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seven men whose names we have set down! How vast is the interval between the German transcendentalist and the strong common sense of Johnson! How opposed are they alike to the intellectual coldness of Hume! And if all these three have the kinship of genius, the commonplace unmarked character of Louis XVI. affords no such reason why Mr. Carlyle should trace his fortunes with sympathy. No one who reads the "Miscellanies" and the "French Revolution" attentively will deny that the breadth of sympathy displayed therein is one of the rarest qualities ever exhibited by any man. We are not saying that all Mr. Carlyle's judgments, even here, are perfect. Most people will think that he rates Burns too high; and a Frenchman would probably consider that he gave inadequate recognition to the universality of Voltaire. But these defects of a luxuriant nature are trivial when compared with the sterility of ordinary historians and moralists, who can do nothing but barrenly admire or condemn, and have not the patient care which follows a man through the changing scenes of his fortunes, marking at once the internal nature that made him act as he did, and the external consequences, good or bad, that flowed from his act. The cold impartiality of Hallam, so much praised, has no doubt its value; it keeps alive the sense of justice, so much needed among men; but it is not to be named by the side of that warm intelligence which apprehends, not merely the upshot of a man's life, but the whole course of it.

Of all the characters to whom it was difficult to render justice, but to whom Mr. Carlyle has rendered justice, Boswell is perhaps the most worthy of notice. Our readers will doubtless remember Lord Macaulay's essay on Croker's edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson," in which editor, author, and hero meet alike with castigation from that brilliant pen. Of all the persons whom Lord Macaulay ever satirized, there is none on whom a fuller measure of his contempt fell than on Boswell. Here are a few of his sentences:

"Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London; such was this man, and such he

was content and proud to be. Every thing which another man would have hidden, every thing the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal."

Macaulay's Essays. ("Works," vol. v. PP. 514, seqq., ed. 1866.)

Surely it might have occurred to Macaulay that to attribute extraordinary excellence to pure weakness and folly as its cause was, at the very least, paradoxical! Would it have been an unwholesome doubt of his own perspicacity if he had modified the sharpness of his sweeping sentences? Deliberately we say that Mr. Carlyle shows not merely greater insight, but far greater soberness of mind, than Lord Macaulay when he writes

"Boswell 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 recognizable therefore by every one; nay, apt even (so strange had they grown) to be confounded with the

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very vices they lay contiguous to, and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and gross liver; gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an allpervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much when the tailor, by a courtsuit, had made a new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakspeare Jubilee with a riband, imprinted Corsica Boswell,' round his hat; and in short, if you will, lived no day of his life without saying and doing more than one pretentious ineptitude; all this unhappily is evident as the sun at Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuine good lay in him was nowise so self-evident. The man, once for all, had an open sense,' an open loving heart, which so few have: where excellence existed, he was compelled to acknowledge it; was drawn towards it, and 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. It has been commonly said, The man's vulgar vanity was all that attached him to Johnson; he delighted to be seen near him, to be thought connected with him. Now let it be at once granted that no consideration springing out of vulgar vanity could well be absent from the mind of James Boswell, in this his intercourse with Johnson, or in any considerable transaction of his life. At the same time, ask yourself: Whether such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein.

The man was, by nature and habit, vain; a sycophant-coxcomb, be it granted: but had there been nothing more than vanity in him, was Samuel Johnson the man of men to whom he must attach himself? At the date when Johnson was a poor rustycoated scholar, dwelling in Temple Lane, and indeed throughout their whole intercourse afterwards, were there not chancellors and prime ministers enough; graceful gentlemen, the glass of fashion; honorgiving noblemen; dinner-giving rich men; any one of whom bulked much larger in the world's eye than Johnson ever did? To any one of whom, by half that submissiveness and assiduity, our Bozzy might have recommended himself. To no one of whom, however, though otherwise a

most diligent solicitor and purveyor, did he so attach himself: such vulgar courtierships were his paid drudgery, or leisure amusement; the worship of Johnson was his grand, ideal, voluntary business. Nay, it does not appear that vulgar vanity could ever have been much flattered by Boswell's relation to Johnson. Mr. Crooker says, Johnson was, to the last, little regarded by the great world: from which, for a vulgar vanity, all honor, as from its fountain, descends. 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 indubitable for the strange lodging it had taken."-Carlyle's Miscellanies. (“Works,” vol. ix. pp. 33, seqq.)

