"The works of a man, bury them under wha guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities; remains for ever a new divine portion of the Sum of Things."* produces yelow, and the kind which | this truth he is powerful. That which produces green, divine their effects he has discovered is immortal and effi from their nature, predict to people the cacious: tint under which the object we are about to present to them will appear, construct beforehand the system of every mind, and perhaps one day free ourselves from every system. "As a poet," said Goethe, "I am a polytheist; as a naturalist, a pantheist; as a mora man, a deist; and in order to express my mind, I need all these forms." In fact, all these glasses are serviceable, for they all show us some new aspect of things. The important point is to have not one, but several, to employ each at the suitable moment, not to mind the particular color of these glasses, but to know that behind these million moving poetical tints, optics only prove transformations governed by a law. $ 4.-CONCEPTION of History. I. "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world; the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these." * "No nobler feeling than this of admiration of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the for one higher than himself dwells in the breast vivifying influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it.... What therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but miration for the truly great? Society is founded an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive adon Hero-worship." f This feeling is the deepest part of man. It exists even in this levelling and destructive age: "I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall." II. We have here a German theory, but transformed, made precise, thickened after the English manner. The Germans said that every nation, period, civilization, had its idea; that is its chief feature, from which the rest were derived; so that philosophy, religion, arts, and morals, all the elements of thought and action, could be deduced from some original and fundamental quality, from which all proceeded and in which all ended. Where Hegel heroic sentiment. It is more palpable proposed an idea, Carlyle proposes a and moral. To complete his escape from the vague, he considers this sen"Such a man is what we call an original timent in a hero. He must give to abman; he comes to us at first-hand. A mes-stractions a body and soul; he is not senger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with at ease in pure conceptions, and wishes tidings to us. Direct from the Inner Fact of things;-he lives, and has to live, in daily to touch a real being. communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; it glares in upon him.... It is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things." + Whatever they be, poets, reformers, writers, men of action, revealers, he gives them all a mystical character: But this being, as he conceives it, is an abstract of the rest. For according to him, the hero contains and represents the civilization in which he is claimed or practised an original conhe has discovered, procomprised; ception, and in this his age has followed timent thus gives us a knowledge The knowledge of a heroic sen Cromweiss Letters and Speeches, in part * Lectures on Heroes, i.; The Hero as Dix.; Death of the Protector. vinity. Lectures on Heroes, i.; The Heroes De vinity. Ibid. In vain the ignorance of his age and his own imperfections mar the purity of his original vision; he ever attains some immutable and life-giving truth; for this truth he is listened to, and by ↑ ĺbid. ii.; The Hero as Prophet. him. a whole age. By this method Carlyle has emerged beyond biography. He has rediscovered the grand views of his masters. He has felt, like them, that a civilization, vast and dispersed as it is over time and space, forms an indivisible whole. He has combined in a system of hero-worship the scattered fragments which Hegel united by a law. He has derived from a common sentiment the events which the Germans derived from a common definition. He has comprehended the deep and distant connection of things, such as bind man to his time, such as connect the works of accomplished thought with the stutterings of infant thought, such as link the wise inventions of modern constitutions to the disorderly furies of primitive barbarism: "Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things ;-progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons. Hrolf or Rollo, Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in governing England at this hour."* "No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaïd Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavour, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay, the Snished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed." t Hence a new fashion of writing history. Since the heroic sentiment is the rause of the other sentiments, it is to this the historian must devote himself. Since it is the source of civilization, the mover of revolutions, the master and regenerator of human life, it is in this that he must observe civilization, revolutions, and human life. Since it is the spring of every movement, it is by this that we shall understand every • Lectures on Heroes, i.; The Hero as Di vinity. tfbid. v.; The Hero as Priest. movement. Let the metaphysicians draw up deductions and formulas, o the politicians expound situations ard constitutions. Man is not an inert being, moulded by a constitution, nor a lifeless being expressed by formula; he is an active and living soul, capable of acting, discovering, creating, devo ting himself, and before all, of daring; genuine history is an epic of heroism. This idea is, in my opinion, brilliant and luminous. For men have not done great things_without_great emotions The first and sovereign motive of ar extraordinary revolution is an extraordinary sentiment. Then we see appear and swell a lofty and all-powerful pas sion, which has burst the old dykes, and hurled the current of things into a new bed. All starts from this, and it is this which we must observe. Let us A revo leave metaphysical formulas and political considerations, and regard the inner state of every mind. Let us quit bare narrative, forget abstract explanations, and study impassioned souls. lution is only the birth of a great sentiment. What is this sentiment, how is it bound to others, what is its degree, source, effect, how does it transform the imagination, understanding, common inclinations; what passions feed it, what proportion of folly and reason does it embrace-these are the main questions. If any one wishes to represent to me the history of Buddhism, he ascetics who, deadened by the contemmust show me the calm despair of the plation