our sole object is to find ourselves face to face with the sublime; the whole destiny of man is to perceive heroism; poetry and art have no other employment or merit. You see how far and with what excess Carlyle possesses the Germanic sentiment, why he loves the mystics, humorists, prophets, illiterate writers, and men of action, spontaneous poets, all who violate regular beauty through ignorance, brutality, folly, or deliberately. He goes so far as to excuse the rhetoric of Johnson, because Johnson was loyal and sincere; he does not distinguish in him the literary man from the practical: he ceases to see the classic declaimer, a strange compound of Scaliger, Boileau, and La Harpe, majestically decked out in the Ciceronian gown, to see only the religious man of convictions. Such a habit shuts the eyes to one half of things. Carlyle speaks with scornful indifference of modern dilettantism, seems to despise painters, admits no sensible beauty. Wholly on the side of the writers, he neglects the artists; for the source of arts is the sentiment of form; and the greatest artists, the Italians, the Greeks, did not know, like their priests and poets, any beauty beyond that of voluptuousness and force. Thence also it comes that he has no taste for French literature. The exact order, the fine proportions, the perpetual regard for the agreeable and proper, the harmonious structure of clear and consecutive ideas, the delicate picture of society, the perfection of style,-nothing which moves us, has attraction for him. His mode of comprehending life is too far removed from ours. In vain he tries to understand Voltaire; 1 all he can do is to slander him: We find no heroism of character in him, from first to last; nay, there is not, that we know of, one great thought in all his six-and-thirty quartos. . . . He sees but a little way into Nature; the mighty All, in its beauty and infinite mysterious grandeur, humbling the small me into nothingness, has never even for moments been revealed to him; only this and that other atom of it, and the differences and discrepancies of these two, has he looked into and noted down. His theory of the world, his picture of man and man's life is little; for a poet and philosopher, even pitiful. "The Divine idea, that which lies at the bottom of appearance," was never more invisible to any man. He reads history not with the eyes of a devout seer, or even of a critic, but through a pair of mere anticatholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama enacted on the theatre of Infinitude, with suns for lamps and Eternity as a background, . . . but a poor wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopédie and the Sorbonne. . . . God's Universe is a larger patrimony of St. Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt out the Pope. . . . The still higher praise of having had a right or noble aim cannot be conceded him without many limitations, and may, plausibly enough, be altogether denied. . . . The force necessary for him was nowise a great and noble one; but small, in some respects a mean one, to be nimbly and seasonably put into use. The Ephesian temple, which it had employed many wise heads and strong arms for a lifetime to build, could be unbuilt by one madman, in a single hour.' These are big words; we will not employ the like. I will simply 1 Life of Sterling. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 4 vols. ; ii. Voltaire. say, that if a man were to judge Carlyle, as a Frenchman, as he judges Voltaire as an Englishman, he would draw a different picture of Carlyle from that which I am trying here to draw. VI. This trade of calumny was in vogue fifty years ago; in fifty more it will probably have altogether ceased. The French are beginning to comprehend the gravity of the Puritans; perhaps the English will end by comprehending the gaiety of Voltaire: the first are labouring to appreciate Shakspeare; the second will doubtless attempt to appreciate Racine. Goethe, the master of all modern minds, knew well how to appreciate both.1 The critic must add to his natural and national soul five or six artificial and acquired souls, and his flexible sympathy must introduce him to extinct or foreign sentiments. The best fruit of criticism is to detach ourselves from ourselves, to constrain us to make allowance for the surroundings in which we live, to teach us to distinguish objects themselves from the transient appearances, with which our character and our age never fail to clothe them. Each one regards them through glasses of diverse focus and hue, and no one can reach the truth save by taking into account the form and tint which the composition of his glasses imposes on the objects which he sees. Hitherto we have been wrangling and pummelling one another, this man declaring that things are green, another that they are yellow; others, again, that they are red; each accusing his neighbour of seeing wrong, and being disingenuous. Now, at last, we are learning moral optics; we are finding that the colour is not in the objects, but in ourselves; we pardon our neighbours for seeing differently from us; we recognise that they may see red what to us appears blue, green what to us appears yellow; we can even define the kind of glasses which produces yellow, and the kind which produces green, divine their effects from their nature, predict the 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 moral 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 take into account the particular colour of these glasses, but to know that behind these million moving poetical tints, optics affirm only law-abiding transformations. § 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 1 See this double praise in Wilhelm Meister. 