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simple expression; he employs figures | the breadth of the field which they at every step; he embodies all his traverse. From the sublime to the ideas; he must touch forms. We see ignoble, from the pathetic to the gro that he is besieged and haunted by tesque, is but a step with Carlyle. At brilliant or gloomy visions; every one and the same time he touches the thought with him is a shock; a stream two extremes. His adorations end in misty passion comes bubbling into sarcasms. The Universe is for him his overflowing brain, and the torrent an oracle and a temple, as well as a of images breaks forth and rolls on kitchen and a stable. He moves free.. amidst every kind of mud and mag-ly about, and is at his ease in mysticism, nificence. He cannot reason, he must as well as in brutality. Speaking of paint. If he wants to explain the em- the setting sun at the North Cape he barrassment of a young man obliged to writes: choose a career amongst the lusts and doubts of the age, in which we live, he tells you of

"A world all rocking and plunging, like that old Roman one when the measure of its iniquities was full; the abysses, and subterranean ar supernal deluges, plainly broken loose; in the wild dim-lighted chaos all stars of Heaven

gone out. No star of Heaven visible, hardly now to any man; the pestiferous fogs and foul exhalations grown continual, have, except on the higest mountain-tops, blotted out all stars: will-o'-wisps, of various course and colour, take the place of stars. Over the wild surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun,-though visibly it is but a Chinese Lantern made of paper mainly, with candle-end foully dying in the heart of it." *

"Silence as of death; for Midnight, even in the Arctic latitudes, has its character: nothing but the granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, the peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar Ocean, hangs low and lazy, as if he too were slumberover which in the utmost North the great Sun ing. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought of crimson and cloth-of-gold; yet does his light stream over the mirror of waters, like a tremulous firepillar, shooting downwards to the abyss, and hide itself under my feet. In such moments, Solitude also is invaluable; for who would speak, or be looked on, when behind him lies watchmen; and before him the silent Immenall Europe and Africa, fast asleep, except the sity, and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our Sun is but a porch-lamp ?” *

Such splendors he sees whenever he is face to face with nature. No one has contemplated with a more powerful emotion the silent stars which roll eternally in the pale firmament and Imagine a volume, twenty volumes, envelop our little world. No one has made up of such pictures, united by contemplated with more of religious exclamations and apostrophes; even awe the infinite obscurity in which our history-that of the French Revolution slender thought appears for an instant -is like a delirium. Carlyle is a Puri- like a gleam, and by our side the tan seer, before whose eyes pass scaf- gloomy abyss in which the hot frenzy folds, orgies, massacres, battles, and of life is to be extinguished. His eyes who, beset by furious or bloody phan-are habitually fixed on this vast Darktoms, prophesies, encourages, or curses. ness, and he paints with a shudder of If we do not throw down the book veneration and hope the effort which from anger or weariness, we will be- religions have made to pierce it : come dazed; our ideas leave us, nightnare seizes us, a medley of grinning and ferocious figures whirl about in cur head; we hear the howls of insurrection, cries of war; we are sick; we are like those hearers of the Covenanters, whom the preaching filled with disgust or enthusiasm, and who broke the head of their prophet, if they did not take him for their leader.

These violent outbursts will seem to us still more violent if we mark

*The Life of John Sterling, ch. v. ; A Profession.

rises the little Kirk; the Dead all slumbering hope of a happy resurrection;'-dull wert thou, round it, under their white memorial stones, 'in O Reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowd up of Darkness) it spoke to thee-things unspeakable, that went to thy soul's soul. Strong was he that had a Church, what we can call a Church: he stood thereby, though in the centre of Imlike towards God and man: the vague shoreless mensities, in the conflux of Eternities,' yet man

"In the heart of the remotest mountains

Sartor Resartus, 1868, bk. ii. ch. vii. Centre of Indifference.