of the infinite void, and by the expectation of final annihilation, attain in their monotonous quietude the sentiment of universal fraternity. If any one wishes to represent to me the his tory of Christianity, he must show me the soul of a Saint John or Saint Paul, the sudden renewal of the conscience, the faith in invisible things, the transformation of a soul penetrated by the presence of a paternal God, the irruption of tenderness, generosity, abnega. tion, trust, and hope, which rescued the wretches oppressed under the Roman tyranny and decline. To explain a revolution, is to write a partial psychology; the analysis of critics and the divination of artists are the only instruments which can attain to it: if we would have it precise and profound, we must ask it of those who, through | the historian does not obtrue himselt their profession or their genius, possess between me and his subject I see a a knowledge of the soul-Shakspeare, fact, and not an account of a fact; the Saint-Simon, Balzac, Stendhal. This oratorical and personal envelope, with is why we may occasionally ask it of which a narrative covers the truth, Carlyle. And there is a history which disappears; I can touch the truth itself. we may ask of him in preference to all And this Cromwell, with the Puritans, others, that of the Revolution which comes forth from the test, recreated had conscience for its source, which and renewed. We divined pretty well set God in the councils of the state, already that he was not a mere man which imposed strict duty, which pro- of ambition, a hypocrite, but we took voked severe heroism. The best his-him for a fanatic and hateful dispu torian of Puritanism is a Puritan IV. tant. We considered these Puritans as gloomy madmen, shallow brains, and full of scruples. Let us quit our French and modern ideas, and enter into these souls: we sha. find there something else than hypochondria, namely, a grand sentiment—am I a just And if God, who is perfect justice, were to judge me at this moment, what sentence would he pass upon me ?-Such is the original idea of the Puritans, and through them came the Revolution into England. The feeling of the difference there is between good and evil, filled for them all time and space, and became incarnate, and expressed for them, by such words as Heaven and Hell. They were struck by the idea of duty. They examined themselves by this light, severely and without intermission; they conceived the sublime model of infallible and complete virtue; they were imbued therewith; they drowned in this absorbing thought all worldly prejudices and all inclinations of the senses; they conceived a horror even of imperceptible faults, which an honest mind will excuse in itself; they exacted from themselves absolute and continuous perfection, and they entered into life with a fixed re. solve to suffer and do all, rather than deviate one step. We laugh at a revolu tion about surplices and chasubles there was a sentiment of the divine underneath all these disputes about vestments. These poor folk, shop. keepers and farmers, believed, with all their heart, in a sub'ime and terrible God, and the manne how to worship Him was not a trifling thing for them. The history of Cromwell, Carlyle's masterpiece, is but a collection of letters and speeches, commented on and united by a continuous narrative. The impression which they leave is extraor-man? dinary. Grave constitutional histories hang heavy after this compilation. The author wished to make us comprehend a soul, the soul of Cromwell, the greatest of the Puritans, their chief, their abstract, their hero, and their model. His narrative resembles that of an eyewitness. A covenanter who should have collected letters, scraps of newspapers, and daily added reflections, interpretations, notes, and anecdotes, might have written just such a book. At last we are face to face with Cromwell. We have his words, we can hear his tone of voice; we seize, around each action, the circumstances which produced it we see him in his tent, in council, with the proper background, with his face and costume : every detail, the most minute, is here. And the sincerity is as great as the sympathy; the biographer confesses his ignorance, the lack of documents, the uncertainty; he is perfectly loyal though a poet and a sectarian. With him we simultaneously restrain and give free play to our xonjectures; and we feel at every step, anidst our affirmations and our reservations, that we are firmly planting our feet upon the truth. Would that all history were like this, a selection of texts provided with a commentary! I would exchange for such a history all the regular arguments, all the beautiful colorless narrations, of Robertson and Hume. I can verify the judgment of the author whilst reading this; I no more think after him, but for myself; "Suppose now it were some matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine worship is), about which your whole knew not how to form itself into utterance at soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling, all, and preferred formless silence to any utter ance there possible,-what should we say of a, energy. Greeks." * This has caused the Revolution, and not the Writ of Shipmoney, or any other political vexation. "You may take my purse, but the Self is nine and God my Maker's." And the same sentiment which made them rebels made them conquerors. Men could not understand how discipline could exist in an army in which an inspired corporal would reproach a lukewarm general. They thought it strange that generals, who sought the Lord with tears, had learned administration and strategy in the Bible. They wondered that madmen could be men of business. The truth is, that they were not madmen, but men of business. The whole difference between them and practical men whom we know, is that they had a conscience; this conscience was their flame; mysticism and dreams were but the smoke. They sought the true, the just; and their long prayers, their nasal preachings, their quotations from the Bible, their tears, their anguish, only mark the sincerity and ardor with which they applied themselves to the search. They read their duty in themselves; the Bible only aided them. At need they did violence to it, when they wish ed to verify by texts the suggestions of their own hearts. It was this sentiment of duty which united, inspired, and sustained them, which made their discipline, courage, and boldness; which raised to ancient heroism Hutchinson, Milton, and Cromwell; which instigated all decisive deeds, grand resolves, marvellous successes, the declaration of war, the trial of the king, the purge of Parliament, the humiliation of Europe, the protection of Protestantism, the sway of the seas. These men are the true heroes of England; they display, in high relief, the original characteristics and noblest