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There is no lack, here, of keenness to see the weaknesses of Boswell. Keenness, indeed, was hardly necessary in such a case; but yet a person of less strength that Mr. Carlyle, had he undertaken to defend Boswell at all, would have somewhat shrunk from the forcible and picturesque delineation of his faults. not for a moment, not in one single point, does Mr. Carlyle shrink. He gives the full aspect, as it might appear to the most hostile observer, of the gluttony, the vanity, the coxcombry, of the man whose cause he is advocating. And this would appear still more manifestly had we space to quote more at length from his essay. It is not without appreciating and representing the whole that may be said against Boswell that he gives that good element in himthat element so easy to overlook, so certain to be overlooked by all but the most generous natures, and yet an element which no mind of even moderate generosity will refuse to acknowledge when once it is pointed out-the element of love, and admiration, and humility. Few but Mr. Carlyle would have cared to prove the existence of these qualities in Boswell: that he did care to do so, that he had that rare gratitude which consents to blunt the edge of its satire, would of itself be sufficient demonstration of uncommon fineness of nature.

It is curious, again, to compare the criticism of Johnson himself by Mr. Carlyle with that by Macaulay. We are far from saying here that the advantage, as in the former case, lies wholly on Mr.

Carlyle's side; for Macaulay had a genuine respect for Johnson, which, considering the extreme difference of their opinions, did him, great credit; and the vivacity with which he moves the laughter of the reader against Johnson is good-humored, and not intended to arouse contempt. On the other hand, there is something elephantine in Mr. Carlyle's essay; it harps too much on general ideas, on the excellence of hero-worship, on the infinity of duty; on the evil of cant; nor is it possible to help suspecting that Johnson would have but imperfectly reciprocated Mr. Carlyle's feeling to himself, had he had the opportunity of doing so. But still the very defects of Mr. Carlyle arise from an excess of generosity. If he is ever wearisome, it is because he is at such labor to explain why he admires Johnson so much; it is because he has such regard for every token of a noble mind. Nor, again, is he blind to Johnson's limitations; his applause is not indiscriminate. An admirer and sympathizer, he is at the very farthest possible distance from being a follower or imitator.

Here are two passages, one from Macaulay's essay, the other from Mr. Carlyle's, which may serve as a specimen of the different way in which the two writers treat their subject. First, let us quote Macaulay :

"The roughness and violence which he" [Johnson] "showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be eo immitior quia toleraverat,' that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanor in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a

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kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection."—Macaulay's Essays. (“Works,” vol. v. p. 525.)

There is the common sense view of Johnson; a view neither bitter nor unjust, but not seeking to penetrate beneath the obvious exterior. Mr. Carlyle is not content with this; he endeavors to prove that Johnson was intrinsically polite and courteous, though he does not, of course, deny the frequency with which the exercise of these qualities was hidden under a rough show:

"In Johnson's 'Politeness,' which he often, to the wonder of some, asserted to be great, there was indeed somewhat that needed explanation. Nevertheless, if he insisted always on handing lady-visitors to their carriage; though with the certainty of collecting a mob of gazers in Fleet street

-as might well be, the beau having on, by way of court-dress, 'his rusty brown mourning suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, a little shriveled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose.'

