleon was titanic — especially to the generation that looked on him, and that waited shuddering to be devoured by him. In general, in that French Revolution, all was on a huge scale ; if not greater than anything in human experience, at least more grandiose. All was recorded in bulletins, too, addressed to the shilling- gallery ; and there were fellows on the stage with such a breadth of sabre, extent of whiskerage, strength of windpipe, and command of men and gunpowder, as had never been seen before. How they bellowed, stalked and flourished about ; counter- feiting Jove's thunder to an amazing degree ! Terrific Drawcansir figures, of enormous whiskerage, unlimited command of gunpowder ; not without sufficient ferocity, and even a certain heroism, stage-heroism in them; compared with whom, to the shilling-gallery, and fright- ened excited theatre at large, it seemed as if there had been no generals or sovereigns before ; as if Frederick, Gustavus, Cromwell, William Conqueror, and Alexander the Great were not worth speaking of henceforth. All this, however, in half a century is considerably altered. The Drawcansir equipments getting gradually torn off, the natural size is seen better ; translated from the bulletin style into that of fact and history, miracles, even to the shilling-gallery, are not so miraculous. It begins to be apparent that there lived great men before the era of bulletins and Agamemnon. Austerlitz and Wagram shot away more gunpowder, — gunpowder probabl)^ in the proportion of ten to one, or a hundred to one: but neither of them was tenth-part such a beat- ing to your enemy as that of Rosbach, brought about by strategic art, human ingenuity and intrepidity, and the loss of 478 men. Leuthen, too, the Battle of Leuthen (though so few English readers ever heard of it) may very well hold up its head beside any victory gained by PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 91 Napoleon or another. For the odds were not far from three to one ; the soldiers were of not far from equal quality ; and only the General was consummately supe- rior, and the defeat a destruction. Napoleon did indeed, by immense expenditure of men and gunpowder, over- run Europe for a time : but Napoleon never, by husbanding and wisely expending his men and gun- powder, defended a little Prussia against all Europe, year after year for seven years long, till Europe had enough, and gave up the enterprise as one it could not manage. So soon as the Drawcansir equipments are well torn off, and the shilling-gallery got to silence, it will be found that there were great Kings before Napo- leon, — and likewise an Art of War, grounded on veracity and human courage and insight, not upon Drawcansir rodomontade, grandiose Dick-Turpinism, revolutionary madness, and unlimited expenditure of men and gunpowder. "You may paint with a very big brush, and yet not be a great painter," says a satir- ical friend of mine. This is becoming more and more apparent, as the dust- whirlwind, and huge uproar of the last generation, gradually dies away again. —F. I. i. AUGUST THE STRONG, KING OF POLAND. Frederick August, the big King of Poland, called by some of his contemporaries August the Great, which ep- ithet they had to change iox August der Starke, August the Physically Strong : this August of the three-hun- dred-and-fifty-four bastards, who was able to break a horse-shoe with his hands, and who lived in this world regardless of expense, — he is the individual of this jun- ior-senior Albertine Line,* whom I wish to pause one moment upon: merely with the remark, that if Moritzt had any hand in making him the phenomenon he was, Moritz may well be ashamed of his work. More trans- * Saxony. t Elector of Saxony : " the ' Maurice' known in English Protestant books." Fred- erick August was his grand-nephew. Q2 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. cendent king of gluttonous flunkeys seldom trod this lower earth, A miracle to his own century, — to certain of the flunkey species a quasi-celestial miracle, bright with diamonds, with endless mistresses, regardless of ex- pense, — to other men a prodigy, portent and quasi-in- fernal miracle, awakening insoluble inquiries : Whence this, ye righteous gods, and above all, whither ! Poor devil, he was full of good humour too, and had the best of stomachs. A man that had his own troubles withal. His miscellany of mistresses, very pretty some of them, but fools all, would have driven most men mad. You may discern dimly in the flunkey histories, in babbling PoUnitz and others, what a set they w^ere ; what a time he must have had with their jealousies, their sick va- pours, megrims, angers and infatuations ; — springing, on occasion, out of bed in their shift, like wild-cats, at the throat of him, fixing their mad claws in him, when he merely enters to ask, "How do you do, mon chow?'' Some of them, it is confidently said, were his own chil- dren. The unspeakably exemplary mortal ! . He got his skin well beaten, — cow-hicled, as we may say, — by Charles XH., the rough Swede, clad mostly in leather. He was coaxed and driven-about by Peter the Great, as Irish post-horses are, — long miles, with a bundle of hay, never to be attained, stuck upon the pole of the coach. He reduced himself to utter bank- ruptcy. He had got the crown of Poland by pretend- ing to adopt Papistry, — the apostate, and even pseudo- apostate ; and we may say he has made Protestant Sax- ony, and his own House first of all, spiritually bankrupt ever since. He died at last, at Warsaw (year 1733), of an 'old man's foot;' highly composed, eupeptic to the last ; busy in scheming out a partition of Poland, — a thing more than once in men's heads, but not to be com- pleted just yet. Adieu to him forever and a day. — AI. The Prinzcnraub. portraits and characters. 93 marAchal de sake. On the authority of Baron d'Espagnac, {Vie dii Mare- chal de Saxe\ I mention one other thing of this Mau- ritius or Moritz, Marechal de Saxe ; who like his father,* was an immensely strong man. Walking once in the streets of London, he came into a collision with a scav- enger, who perhaps had splashed him with his mud- shovel, or the like. Scavenger would make no apol- ogy ; willing to try a round of boxing instead. Moritz grasps him suddenly by the back of the breeches ; whirls him aloft in horizontal position ; pitches him in- to his own mudcart, and walks on. A man of much physical strength till his wild ways wasted it all. He was tall of stature, had black circular eyebrows, black bright eyes, — brightness partly intellectual, partly animal, — oftenest with a smile in them. Undoubtedly a man of unbounded dissoluteness ; of much energy, loose native ingenuity ; and the worst speller probably ever known. Take this one specimen, the shortest I have, not otherwise the best ; specimen achieved, when there had a proposal arisen in the obsequious Acade- mic Franfaise to elect this Marechal a member. The Marechal had the sense to decline. lis veule me fere de la Cade'inie, writes he ; sela miret com une bage a un chas ; meaning probably, Us venlcnt me f aire de V Acad- anie ; cela m'iroit comme nne bague a un chat : 'They would have me in the Academy ; it would suit me as a ring would a cat,' or say, a pair of breeches a cock. Probably he had much skill in war ; I cannot judge : his victories were very pretty ; but it is to be remem- bered, he gained them all over the Duke of Cumber- land ; who was beaten by everybody that tried, and never beat anything, except once some starved High- land peasants at CuUoden. —M. The Prinzenranb. * The "big King of Poland." His mother was Aurora von Konigsmark. He was born at Goslar, Oct. 28, 1696. g4 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. NAPOLEON. A GREAT man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed with an idea. Napoleon himself, not the su- perfinest of great men, and ballasted sufficiently with prudences and egoisms, had nevertheless, as is clear enough, an idea to start with : the idea that Democracy- was the Cause of Man, the right and infinite Cause. Accordingly he made himself ' the armed soldier of Democracy ; ' and did vindicate it in a rather great manner. Nay, to the very last, he had a kind of idea : that, namely, of ' La carriere oiiverte aux talens, The tools to him that can handle them ; ' really one of the best ideas yet promulgated on that matter, or rather, the one true central idea, towards which all the others, if they tend anywhither, must tend. Unhappily it was in the military province only that Napoleon could real- ize this idea of his, being forced to fight for himself the while: before he got it tried to any extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew light (no head can stand more than its quantity) ; and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out ; leaving his idea to be real-* ized, in the civil province of things, by others ! —AI. Scott. MIR ABE A U. Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have : be their work what it may, there is one man there who, by char- acter, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it ; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be ? With the /mre, as himself calls it, or black boars head, fit to be "shaken" as a senatorial portent .f* Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbun- cled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incon- PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 95 tinence, bankruptcy, — and burning fire of genius; like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confu- sions ? It is Gabriel Honor'e Riqicetti de Mirabean, the world-compeller ; man-ruling Deputy of Aix ! Ac- cording to the Baroness de Stael, he steps proudly along, though looked at askance here ; and shakes his black chevehire, or lion's-mane ; as if prophetic of great deeds. Yes, Reader, that is the Type- Frenchman of this epoch : as Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than any other man ; — and intrin- sically such a mass of manhood too. Mark him well. The National Assembly were all different without that one ; nay, he might say with the old Despot : " The National Assembly? I am that." Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood : for the Riquettis, or Arrighettis, had to fly from Florence and the Guelfs, long centuries ago, had settled in Pro- vence ; where from generation to generation they have ever approved themselves a peculiar kindred : irascible, indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like the steel they wore; of an intensity and activity that sometimes verged towards madness, yet did not reach it. One ancient Riquetti, in mad fulfilment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains together; and the chain, with its "iron star of five rays," is still to be seen. May not a mod- ern Riquetti «;/chain so much, and set it drifting, — which also shall be seen ? Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Mira- beau ; Destiny has watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not his Grandfather, stout Col-d' Ar- ge}it (Silver-stock, so they named him), shattered and slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one fell day, lie sunk together on the Bridge at Casano ; while Prince Eugene's cavalry galloped and regalloped over him, — ■ only the flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle ovei 96 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. that loved head ; and Vendome, dropping his spyglass, moaned out, " Mirabeau is dead, thenl" Nevertheless he was not dead : he awoke to breath, and miraculous surgery ; — for Gabriel was yet to be. With his silver stock he kept his scarred head erect, through long years; and wedded; and produced tough Marquis Victor, the Friend of Men. Whereby at last in the appointed year 1749, this long-expected rough-hewn Gabriel Honore did likewise see the light: roughest lion's whelp ever littered of that rough breed. How the old lion (for our old Marquis too was lionlike, most unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wondering on his offspring ; and determined to train him as no lion had yet been ! It is in vain, O Marquis ! This cub, though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn to draw in dogcart of Political Economy, and be a Friend of Men; he will not be Thou, but must and will be Himself, an- other than Thou. Divorce lawsuits, " whole family save one in prison, and three-score Lcttrcs-dc- Cachet" for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world. Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the Isle of Rhe, and heard the Atlantic from his tower ; in the Castle of If, and heard the Mediter- ranean at Marseilles. He has been in the Fortress of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in the Dungeon of Vincennes ; — all by Lettre- de- Cachet, from his lion father. He has been in Pon- tarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner) ; was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men. He has pleaded before Aix Parle- ments (to get back his wife) ; the public gathering on roofs, to see since they could not hear: "the clatter- teeth (claquedent) ! " snarls singular old Mirabeau ; dis- cerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species. But as for Gabriel Honore, in these strange wayfar- ings, what has he not seen and tried! From drill-ser- PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 07 geants, to prime ministers, to foreign and domestic book- sellers, all manner of men he has seen. All manner of men he has gained ; for at bottom it is a social, loving heart, that wild unconquerable one ; — more especially all manner of women. From the Archer's Daughter at Saintes to that fair young Sophie Madame Monnier, whom he could not but " steal," and be beheaded for — in effigy ! For indeed hardly since the Arabian Prophet lay dead on the battle-field to All's admiration, was there seen such a Love-hero, with the strength of thirty men. In War, again, he has helped to conquer Cor- sica ; fought duels, irregular brawls ; horsewhipped cal- umnious barons. In Literature, he has written on Des- potism, on Lettres-de- Cachet ; Erotics Sapphic- Werte- rean. Obscenities, Profanities ; Books on the Prussian Monarchy, on Cagliostro, on Calonne, on the Water Companies of Paris : — each book comparable, we will say, to a bituminous alarum-fire; huge, smoky, sudden! The firepan, the kindling, the bitumen were his own ; but the lumber, of rags, old wood and nameless com- bustible rubbish (for all is fuel to him), was gathered from hucksters, and ass-paniers, of every description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have been heard to exclaim : Out upon it, the fire is mine f Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his ; the man himself he can make his. " All reflex and echo (tout de reflet et de rcverbcre) ! " snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men ! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature ; and will now be the quality of qualities for him. In that forty years' " struggle against despotism," he has gained the glorious faculty of se/f- help, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of fellow- ship, of being helped. Rare union : this man can live self-sufficing — yet lives also in the life of other men : 7 98 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY, can make men love him, work with him ; a born king of men ! But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has " made away with {huine, swallowed) all Formulas y — a fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of system, then ; he is only a man of instincts and insights. A man nevertheless who will glare fiercely on any object; and see through it, and conquer it : for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles ; but with an eye ! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort ; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and sincer- ity there : a Reality, not an Artificiality, not a Sham ! And so he, having struggled " forty years against des- potism," and " made away with all formulas," shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism ; to make away with Jier old formulas, — having found them naught, worn out, far from the reality ? She will make away with such formulas ; — and even go bare, if need be, till she have found new ones. Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the slouch-hat, he steps along there. A fiery fuliginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke. And now it has gotrtz'r/ it will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too, and fill all France with flame. Strange lot ! Forty years of that smouldering, with foul fire-damp and vapour enough ; then victory over that ; — and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high ; and for twenty-three resplen- dent months, pours out, in flame and molten fire-tor- rents, all that is in him, the Pharos and Wonder-sign of an amazed Europe ; — and then lies hollow, cold forever ! PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS 99 Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honore, the greatest of them all : in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation, there is none like and none second to thee. —F. Ji., P. I., B. IV. 4 But whoever Avill, with sympathy, which is the first essential towards insight, look at this questionable Mira- beau, may find that there lay verily in him, as the basis of all, a Sincerity, a great fore Earnestness ; nay call it Honesty, for the man did before all things see, with that clear flashing vision, into what was, into what existed as fact ; and did, with his wild heart, follow that and no other. Whereby or what ways soever he travels and struggles, often enough falling, he is still a brother man. Hate him not ; thou canst not hate him ! Shin- ing through such soil and tarnish, and now victorious effulgent, and oftenest struggling eclipsed, the light of genius itself is in this man ; which was never yet base and hateful ; but at worst was lamentable, lovable with pity. They say that he was ambitious, that he wanted to be Minister? It is most true. And was he not simply the one man in France who could have done any good as Minister ? Not vanity alone, not pride alone ; far from that ! Wild burstings of affection were in this great heart ; of fierce lightning, and soft dew of pity. So sunk bemired in wretchedest defacements, it may be said of him, like the Magdalen of old, that he loved much : his Father, the harshest of old crabbed men, he loved with warmth, with veneration. Be it that his falls and follies are manifold, — as him- self often lamented even with tears. Alas, is not the Life of every such man already a poetic Tragedy ; made up ' of Fate and of one's own Deservings,' of Schicksal und cigene ScJuild ; full of the elements of Pity and Fear ? This brother man, if not Epic for us, is Tragic ; if not great, is large ; large in his qualities, world-large in his destinies. —M. Mlrabeau. 100 . THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. MiRABEAU'S spiritual gift will be found on examination, to be verily an honest and a great one ; far the strong- est, best practical intellect of that time ; entitled to rank among the strong of all times. * * * Hear this man on any subject, you will find him worth consider- ing. He has words in him, rough deliverances ; such as m;n do not forget. As thus: 'I know but three ways of living in this world : by wages for work ; by begging; thirdly, by stealing (so named or not so named).' Again : 'Malebranche saw all things in God; and M. Necker sees all things in Necker !' There are nicknames of Mirabeau's worth whole treatises, 'Grandison-Cromwell-Lafayette :' write a volume on the man, as many volumes have been written, and try to say more ! It is the best likeness yet drawn of him, — by a flourish and two dots. Of such inexpressible advantage is it that a man have 'an eye, instead of a pair of spectacles merely ;' that, seeing through the formulas of things, and even 'making-away' with many a formula, he see into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it ! —M. Mimbeau. D ANTON. If Bonaparte were the 'armed Soldier of Democracy,' invincible while he continued true to that, then let us call this Danton the Ejifajit Perdu, and z/«enlisted Revolter and Titan of Democracy, which could not yet have soldiers or discipline, but was by the nature of it lawless. An Earth-born, we say, yet honestly born of Earth ! In the Memou'S of Garat, and elsewhere, one sees these fire-eyes beam with earnest insight, fill with the water of tears ; the broad rude features speak withal of wild human sympathies; that Antalus' bosom also held a heart. "It is not the alarm-cannon that you hear," cries he to the terror-struck, when the Prussians were already at Verdun : "it is the/«5 de charge against our enemies." ^^ De Vmidace, et e^tcore de Vaudace, et PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. iqj toiijoiirs de Vatidace, To dare, and again to dare, and without limit to dare !" — there is nothing left but that. Poor 'Mirabcau of the Sansculottes,' what a mission! And it could not be but done, — and it was done. But indeed, may there not be, if well considered, more virtue in this feeling itself, once bursting earnest from the wild heart, than in whole lives of immaculate Pharisees and Respectabilities, with their eye ever set on 'char- acter' and the letter of the law: ''Que moii noin soil Jietri, Let my name be blighted, then ; let the cause be glorious, and have victory " ! By-and-by, as we pre- dict, the Friend of Humanity, since so many Knife- grinders have no story to tell him, will find some sort of story in this Danton. A rough-hewn giant of a man, not anthropophagous entirely ; whose 'figures of speech,' and also of action, 'are all gigantic;' whose 'voice reverberates from the domes,' and dashes Bruns- wick across the marches in a very wrecked condition. Always his total freedom from cant is one thing ; even in his briberies, and sins as to money, there is a frankness, a kind of broad greatness. Sincerity, a great rude sin- cerity of insight and of purpose, dwelt in the man, which quality is the root of all : a man who could see through many things, and would stop at very few things ; who marched and fought impetuously forward, in the questionablest element ; and now bears the pen- alty in a name 'blighted,' yet, as we say, visibly clearing itself Once cleared, why should not this name too have significance for men ? The wild history is a tragedy, as all human histories are. Brawny Dantons, still to the present hour, rend the globe, as simple brawny Farmers, and reap peaceable harvests, at Arcis- sur-Aube ; and this Danton — ! It is an ?/«rhymed tragedy; very bloody, fuliginous (after the manner of the elder dramatists) ; yet full of tragic elements ; not undeserving natural pity and fear. In quiet times, per- haps still at a great distance, the happier on-looker may JQ2 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Stretch out the hand, across dim centuries, to him, and say : " Ill-starred brother, how thou foughtest with wild lion-strength, and yet not with strength enough, and flamedst aloft, and wert trodden down of sin and mis- ery ; — behold thou also wert a man 1" —M. Mirabeau. CAMILLE DESMOULINS. This Procureur General de la Lanterne has a place of his own in the history of the Revolution ; there are not many notabler persons in it than he. A light harmless creature; as he says of himself, 'a man born to write verses;' but whom Destiny directed to overthrow Bas- tilles, and go to the guillotine for doing that. How such a man will comport himself in a French Revolu- tion, as he from time to time turns up there, is worth seeing. Of loose headlong character ; a man stuttering in speech ; stuttering, infirm in conduct too, till one huge idea laid hold of him : a man for whom Art, Fortune or himself would never do much, but to whom Nature had been very kind ! One meets him always with a sort of forgiveness, almost of underhand love, as for a prodigal son. He has good gifts and even aquire- ments ; elegant law-scholarship, quick sense, the freest joyful heart: a fellow of endless wit, clearness, soft lambent brilliancy ; on any subject you can listen to him, if without approving, yet without yawning. As a writer, in fact, there is nothing French, that we have heard of, superior or equal to him for these fifty years. — M, Hist, of French Revohition. — Slight-built — ; he with the long curling locks; with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradi- ated with genius, as if a naphtha-lamp burnt v/ithin it : that figure is Camilje Desmoulins. A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour ; one of the sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions. Thou poor Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong lightly sparkling man ! —F. A\, Part I., B. iv. 4. PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS, 103 ROBESPIERRE. Consider Maximilien Robespierre ; for the greater part of two years, what one may call Autocrat of France. A poor sea-green (verddtrc), atrabiliar Form- ula of a man ; without head, without heart, or any grace, gift or even vice beyond common, if it were not vanity, astucity, diseased rigour (which some count strength) as of a cramp : really a most poor sea-green individual in spectacles ; meant by Nature for a Meth- odist parson of the stricter sort, to doom men who de- parted from the written confession ; to chop fruitless shrill logic ; to contend, and suspect, and ineffectually wrestle and wriggle ; and, on the whole, to love, or to know, or to be (properly speaking) Nothing : — this was he who, the sport of the wracking winds, saw himself whirled aloft to command la premiere nation de runi- vers, and all men shouting long life to him : one of the most lamentable, tragic, sea-green objects, ever whirled aloft in that manner, in any country, to his own swift destruction and the world's long wonder ! —M. Mirabcau. CAGLIOSTRO. One of the most authentic documents preserved of him is the Picture of his Visage. An Effigies once univer- sally diffused ; in oil-paint, aquatint, marble, stucco, and perhaps gingerbread, decorating millions of apartments: of which remarkable Effigies one copy, engraved in the line-manner, happily still lies here. Fittest of visages ; worthy to be worn by the Quack of Quacks. A most portentous face of scoundrelism : a fat, snub, abomina- ble face ; dew-lapped, flat-nosed, greasy, full of greedi- ness, sensuality, oxlike obstinacy ; a forehead impudent, refusing to be ashamed ; and then two eyes turned up seraphically languishing, as in divine contemplation and adoration ; a touch of quiz too : on the whole perhaps the most perfect quack-face produced by the eighteenth century. There he sits, and seraphically languishes, with this epigraph : 104 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. De I'Ami des Humains reconnaissez les traits : Tous ses jours sont naarques par de nouveaux bienfaits, II prolonge la vie, il secourt I'indigence ; Le plaisir d'etre utile est seul sa recompense. — M. Cagliostro. VOLTAIRE. Voltaire's worst enemies, it seems to us, will not deny that he had naturally a keen sense for rectitude, indeed for all virtue : the utmost vivacity of tempera- ment characterises him ; his quick susceptibility for every form of beauty is moral as well as intellectual. Nor was his practice without indubitable and highly creditable proofs of this. To the help-needing he was at all times a ready benefactor:, many were the hungry adventurers who profited by his bounty, and then bit the hand that had fed them. If we enumerate his gen- erous acts, from the case of the Abbe Desfontaines down to that of the Widow Calas, and the Serfs of Saint Claude, we shall find that few private men have had so wide a circle of charity, and have watched over it so well. Should it be objected that love of reputa- tion entered largely into these proceedings, Voltaire can afford a handsome deduction on that head : should the uncharitable even calculate that love of reputation was the sole motive, we can only remind them that love oi such reputation is itself the effect of a social humane disposition ; and wish, as an immense improvement, that all men were animated with it. —M. Voltaire. The truth is we are trying Voltaire by too high a stand- ard ; comparing him with an ideal which he himself never strove after, perhaps never seriously aimed at. He is no great Man, but only a great Persifletir ; a man for whom life and all that pertains to it, has, at best, but a despicable meaning ; who meets its difficul- ties not with earnest force, but with gay agility ; and is found always at the top, less by power in swimming, than by lightness in floating. Take him in this character, forgetting that any other was ever ascribed to him, and PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 105 we find that he enacted it almost to perfection. Never man better understood the whole secret of Persiflage ; meaning thereby not only the external faculty of