features of England-practical piety, the rule of conscience, manly resolution, indomitable *Lectures on Heroes, vi.; The Hero as King. Ibid. They founded England, in spite of the corruption of the Stuarts and the relaxation of modern manners, by the exercise of duty, by the practice of justice, by obstinate toil, by vindication of right, by resistance to oppres sion, by the conquest of liberty, by the repression of vice. Scotland, they founded the United They founded States: at this day they are, by their descendants, founding Australia and colonizing the world. Carlyle is so much their brother, that he excuses or admires their excesses-the execution of the king, the mutilation of Parliament, their intolerance, inquisition, the despotism of Cromwell, the theocracy of Knox. He sets them before us as models, and judges both past and present by them alone. V. French Revolution. He understands our manner of acting no better than our Puritan sentiment; and, as he does not He looks for manner of thinking. find it, he condemns us. The idea of duty, the religious spirit, self-government, the authority of an austere conscience, can alone, in his opinion, reform a corrupt society; and none of all these are to be met with in French society. The philosophy which has produced and guided the Revolution was simply destructive, proclaiming no other gospel but " that a lie cannot be believed! Philosophy knows only this: Her other relief is mainly that in spiritual, supra-sensual matters, no belief is possible." The theory of the Rights of Man, borrowed from Rousseau, is only a logical game, a pedantry almost as opportune as a "Theory of Irregular Verbs." The manners in vogue were the epicurism of Faublas. The morality in vogue was the promise of universal happiness. Incredulity, hollow rant, sensuality, were the mainsprings of this reformation. Men let loose their instincts and overturned the barriers They replaced corrupt authority by unchecked anarchy. In what could a jacquerie of brutalized peasants impel led by atheistical arguments, end? "For ourselves, we answer that French Rev olution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt, worn-out Authority.* 66 Revolution, revolts him against mod ern England: "We have forgotten God;-in the most So thousandfold complex a Society ready modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we to burst up from its infinite depths; and these have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it is men its rulers and healers, without life-rule for not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the themselves-other life-rule than a Gospel ac- eternal Substance of things, and opened them cording to Jean Jacques! To the wisest of only to the Shows and Shams of things. We them, what we must call the wisest, man is prop-quietly believe this Universe to be intrinsically erly an accident under the sky. Man is without duty round him, except it be to make the Constitution. He is without Heaven above aim, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world. While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot et the upper, and want and stagnation of the lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing is certain?... What will remain? The five unsatiated senses will remain, the sixth insatiable sense (of vanity); the whole dæmoniac nature of man will remain. "Man is not what we call a happy animal; his appetite for sweet victual is too enormous. (He cannot subsist) except by girding himself together for continual endeavour and endurance." t But set the good beside the evil; put down virtues beside vices! These skeptics believed in demonstrated truth, and would have her alone for mistress. These logicians founded society only on justice, and risked their lives rather than renounce an established theorem. These epicureans embraced in their sympathies entire humanity. These furious men, these workmen, these hungry, threadbare peasants, fought on the frontiers for humanitarian interests and abstract principles. Generosity and enthusiasm abounded in France, as well as in England; acknowledge them under a form which is not English. These men were devoted to abstract truth, as the Puritan to divine truth; they followed philosophy, as the Puritans followed religion; they had for their aim universal salvation, as the Puritans had individual salvation. They fought against evil in society, as the Puritans fought it in the soul. They were generous, as the Puritans were virtuous. They had, like them, a heroism, but sympathetic, sociable, ready to proselytize, which reformed Europe, whilst the English only served Eng land. VI. This exaggerated Puritanism, which revolted Carlyle against the French * The French Revolution, 1. pk. vi. ch. i. ; Make the Constitution. ↑ Ibid. a great unintelligible PERHAPS; extrinsically. clear enough, it is a great, most extensive Cattiefold and Workhouse, with most extensive Kitchen-ranges, Dining-tables-whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the Truth of this Universe is uncertain; oy the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical man. Laws are become a Greatest-Happiness Prin"There is no longer any God for us! God's ciple, a Parliamentary Expediency; the Heavens overarch us only as an Astronomical Timekeeper; a butt for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities at : in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the soul out of him; and now, after the due period,begins to find the want of it! This is verily the plague-spot; centre of the universal Social Gangrene. threatening all modern things with frightful deata. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poisonin atrophy and agony. You touch the focalexudations, under which the world lies writhing centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion: there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform bills, in French Revolutions, Manches ter Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, hour." reappears in new force and desperateness next We Since the return of the Stuarts, we are utilitarians or skeptics. We believe only in observation, statistics, gross and concrete truths; or else we doubt, half believe, on hearsay, with reserve. We have no moral convictions, and we have only floating convictions. have lost the mainspring of action; we no longer set duty in the midst of our resolve, as the sole and undisturbed foundation of life; we are caught by all kinds of little experimental and positive receipts, and we amuse ourselves with all kinds of pretty pleasures, well chosen and arranged. We are egotists or dilettanti. We no longer look on life as an august temple, but as a machine for solid profits, or as a hall for refined amusements. We have our rich men, our manufact arers, our bank *Past and Present, bk. iii. ch. i.; Phe nomena. |
