I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate of
Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his
utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great passage
from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.
Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar
with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emulation; but in the
result we must admit that he amply justifies his temerity.
The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the roaring
mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most overwhelming
product.
The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words
ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.
Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this
astonishing outburst:--
"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!
"For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymæ rerum, et mentem
mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without
pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of
thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face
too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour;
and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine
and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?
"Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is
wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes
is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as
of one living in death.
"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the
World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with
vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac
heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!
"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled
blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face,
which she hides with her hands.
"There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'God pity thee'?
"O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
Crucified--Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow
still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built
of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!
"Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
Tuileries, where thy step was once so light--where thy children
shall not dwell.
"Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes--dumb lies the world;
that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."
There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of
the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last
consummate touch of greatness.
Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of
that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
peaceful France, and he exclaims:--
"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on
reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also
on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel de Ville."
And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by
what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:--
"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
Read this portion of an old letter.
"'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'
"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
other history,--she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art
dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question;
to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men."
In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen
thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued, by which anyone could be
suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest,
imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.
In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand persons
perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered with
execrations their dreadful executioners.
But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long agony
and the unutterable despair of the victims of that remorselessly cruel
system which the Revolution overthrew.
The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to
me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle,
though at a perceptible distance:--
"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,
know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!
"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision the whole members are
in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as
once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let there be
Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is it not
miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to
the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the
rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate
Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and
the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, above; instead
of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,
heaven-encompassed World.
"I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the
pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.
Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh
wherein no man can work.'"
There is another passage in _Sartor Resartus_ which I have always
held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so
"hardly-entreated" as when Carlyle wrote of him:--
"Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman that
with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and
makes her man's.
"Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of
the sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all
weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is
the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for
thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!
Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were
thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to
be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to
know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; _thou_ art in thy duty, be
out of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable,
for daily bread.
"A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen
toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but
the bread of life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his
outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him
artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with
heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and
humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil
for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom,
immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else
is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.
"Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities
united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's
wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this
world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere
be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself;
thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the
humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great darkness."
_Sartor Resartus_ has long taken its place among the greatest prose
works of the nineteenth century, and it is a strange commentary on this
mandate to us all to "produce, produce!" to find that for eleven years
Carlyle could find no publisher who would give it in book form to the
world!
It is a solemn reflection to think that there may be many books of
eloquence and splendour that have never seen the light of publicity.
Publishers concern themselves less with what is finely written than with
what will best sell; and in their defence it may be acceded that some of
the masterpieces of literature have at their first appearance before the
world fallen dead from the press.
The first edition of FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyám_, issued at one
shilling, was totally unrecognised, and copies of it might have been
bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of trash on the pavement
outside old bookshops!
But if once a work is published, time will with almost irresistible force
place it ultimately in the station it deserves in the literature of the
world.
Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the middle of
the last century Martin Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ garnished
every drawing-room table; and now, where is it?
Your loving old
G.P.
_P.S._--Do not look for the passage on Marie Antoinette in the _French
Revolution_, for you will not find it there, but in the "Essay of the
Diamond Necklace."
24