polite contempt, but that art of general inward contempt, by which a man of this sort endeavors to subject the cir- cumstances of his Destiny to his Volition, and be, what is the instinctive effort of all men, though in the midst of material Necessity, morally Free. Voltaire's latent derision is as light, copious and all-prevading as the de- rision that he utters. Nor is this so simple an attain- ment as we might fancy ; a certain kind and degree of Stoicism, or approach to Stoicism, is necessary for the completed Persifleur ; as for moral, or even practical completion, in any other way. The most indifferent- minded man is not by nature indifferent to his own pain and pleasure : this is an indifference which he must by some method study to acquire, or acquire the show of; and which, it is fair to say, Voltaire manifests in rather a respectable degree. Without murmuring, he has rec- onciled himself to most things : the human lot, in this lower world, seems a strange business, yet, on the whole, with more of the farce in it than of the tragedy ; to him it is nowise heartrending, that this Planet of ours should be sent sailing through Space, like a miser- able aimless Ship-of-Fools, and he himself be a fool among the rest, and only a very little wiser than they. He does not, like Bolingbroke, 'patronise Providence,' though such sayings as Si Dieu nexistait pas, il faii- drait Vinventer, seem now and then to indicate a tend- ency of that sort: but at all events, he never openly levies war against Heaven ; well knowing that the time spent in frantic malediction, directed thither, might be spent otherwise with more profit. There is, truly, no Werterisin in him, either in its bad or its good sense. If he sees no unspeakable majesty in heaven and earth, neither does he see any unsufferable horror there. His view of the world is a cool, gently scornful, altogether 105 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. prosaic one ; his sublimest Apocalypse of Nature lies in the microscope and telescope ; the Earth is a place for producing corn ; the Starry Heavens are admirable as a nautical time-keeper. Yet, like a prudent man, he has adjusted himself to his condition, such as it is : he does not chaunt any Miserere over human life, calculat- ing that no charitable dole, but only laughter, would be the reward of such an enterprise ; does not hang or drown himself, clearly understanding that death itself will soon save him that trouble. Affliction, it is true, has not for him any precious jewel in its head ; on the contrary, it is an unmixed nuisance; yet, happily, not one to be howled over, so much as one to be speedily removed out of sight : if he does not learn from it Hu- mility, and the sublime lesson of Resignation, neither does it teach him hard-heartedness and sickly discon- tent; but he bounds lightly over it, leaving both the jewel and the toad at a safe distance behind him. — M. Voltaire. ROUSSEAU. Hovering in the distance, with woestruck, minatory air, stern-beckoning, comes Rousseau. Poor Jean Jacques ! Alternately deified, and cast to the dogs; a deep-minded, high-minded, even noble, yet wofully mis- arranged mortal, with all misformations of Nature in- tensated to the verge of madness by unfavourable Fort- une. A lonely man; his life a long soliloquy ! The wandering Tiresias of the time; — in whom, however, did lie prophetic meaning, such as none of the others offer. Whereby indeed it might partly be that the world went to such extremes about him; that, long after his departure, we have seen one whole nation wor- ship him, and a Burke, in the name of another, class him with the offscourings of the earth. His true char- acter, with its lofty aspirings and poor performings; and how the spirit of the man worked so wildly, like celes- tial fire in a thick dark element of chaos, and shot forth PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 107 ethereal radiance, all-piercing lightning, yet could not illuminate, was quenched and did not conquer : this, with what lies in it, may now be pretty accurately ap- preciated. Let his history teach all whom it concerns, to ' harden themselves against the ills which Mother Nature will try them with ; ' to seek within their own soul what the world must forever deny them ; and say composedly to the Prince of the Power of this lower Earth and Air : Go thou thy way ; I go mine ! — M. Diderot. He is not what I call a strong man. A morbid, excit- able, spasmodic man ; at best intense rather than strong. He had not the 'talent of Silence,' an invaluable talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel in ! The suffering man ought really ' to consume his own smoke ; ' there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of be- coming ! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force for diifhculty ; the first characteristic of true great- ness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength ! A man is not strong who takes con- vulsion-fits ; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever, especially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind our- selves of that. A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man. Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high, but narrow contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in which there is something be- wildered-looking, — bewildered, peering with lynx-ea- gerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by intensity : the face of what is called a P'anatic, — a sadly contracted Hero! —H. V. I08 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. GOETHE. We find, then, in Goethe, an Artist, in the high and an- cient meaning of that term; in the meaning which it may have borne long ago among the masters of ItaHan paint- ing, and the fathers of Poetry in England ; we say that we trace in the creations of this man, belonging in every sense to our own time, some touches of that old, divine spirit, which had long passed away from among us, nay which, as has often been laboriously demonstrated, was not to return to this world any more. Or perhaps we come nearer our meaning if w'e say that in Goethe we discover by far the most striking in- stance, in our time, of a writer who is, in strict speech, what Philosophy can call a Man. He is neither noble nor plebeian, neither liberal or servile, nor infidel nor devo- tee ; but the best excellence oi all these, joined in pure union ; ' a clear and universal Man.' Goethe's poetry is no separate faculty, no mental handicraft ; but the voice of the whole harmonious manhood : nay it is the very harmony, the living and life-giving harmony of that rich manhood which forms his poetry . All good men may be called poets in act, or in word ; all good poets are so in both. But Goethe besides appears to us as a person of that deep endowment, and gifted vis- ion, of that experience also and sympathy in the ways of all men, which qualify him to stand forth, not only as the literary ornament, but in many respects too as the Teacher and exemplar of his age. For, to say nothing of his natural gifts, he has cultivated himself and his art, he has studied how to live and to write, with a fidelity, an unwearied earnestness, of which there is no other living instance ; of which, among British poets especially, Wordsworth alone offers any resem- blance. — M. Goethe. GOETHE: EQUANIMITY. In Goethe's mind the first object that strikes us is its calmness, then its beauty; a deeper inspection reveals tc PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 109 US its vastness and unmeasured strength. This man rules, and is not ruled. The stern and fiery energies of a most passionate soul lie silent in the centre of his be- ing; a trembling sensibility has been inured to stand, without flinching or murmur, the sharpest trials. Noth- ing outward, nothing inward, shall agitate or control him. The brightest and most capricious fancy, the most piercing and inquisitive intellect, the wildest and deep- est imagination ; the highest thrills of joy, the bitterest pangs of sorrow : all these are his, he is not theirs. While he moves every heart from its steadfastness, his own is firm and still : the words that search into the utmost recesses of our nature, he pronounces with a tone of coldness and equanimity ; in the deepest pathos he weeps not, or his tears are like water trickling from a rock of adamant. He is king of himself and of his world ; nor does he rule it like a vulgar great man, like a Napoleon or Charles the Twelfth, by the mere brute exertion of his will, grounded on no principle, or on a false one : his faculties and feelings are not fettered or prostrated under the iron sway of Passion, but led and giiided in kindly union under the mild sway of Reason: as the fierce primeval elements of chaos were stilled at the coming of Light, and bound together, under its soft vesture, into a glorious and beneficent Creation. This is the true Rest of man ; the dim aim of every human soul, the full attainment of only a chosen few. It comes not unsought to any ; but the wise are wise because they think no price too high for it. Goethe's inward home has been reared by slow and laborious efforts ; but it stands on no hollow or deceitful basis : for his peace is not from blindness, but from clear vis- ion ; not from uncertain hope of alteration, but from sure insight into what cannot alter. His world seems once to have been desolate and baleful as that of the darkest sceptic : but he has covered it anew v/ith beauty and solemnity, derived from deeper sources, over which no THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Doubt can have no sway. He has inquired fearlessly, and fearlessly searched out and denied the False ; but he has not forgotten, what is equally essential and infi- nitely harder, to search out and admit the True. His heart is still full of warmth, though his head is clear and cold ; the world for him is still full of grandeur, though he clothes it with no false colours ; his fellow creatures are still objects of reverence and love, though their basenesses are plainer to no eye than to his. To recon- cile these contradictions is tlie task of all good men, each for himself, in his own way and manner ; a task which, in our age, is encompassed with difficulties pecu- liar to the time ; and which Goethe seems to have ac- complished with a success that few can rival. A mind so in unity with itself, even though it were a poor and small one, would arrest our attention, and win some kind regard from us ; but when this mind ranks among the strongest and most complicated of the species, it be- comes a sight full of interest, a study full of deep instruc- tion. —M. Goethe. GOETHE: HIS CHARACTER. Precious is the new light of Knowledge which our Teacher conquers for us ; yet small to the new light of Love which also we derive from him : the most im- portant element of any man's performance is the Life he has accomplished. Under the intellectual union of man and man, which works by precept, lies a holier union of affection, working by example ; the influences of which latter, mystic, deep-reaching, all-embracing, can still less be computed. For Love is ever the begin- ning of Knowledge, as fire is of light ; and works also more in the manner of fire. That Goethe was a great Teacher of men means already that he was a good man ; that he had himself learned ; in the school of ex- perience had striven and proved victorious. To how many hearers, languishing, nigh dead, in the airless PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. i j i dungeon of Unbelief (a true vacuum and nonentity)j has the assurance that there was such a man, that such a man was still possible, come like tidings of great joy ! He who would learn to reconcile reverence with clear- ness ; to deny and defy what is False, yet believe and worship what is True ; amid raging factions, bent on what is either altogether empty or has substance in it only for a day, which stormfully convulse and tear hither and thither a distracted expiring system of society, to adjust himself aright ; and, working for the world and in the world, keep himself unspotted from the world, — let him look here. This man, we may say, became morally great, by being in his own age, what in some other ages many might have been, a genuine man. His grand ex- cellency was this, that he was genuine. As his primary faculty, the foundation of all others, was Intellect, depth and force of Vision ; so his primary virtue was Justice, was the courage to be just. A giant's strength we ad- mired in him ; yet, strength ennobled into softest mild- ness ; even like that ' silent rock-bound strength of a world,' on whose bosom, which rests on the adamant, grow flowers. The greatest of hearts was also the bravest ; fearless, unwearied, peacefully invincible. A completed man : the trembling sensibility, the wild enthusiasm of a Mignon can assort with the scornful world-mockery of a Mephistopheles ; and each side of many sided life receives its due from him. —M. Death of Goethe. SGHILLER. In forming for ourselves some picture of Schiller as a man, of what may be called his moral character, per- haps the very perfection of his manner of existence tends to diminish our estimate of its merits. What he aimed at he has attained in a singular degree. His life, at least from the period of manhood, is still, unruffled ; of clear, even course. The completeness of the victory hides from us the magnitude of the struggle. On the 112 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. whole, however, we may admit, that his character was not so much a great character as a holy one. We have often named him a Priest; and this title, with the quiet loftiness, the pure, secluded, only internal, yet still heavenly worth that should belong to it, perhaps best describes him. One high enthusiasm takes possession of his whole nature. Herein lies his strength, as well as the task he has to do ; for this he lived, and we may say also he died for it. In his life we see not that the social affections played any deep part. As a son, hus- band, father, friend, he is ever kindly, honest, amiable ; but rarely, if at all, do outward things stimulate him into what can be called passion. Of the wild loves and lamentations, and all the fierce ardour that distinguish, for instance, his Scottish contemporary Burns, there is scarcely any trace here. In fact, it was towards the Ideal, not towards the Actual, that Schiller's faith and hope were directed. His highest happiness lay not in outward honour, pleasure, social recreation, perhaps