Consider, in the passage above quoted, his description of the citizens at their festivities; he shows you these men, in their private relations, when they are engaged in matters at the level of their comprehension, much like other men; they are not fiends-they have affections, duties, pleasures. And yet the awfulness of the situation is never absent from his thoughts. He shows you the minds of men, in all other respects inconceivably separated from each other, alike in this respect, that they seemed in the midst of black unmixed chaos; as if a new order of things had begun, in which all old experiences were wiped out-in which the extravagance of a line of conduct was no proof that it might not be the very line to lead to safety. And the chaos which men saw was intensified by the very fact that they saw it. All this Mr. Carlyle describes; and his description is most true, most impartial, most serviceable to all who desire to understand men.

The only narrowness that we can find in these early writings is a tendency to disparage, not all succesul men, but those whose success was based on qualities perfectly intelligible to the crowd, and who, therefore, had little apparent failure to undergo. This is most apparent in the case of Sir Walter Scott. Scott, says Mr. Carlyle, had no inward struggles-no fervent aspirations after the highest good; and he contrasts him not favorably with the Hindoo Ram-dass, who "had lately set up for godhood," and who said that he "had fire in his belly to consume the sins of the world." "Ram-dass," says Mr. Carlyle, with some wit, "had a spice of sense in him." But we venture to affirm that Scott was by no means without that "spice of sense" as well; Scott knew perfectly that to reform the world was a much-needed, but he also knew that it was a most difficult task. He knew that to reform the world, you must not take the rest of the world to be fools and yourself the only wise man; on the contrary, as Mr. Carlyle himself has said elsewhere, that the best way of reforming the world was to be continually reforming yourself. There is, as Mr. Ruskin has shown, an undercurrent of sorrow and self-introspection in Scott's writings which it is touching to trace. No doubt, Scott was not a speculative or logical thinker; but this is not the ground of Mr. Carlyle's attack.

In the same way Mr. Carlyle disparages Byron; and, forgetful of his great superiority in intellectual grasp and breadth of view, sets him down as inferior to Burns. He is offended by the wild chaotic element in Byron; but such an element is the necessary seed-ground of genius, which must mould its own forms, and can not accept them traditionally in the lump, however much we may lament that so powerful a mind should have remained to the end in these dark solitudes of spirit.

We have dwelt much on the sympathetic element in Mr. Carlyle's early writings, because we think it is not in general sufficiently noticed as belonging to him. It did indeed, from the first, cover, and at last has been entirely overborne bỷ, a deeper characteristic-a sarcastic and censorious indignation. And it is of this deepest quality of his nature that we now wish to trace the growth.

Mr. Carlyle's censoriousness was at first comparatively latent, because it was directed mainly upon himself. His moralizings turned inwards, and not outwards. Through all his earlier essays are scattered hints, involuntarily uttered, respecting the limits which necessity sets against the desires of man, and the resignation with which it is fit that we should acquiesce in these limits. Doubtless, he had met with sorrow; yet he never affects to despise the things, whatever they were, of which he had been disappointed. He is neither a coldblooded moralist, nor is he a mere Stoic. He has been called, and not altogether untruly, the typical antagonist of Byron; but he is so typical an antagonist, precisely because he is so similar to Byron. He feels the immeasurable longing for happiness which Byron felt; like Byron, he rejoices in the beauty and delight of external things-a delight which is so often. wasted and missed by us. But Mr. Carlyle feels this longing, this delight, only to repudiate it; to repudiate it as a principle of life. Yet, feeling as he does the intensity, the immeasureableness of the thing which he repudiates, he can not be content without something infinite and immeasurable on the other side to set over against it, and by which to overcome it-an infinite and sure peace to set over against the infinite but uncertain happiness which is what Nature gives us. As long as he was consciously in search of this first principle of emotion and action, so long were his

utterances guarded and moderate.

But

at last he believed himself to have found what he sought. The passage in which he imparts this discovery is contained in the chapter in "Sartor Resartus," entitled "The Everlasting Yea." It is necessary to quote it:

"There is in man a higher than Love of Happiness he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him. .

"Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that' Doubt of any sort can not be removed except by Action.' On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: 'Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,' which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.

The

"May we not say, however, that the love of Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this when your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed and thrown open. 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 nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.

"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of Creation is Light."-Sartor Resartus. ("Works," vol. i. p. 184 seqq.)

