On the other hand, this visionary process is hazardous: when we wish to leap immediately into the familiar and generative idea, we run the risk of falling short; the gradual progress is slower, but more sure. The methodical people, so much ridiculed by Carlyle, have at least the advantage over him in being able to verify all their steps. Moreover, these vehement divinations and assertions are very often void of proof. Carlyle leaves the reader to search for them: the reader at times does not search for them, and refuses to believe the soothsayer on his word. Consider, again, that affectation infallibly enters into this style. It must assuredly be inevitable, since Shakspeare is full of it. The simple writer, prosaic and rational, can always reason and stick to his prose; his inspiration has no gaps, and demands no efforts. On the contrary, prophecy is a violent condition which does not sustain itself. When it fails, it is replaced by grand gesticulation. Carlyle warms himself up in order to continue glowing. He struggles hard; and this forced perpetual epilepsy is a most shocking spectacle. We cannot endure a man who wanders, repeats himself, returns to oddities and exaggerations already worn bare, makes a jargon of them, declaims, exclaims, and makes it a point, like a wretched bombastic comedian, to upset our nerves. Finally, when this species of mind coincides in a lofty mind with the habits of a gloomy preacher, it results in objectionable manners. Many will find Carlyle presumptuous, coarse; they will suspect from his theories, and also from his way of speaking, that he looks upon himself as a great man, neglected, of the race of heroes; that, in his opinion, the human race ought to put themselves in his hands, and trust him with their business. Certainly he lectures us, and with contempt. He de spises his epoch; he has a sulky, sour tone; he keeps purposely on stilts. He disdains objections. In his eyes, opponents are not up to his form. He bullies his predecessors: when he speaks of Cromwell's biographers, he takes the tone of a man of genius astray amongst pedants. He has the superior smile, the resigned condescension of a hero who feels himself a martyr, and he only quits it, to shout at the top of his voice, like an ill-taught plebeian.

All this is redeemed, and more, by rare advantages. He speaks truly minds like his are the most fertile. They are almost the only ones which make discoveries. Pure classifiers do not invent; they are too dry. To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it.' 'Fantasy is the organ of the Godlike, the understanding is indeed thy window; too clear thou canst not make it; but fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased.' In more simple language, this means that every object, animate or inanimate, is gifted with powers which constitute its nature and produce its development; that, in order to know it, we must recreate it in ourselves, with the train of its potentialities, and that we only know it entirely by inwardly perceiving all its tendencies, and inwardly seeing all its effects. And verily this process,

which is the imitation of nature, is the only one by which we can penetrate nature; Shakspeare had it as an instinct, and Goethe as a method. There is none so powerful or delicate, so fitted to the complexity of things and to the structure of our mind. There is none more proper to renew our ideas, to withdraw us from formulas, to deliver us from the prejudices with which education involves us, to overthrow the barriers in which our surroundings enclose us. It is by this that Carlyle escaped from conventional English ideas, penetrated into the philosophy and science of Germany, to think out again in his own manner the Germanic discoveries, and to give an original theory of man and of the universe.

§ 2. VOCATION.

It is from Germany that Carlyle has drawn his greateat ideas. He studied there, he knows perfectly its literature and language, he sets this literature in the highest rank, he translated Wilhelm Meister, he wrote upon the German writers a long series of critical articles, he has just written a life of Frederick the Great. He has been the most recognised and most original of the interpreters who have introduced the German mind into England. This is no mean work, for it is in a like work that every thinking person is now labouring.

I.

From 1780 to 1830 Germany has produced all the ideas of our historic age; and for half a century still, perhaps for a whole century, our great work will be to think them out again. The thoughts which have been born and have blossomed in a country, never fail to propagate themselves in the neighbouring countries, and to be engrafted there for a season. That which is happening to us has happened twenty times already in the world; the growth of the mind has always been the same, and we may, with some assurance, foresee for the future what we observe in the past. At certain times appears an original form of mind, which produces a philosophy, a literature, an art, a science, and which, having renewed human thought, slowly and infallibly renews all human thoughts. All minds which seek and find are in the current; they only progress through it: if they oppose it, they are checked; if they deviate, they are slackened; if they assist it, they are carried beyond the rest. And the movement goes on so long as there remains anything to be discovered. When art has given all its works, philosophy all its theories, science all its discoveries, it stops; another form of mind takes the sway, or man ceases to think. Thus at the Renaissance appeared the artistic and poetic genius, which, born in Italy and carried into Spain, was there extinguished after a century and a half, in universal extinction, and which, with other characteristics, transplanted into France and England, ended after a hundred

years in the refinements of mannerists and the follies of sectarians, having produced the Reformation, confirmed free thought, and founded science. Thus with Dryden and Malherbe was born the oratorical and classical spirit, which, having produced the literature of the seventeenth century and the philosophy of the eighteenth, dried up under the successors of Voltaire and Pope, and died after two hundred years, having polished Europe and raised the French Revolution. Thus at the end of the last century arose the philosophic German genius, which, having engendered a new metaphysics, theology, poetry, literature, linguistic science, an exegesis, erudition, descends now into the sciences, and continues its evolution. No more original spirit, more universal, more fertile in consequences of every scope and species, more capable of transforming and reforming everything, has appeared for three hundred years. It is of the same order as that of the Renaissance and of the Classical Age. It, like them, connects itself with the great works of contemporary intelligence, appears in all civilised lands, is propagated with the same inward qualities, but under different forms. It, like them, is one of the epochs of the world's history. It is encountered in the same civilisation and in the same races. We may then conjecture without too much rashness, that it will have a like duration and destiny. We thus succeed in fixing with some precision our place in the endless stream of events and things. We know that we are almost in the midst of one of the partial currents which compose it. We can detach the form of mind which directs it, and seek beforehand the ideas to which it conducts us.