not even in friendly affection, such as the world could show it ; but in the realm of Poetry, a city of the mind, where, for him, all that was true and noble had founda- tion. His habits, accordingly, though far from dis- social, were solitary ; his chief business and chief pleas- ure lay in silent meditation. —M. Schiller. RICHTER. Viewed under any aspect, whether as Thinker, Moral- ist, Satirist, Poet, he is a phenomenon ; a vast, many- sided, tumultuous, yet noble nature ; for faults as for merits, 'Jean Paul the Unique.' In all departments, we find in him a subduing force. Thus, for example, few understandings known to us are of a more irresisti- ble character than Richter's ; he does not cunningly undermine his subject, and lay it open, by syllogistic implements or any rule of art; but he crushes it to pieces in his arms, he treads it asunder, not without gay PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 113 triumph, under his feet; and so in almost monstrous fashion, yet with piercing clearness, lays bare the in- most heart and core of it to all eyes. In passion again, there is the same wild vehemence : it is a voice of soft- est pity, of endless boundless wailing, a voice as of Rachel weeping for her children ; — or the fierce bellow- ing of lions amid savage forests. Thus too, he not only loves Nature, but he revels in her; plunges into her infinite bosom, and fills his whole heart to intoxication with her charms. He tells us that he was wont to " study, to write, almost to live, in the open air ; and no skyey aspect was so dismal that it altogether wanted beauty for him. We know of no Poet with so deep and passionate and universal a feeling toward Nature : 'from the solemn phases of the starry heaven to the simple floweret of the meadow, his eye and his heart are open for her charms and her mystic meanings.' But what most of all shadows forth the inborn, essential temper of Paul's mind, is the sportfulness, the wild heartfelt Humour, which, in his highest as in his lowest moods, ever exhibits itself as a quite inseparable ingredient. His Humour, with all its wildness, is of the gravest and kindliest, a genuine Humour ; ' consistent with utmost earnestness, or rather, inconsistent with the want of it.' But on the whole, it is impossible for him to write in other than a humorous manner, be his subject what it may. His Philosophical Treatises, nay, as we have seen, his Autobiography itself, everything that comes from him, is encased in some quaint fantastic framing; and roguish eyes (yet with a strange sympathy in the matter, for his Humour, as we said, is heartfelt and true) look out on us through many a grave delineation. ~-M. Richter. LESSING. Among all the writers of the eighteenth century, we will not except even Diderot and David Hume, there is not one of a more compact and rigid intellectual struct- 114 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. ure ; who more distinctly knows what he is aiming at, or with more gracefulness, vigour and precision sets it forth to his readers. He thinks with the clearness and piercing sharpness of the most expert logician ; but a genial fire pervades him, a wit, a heartiness, a general richness and fineness of nature, to which most logicians are strangers. He is a sceptic in many things, but the noblest of sceptics ; a mild, manly, half-careless enthu- siasm struggles through his indignant unbelief: he stands before us like a toil-worn but unwearied and heroic champion, earning not the conquest but the battle; as indeed himself admits to us, that 'it is not the finding of truth, but the honest search for it, that profits.' — -/'/. State of German Literature. DR. JOHNSON. Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, almost poetic soul ; yet withal imprisoned it in an inert, un- sightly body : he that could never rest had not limbs that would move with him, but only roll and waddle : the inward eye, all-penetrating, all-embracing, must look through bodily windows that were dim, half- blinded ; he so loved men, and ' never once sazv the human face divine ' ! Not less did he prize the love of men ; he was eminently social ; the approbation of his fellows was dear to him, 'valuable,' as he owned, 'if from the meanest of human beings : ' yet the first im- pression he produced on every man was to be one of aversion, almost of disgust. By Nature it was further ordered that the imperious Johnson should be born poor : the ruler-soul, strong in its native royalty, gen- erjous, uncontrollable, like the lion of the woods, was to be housed, then, in such a dwelling-place : of Disfigure- ment, l^isease, and lastly of a Poverty which itself made him the servant of servants. Thus was the born king likewise a born slave : the divine spirit of Music must awake imprisoned amid dull-croaking universal PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. lis Discords ; the Ariel finds himself encased in the coarse hulls of a Caliban. So is it more or less, we know (and thou, O Reader, knowest and feelest even now), with all men : yet with the fewest men in any such degree as with Johnson. —M. Boswell. HIS AFFECTIONA TE NA TURK. That Mercy can dwell only with Valour, is an old sen^ timent or proposition ; which, in Johnson, again receives confirmation. Few men on record have had a more merciful, tenderly affectionate nature than old Samuel. He was called the Bear ; and did indeed too often look, and roar like one ; being forced to it in his own de- fence : yet within that shaggy exterior of his there beat a heart warm as a mother's, soft as a little child's. Nay generally, his very roaring was but the anger of affec- tion : the rage of a Bear, if you will ; but of a Bear be- reaved of her whelps. Touch his Religion, glance at the Church of England, or the Divine Right ; and he was upon you ! These things were his Symbols of all that was good and precious for men ; his very Ark of the Covenant : whoso laid hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of hatred to the opponent, but of love to the thing opposed, did Johnson grow cruel, fiercely contradictory : this is an important dis- tinction ; never to be forgotten in our censure of his conversational outrages. But observe also with what humanity, what openness of love, he can attach himself to all things : to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a Cat 'Hodge.' 'His thoughts in the latter part of his life were frequently employed on his deceased friends ; he often muttered these or such like sentences : "Poor man! and then he died."' How he patiently converts his poor home into a Lazaretto ; endures, for long years, the contradiction of the miserable and un- reasonable ; with him unconnected save that they had no other to yield them refuge ! Generous old man ! jl5 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Worldly possession he has little ; yet of this he gives freely ; from his own hard-earned shilling, the half-pence for the poor, that 'waited his coming out,' are not with- held : the poor 'waited the coming out' of one not quite so poor ! A Sterne can write sentimentalities on Dead Asses : Johnson has a rough voice ; but he finds the wretched Daughter of Vice fallen down in the streets ; carries her home on his own shoulders, and like a good Samaritan gives help to the help-needing, worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, even in that sense, to cover a multitude of sins ? No Penny-a-week Committee- Lady, no Manager of Soup- Kitchens, dancer at Charity- Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged man : but where, in all England, could there have been found another soul so full of Pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as his ? The widow's mite, we know, was greater than all the other gifts. Perhaps it is this divine feeling of Affection, through- out manifested, that principally attracts us toward Johnson. A true brother of men is he ; and filial lover of the Earth ; who, with little bright spots of Attach- ment, 'where lives and works some loved one,' has beautified 'this rough solitary Earth into a peopled garden.' Lichfield, with its mostly dull and limited inhabitants, is to the last one of the sunny islets for him: Salve magna parens! Or read those letters on his Mother's death : what a genuine solemn grief and pity lies recorded there-; a looking back into the Past, unspeakably mournful, unspeakably tender. And yet calm, sublime ; for he must now act, not look : his ven- erated Mother has been taken from him ; but he must now write a Rasselas to defray her funeral ! Again in this little incident, recorded in his Book of Devotion, are not, the tones of sacred Sorrow and Greatness deeper than in many a blank verse Tragedy; — as, indeed, 'the fifth act of a Tragedy,' though unrhymed, does 'lie in every death-bed, were it a peasant's and of straw:' PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 117 'Sunday, October 18, 1767. Yesterday at about ten in the morning, I took my leave forever of my dear old friend, Catherine Chambers, who came to hve with my mother about 1724, and has been but httle parted from us since. She buried my father, my brother and my mother. She is now fifty-eight years old. ' I desired all to withdraw ; then told her that we were to part forever ; that as Christians, we should part with prayer; and that I would, if she was willing, say a short prayer beside her. She expressed great desire to hear me ; and held up her poor hands as she lay in bed, with great fervour, while I prayed kneeling by her. * * ' I then kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain she had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in a better place. I expressed with swelled eyes and great emotion of tenderness, the same hopes. We kissed and parted ; I humbly hope, to meet again, and to part no more.' Tears trickling down the granite rock : a soft well of Pity springs within ! — Still more tragical is this other scene: 'Johnson mentioned that he could not in general accuse himself of having been an undutiful son. "Once, indeed," said he, "I was disobedient : I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago I desired to atone for this fault." ' — But by what method ? — what method was now possible ? Hear it ; the words are again given as his own, though here evidently by a less capable reporter : * Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure in the morning, but I was compelled to it b)^ conscience. Fifty years ago. Madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial piety. My father had been in the habit of attending Uttoxeter market, and opening a stall there for the sale of his Books. Con- fined by indisposition, he desired me, that day, to go Ilg THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. and attend the stall in his place. My pride prevented me ; I gave my father a refusal. — And now to-day have I been at Uttoxeter ; I went into the market, at the time of business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare, for an hour, on the spot where my father's stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory.' Who does not figure to himself this spectacle, amid the 'rainy weather, and the sneers,' or wonder 'of the bystanders'? The memory of old Michael Johnson, rising from the far distance ; sad- beckoning in the 'moonlight of memory': how he had toiled faithfully hither and thither ; patiently among the lowest of the low ; been buffeted and beaten down, yet ever risen again, ever tried it anew — And oh ! when the wearied old man, as Bookseller, or Hawker, or Tinker, or what- soever it was that Fate had reduced him to, begged help of thee for one day, — how savage, diabolic, was that mean Vanity, which answered, No ! He sleeps now ; after life's fitful fever, he sleeps : but thou, O Merciless, how now wilt thou still the sting of that remembrance ? — The picture of Samuel Johnson stand- ing bare-headed in the market there, is onfe of the grandest and saddest we can paint. Repentance ! Repentance ! he proclaims, as with passionate sobs : but only to the ear of Heaven, if Heaven will give him audience : the earthly ear and heart, that should have heard it, are now closed, unresponsive forever. —M. Bos-well. BOS WELL. BoS^YELL was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye : visible, palpable to the dullest. His good qualities, again, belonged not to the Time he lived in ; were far from common then ; indeed, in such a degree, were almost unexampled ; not recog- nisable therefore by every one ; nay, apt even (so strange had they grown) to be confounded with the PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. I ig very vices they lay contiguous to, and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and gross Uver ; glut- tonously fond off whatever would yield him a little so- lacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is un- deniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a bab- bler; had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much when the Tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new man of him ; that he appeared at the Shakspeare Jubilee with a rib- and, imprinted 'CORSICA BOSWELL,' round his hat; and, in short, if you will, lived no day of his Hfe without doing and saying more than one pretentious ineptitude: all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure, and scent it from afar ; in those bag- cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more ; in that coarsely protracted shelf-mouth, that fat dewlapped chin ; in all this, who sees not sen- suality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough ; much that could not have been ornamental in the temper of a great man's over-fed great man (what the Scotch name ^ini^f) though it had been more natural there? The under part of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish character. Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuine good lay in him was nowise so self-evident. That Boswell was a hunter after spiritual Notabilities, that he loved such, and longed, and even crept and crawled to be near them ; that he first (in old Touch- wood Auchinleck's phraseology) "took on with Paoli;" and then being off with " the Corsican landlouper," took on with a schoolmaster, " ane that ke'eped a schule, and ca'd it an academy : " that he did all this, and could not help doing it, we account a very singular merit. 