This is the central passage in Mr. Carlyle's writings, as indeed "Sartor Resartus" is the central work: to it every thing which precedes converges; from it every thing which succeeds diverges. After writing this, he felt himself enabled to criticise men and events freely.

The impressiveness of the passage will be felt, we think, by all; but at any rate by those who study it in connection with what has gone before. We have, however, two remarks to make on it; one with reference to what it contains, another with reference to what it does not contain. Mr. Carlyle says here, "Love God." Has

he ever said this a second time? Our belief is that he has not; however often he has since bidden men worship, or fall down in wonder before, the Unnamable, the Eternities, the Immensities. The change is noticeable: it is, to say the least, singular that a principle should be laid down with such emphasis, and never referred to afterwards.

He

Do

But secondly, a first principle ought not merely to be true, but complete. Now Mr. Carlyle has frequently asserted, and with the strongest emphasis, that the Eternal Powers reward and punish men. has likewise asserted that they hate. they then, also, love? He leaves us in the dark on this point. We, therefore, think it expedient to inquire this of him. If they do not love, what reason can he assign for this inhumanity in the deepest depths of nature? If they do love, do they love all, or only some? And what is the proof, sign, or trace of their love? Does it lie in the material success of those whom they love? If not, in what?

These questions, which Mr. Carlyle has omitted to consider in his works, we now propose to him, and invite his notice of them.

Our own answers we do not, at present, give; nevertheless, if required, we have them.

We now come to Mr. Carlyle's later writings; and we must own that there seem to us in them many and great defects. In saying this, we are not unmindful of the power manifested in them, which is not unworthy of the promise of his early days; nor do we fail to see many deep and piercing truths. But that they can satisfy the mind which seeks for secure scientific truth, or for a secure basis for action,— this, indeed, we can not believe. know well what allowance has always to be made for the possibility of misunderstanding in criticising the works of a man of genius. If we regarded Mr. Carlyle as unintelligible, we should never venture to say that he was defective. It is because he seems to us entirely intelligible, that we venture to declare him faulty.

It is worth considering how far he has carried out his own principles, which, after all, are worth nothing unless acted on. He said, "Love God;" and we presume he would not exclude from the meaning of this maxim that other maxim, "Love men." Now nothing is more marked in his later writings than the absence of tenderness:

admiration there is, but not love. There is no spontaneous trust in them; no willingness to believe that what is not seen may be excellent, that actions and dispositions at first sight questionable may be susceptible of explanation, or at any rate of palliation. He is Rhadamantine-inexorable as soon as a thing appears, it is stamped by him with black or white; and the white marks are very rare indeed.

He also bade men "act ;" and, for the third thing, he bade them "seek light;" that is, clearness of knowledge. How then has he carried out these maxims? He has certainly gained a good deal of clear knowledge in the historical line; and he has exhibited as much vigor of action as any man can exhibit in the way of writing. Nor is there any thing to be said against his conduct in these respects, though something against his consistency, considering the opposition which he has continually affirmed to exist between talk and action. But the real mischief lies here: For all knowledge, for all action, experience is required; principles, however sound, will do nothing by themselves. Now the field of experience to which Mr. Carlyle's faculty led him was one; the field of experience to which his desires led him was another, and a very different one. His faculty lay in the treatment of all which is deep in feeling, and vivid in external presentation. He might have been an unrivaled historian. But his desire was to exert a strong practical influence on mankind; and his defect in the cool patient understanding, in appreciation of the material mechanism of society, was a fatal barrier against his exerting such an influ

ence.

Of the qualities of a statesman he has none. There is not, we will confidently affirm, one single political proposal of his own, in the whole compass of his writings, that is even intelligible, let alone its being feasible or good; scarcely is there an instance of his supporting an intelligible political proposal framed by another. His writings are full of generous political feeling, and contain many considerations that may be made use of by a statesman; but of practical proposals, there is an absolute void. That he should have thought himself capable at all of entering on this field was a mistake, and a mistake not without pernicious consequences.

The error, however, was unavoidable. The desire, yet the incapacity, for action

was too powerful in Mr. Carlyle to be restrained; what he could not effect himself he was compelled to inculcate upon others. This vehement urgency chafes and mutters beneath the surface even of his earlier writings. He chides the temper, he rebukes it, he represses it; but it is there. In vain does he say that "no wise man will endeavor to reform a world; the only sure reformation is that which each begins and perfects upon himself." Mr. Carlyle, in spite of all disclaimers, was bent upon reforming a world. In vain does he take Goethe for his modelthe creative, impersonal, tranquil, universal poet. These qualities did not by nature belong to Mr. Carlyle; and he could not assume them. The volcanic fires burst out at length through all the green smoothness of their covering.