II.

Wherein consists this form? In the power of discovering general ideas. No nation and no age has possessed it in so high a degree as the Germans. This is their governing faculty; it is by this power that they have produced all they have done. This gift is properly that of comprehension (begreifen). By it we find the aggregate conceptions (Begriffe); we reduce under one ruling idea all the scattered parts of a subject; we perceive under the divisions of a group the common boud which unites them; we conciliate objections; we bring down apparent contrasts to a profound unity. It is the pre-eminent philosophical faculty; and, in fact, it is the philosophical faculty which has impressed its seal on all their works. By it, they have vivified dry studies, which seemed only fit to occupy pedants of the academy or seminary. By it, they have divined the involuntary and primitive logic which has created and organised languages, the great ideas which are hidden at the bottom of every work of art, the dull poetic emotions and vague metaphysical intuitions which have engendered religions and myths. By it, they have perceived the spirit of ages, civilisations, and races, and transformed into a system of laws the history which was but a heap of facts. By it, they have rediscovered or renewed the

sense of dogmas, connected God with the world, man with nature, spirit with matter, perceived the successive chain and the original necessity of the forms, whereof the aggregate is the universe. By it, they have created a science of linguistics, a mythology, a criticism, an aesthetics, an exegesis, a history, a theology and metaphysics, so new that they continued long incomprehensible, and could only be expressed by a separate language. And this bent was so dominant, that it subjected to its empire arts and poetry themselves. The poets by it have become erudite, philosophical; they have constructed their dramas, epies, and odes after prearranged theories, and in order to manifest general ideas. They have rendered moral theses, historical periods, sensible; they have created and applied æsthetics; they had no artlessness, or made their artlessness an instrument of reflection; they have not loved their characters for themselves; they have ended by transforming them into symbols; their philosophical ideas have broken every instant out of the poetic shape, in which they tried to enclose them; they have been all critics, bent on constructing or reconstructing, possessing erudition and method, attracted to imagination by art and study, incapable of producing living beings unless by science and artifice, really systematical, who, to express their abstract conceptions, have employed, in place of formulas, the actions of personages and the music of verse.

III.

From this aptitude to conceive the aggregate, one sole idea could be produced—the idea of aggregates. In fact, all the ideas worked out for fifty years in Germany are reduced to one only, that of development (Entwickelung), which consists in representing all the parts of a group as jointly responsible and complemental, so that each necessitates the rest, and that, all combined, they manifest, by their succession and their contrasts, the inner quality which assembles and produces them. A score of systems, a hundred dreams, a hundred thousand metaphors, have variously figured or disfigured this fundamental idea. Despoiled of its trappings, it merely affirms the mutual dependence which unites the terms of a series, and attaches them all to some abstract property within them. If we apply it to Nature, we come to consider the world as a scale of forms, and, as it were, a succession of conditions, having in themselves the reason for their succession and for their existence, containing in their nature the necessity for their decay and their limitation, composing by their union an indivisible whole, which, sufficing for itself, exhausting all possibilities, and connecting all things, from time and space to existence and thought, resemble by its harmony and its magnificence some omnipotent and immortal god. If we apply it to man, we come to consider sentiments and thoughts as natural and

1 Goethe, the greatest of them all.

necessary products, linked amongst themselves like the transformations of an animal or plant; which leads us to conceive religions, philosophies, literatures, all human conceptions and emotions, as necessary series of a state of mind which carries them away on its passage, which, if it returns, brings them back, and which, if we can reproduce it, gives us indirectly the means of reproducing them at will. These are the two doctrines which run through the writings of the two chief thinkers of the century, Hegel and Goethe. They have used them throughout as a method, Hegel to grasp the formula of everything, Goethe to obtain the vision of everything; they have steeped themselves therein so thoroughly, that they have drawn thence their inner and habitual sentiments, their morality and their conduct. We may consider them to be the two philosophical legacies which modern Germany has left to the human race.

IV.

passion for It is rarely

too narrow

But these legacies have not been unmixed, and this aggregate views has marred its proper work by its excess. that our mind can grasp aggregates: we are imprisoned in a corner of time and space; our senses perceive only the surface of things; our instruments have but a small scope; we have only been experimentalising for three centuries; our memory is short, and the documents by which we dive into the past are only doubtful lights, scattered over an immense region, which they show by glimpses without illuminating them. To bind together the small fragments which we are able to attain, we have generally to guess the causes, or to employ general ideas so vast, that they might suit all facts; we must have recourse either to hypothesis or abstraction, invent arbitrary explanations, or be lost in vague ones. These, in fact, are the two vices which have corrupted German thought. Conjecture and formula have abounded. Systems have multiplied, some above the others, and broken out into an inextricable growth, into which no stranger dare enter, having found that every morning brought a new budding, and that the definitive discovery proclaimed over-night was about to be choked by another infallible discovery, capable at most of lasting till the morning after. The public of Europe was astonished to see so much imagination and so little common sense, pretensions so ambitious and theories so hollow, such an invasion of chimerical existences and such an overflow of useless abstractions, so strange a lack of discernment and so great a luxuriance of irrationality. The fact was, that folly and genius flowed from the same source; a like faculty, excessive and all-powerful, produced discoveries and errors. If to-day we behold the workshop of human ideas, overcharged as it is and encumbered by its works, we may compare it to some blast-furnace, a monstrous machine which day and night has flamed unwearingly, half darkened by choking vapours, and in which the raw ore, piled heaps on heaps, has descended bubbling in