120 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. The man, once for all, had an 'open sense,' an open loving heart, which so few have : when Excellence ex- isted, he was compelled to acknowledge it ; was drawn towards it, and (let the old sulphur-brand of a Laird say what he liked) could not but walk with it, — if not as superior, if not as equal, then as inferior and lackey, better so than not at all. * * * * In fact, the so copi- ous terrestrial dross that welters chaotically, as the outer sphere of this man's character, does but render for us more remarkable, more touching, the celestial spark of goodness, of light, and Reverence for Wisdom, which dwelt, in the interior, and could struggle through such encumbrances, and in some degree illuminate and beau- tify them. There is much lying yet undeveloped in the love of Boswell for Johnson. A cheering proof, in a time which else utterly wanted and still wants such, that living Wisdom is quite infinitely precious to man, is the symbol of the Godlike to him, which even weak eyes may discern ; that Loyalty, Discipleship, all that was ever meant by He7'o- Worship, lives perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in these dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, and inspire all men with it, and again make the world alive ! James Boswell we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr, to this high everlasting truth. A wonderful martyr, if you will; and in a time which made such martyrdom doubly won- derful : yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited each other. . For a decrepit, death-sick Era, when Cant had first decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to pro- claim that God- worship and. Mammon- worship were one and the same, that Life was a Lie, and the Earth Beelzebub's, which the Siiprcnie Quack should inherit; and so all things were fallen into the yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corruption : for such an Era, perhaps no better Prophet than a parti-coloured Zany- Prophet, concealing, from himself and others, his pro- phetic significance in such unexpected vestures — was PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 121 deserved, or would have been in place. A precious medicine lay hidden in floods of coarsest, most compos- ite treacle : the world swallowed the treacle, for it suited the world's palate ; and now, after half a century, may the medicine also begin to show itself! James Boswell belonged, in his corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind ; a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit: but in his corruptible there dwelt an incorruptible, all the more impressive and in- dubitable for the strange lodging it had taken. —M. Bos- well. Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill-assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, indeed, is man's Hfe generally but a kind of beast-god- hood ; the god in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving more and more to subdue it under his feet ? Did not the Ancients, in their wise, perenni- ally significant way, figure Nature itself, their sacred All, or Pan, as a portentous commingling of these two discords ; as musical, humane, oracular in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven hairy feet of a goat ? The union of melodious, celestial Freewill and Reason with foul Irrationality and Lust ; in which, nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear and half-mad panic Awe ; as for mortals there well might ! And is not man a microcosm, or epitomised mirror of that same Universe ; or rather is not that Universe even Himself, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, 'the waste fantasy of his own dream?' No wonder that man, that each man, and James Boswell like the others, should resemble it ! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination : the highest lay side by side with the lowest; not morally combined with it, and spiritually transfiguring it, but tumbling in half-mechanical juxta- position with it, and from time to time, as the mad alternation chanced, irradiating it, or eclipsed by it. 122 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him ; discerning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass ; without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret ; and thus fi-guring him nowise as a god Pan, but simply of the bestial species, like the cattle on a thousand hills. Nay, sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of him ; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities that he did his good work ; as if it were the very fact of his being among the worst men in this world that had enabled him to write one of the best books therein ! Falser hypothesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by its nature negative, and can do nothing ; whatso- ever enables us to do anything is by its very nature good. Alas, that there should be teachers in Israel, or even learners, to whom this world-ancient fact is still problematical, or even deniable ! Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth ; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Open-mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness ; wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, how- ever, his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is the low- est, but Reverence, which is the highest of human feel- ings. None but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have found his way from Boswell's en- vironment to Johnson's : if such worship for real God- made superiors, showed itself also as worship for appar- ent Tailor-made superiors, even as hollow interested mouth-worship for such, — the case, in this composite human nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity ! But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last article of Faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worth the name : That PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 123 neither James Boswell's good Book, nor any other good tiling, in any time or in any place, was, is or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof. —M. Bosiveil. BYRON. With longer life, all things were to have been hoped for from Byron : for he loved truth in his inmost heart, and would have discovered at last that his Corsairs and Harolds were not true. It was otherwise appointed. — M. State of German Literature. CERVANTES AND BYRON. A CERTAIN strong man, of former times, fought stoutly at Lepanto ; worked stoutly as Algerine slave ; stoutly delivered himself from such working ; with stout cheer- fulness endured famine and nakedness and the world's ingratitude ; and, sitting in jail, with the one arm left him, wrote our joyfullest, and all but our deepest, mod- ern book, and named it Don Quixote : this was a genuine strong man. A strong man, of recent time, fights little for any good cause anywhere ; works weakly as an English lord ; weakly delivers himself from such working ; with weak despondency endures the cackling of plucked geese at St. James's ; and, sitting in sunny Italy, in his coach-and-four, at a distance of two thou- sand miles from them, writes, over many reams of paper, the following sentence, with variations : Saw ever the world one greater or unhappier ? This was a sham strong man. Choose ye. — — M. Goethe's Works. BYRON AND BURNS. We hope we have now heard enough about the effi- cacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days ? Byron, a man of an endowment consider- ably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer : the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, 124 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY, are his by inheritance ; the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him ? Is he happy, is he- good, is he true ? Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal ; and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the stars ! Like Burns, he is only a proud man ; might, like him, have 'purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan ; ' for Satan also is Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of his conduct. As in Burns's case too, the celestial element will not mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet and man of the world he must not be ; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration ; he caiuiot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy ; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged : the fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a world ; but it is the mad fire of a volcano ; and now, — we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow ! —M. Bums, BURNS. To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of making man's life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given. Destiny, — for so in our ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the faults of oth- ers, proved too hard for him ; and that spirit, which might have soared could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom ; and died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. And so kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless things ! How his heart flows out in sympathy over universal Nature ; and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning! The 'Daisy' falls not un- PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 125 heeded under his ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that 'wee, cowering, timorous beastie,' cast forth, after all its provident pains, to 'thole the sleety dribble and cranreuch cauld.' The 'hoar visage' of Winter delights him ; he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes of solemn desolation ; but the voice of the tempest becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the sounding woods, for 'it raises his thoughts to Him that ivalketh on the wings of the wind.' A true Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music ! But observe him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What warm, all-com- prehending fellow-feeling : what trustful, boundless love ; what generous exaggeration of the object loved ! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him : Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, and Courage ; the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and venerable to his heart: and thus over the lowest provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his own soul ; and they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence ; no cold suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, like a King in exile : he is cast among the low, and feels himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, that none may be disputed to him. The forward he can repel, the supercilious he can subdue ; pretensions of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him ; there is a fire in that dark eye, 126 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. under which the 'influence of condescension' cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he for- gets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels himself above com- mon men, he wanders not apart from them, but mixes warmly in their interests ; nay, throws himself into theii arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest despondency, this proud being still seeks reUef from friendship ; unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy ; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart that knows only the name of friendship. And yet he was * quick to learn;' a man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His understanding saw through the hollowness even of accomplished deceivers; but there was a generous credulity in his heart. And so did our Peasant show himself among us; 'a soul like an ^olian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into articulate melody.' And this was he for whom the world found no fitter business than quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise-dues on tallow, and gauging ale-barrels. In such toils was that mighty Spirit sor- rowfully wasted : and a hundred years may pass on, before another such is given us to waste. —M. Bums. SIR WALTER SCOTT. Friends to precision of Epithet will probably deny his title to the name 'great.' It seems to us there goes other stuff to the making of great men than can be detected here. One knows not what idea worthy of the name of great, what purpose, instinct or tendency, that could be called great, Scott ever was inspired with. His life was worldly ; his ambitions were worldly. There is nothing spiritual in him ; all is economical, material, of the "earth earthy. A love of picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous and graceful things ; a genuine PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 127 love, yet not more genuine than has dwelt in hundreds of men named minor poets : this is the highest quahty to be discerned in him. His power of representing these things too, his poetic power, hke his moral power, was a genius in extcnso, as we may say, not in intenso. In action, in speculation, broad as he was, he was no- where high ; productive without measure as to quantity, in quality he for the most part transcended but a little way the region of commonplace. It has been said, 'no man has written so many volumes with so few sen- tences that can be quoted.' Winged words were not his vocation ; nothing urged him that way ; the great Mystery of Existence was not great to him ; did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish. He had nothing of the martyr; into no 'dark region to slay monsters for us,' did he, either led or driven, venture down ; his conquests were for his own behoof mainly, conquests over common market-labour, and reckonable in good metallic coin of the realm. The thing he had faith in, except power, power of what sort soever, and even of the rudest sort, would be difficult to point out. One sees not that he believed in anything ; nay, he did not even disbelieve; but quietly acquiesced, and made him- self at home in a world of conventionalities ; the false, the semi-false and the true were alike true in this, that they were there, and had power in their hands more or less. It was well to feel so ; and yet not well ! We find it written, 'Woe to them that are at ease in Zion;' but surely it is a double woe to them that are at ease in Babel, in Domdaniel. On the other hand, he wrote many volumes, amusing many thousands of men. Shall we call this great? It seems to us there dwells and struggles another sort of spirit in the inward parts of great men. —M. Scott. Yet on the other hand, the surliest critic must allow that Scott