In all this we can see the spirit of true politeness, only shining through a strange medium. Thus again, in his apartments, at one time, there were unfortunately no chairs. A gentleman who frequently visited him whilst writing his "Idlers," constantly found him at his desk, sitting on one with three legs; and on rising from it, he remarked that Johnson never forgot its defect; but would either hold it in his hand, or place it with great composure against some support; taking no notice of its imperfection to his visitor-who, meanwhile, we suppose, sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion. It was remarkable in Johnson,' continues Miss Reynolds, (Renny dear,) that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence. Whether this was the effect of philosophic pride, or of some partial notion of his respecting highbreeding, is doubtful. That it was, for

one thing, the effect of genuine politeness, is nowise doubtful."-Carlyle's Miscellanies. ("Works," vol. ix. p. 101.)

That this passage comes from a deeper and more patiently inquiring mind than Macaulay, will not be questioned. It was written, certainly, by one who did not fear to challenge, and (if need were) to contradict the first obvious appearance of a matter—an eminent and necessary characteristic of all discoverers of hidden truth. Of such a characteristic it is the necessary complement that the possessor of it should be liable to paradox and onesideedness. And yet we do not think that the charge of paradox will be brought against the passage we have quoted, or that, indeed, anywhere in these "Miscellanies," Mr. Carlyle has forgotten, or swerved from, that basis of common sense and common experience on which we all stand. He never, here, lays aside the practical consideration that he is addressing himself to readers of the nineteenth century-to readers who have already a certain stock of knowledge, which it is useless to ignore and irrational to despise, however largely he may himself be capable of adding to it. It claims and obtains the respect of his readers on the ground that he has a respect for them-that he can enter into their opinions, curiosities, desires. As an instance of his so doing, let us refer to his treatment of the German philosophersphilosophers who were seldom then mentioned but with derision, and whom Mr. Carlyle, in his later phases, has seen fit to discard as containing nothing worthy of attention. It was a better mind, in these earlier days, which led him, not to profess himself their disciple, not to accept their opinions or any special phase of them in the lump, but to hold them out as examples of sincere and profound inquiry, as well worthy of the study on the part of all who look into the difficult parts of speculation. Thus of Kant he says: "Perhaps among all the metaphysical writers of the eighteenth century, including Hume and Hartley themselves, there is not one that so ill meets the conditions of a mystic as this same Immanuel Kant." And again, very pertinently: "It is true, a careless or unpretending reader will find Kant's writing a riddle; but will a reader of this sort make much of Newton's Principia,' or D'Alembert's Calculus of Variations?' Of Fichte he speaks in terms of enthusias

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tic admiration. Of the works of the mys-, tic Novalis he says that they are fathomable mine of philosophical ideas, where the keenest intellect may have occupation enough; and in such occupation, without looking further, reward enough." He defends Coleridge, as a man "able to originate deep thoughts," and "having more intellectual insight than other men,' and affirms that his works are "like living brooks, hidden for the present under mountains of froth and theatrical snowpaper, and which only at a distant day, when these mountains shall have decomposed themselves into gas and earthly residuum, may roll forth in their true limpid shape, to gladden the general eye with what beauty and everlasting freshness does reside in them." Again, not confining himself to the German school, he says of Dugald Stewart: "We regard his discussions on the nature of Philosophic language, and his unwearied efforts to set forth and guard against its fallacies, as worthy of all acknowledgment." While opposing Locke, (in his "Essay on the State of German Literature,") he opposes him without bitterness or animosity.

It is needless to remark that Mr. Carlyle was not at this time, any more than afterwards, the adherent of any philosophical or scientific system. Thus, while he says of Kant's system, "We would have it studied and known, on general grounds, because even the errors of such men are instructive"-he never for one moment thinks of entering into its several parts. Minute analysis was never one of his characteristics. But if he never had the power of philosophical analysis, he had then a breadth of feeling and a tolerance, truly philosophical. It is the union of this with picturesque and animated description that constitutes so signal an evidence of power in his early writings; for though there is no discordance between these qualities there is great difference, and they are generally found in very different characters. To illustrate them both, take almost at random a passage from the "French Revolution." Here is one, descriptive of the Reign of Terror; first, of the victims, then, of the multitude:

"Another row of Tumbrils we must notice; that which holds Elizabeth, the sister of Louis. Her trial was like the rest; for plots, for plots. She was among the kindliest, most innocent of women. There