Univers: had become for him a firm city, and | With such buffoonery he concludes his dwelling which he knew."*

best book, never quitting his tone of gravity and gloom, in the midst of anathemas and prophecies. He needs these great shocks. He cannot remain quiet, or stick to one literary province at a time. He leaps in unimpeded jerks from one end of the field of ideas to the other; he confounds all styles, jumbles all forms, heaps together pa

man abstractions, technical terms. poetry, slang, mathematics, physiology, archaic words, neologies. There nothing he does not tread down and ravage. The symmetrical constructions of human art and thought, dispersed and upset, are piled under his hands into a vast mass of shapeless ruins, from the top of which he gesticulates and fights, like a conquering savage.

Rembrandt alone has beheld these sombre visions drowned in shade, traversed by mystic rays: look, for example, at the church which he has painted; glance at the mysterious floating apparition, full of radiant forms, which he has set in the summit of the heavens, above the stormy night and the terror which shakes mortality.fgan allusions, Bible reminiscences, Ger The two imaginations have the same painful grandeur, the same scintillations, the same agony, and both sink with like facility into triviality and crudeness. No ulcer, no filth, is repulsive enough to disgust Carlyle. On occasion he will compare the politician who seeks popularity to "the dog that was drowned last summer, and that floats up and down the Thames with ebb and flood. . . You get to know him by sight. with a painful oppression of nose. . Daily you may see him, . . . and daily the odor of him is getting more intolerable." Absurdities, incongruities, abound in his style. When the frivolous Cardinal de Loménie proposed to convoke a Plenary Court, he compares him to "trained canary birds, that would fly cheerfully with lighted matches and fire cannon; fire whole powder magazines."§ At need, he turns to funny images. He ends a dithyramb with a caricature: he bespatters magnificence with eccentric and coarse language: he couples poetry with puns:

"The Genius of England no longer soars Sunward, world defiant, like an Eagle through the storms, mewing her mighty youth.' as John Milton saw her do: the Genius of England, much liker a greedy Ostrich intent on provender and a whole skin mainly, stands with its other extremity Sunward; with its Ostrichhead stuck into the readiest bush, of old Churchtippets, King-cloaks, or what other sheltering Fallacy' there may be, and so awaits the issue. The issue has been slow; but it is now seen to have been inevitable. No Ostrich, intent on gross terrene provender, and sticking its head into Fallacies, but will be awakened one day,in a terrible posteriori manner if not otherwise!" ||

II.

This kind of mind produces humor, a word untranslatable in French, because in France they have not the idea. Humor is a species of talent which amuses Germans, Northmen; it suits their mind, as beer and brandy suit their palate. For men of another race it is disagreeable; they often find it too harsh and bitter. Amongst other things, this talent embraces a taste for contrasts. Swift jokes with the serious mien of an ecclesiastic, performing religious rites, and develops the most grotesque absurdities, like a convinced man. Hamlet, shaken with terror and despair, bristles with buffooneries. Heine mocks his own emotions, even whilst he displays them. These men love travesties, put a solemn garb over comic ideas, a clown's jacket over grave ones.

Another feature of humor is that the author forgets the public for whom he writes. He tells us that he does not care for us, tha he needs neither to be understood nor approved, that he thinks and amuses himself by himself, and that if his taste and ideas displease us we have only to take our selves off. He wishes to be refined and original at his ease; he is at home ↑ In the Adoration of the Magi. Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850; Stump Ora-in his book, and with closed doors, he gets into his slippers, dressing-gown, The French Revolution, i. bk. ii. ch. vii.; often with his feet in the air, sometimes Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, iii. x. ¡ | his own, and marks his idea in his ow without a shirt. Carlyle has a style of

History of the French Revolution, bk. i. ch. ii.; Realized Ideals.

tor, 35.

Internecine.

the end.