was a genuine man, which itself is a great 12$ THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. matter. No affectation, fantasticality, or distortion, dwelt in him ; no shadow of cant. Nay withal, was he not a right brave and strong man, according to his kind ? What a load of toil, what a measure of felicity, he quietly bore along with him ; with what quiet strength he both worked on this earth, and enjoyed in it ; invincible to evil fortune and to good ! A most composed invincible man ; in difficulty and distress knowing no discouragement, Samson-like carrying off on his strong Samson-shoulders the gates that would imprison him ; in danger and menace laughing at the whisper of fear. And then, with such a sunny current of true humou'r and humanity, a free joyful sympathy with so many things ; what of fire he had all lying so beautifully latent, as radical latent heat, as fruitful inter- nal warmth of life ; a most robust, healthy man ! The truth is our best definition of Scott were perhaps even this, that he was, if no great man, then something much pleasanter to be, a robust, thoroughly healthy and withal very prosperous and victorious man. An emi- nently well-conditioned man^ healthy in body, healthy in soul ; we will call him one of the healthiest of men. Or, on the whole, might we not say, Scott, in the new vesture of the nineteenth century, was intrinsically very much the old fighting Borderer of prior centuries ; the kind of man Nature did of old make in that birthland of his ? In the saddle, with the foray-spear, he would have acquitted himself as he did at the desk with his pen. One fancies how, in stout Beardie of Harden's time, he could have played Beardie's part ; and been the stalwart buff-belted terrcB filius he in this late time could only delight to draw. The same stout self-help was in him ; the same oak and triple brass round his heart. He too could have fought at Redswire, cracking crowns with the fiercest, if that had been the task ; could have harried cattle in Tynedale, repaying injury with compound interest ; a right sufficient captain of PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 129 men, A man without qualms or fantasticalities ; a hard- headed, sound-hearted man of joyous robust temper, looking to the main chance, and fighting direct thither- ward ; valde stalwartiis homo ! — M. Scott. COLERIDGE. Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, [about 1828-9] looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle ; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His ex- press contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any spe- cific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent ; but he had, espe- cially among young inquiring men, a higher than liter- ary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms ; knew the sub- lime secret of believing by 'the reason' what the 'under- standing ' had been obliged to fling out as incredible ; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallow- tide, Esto perpetua. A sublime man ; who alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual man- hood ; escaping from the dark materialisms, and revolu- tionary deluges, with 'God, Freedom, Immortality' still his: a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer : but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character ; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gil- man's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon. The Gilmans did not encourage much company, or 9 I30 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. excitation of any sort, round their sage ; nevertheless access to him, if a youth did reverently wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place, — per- haps take you to his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the chief view of all. A really charming outlook, in fine weather. Close at hand, wide sweep of flowery leafy gardens, their few houses mostly hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy umbrage, flowed gloriously down hill ; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating plain-coun- try, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming country of the brightest green ; dotted all over with handsome villas, handsome groves ; crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible or heard only as a musical hum : and behind all swam, under olive- tinted haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward, — southward, and so draping with the city- smoke not fou but the city. Here for hours would Coleridge talk, concerning all conceivable or inconceivable things ; and liked nothing better than to have an intelligent, or failing that, even a silent and patient human listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at least the most surprising talker extant in this world, — and to some small minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent. The good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps ; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings ; a life heavy-laden, half- vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and ir- resolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 131 of sorrow as of inspiration : confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute ; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude ; in walk- ing, he rather shuffled than decisively stepped : and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring and surely much suffer- ing man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had con- tracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong ; he spoke as if preaching, — you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' and 'subject,' terms of contin- ual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang and snuffled them into "om-m-mject" and "sum- m-mject,' with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be more surprising. —Sl /. 8. B/S TALK. To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or not, can in the long-run be exhilarating to no creature; how eloquent soever the flood of utter- ance that is descending. But if it be withal a confused unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought, and drown the world and you ! — I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, — certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope ; the most had long before given up, and formed (if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own. He began anywhere : you put some question to him, made 132 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. some suggestive observation : instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out ; perhaps did at last get under way, — but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the glance of some radiant new game on th's hand or that, into new courses ; and ever into new; and before long into all the Universe, Avhere it was uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any. His task, alas, was distinguished like himself, by irres- olution : it disliked to be troubled with conditions, ab- stinences, definite fulfilments ; — loved to wander at its own sweet will, and make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for itself! He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the high seas of theosophic philoso- phy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean transcendentalism, with its 'sum-m-mjects' and 'om-m-mjectS;' Sad enough ; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them ; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things, for most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner. Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze ; but they were few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. Balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible: — on which occasions those second- ary humming groups would all cease humming, and hang breathless upon the eloquent words ; till once your islet got wrapt in the mist again, and they could recommence humming. Eloquent artistically expres- sive words you always had ; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight come at intervals ; tones of noble pious sympathy, recognisable as pious though strangely PORTRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 133 coloured, were never wanting long : but in general you could not call this aimless, cloudcapt, cloudbased, law- lessly meandering human discourse of reason by the name of 'excellent talk,' but only of 'surprising '; and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt's account of it: "Ex- cellent talker, very, — if you let him start from no prem- ises and come to no conclusion." Coleridge was not witiiout what talkers call wit, and there were touches of prickly sarcasm in him, contemptuous enough of thp world and its idols and popular dignitaries ; he has traits even of poetic humour : but in general he seemed deficient in laughter ; or indeed in sympathy for con- crete human things either on the sunny or on the stormy side. One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity, rub- bing elbows with us on this solid Earth, how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting ghosts and shadows! None such ever came. His life had been an abstract thinking and dreaming, idealistic, passed amid the ghosts of defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The moaning singsong of that theosophic- metaphysical monotony left on you, at last, a very dreary feeling. — .5"^. /. 8. HIS CHARACTER. To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble endowment A subtle lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous pious sensibility to all good and all beautiful; truly a ray of empyrean light; — but imbed- ded in such weak laxity of character, in such indolences, and esuriences as had made strange work with it. Once more the tragic story of a high endowment with an in- sufficient will. An eye to discern the divineness of the Heaven's splendours and lightnings, the insatiable wish to revel in their godlike radiances and brilliances ; but 134 THE CARLVLE ANTHOLOGY. no heart to front the scathing terrors of them, which is the first condition of your conquering an abiding place there. The courage necessary for him, above all things, had been denied this man. His life, with such ray of the empyrean in it, was great and terrible to him ; and he had not valiantly grappled with it, he had fled from it; sought refuge in vague day-dreams, hollow com- promises, in opium, in theosophic metaphysics. Harsh pain, danger, necessity, slavish harnessed toil, were of all things abhorrent to him. And so the empyrean el- ement, lying smothered under the terrene, and yet in- extinguishable there, made sad writhings. For pain, danger, difficulty, steady slaving toil, and other highly disagreeable behests of destiny, shall in no wise be shirked by any brightest mortal that will approve him- self loyal to his mission in this world ; nay, precisely the higher he is, the deeper will be the disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks laid on him ; and the heavier too, and more tragic, his penalties if he neglect them. —Si. I. 8. III. LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. LITER A TURE. Could ambition always choose its own path, and were will in human undertakings synonymous with faculty, all truly ambitious men would be men of letters. Cer- tainly, if we examine that love of power which enters so largely into most practical calculations, nay which our Utilitarian friends have recognised as the sole end and origin, both motive and reward, of all earthly en- terprises, animating alike the philanthropist, the con- queror, the money-changer and the missionary, we shall find that all other arenas of ambition, compared with this rich and boundless one of Literature, meaning thereby whatever respects the promulgation of Thought, are poor, limited and ineffectual. For dull, unreflect- ive, merely instinctive as the ordinary man may seem, he nas nevertheless, as a quite indispensable appendage, a head that in some degree considers and computes ; a lamp or rushlight of understanding has been given him, which, through whatever dim, besmoked and strangely diffractive media it may shine, is the ultimate guiding light of his whole path : and here as well as there, now as at all times in man's history. Opinion rules the world. —M. Voltaire. 137 138 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. THE POWER OF LITERATURE. It has been said, and may be repeated, that Literature is fast becoming all in all to us ; our Church, our Senate, our whole Social Constitution. The true Pope of Christendom is not that feeble old man in Rome ; nor is its Autocrat the Napoleon, the Nicholas, with his half-million even of obedient bayonets : such Autocrat is himself but a more cunningly-devised bayonet and military engine in the hands of a mightier than he. The true Autocrat and Pope is that man, the real or seeming Wisest of the past age ; crowned after death ; who finds his Hierarchy of gifted Authors, his Clergy of assiduous Journalists ; whose Decretals, written not on parchment, but on the living souls of men, it were an inversion of the Laws of Nature to disohay. In these times of ours, all Intellect has fused itself into Litera- ture : Literature, Printed Thought, is the molten sea and wonder-bearing chaos,- into which mind after mind casts forth its opinion, its feeling, to be molten into the general mass, and to work there ; Interest after Interest is engulfed in it, or embarked on it : higher, higher it rises round all the Edifices of Existence ; they must all be molten into it, and anew bodied forth from it, or stand unconsumed among its fiery surges. Woe to him whose Edifice is not built of true Asbest, and on the everlasting Rock ; but on the false sand, and of the drift-wood of Accident, and the paper and parchment of antiquated habit! For the power, or powers, exist not on our Earth that can say to that sea, Roll back, or bid its proud waves be still. —M. Taylor's Survey. THE ANARCHY OF LITERATURE. Tfie polity of Literature is called a Republic ; oftener it is an Anarchy, where, by strength of fortune, favour- ite after favourite rises into splendour and authority, but, like Masaniello, while judging the people, is on the third day deposed and shot. Nay, few such adventur- LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. j^g ers can attain even this painful preeminence : fc r at most, it is clear, any given age can have but one first man ; many ages have only a crowd of secondary men, each of whom is first in his own eyes : and seldom, at best, can the 'Single Person' -long keep his station at the head of this wild commonwealth ; most sovereigns are never universally acknowledged, least of all in their lifetime ; few of the acknowledged can reign peaceably to the end. —M. Goethe. THE CHAOTIC CONDITION OF LITERATURE. Complaint is often" made, in these times, of what we call the disorganised condition of society : how ill many arranged forces of society fulfil their work ; how many powerful forces are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a com- plaint as we well know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganisation ; — a sort of heart, from which and to which all other confusion circulates in the world ! Considering what Book-writers do in the world, and what the world does with Book-writers, I should say. It is the most anom- alous thing the world at present has to show. — * * Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations ; everywhere in the civilised world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to best advan- tages, address his fellow-men. They felt that this was the most important thing; that without this there was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs ; beautiful to behold ! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this 140 THE CARLVLE ANTHOLOGY. day or that, but to all men in all times and places ? Surely it is of the last importance that he do his work right, whoever do it wrong; that the eye report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray ! Well ; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his books, if lucky, he is of some importance ; to no other man of any. Whence he eame, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the mis- guidance. —H. V. THE ART OF WRITING. Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Rimes * were the first form of the work of a Hero ; Books, written words, are still miraculous Riuies, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time ; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbours and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, — they are precious, great : but what do they become ? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece ; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks : but the Books of Greece ! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives : can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, * "Odin's Runes are a significant feature of him. Runes, and the miracles of 'magic' he worked by them, make a great feature in tradition. Runes are the Scandi- navian Alphabet; suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Letters, 3S. well as 'magic,' among that people ! It is the greatest invention man has ever made, this of marking-down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first. If Odin brcught letters among his people, he might work magic enough ! " LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. 141 gained or been : it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men. Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Rimes were fabled to do ? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regu- late 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 Practice one day. Consider whether any Rwie in the wildest imagination of My- thologist 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-thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai ! It is the strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an in- evitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It re- lated, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present 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 works of men : teaching, preach- ing, governing, and all else. —H. V. BOOKS AND UNIVERSITIES. To look at teaching for instance. Universities are a notable and respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable ; while a man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had some knowledge 142 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learn- ets round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had also something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience opened : so many thousands eager to learn were already assembled yonder ; of all places the best for him was that. For any third teacher it was better still ; and grew ever the better, the more teach- ers there came. It only needed now that the king took notice of this new phenomenon ; combined or agglom- erated the various schools into one school ; gave it edi- fices, privileges, encouragements, and named it Univer- sitas, or School of all Sciences : the University of Paris, in its essential characters was there. The model of all subsequent Universities, which down even to this day, for six centuries now, have gone on to found them- selves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universi- ties. It is clear, however, that with this simple circum- stance, facility of getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Univer- sities, or superseded them ! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might speak to them what he knew : print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at hi? own fireside, much more effectually to learn it ! — Doubt- less there is still peculiar virtue in Speech ; even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances, find it con- venient to speak also. There is, one would say, ' and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must remain ; to Universi- ties among others. But the limits of the two have no- LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. 143 where yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in practice : the University which would completely take-in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing, — teach us to read. We learn to read, in various languages, in vari- ous sciences ; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves ! It depends on what we read, after all man- ner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection of Books. —H. V. BOOKS AND THE CHURCH. But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the intro- duction of Books. The Church is the working recog- nised Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing, or Printing, the preaching of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now with Books! — He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is he not the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of all England ? I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern coun- try. Nay, not only our preaching, but even our wor- ship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books ? The noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melody into our hearts, — is not this essentially, if we will under- stand it, of the nature of worship ? There are many, in all countries, who, in this confused time, have no 144 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. other method of worship. He who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a Hly of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us.as an influence of the Fountain of all Beauty ; as the handwriting, made vis- ible there, of the great Maker of the Universe ? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart, the noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man ! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic. Literature, so far as it is Lit- erature, is an 'apocalypse of Nature,' a revealing of the 'open secret.' It may well enough be named, in Pichte's style, a 'continuous revelation' of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth endure there ; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay, the withered mockery of a French sceptic, — his mockery of the False, a love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe ; the cathedral-music of a Milton ! They a«e something too, those humble gen- uine lark-notes of a Burns, — skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead in the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there ! For all true singing is of the nature of worship; as indeed all true working may be said to be, — whereof such singing is but the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. Frag- ments of a real ' Church Liturgy' and 'Body of Homi- lies,' strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature ! Books are our Church too. -H. V. LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. 1^5 LITERATURE AND GOVERNMENT. Or turning now to the Government of men. Witen- agemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The afifairs of the nation were there deliberated and decided ; what we were to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more com- prehensive way, out of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament ; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Es- tate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying ; it is a literal fact, — very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Par- liament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy : in- vent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal every-day extempore Print- ing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speak- ing now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law- making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures : the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to ; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation : Democ- / racy is virtually there. Add only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organised ; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstruc- tions it will never rest till it get to work free, unincum- bered, visible to all. Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant. —H. V. PHASES OF LITER A TURE. Literature, ever since its appearance in our Euro- pean world, especially since it emerged out of Cloisters into the open Market-place, and endeavoured to make itself roorti, and gain a subsistence there, has offered the lO 146 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. strangest phases, and consciously or unconsciously done the strangest work. Wonderful Ark of the Deluge, where so much that is precious, nay priceless to man- kind, floats carelessly onwards through the chaos of distracted Times, — if so be it may one day find an Ara- rat to rest on, and see the waters abate ! The History of Literature, especially for the last two centuries, is oflr proper Church History ; the other Church, during that time, having more and more decayed from its old func- tions and influence, and ceased to have a history. And now to look only at the outside of the matter, think of the Tassos and older or later Racines, struggling to raise their office from its pristine abasement of court- jester; and teach and elevate the World, in conjunction with that other heteroclite task of solacing and glorifying some Pidlus Jovis, in plush cloak and other gilt or gold- en king-tackle, that they in the interim might live there- by ! Consider the Shakspeares and Molieres, plying a like trade, but on a double^ material ; glad of any royal or notable patronage, but eliciting, as their surer stay, some fractional contribution from the thick-skinned, many- pocketed million. Saumaises, now bully-fighting 'for a hundred gold Jacobuses,' now closeted with Queen Christinas, who blow the fire with their own queenly mouth, to make a pedant's breakfast; anon cast forth (being scouted and confuted), and dying of heart- break, coupled with hen-peck. Then the Laws of Copyright, the Quarrels of Authors, the Calamities of Authors ; the Heynes dining on boiled peasecods, the Jean Pauls on water ; the Johnsons bedded and boarded on four-pence-half-penny a-day. Lastly, the unutter- able confusion worse confounded of our present Period- ical existence ; when, among other phenomena, a young Fourth Estate (whom all the three elder may try if they can hold) is seen sprawling and staggering tu- multuously through the world ; as yet but a huge, raw- boned, lean calf; fast growing, however, to be a Pha- LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. 147 raoh's lean cow, — of whom let the fat kine beware ! All this of the mere exterior, or dwelling-place of Lit- erature, not yet glancing at the internal, at the Doc- trines emitted or striven after, will the future Eusebius and Mosheim have to record ; and (in some small de- gree) explain to us what it means. Unfathomable is its meaning: Life, mankind's Life, ever from its unfathom- able fountains, rolls wondrous on, another though the . same ; in Literature too, the seeing eye will distinguish Apostles of the Gentiles, Proto- and Deutero-mar- tyrs ; still less will the Simon Magus, or Apollonius with the golden thigh be wanting. But all now is on an infinitely wider scale ; the elements of it all swim far-scattered, and still only striving towards union ; — whereby, indeed, it happens that to the most, under this new figure, they are unrecognisable. —M. Diderot. SOLDIERS OF LITERA TURE. The strangest regiment in her Majesty's service, this of the Soldiers of Literature : — would your Lordship much like to march through Coventry with them ? The immortal gods are there (quite irrecognisable under these disguises), and also the lowest broken valets ; — an extremly miscellaneous regiment. In fact the regi- ment, superficially viewed, looks like an immeasurable motley flood of discharged playactors, funambulists, false prophets, drunken ballad-singers ; and marches not as a regiment, but as a boundless canaille, — without drill, uniform, captaincy or billet ; with huge ^7'^r-pro- portion of drummers ; you would say, a regiment gone wholly to the drum, with hardly a good musket to be seen in it, — more a canaille than a regiment. Canaille of all the loud-sounding levities, and general winnow- ings of Chaos, marching through the world in a most ominous manner ; proclaiming, audibly if you have ears : " Twelfth hour of the Night ; ancient graves yawning; pale clammy Puseyisms screeching in their 148 THE CARLVLE ANTHOLOGY. winding-sheets ; owls busy in the City regions ; many gobhns abroad! Awake, ye living; dream no more; arise to judgment ! Chaos and Gehenna are broken loose ; the Devil with his Bedlams must be flung in chains again, and the Last of the Days is about to dawn ! " Such is Literature to the reflective soul at this moment. —L. D. P. V. ORGANISATION. All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the man of Letters in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the Senatiis Acadcmiciis and much else, has been admitted for a good while ; and recognised often enough in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If Men of Letters are so incalculably influential, actually per- forming such work for us from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will not always wander like unrecog- nised, unregulated Ishmaelites among us ! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtually unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages and step-forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power. That one man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite another: there can be no profit in this ; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, alas, the making of it right — what a business, for long times to come ! Sure enough, this that we call Organisation of the Literary Guild is still a a great way ofl", incumbered by all manner of complex- ities. If you asked me what were the best possible or- ganisation for the Men of Letters in modern society; the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual facts of their position and of the world's position, — I should beg to say that LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. 149 the problem far exceeded my faculty ! It is not one man's faculty ; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it, that will bring-out even an approxi- mate solution. What the best arrangement were none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is the worst ? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it ; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one there is yet a long way. —H. V. THE POVERTY OF LITERARY MEN. One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliament- ary grants of money are by no means the chief thing wanted ! To give our Men of Letters stipends, endow- ments and all furtherance of cash, will do little toward the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to be poor ; that there ought to be Literary Men poor, — to show whether they are genuine or not ! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men doomed to beg, were instituted in the Christian Church ; a most natural and even necessary development of the spirit of Christianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Cruci- fixion, every species of worldly Distress and Degrada- tion. We may say that he who has not known these things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of school- ing. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse woolen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business ; — nor an honourable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so made it honoured of some ! Begging is not in our course at the present time : but for the rest of it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for be- ing poor ? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is not the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned ISO THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every heart ; need, above all, to be cast-out of his heart, — to be, with whatever pangs, torn-out of it, cast-forth from it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made-out even less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows, but in that same 'best possible organisa- tion' as yet far off. Poverty may still enter as an im- portant element ? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still then, as they now are, a kind of 'involuntary monastic order' ; bound still to this same ugly Poverty, till they had tried what was in that too, till they had learned to make it do for them ! Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there ; and ever spurn it back when it wisehs to get farther. —H. V. SOCIETY— MONEY. The truth of the matter seems to be, that with the cult- ure of a genuine poet, thinker or other artist, the in- fluence of rank has no exclusive or even special con- cern. For men of action, for senators, public speakers, political writers, the case may be different ; but of such we speak not at present. Neither do we speak of imi- tators, and the crowd of mediocre men, to whom fash- ionable life sometimes gives an external inoffensiveness, often compensated by a frigid malignity of character. We speak of him who, from amid the perplexed and conflicting elements of their every-day existence, are to form themselves into harmony and wisdom, and show forth the same wisdom to others that exist along with them. To such a man, high life, as it is called, will be a province of human life, but nothing more. He will study to deal with it as he deals with all forms of mor- tal being; to do it justice, and to draw instruction from it ; but his light will come from a loftier region, or he wanders forever in darkness ; dwindles into a man of LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. j^j vers de societe, or attains at best to be a Walpole or a Caylus. Still less can we think that he is to be viewed as a hireling ; that his excellence will be regulated by his pay. ' Sufficiently provided for from within, he has need of little from without: ' food and, raiment, and an unviolated home, will be given him in the rudest land ; and with these, while the kind earth is round him, and the everlasting heaven is over him, the world has little more that it can give. Is he poor? So also were Ho- mer and Socrates : so was Samuel Johnson ; so was John Milton. Shall we reproach him with his poverty, and infer that, because he is poor, he must likewise be worthless ? God forbid that the time should ever come when he too shall esteem riches the synonym of good ! The spirit of Mammon has a wide empire ; but it can- not and must not be worshipped in the Holy of Holies. Nay, does not the heart of every genuine disciple of literature, however mean his sphere, instinctively deny this principle, as applicable either to himself or another ? Is it not rather true, as D'Alembert has said, that for every man of letters, who deserves that name, the motto and the watchword will be Freedom, Truth, and even this same POVERTY ; that if he fear the last, the two first can never be made sure to him ? — M. State of German Literature. POVERTY. Poverty, incessant drudgery and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. Locke was ban- ished as a traitor ; and wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding sheltering himself in a Dutch garret Was Milton rich or at his ease when he composed Par- adise Lost ? Not only low, but fallen from a height ; not only poor but impoverished; in darkness and with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier and in prison ? Nay, 152 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. was not the Araticana, which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written without even the aid of paper; on scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that wild warfare ? —M. Bums. COURAGE. Let no man doubt the omnipotence of Nature, doubt the majesty of man's soul ; let no lonely unfriended son of genius despair ! Let him not despair ; if he have the will, the right will, then the power also has not been denied him. It is but the artichoke that will not grow except in gardens. The acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, yet it rises to be an oak; on the wild soil it nourishes itself, it defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years. — M. Heyne. THE POET'S LIFE. Every Poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds him- self born in the midst of Prose ; he has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an Actual world, into the freedom and infinitude of an Ideal ; and the history of such struggle, which is the history of his life, can- not be other than instructive. His is a high, laborious, unrequited, or only self-requited endeavour; Avhich, however, by the law of his being, he is compelled to undertake, and must prevail in, or be permanently wretched ; nay the more wretched, the nobler his gifts are. For it is the deep, inborn claim of his whole spir- ■ itual nature, and will not, and must not go unanswered. His youthful unrest, that 'unrest of genius,' often so wayward in its character, is the dim anticipation of this ; the mysterious, all-powerful mandate, as from Heaven, to prepare himself, to purify himself, for the vocation wherewith he is called. And yet how few can fulfil this mandate, how few earnestly give heed to it ! Of the thousand jingling dilettanti, whose jingle dies with the hour which it harmlessly or hurtfully amused, we say nothing here : to these, as to the mass of men, such LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. 153 calls for spiritual perfection speak only in whispers, drowned without difficulty in the din and dissipation of the world. But even for the Byron, for the Burns, whose ear is quick for celestial messages, in whom 'speaks the prophesying spirit,' in awful prophetic voice, how hard is it to 'take no counsel with flesh and blood,' and instead of living and writing for the Day that passes over them, live and write for the Eternity that rests and abides over them ; instead of living commodiously in the Half, the Reputable, the Plausible, 'to live resolutely in the whole, the Good, the True!'* Such Halfness, such halting between two opinions, such painful, alto- gether fruitless negotiating between Truth and False- hood, has been the besetting sin, and chief misery, of mankind in all ages. Nay in our age, it has christened itself Moderation, a prudent taking of the middle course; and passes current among us as a virtue. How virtu- ous it is, the withered condition of many a once ingen- uous nature that has Hved by this method ; the broken or breaking heart of many a noble nature that could not live by it, — speak aloud, did we but listen. —M. Schiller. POET AND PROPHET. Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous ; Vatcs means both Prophet and Poet : and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Funda- mentally indeed they are still the same ; in this most important respect especially. That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe ; what Goethe calls the 'open secret.' "Which is the great secret?" asks one. — "The open secret," — open tc all, seen by almost none ! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance,' as */;« GaHzen, Guteti, H'ahren resolut zu leben. Goethe. 154 THE CARLYLE ANTHOLOGY. Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the vesture, the embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery is in all times and in all places ; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dia- lect, as the realised Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter, — as if, says the Sati- rist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together ! It could do no good, at present, to speak much about this ; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity ; — a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise ! But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mys- tery, the Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetra- ted into it ; is a man sent hither to make it more im- pressively known to us. That always is his message ; he is to reveal that to us, — that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it ; — I might say he has been driven to know it; without consent asked of kiin, he finds hirhself living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man ! Who- soever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things. A man, once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a Vates, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the 'open secret,' are one. With respect to their distinction again : The Vates Prophet, we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition ; the Vates Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the Hke. The one we LITERATURE, AND THE LITERARY LIFE. 15^ may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love : how else shall he know what it is we are to do ? The high- est Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, "Consider the lilies of the field ; they toil not, neither do they spin : yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." A glance, that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. 'The lilies of the field,' dressed finer than earthly princes, springing up there in the humble furrgw-field, a beautiful eye looking-out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty. How could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not in- wardly Beauty ? — In this point of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, which "has staggered several, may have meaning; 'The Beautiful,' he intimates, 'is higher than the Good ; the Beautiful includes in it the Good.' The true Beautiful ; which however, I have said somewhere, ' differs from the false, as Heaven does from Vauxhall ! ' — //. ///. DEFINITION OF POETRY, MUSIC. For my own part I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon as anything else : If your delineation be authentically musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterance of it, in the whole concep- tion of it, then it will be poetical ; if not, not. — Musical: how much lies in that ! A musical thought is one spo- ken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing ; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the ^nelody that lies hidden in it ; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious ; naturally 156 THE CARLVLE ANTHOLOGY. utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us ? A kind of inarticulate un- fathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that ' * * * Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical, — with a finer music than the mere ac- cent ; the speech of a man even in zealous anger be- comes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central Essence of us, Song ; as if all ^he rest were but wrappages and hulls ! The primal element of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies; it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature ; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom it turns still on power of intellect ; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. ~H. III. RHYTHM AND MELODY. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song! we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All ^/