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.'1 Whatever they be, poets, reformers, writers, men of action, revealers, he gives them all a mystical character: Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us. . . . Direct from the Inner Fact of things ;-he lives, and has to live, in daily 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.' 2 In vain the ignorance of his age and his own imperfections mar the purity of his original vision; he ever attains some immutable and lifegiving truth; for this truth he is listened to, and by this truth he is powerful. That which he has discovered is immortal and efficacious: The works of a man, bury them under what 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 forever a new divine portion of the Sum of Things.' 3 'No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it. . . . What therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship.' ... This feeling is the very bottom 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.'5 II. We have here a German theory, but transformed, made precise, thickened after the English manner. The Germans said that every nation, period, civilisation, 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 proposed an idea, Carlyle proposes a heroic sentiment. It is more palpable and moral. To complete his escape from the vague, he considers this sentiment in a hero. He must 1 Lectures on Heroes, i.; The Hero as Divinity. 3 Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, iii. part x.; Death of the Protector. Ibid. give to abstractions a body and a soul; he is not at ease in pure conceptions, and wishes to touch a real being. But this being, as he conceives it, is an abstract of the rest. For, according to him, the hero contains and represents the civilisation in which he is comprised; he has discovered, proclaimed or practised an original conception, and in this his age has followed him. The knowledge of a heroic sentiment thus gives us a knowledge of 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 civilisation, 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 a great 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.'1 '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 finished 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.'2 His great poetic or practical works only publish or apply this dominant idea; the historian makes use of it, to rediscover the primitive sentiment which engenders them, and to form the aggregate conception which unites them. III. Hence a new fashion of writing history. Since the heroic sentiment is the cause of the other sentiments, it is to this the historian must devote himself. Since it is the source of civilisation, the mover of revolutions, the master and regenerator of human life, it is in this that he must observe civilisation, revolutions, and human life. Since it is the spring of every movement, it is by this that we shall understand every movement. Let the metaphysicians draw up deductions and formulas, or the politicians expound situations and 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, devoting himself, and before all, of daring; genuine 1 Lectures on Heroes, i.; The Hero as Divinity. Ibid. iv.; The Hero as Priest. history is an epic of heroism. This idea is, in my opinion, as it were, a brilliant light. For men have not done great things without great emotions. The first and sovereign motive of an extraordinary revolution is an extraordinary sentiment. Then we see appear and swell a lofty and all-powerful passion, 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. Leave metaphysical formulas and political considerations, and regard the inner state of every mind; quit the bare narrative, forget abstract explanations, and study impassioned souls. A revolution 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 you wish to represent to me the history of Buddhism, you must show me the calm despair of the ascetics who, deadened by the contemplation of the infinite void, and by the expectation of final annihilation, attain in their monotonous quietude the sentiment of universal fraternity. If you wish to represent to me the history of Christianity, you 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, abnegation, 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 their profession or their genius, possess a knowledge of the soul-Shakspeare, Saint-Simon, Balzac, Stendhal. This is why we may occasionally ask it of Carlyle. And there is a history. which we may ask of him in preference to all others, that of the revolution which had conscience for its source, which set God in the councils of the state, which imposed strict duty, which provoked severe heroism. The best historian of Puritanism is a Puritan. IV. This 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 extraordinary. 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 eye-witness. A covenanter who should • have collected letters, scraps of newspapers, and had 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, |