"To the eye of vulgar Logic," says he, "what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Aplies, under all those wool-rags, a Garn'ent of parition. Round his mysterious ME. there Flesh (or of Senses) contextured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands and sees and fashions for himself a Universe, of Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and inextricably over God." + shrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a

tric and mystical, hiding theories under The paradox continues, at once eccenfollies, mixing together fierce ironies, tender pastorals, love-stories, explosions of rage, and carnival pictures. He says wel!:

"Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modern History is not the Diet of Worms, still loo, Peterloo, or any other Battle; but an inless the battle of Austerlitz, Wagram, Watercident 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."

ashion; it is our business to under-pineal gland of the Body wcial: I tand it. He alludes to a saying of mean, a PURSE:"* Goethe, or Shakspeare, or to an anecdote which strikes him at the moment; so much the worse for us if we do not know it. He shouts when the fancy takes him; the worse for us if our ears do not like it. He writes on the caprice of his imagination, with all the starts of invention; the worse for us if our mind goes at a different pace. He catches on the wing all the shades, all the oddities of his conception; the wse for us if ours cannot reach them. A last feature of humor is the irruption of violent joviality, buried under a heap of sadness. Absurd incongruity appears unexpected. Physical nature, hidden and oppressed under habits of melancholic reflection, is laid bare for an instant. We see a grimace, a clown's gesture, then every thing resumes its wonted gravity. Add lastly the unforeseen flashes of imagination. The humorist covers a poet; suddenly, in the monotonous mist of prose, at the end of an argument, a vista opens up; beautiful or ugly, it matters not; it is enough that it strikes our eyes. These inequalities fairly paint the solitary, energetic, imaginative German, a lover of violent contrasts, based on personal and gloomy reflection, with sudden upwellings of physical instinct, so different from the Latin and classical races, races of orators or artists, where they never write but with an eye to the public, where they relish only consequent ideas, are only happy in the spectacle of harmonious forms, where the fancy is regulated, and voluptuousness appears natural. Carlyle is profoundly German, nearer to the primitive stock than any of his contemporaries, strange and unexampled in his fancies and his pleasantries; he calls himself " a bemired aurochs or urus of the German woods, the poor wood-ox so bemired in the forests."* For instance, his first book Sartor Resartus, which is a clothes-philosophy, contains, à propos of aprons and breeches, metaphysics, politics, psychology. Man, according to him, is a dressed animal. Society has clothes to. its foundation. How, without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's seat, and true * Life of Sterling.

46

For, thus clothed for the rest of his life, lodging in a tree and eating wild berries, man could remain idle and invent Puritanism, that is, conscienceworship, at his leisure. This is how Carlyle treats the ideas which are dearest to him. He jests in connection with the doctrine, which was to employ his life and occupy his whole soul.

Should we like an abstract of his politics, and his opinion about his country? He proves that in the modern transformation of religions two principal sects have risen, especially in England; the one of "Poor Slaves," the other of Dandies. Of the first he says:

"Something Monastic there appears to be in their Constitution: we find them bound by the two Monastic Vows, of Poverty and Obedience; they observe with great strictness; nay, as which Vows, especially the former, it is said, have understood it, they are pledged, and be it by any solemn Nazarene or nation or not, ir birth. That the third Monastic Vow, of Chastity, is rigidly enforced among them, I find ro ground to conjecture.

revocably consecrated thereto, even before

son.

* Sartor Resartus, bk. i. ch. x.; Pure Rea ↑ Ibid. Ibid. bk. iii. ch. i.; Incident in Modern History.

"Furthermore, they appear to imitate the Dandiacal Sect in their grand principle of wearmg a peculiar Costume.... Their raiment consists of innumerable skirts, lappets, and irregular wings, of all cloths and of all colours; through the labyrinthic intricacies of which their bodies are introduced by some unknown process. It is fastened together by a multiplex combination of buttons, thrums, and skewers; to which frequently is added a girdle of leather, of hempen or even of straw rope, round the loins. To straw rope, indeed, they seem partial, and often wear it by way of sandals.

...

