This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests on his

absolute belief in strength (which always grows by concentration), on his

unqualified admiration of order, and on his utter disbelief in what his

adverse friend Mazzini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as

"collective wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this

view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of

any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of

an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in

the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae

dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in

times of revolution; but their right to rule is apt to pass before their

power, and when the latter descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius

to Commodus, it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe

distance, the amount of good that may be associated with despotism: its

worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suffocates freedom and induces

inertia, but it renders wholly uncertain the life of those under its

control. Most men would rather endure the "slings and arrows" of an

irresponsible press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, the delay

of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, than have lived from

1814 to 1840, with the noose around all necks, in Paraguay, or even

precariously prospered under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's

extraordinary father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia.

Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never

leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent

repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no

form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent

optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's

partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action,

action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the _Latter-Day

Pamphlets_ he quotes from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and

Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, 'Well, God mend all!'--'Nay,

by God, Donald; we must help Him to mend it,' said the other."

"I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on the publication of

_Chartism_, "no, but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of

Radicals." With the Toryism which merely says "stand to your guns" and,

for the rest, "let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was nothing

selfish in his theories. He felt for and was willing to fight for

mankind, though he could not trust them; even his "king" he defines to

be a minister or servant of the State. "The love of power," he says, "if

thou understand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very noble

and indispensable love"; that is, the power to raise men above the "Pig

Philosophy," the worship of clothes, the acquiescence in wrong. "The

world is not here for me, but I for it." "Thou shalt is written upon life

in characters as terrible as thou shalt not"; are protests against the

mere negative virtues which religionists are wont unduly to exalt.

Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German poetry; in the

sphere of common life and politics he made use of plain prose, and often

proved himself as shrewd as any of his northern race. An excessively

"good hater," his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the

abstract they are always so; but about the abstract there is no

dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike shams, hypocrisies,

phantoms,--by whatever tiresomely reiterated epithet he may be pleased to

address things that are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with

the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admiration of an

honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his successor appears in

painstaking search; his discrimination in the detection, his eloquence in

his handling of humbugs. Occasional blunders in the choice of objects

of contempt and of worship--between which extremes he seldom

halts,--demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of literary

and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any one, or anything,

without a show of reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great

teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to

halt and hesitate and consider the _juste milieu,_ seldom guards himself

against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and

unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness,

and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them

from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by

caveats but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least to

be expected. Much of his writing is a blast of war, or a protest against

the philanthropy that sets charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the

London Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find:--

I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war

and cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the

better for us all. As men no longer wear swords in the

streets, so neither by and by will nations.... How many

meetings would one expedition to Russia cover the cost of?

He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of their

"Constitution," for having no Government; and yet admitted that what he

called their anarchy had done perhaps more than anything else could have

done to subdue the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the "rights of

women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors,

expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so

eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated

the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model

Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel

amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the

"Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every

law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there

was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws."

Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they

knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been

trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees.

[Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of

Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.]

Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised

humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England

Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found

a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day

after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large

extent nothing but the good sense of 1881." Such are:--his insistence on

affording every facility for merit to rise from the ranks, embodied in

measures against promotion by Purchase; his advocacy of State-aided

Emigration, of administrative and civil service Reform,--the abolition of

"the circumlocution office" in Downing Street,--of the institution of a

Minister of Education; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights

of landowners,--the theme of so many Land Acts; his enlarging on the

superintendence of labour,--made practical in Factory and Limited Hours

Bills--on care of the really destitute, on the better housing of the

poor, on the regulation of weights and measures; his general contention

for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and the executive

bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find a way to public life for

men of eminence who will not cringe to mobs, has made a step towards

realisation in further enfranchisement of Universities. Other of his

proposals, as the employment of our army and navy in time of peace, and

the forcing of able-bodied paupers into "industrial regiments," have

become matter of debate which may pave the way to legislation. One of

his desiderata, a practical veto on "puffing," it has not yet been found

feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on advertisements,

to realise.

Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are dominant in

Carlyle's political treatises. _First_--a vehement protest against

the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the

governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific

mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer

suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union

wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of

_Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared

to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_,

"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do

it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with,

them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class,

man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he

will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The

result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger

interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will

grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt.

_Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he

advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future

to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness

has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of

Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems

ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science,"

or of what it has proved and disproved. Consequently, while brought in

evidence by most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Communists

alike, all they can say is that he has given to their protest against the

existing state of the commercial world a more eloquent expression than

their own. He has no compact scheme,--as that of St. Simon or Fourier, or

Owen--few such definite proposals as those of Karl Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka

or Gronlund, or even William Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view

that "the restraints of communism are weak in comparison with those of

capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward to some golden age; he

has given emphatic support to a copartnership of employers and employed,

in which the profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of

equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ those who are out

of work in public undertakings.

Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of

industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English

foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch

hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of

square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh

butter and milk and beef without limit:--

an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work

generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of

Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right

across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that

"the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other

mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races

and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear

cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and

immortality.

Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or

rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population.

He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions

other than his own:--

A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One

man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him

earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded

indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and

delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your

population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of

Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so

that every honest willing workman who found England too

strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might

find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little

isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world

is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If

this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not

everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to

us "Come and till me, come and reap me"?

On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies,

"overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle

would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans,

and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the

problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines

to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to

overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps.

In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is

ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of

Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite

tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's

leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public

life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive

to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day

demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of

_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to

become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one,

of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule

for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample

without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common

good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's

blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many

respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits

of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an

eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the

superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts,

some of which may find a mark the archer little meant.

[Footnote: _Vide passim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ entitled "Limits to the

Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea

of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad

workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."]

CHAPTER X

CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE

The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is

traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages

of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the

widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was

the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his

Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The

answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine

von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think

religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and

sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to

speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against

intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own

secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries

of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their

doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may

veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An

avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text.

With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly

confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting

series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts

to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it

remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he

abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early

date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of

detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism.

We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as

continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further

and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the

last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early

associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without

dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost

his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and

theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction

to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious

sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every

man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in God as

revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but

that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point

to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in

free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the

greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we

desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of

exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe.

This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions

other than his own.

Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all

forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of

Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may

lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain.

Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his

Journals of 1868-1869:--

Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without

a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good,

generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have

given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it

is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."...

Canst _thou_ by searching find out God? I am not surprised thou canst

not, vain fool. If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered

hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of.

Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's

question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect

"could not have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own,"

in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings

as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to

one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men.

If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association of

ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should

say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for

hurricanes and earthquakes to end with.

Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his

faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had

against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt

to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new

idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._--

Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very

sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty

much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm

(unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of

a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms)

appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a

pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of

Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what

surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the

whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes

my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit

for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place

for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles,

says our new Evangelist.... Nobody need argue with these

people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to

decide it their way. He who traces nothing of God in his own

soul, will never find God in the world of matter--mere

circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal

death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either

Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The

fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does

not even wet the soles of my feet.

[Footnote: Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes

on this question with the agitation of one himself not quite at

ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.]

"Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob

or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as

definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in

the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as

intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole

soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal

to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace

of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a

most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul,

"heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He

fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts

the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is

downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is

the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering

to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made

it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional,

religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called

_Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he

abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish,"

and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation

and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has

ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and

justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is

his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more

intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference

between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from

Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow

no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss

and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says

Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jésus_." I asked if a true life

could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so;

but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:--

You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom

I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen

were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought

should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in

unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like

considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel,

deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed

among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat.

What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally

much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A

spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_

of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its

pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and

inspire them. He inherited and _coûte que coûte_ determined to persist in

the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless,

within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a

special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and

later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at

intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good

as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days.

"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew

prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God

on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is

He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere

"tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to

be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted

as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the

Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a

knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice

having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in

Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than

as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into

controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he

recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he

writes:--

I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened

heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if

Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In

this at least there is no harm.