Moreover, there is in him a spirit of self-antagonism, of revulsion from his own nature, and, above all, from those parts of his own nature which might seem to be derived from habit or externally imposed argument or principle, that had no little to do with his rejection of his earlier temper of sympathy, and his assumption of the very reverse. To be natural and sincere has ever been the maxim that he has most earnestly inculcated; yet there is some danger in such a maxim, for all goodness is, in a certain sense, not natural to man. In his own case, the result has been, that his writings are full of extraordinary anomalies.

Nothing does he reprobate more than self-consciousness; yet he is most self-conscious. Rarely can he write five pages without reference to himself." Sauerteig," "Teufelsdröckh," " "Gathercoal," "Crabbe," "Smelfungus," these, and many more, are all so many aliases of Mr. Carlyle. The reader could well dispense with some of these masquerading shades, whose varying garbs ever give vent to one wellknown hollow yet bitter voice, a compound of Heraclitus and Democritus, the weeping and mocking philosophers in one. He preaches loudly and imperatively; yet his favorite maxim is, "Speech is silver, silence is golden." Poetic himself, and the panegyrist of numerous poets, he ends, like Plato, with condemning poets utterly. "Volcanic" is one of his best known epithets of dislike; is it not just to apply it to himself? He declares that the French Revolution was a divine revelation; yet

he is the avowed opponent of democracy. With the reverse intention of Balaam, he went up to the mountains to bless the progress of advancing civilization, and, lo! he was compelled to curse it altogether. These are some of his most remarkable inconsistencies; and the root of it is a something in his character, not without kinship to humility; but the humility of a haughty and self-confident spirit.

Further, this spirit of rebuke and prophecy was in part inherited by him from others. To begin with, it is national: the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum has long been celebrated; and the mantle of the Covenanters has fallen upon Mr. Carlyle. His tone and principles, his loves and his hatreds, even down to minute instances, bear no small affinity to those which marked that most stubborn and most intense of religious sects. And through the Covenanters he is not ambiguously connected with the old Hebrews. With these he feels himself at one. Rarely does he refer to the New Testament; rarely does he think of saints and martyrs, the souls that died in patience, without anger, without honor, without even the effort for an outward victory. But the old prophets and judges, who assumed the rule, and led armies, and denounced the evil-doer, and punished the enemies of God, are ever in his thoughts. Consider the following passages, whether as regards their reference or their character:

"There is one valid reason, and only one, for either punishing a man or rewarding him in this world; one reason, which ancient piety could well define: That you may do the will and commandment of God with regard to him; that you may do justice to him. This is your one true aim in respect of him, aim thitherward, with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul; thitherward, and not elsewhither at all!"

"God Himself, we have always understood, hates sin, with a most authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred. A hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and disappearance from the sum of things. The path of it as the path of a flaming sword: he that has eyes may see it, walking inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with

unquenchable fire, the false and deadworthy from the true and lifeworthy; making all human history, and the biography of every man, a God's Cosmos, in place of a Devil's Chaos. So is it, in the end; even so, to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous beast, and has eyes to see."

"The saddest condition of human affairs, what ancient prophets denounced as the Throne of Iniquity,' where men 'decree injustice by a law:' all this, with its thousandfold outer miseries, is still but a symptom; all this points to a far sadder disease which lies invisible within."

"Like the valley of Jehoshaphat, it lies round us, one nightmare wilderness, and wreck of dead-men's bones, this false modern world: and no rapt Ezekiel in prophetic vision imaged to himself things sadder, more horrible and terrible, than the eyes of men, if they are awake, may now deliberately see."