One might fancy them worshippers of Hertha, or the Earth: for they dig and affection ately work continually in her bosom; or else, shut up in private Oratories, meditate and manipulate the substances derived from her; seldom looking up towards the Heavenly Luminaries, and then with comparative indifference. Like the Druids, on the other hand, they live in dark dwellings; often even breaking their glass-windows, where they find such, and stuffing them up with pieces of raiment, or other opaque substances, till the fit obscurity is restored.

"In respect of diet they have also their observances. All Poor Slaves are Rhizophagous (or Root-eaters); a few are Ichthyophagous, and use Salted Herrings; other animal food they abstain from; except indeed, with perhaps some strange inverted fragment of a Brahminical feeling, such animals as die a natural death.

Their universal sustenance is the root named Potato, cooked by fire alone. In all their

Religious Solemnities, Potheen is said to be an indispensable requisite, and largely con- ́ sumed.

Of the other sect he says:

"A certain touch of Manicheism, not indeed in the Gnostic shape, is discernible enough: also (for human Error walks in a cycle, and reappears at intervals) a not-inconsiderable 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 Apoc alypse of Nature, and Heaven Unveiled. To my own surmise, it appears as if this Dandiacal Sect were but a new modification, adapted to the new time, of that primeval Superstition, Self-worship.

They affect great purity and separatism; distinguish themselves by a particular costume (whereof some notices were given in the earlier part of this Volume); likewise, so far as possible, by a particular speech (apparently some briken Lingua-franca, or English-French); and, on the whole, strive to maintain a true Nazarene deportment, and keep themselves unspotted from the world."

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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

*Sartor Resartus, bk. iii. ch. x.; The Dandiacal Body.

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4. There is safety in a swallow-tail.

5. The good sense of a gentleman is no where more finely developed than in his rings. "6. Itis permitted to mankind, under certain restrictions, to wear white waistcoats.

66

7. The trousers must be exceedingly tight across the hips.

"All which Propositions I, for the present, content myself with modestly but peremptorily and irrevocably denying." ↑

This premised, he draws conclusions:

"I might call them two boundless and indeed unexampled Electric Machines (turned by the 'Machinery of Society'), with batteries of op posite quality; Drudgism the Negative, Dandyism the Positive: one attracts hourly towards it and appropriates all the Positive Electricity of the nation (namely, the Money thereof); the other is equally busy with the Negative (that is to say the Hunger), which is equally potent. Hitherto you see only partial transient sparkles and sputters: but wait a little, till the entire nation is in an electric state; till your whole vital Electricity, no longer healthfully Neutral, is cut into two isolated portions of Positive and Negative (of Money and of Hunger); and The stirring of a child's finger brings the two stands there bottled-up in two World-Batteries! together; and then-What then? The Earth Doom's-thunderpeal: the Sun misses one of is but shivered into impalpable smoke by that his Planets in Space, and thenceforth there are no eclipses of the Moon. Or better still, I might liken-"+

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He stops suddenly, and leaves you to your conjectures. This bitter pleas antry is that of an enraged or despair. ing man, who designedly, and simply by reason of the violence of his pas sion, would restrain it and force himself to laugh; but whom a sudden I shudder at the end reveals just as he is. In one place Carlyle says that there is, at the bottom of the English character, underneath all its habits of calculation and coolness, an inextin guishable furnace :

"Deep hidden it lies, far down in the centre ke genial central fire, with stratum after stra ↑ Ibid. 1 Ibid.

• Ibid.

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It is a fire of extraordinary fierceness,
as the rage of devoted Berserkirs, who,
once rushing to the heat of the battle,
felt no more their wounds, and lived,
fought, and killed, pierced with strokes,
the least of which would have been
mortal to an ordinary man.
It is this
destructive frenzy, this rousing of in-
ward unknown powers, this loosening
of a ferocity, enthusiasm, and imagi-
nation disordered and not to be bridled,
which appeared in these men at the
Renaissance and the Reformation, and
a remnant of which still endures in
Carlyle. Here is a vestige of it, in a
passage almost worthy of Swift, which
is the abstract of his customary emo-
tions, and at the same time his con-
clusion on the age in which we live :

66

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duty of all Pigs, at all times, to diminish_the quantity of unattainable and increase that of at tafnable. All knowledge and device and effort ought to be directed thither and thither only: Pig science, Pig enthusiasm and Devotion have this one aim. It is the Whole Duty of Pigs.