And about the same date to Erskine:--

"Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that

brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an

altogether new emphasis; as if written and shining for me

in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there;

when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden

check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of

composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty

or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay,

I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it

is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in

poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an

"After this manner pray ye."

Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and

faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best

for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with

Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his

father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:--

Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told:

yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my

father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near

me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so

please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one

another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in

some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows

plainer to me.

On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her.

God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the

loss of his brother:--

"What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead.

Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both

you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and

the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps:

surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of

us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?"

After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came

uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns,

never dogmatic:--

The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us.

"In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are

God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do

you know more than I, or any of us?

And later--

What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor

mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted

to go farther"?

To Emerson in 1867 he writes:--

I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily

serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final

chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and

Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to

discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their

sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring

nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger

to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my

door against.

There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that

he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal

Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple

with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the

Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles;

sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the

soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind

that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history.

"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate

and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding

that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the

higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of

"God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain

unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute

opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in

variations of the following strain:--

The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest

purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts.

Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to

die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been,

and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away.

Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling

akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan.

To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied

the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of

ancient books--

Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit,

Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua.

From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling

off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has

written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may

read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his

belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine

depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in

maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The

question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced

Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it

is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found

again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was

to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and

of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear

off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no

historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts

for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the

Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is

withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards

of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives

way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out,"

and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity

Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had

abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its

Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side:

but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the

alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels

he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard

the teaching of Christ as final.

[Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert

Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for

general quotation.]

His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in

_Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not

transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe

any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the

body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving,

through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life.

Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power,

a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a

Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any

proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His

Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race,

are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai,

not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us

world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance

rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of

morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He

did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic,

nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His

often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be

used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his

Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in

a deeper negation.

[Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and

Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.]

"Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God,"

has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration.

The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves.

That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the

self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct

theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's

criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on

Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of

Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the

pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his

"Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as

Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like

the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of

the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other

wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a limited love of abstract truth;

of action his love is unlimited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but

that of Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. _Laborare est orare._ He

alone is honourable who does his day's work by sword or plough or pen.

Strength is the crown of toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that

girds us into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us men.

The midnight phantoms feel the spell,

The shadows sweep away.

There are few grander passages in literature than some of those litanies

of labour. They have the roll of music that makes armies march, and if

they have been made so familiar as to cease to seem new, it is largely

owing to the power of the writer which has compelled them to become

common property.

Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and

play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the

relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his

conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical

imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in

flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite

above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community

of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's

keeper?"

All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men,

the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a

mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my

hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to

attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with

Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the

world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's

world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine

infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a

lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer

the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating

it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in

his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence.

Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them;

and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma.

[Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist

Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer,"

ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese

verdarnmte Basse."]

He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an

infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets

its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion

of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul

makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between

the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the

human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem

to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me;

my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of

Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he

has called the poet's twin:

"He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the

future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was

denied the view from Pisgah."

Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic;

but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of

time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a

cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the

culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's

great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the

Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:--

Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance;

and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is

no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of

Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as

round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity

minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love

and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of

beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and

glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad

dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air

summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake

and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel

host that yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and

Arbela remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly,

even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his

Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other

than the veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its

howling tumult that made night hideous flitted away?

Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the

earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished

from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch

ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider

that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are

in very deed ghosts.

[Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are

made of."]

These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-

blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a

shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some

moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the

Flesh. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the

end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a

body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission

appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one

grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the

giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on

the rocks of Strife in war with his fellow, and then the heaven-

sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even

to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild naming,

wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this

mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick-

succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God-

created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane,

haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again

into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas

filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is

stamped; the rear of the host read traces of the earliest van.

But whence, O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not;

only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sentiment, belief,

opinion, method of thought, and manner of expression, to other thinkers.