All these are from the "Latter-day Pamphlets." The substance of such passages as these we shall discuss presently; meanwhile, let there be observed, first, the intensely active spirit which they manifest. There is no patient waiting in them, no quiet sympathy. All is the zeal for action. And, secondly, let it be observed, there is no reasoning in them. When Mr. Browning tries to represent St. John, he makes him argue-a most fundamental error; for not in the whole of the Old and New Testament, except in the Epistles of St. Paul, who had a Greek education, is there a single instance of argument, as we understand the word. Everywhere there is the most intense, the most undoubting affirmation. And Mr. Carlyle has by nature this quality; by virtue of it, and by virtue of his zeal for action, he is Hebraic. Do we blame Mr. Carlyle for thus urging men to action? Far from it; he does well and rightly in doing so. But we blame him for this, that in his zeal for this one element he has wholly lost sight of all the other elements of a noble character. For thought, for systematization, except so far as it is conducive to immediate brilliant action, he now cares not. For the imagination which apprehends the beauty of material things he cares not. For the inward struggles of the spirit, contending against selfish desires and striving to fashion itself according to the Eternal Will, he cares not. For the germination

of great thoughts and great desires out of nothingness into that incomplete and immature existence which is the lot of almost all things at first, he cares not. All these things, of which his early writings are full, are in his later writings unmentioned, discarded, forgotten. Action, and the intellect which immediately determines action, is all that he admires.

What a contrast is this to the enthusiastic praise and sympathy which he once bestowed on such an immature, mystical, unformed writer as Novalis! What a contrast to Mr. Carlyle's own character! For heis in himself not in the least like those whom he admires. He is no vigorous, resolute, active man; nor (with all his illuminating flashes of insight) is continuous clearness, well-defined purpose, a character of his mind. He is constitutionally weak; never, he said once on a public occasion, had he written a book without making himself ill by writing it. He is meditative, deep-thinking; his very impetuosity is no mark of a practical nature. And yet it is this man who not only takes upon himself the office of exhorting men to be practical, but who has actually inspired numerous followers, some of them most distinguished and able men, with an enthusiasm for action always intense, and oftentimes good, sound, and effective.

It is no paradox to say that the contrast between Mr. Carlyle's own temperament and the temperament which he admires is at once the cause of his influence, and a proof of the great though partial strength of his nature. If Prince Bismarck or Mr. Bright were to issue addresses exhorting men to leave off theorizing and stick to practice, the exhortation would not carry with it any special weight. It would be replied to them, that they have not known the theoretical side of life. This reply can not be made to Mr. Carlyle. He, a thinker, and many would add, a mystic, deliberately, sets thought below action. He describes, with all the resources of an extensive knowledge and a brilliant imagination, the splendors of the power which diplays itself in mighty events, on the great arena of kingdoms; he shows how poor a figure the mere speculatist cuts when brought face to face with these pressing crises of change and peril, how soon he is overthrown before the man who has the ready wit to understand the emergency. And yet in the midst of this, he never

seems actuated by any over-measure of indignation against the theorists; he has the air of knowing them to the bottom; he accompanies them to the limit of their efforts, and rather pities than condemns their failure.

Such teaching as this was not calculated to produce any strong effect on men who were already practical and energetic; for, on the one hand, it did not meet any want or defect of their minds, and, on the other hand, it was not definite enough to help them in particular measures. But it produced the strongest effect on those who were naturally theorists. It pointed out to them a new possibility, an Eldorado of the spirit, a vision of mighty characters exerting themselves in accordance with the profoundest laws; for to the success of the man of action they tacitly superadded that truth of meditated design which they themselves instinctively aimed at. at. Let us not say that Mr. Carlyle did a small or poor work in thus rousing thinkers to the desire of action, in inspiring them with a magnificent hope of realized results. The work was great, and will endure.

The deliberate omissions alone are evil and pernicious.

Does Mr. Carlyle forget his own sayings about the Silences? It is in silence that the foundation of great things is laid, in the meditative vision, unbroken by inroads from without. But the Silences of late years must complain of neglect on the part of their former worshiper. Or, if he himself has now and then turned his relenting eyes back on them, he has led his followers to far different altars, to those of Force and Strength, under whose hands the benefactors of mankind now, as of old, fare but badly. The exquisite and lucid genius of Mr. Ruskin has been hurried away into subjects which he has not proved, with which he deals as an infant deals with the first seen phenomena of the world. That eloquent historian, Mr. Froude, has in an evil hour been induced to mount the prophetic tripod, and to deliver oracles respecting that demigod, Henry VIII., which awaken in the passers-by feelings of mingled astonishment and amusement. And all this, because Mr. Carlyle has chosen to consider that the only virtue existent is that single virtue of which he himself is absolutely devoid, the virtue of practical ability.

Further; not only does Mr. Carlyle