5. Pig Poetry ought to cor sist of universa recognition of the excel ence of Pig's-wash and ground barley, and the felicity of Pigs whose trough is in order, and who have had enough: Hrumph!

"6. The Pig knows the weater; he ought to look out what kind of weather it will be. perhaps the Pork-butcher. 7. 'Who made the Pig?' Unknown

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"8. Have you Law and Justice in Pigdom?" Pigs of observation have discerned that there is, or was once supposed to be, a thing called justice. Undeniably at least there is a sentiment in Pig-nature called indignation, revenge, etc., which, if one Pig provoke another, comes out in a more or less destructive manner: hence For quarrelling is attended with loss of blood, laws are necessary, amazing quantities of laws. of life, at any rate with frightful effusion of the general stock of Hog's-wash, and ruin (temporary ruin) to large sections of the universal served, that so quarrelling be avoided. Swine's trough: wherefore let justice be ob

66

9. What is justice? Your own share of the general Swine's-trough, not any portion of my share. 10. 'But what is 'my' share?' Ah! there, in fact, lies the grand difficulty; upon which Supposing swine (I mean four-footed Pig science, meditating this long while, can swine), of sensibility and superior logical parts, settle absolutely nothing. My share-hrumph! had attained such culture; and could, after sur-my share is, on the whole, whatever I can vey and reflection, jot down for us their notion contrive to get without being hanged or sent to of the Universe, and of their interest and duties the hulks.” * there,-might it not well interest a discerning public, perhaps in unexpected ways, and give a stimulus to the languishing book-trade? The votes of all creatures, it is understood at present, ought to be had; that you may legislate' for them with better insight. 'How can you govern a thing,' say many, without first asking its vote? Unless, indeed, you already chance to know its vote,-and even something more, it wants by its vote; and, still more important, what Nature wants,-which latter, at the end of the account,--the only thing that will be got!-Pig Propositions, in a rough form, are some

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namely, what you are to think of its vote; what

what as follows:

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1. The Universe, so far as sane conjecture can go, is an immeasurable Swine's-trough, consisting of solid and liquid, and of other contrasts and kinds;-especially consisting of attainable and unattainable, the latter in immensely greater quantities for most pigs.

4. Moral evil is unattainability of Pig's wash; moral good, attainability of ditto. Locence? Paradise, called also State of Inrocence, Age of Geld, and other names, was (according to Pigs of weak judgment) unlimited attainability of Pig's-wash: perfect fulfilment of one's wishes, so that the Pig's imagination could not outrun reality; a fable and an impossibility, as Pigs of sense now see.

66 3. 'What is Faradise, or the State of In

Such is the mire in which he plunges modern life, and, beyond all others, Eng. lish life; drowning at the same time, and in the same filth, the positive mind, the love of comfort, industrial science, Church, State philosophy and law. This cynical catechism, thrown in amidst furi. ous declamations, gives, I think, the dominant note of this strange mind: it is this mad tension which constitutes his talent; which produces and explains his images and incongruities, his laughter and his rages. There is an Eng. lish expression which cannot be trans lated into French, but which depicts this condition, and illustrates the whole physical constitution of the race: His blood is up. In fact, the cold and phlegmatic temperament covers surface; but when the roused blood has swept through the veins, the fevered animal can only be glutted by devasta. tion, and be satiated by excess.

4. 'Define the Whole Duty of Pigs.' It the mission of universal Pighood, and the 28.

* Latter-Day Pamphlets 1850: Jesuitis

the

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