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sat with her, amid four-and-twenty others, a once timorous Marchioness de Crussol; courageous now; expressing toward her the liveliest loyalty. At the foot of the scaffold, Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes thanked this Marchioness; said she was grieved she could not reward her. Ah, Madame, would your Royal Highness deign to embrace me, my wishes were complete!' 'Right willingly, Marquise de Crussol, and with my whole heart.' Thus they at the foot of the scaffold. . . . "The spring sends its green leaves and bright weather, bright May, brighter than ever: Death pauses not. Lavoisier, famed Chemist, shall die and not live. Lavoisier begged a fortnight more of life, to finish some experiments: but the Republic does not need such;' the axe must do its work. . . . Condorcet has lurked deep, these many months; Argus-eyes watching and searching for him. His concealment is become dangerous to others and himself; he has to fly again, to skulk, round Paris, in thickets and stone-quarries! And so at the village of Clamars, one bleared May morning, there enters a Figure, ragged, rough-bearded, hunger-stricken; asks breakfast in the tavern there. He is haled forthwith, breakfast unfinished, toward Bourg-la-Reine, on foot; he faints with exhaustion; is set on a peasant's horse; is flung into his damp prison-cell: on the morrow, recollecting him, you enter; Condorcet lies dead on the floor. They die fast, and disappear; the notabilities of France disappear, one after one, like lights in a theatre, which you are snuffing out.

"Under which circumstances, is it not singular, and almost touching, to see Paris City drawn out, in the meek May nights, in civic ceremony, which they call Souper Fraternel,' Brotherly Supper? Along the Rue Saint-Honoré, and main streets and spaces, each Citoyen brings forth what of supper the stingy maximum has yielded him, to the open air; joins it to his neighbor's supper; and with common table, cheerful light burning frequent, and what due modicum of cut-glass and other garnish and relish is convenient, they eat frugally together, under the kind stars. See it, O Night! With cheerfully pledged wine-cup, hobnobbing to the reign of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood, with their wives in best ribands, with their little ones romping round, the Citoyens, in frugal Love-feast, sit there. Night in her wide

empire sees nothing similar. O my brothers, why is the reign of Brotherhood not come! It is come, it shall have come, say the Citoyens, frugally hobnobbing. Ah me! these everlasting stars, do they not look down like glistening eyes, bright with immortal pity, over the lot of man !"French Revolution. ("Works," vol. iv. PP. 325 seqq.)

Let this passage be attentively considered, and several things will appear from it. First, that Mr. Carlyle has no special party spirit in relation to the French Revolutionists, or to their opponents. Not, of course, that he can be devoid of the natural feelings of men toward events so terrible. He, like another man, can blame the original selfishness of the French nobility-can sympathize with their after-sufferings, in many cases heroically endured -can feel horror at the crimes of a Robespierre and a Marat. But these are not, to him, the whole; he can even look with a certain calmness upon these elements of the tragedy, knowing that there lies behind all these another and greater force. This tremendous revolution, as it was not itself the product of individual wills, but the outburst of a suffering nation, so did not either owe its horrors to the wickedness of individual men. The leaders in it were indeed, in the greater number of instances, wicked men; but they were also, with few exceptions, small and vain men. It is paying them too much honor to consider them the real causes of those events of which they were the immediate authors. And so Mr. Carlyle represents the matter. His eye does not rest on them; he looks beyond for a greater cause.

What is that cause? It is ignorancethe mutual ignorance on the part of men of each other's feelings, tempers, designs. When the different ranks in society stand aloof from each other, the error may at first seem small; but their ignorance of each other's lives is like a dangerous gas, at first stifling all good efforts, and afterwards bursting out into a destructive flame, when the smallest spark of suspicion falls upon it. A small moral obliquity, conjoined with a vast ignorance, is the source of the widest calamities.

Now, we do not know any history whatever in which this great fact of human ignorance, with its enormous consequences, is so fully understood and exemplified as in Mr. Carlyle's "French Revolution."

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