His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the

exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often

unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who

impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to

acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been

wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which

exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never

realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece in moulding the

speculations of modern Europe. He knew Plato mainly through the Socratic

dialogues. There is, however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th

1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late in life, some

portions of _The Republic_. "I was much struck with Plato last year, and

his notions about Democracy--mere _Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces_

... refined into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." The

tribute conveyed in the comparison is just; for there is nothing but

community of political view between the bitter acorns dropped from the

gnarled border oak and the rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's

garden. But the coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the modern

writer are among the most remarkable in literary history. We can only

refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange

conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both

possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they

attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth

of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music,

education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian

spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy,

which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of

the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:--

a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the

State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be

made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the

common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a

higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they

must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and

priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn

comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of

Carlyle:--

Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching

class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff

King--there did not society exist without those two vital

elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born

Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them

to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command

of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_.

The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further

curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental

Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_);

in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and

punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato,

crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for

the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf.

_Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and

intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods

shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his

impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national

religion as Carlyle.

[Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position;

allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows

disrespect to the State Religion.]

They both accept Destiny,--the Parcae or the Norns spin the threads of

life,--and yet both admit a sphere of human choice. In the Republic the

souls select their lots: with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The

juxtaposition in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account of the

dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's "Nigger gone masterless among the

pumpkins," and, for pathos, the image of the soul encrusted by the world

as the marine Glaucus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is

another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet

both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail

Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on

"The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are

united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in

exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one

enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching

silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech.

Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was

indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the

Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must

have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and

action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their

views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little

to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same

mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness,

abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power

of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both

in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and

manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more

admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity

of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little

evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought:

nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English

poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to Spenser here and

there with some homage, but hardly ever, excepting Shakespeare, to the

Elizabethan dramatists.

Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have found in Hobbes

some support of his advocacy of a strong government; but his views on

this theme came rather from a study of the history of that age. Milton

he appreciates inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just; the latter,

whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects his English

master, and the points of resemblance in their characters suggest

detailed examination. Their styles are utterly opposed, that of the one

resting almost wholly on its Saxon base, that of the other being a

coat of many colours; but both are, in the front rank of masters of

prose-satire, inspired by the same audacity of "noble rage." Swift's

humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing scorn; his contempt of

mankind was more real; his pathos equally genuine but more withdrawn;

and if a worse foe he was a better friend. The comparisons already

made between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; they remain

associated by their similar struggle and final victory, and sometimes by

their tyrannous use of power; they are dissociated by the divergence of

their intellectual and in some respects even their moral natures; both

were forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of debate;

but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, "all compact." The

one blew "the blast of doom" of the old patronage; the other, against

heavier odds, contended against the later tyranny of uninformed and

insolent popular opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the

influence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French writers,

J.J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion over Reason: in

referring to the Past as a model; in subordinating mere criticism to

ethical, religious or irreligious purpose; in being avowed propagandists;

in their "deep unrest"; and in the diverse conclusions that have been

drawn from their teaching.

Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German literature was, in

some measure, inspired by the pride in a treasure-trove, the regard of a

foster-father or _chaperon_ who first substantially took it by the hand

and introduced it to English society: but it was also due to the feeling

that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own perplexities,

and at least their partial solution. His choice of its representatives is

easily explained. In Schiller he found intellectually a younger brother,

who had fought a part of his own fight and was animated by his own

aspirations; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade

of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised across many

divergencies as his master. The attachment of the belated Scotch Puritan

to the greater German has provoked endless comment; but the former has

himself solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and pupil

remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as

one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the

way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic

mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life,

which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought

than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He

admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it,

saying:--

With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once

perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits....

Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been

attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with

Delusion--a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment

will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no

blessing, since ever-continued battle is better than

captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it

warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion

still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life."

Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with

the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was

genuine and shared by

Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the

master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges

on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that

imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the

_New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and

despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to

look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is

holy." In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:--

Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than

I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John

Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable

_fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty

was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not

reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like

Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent,

that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it

was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold

even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when

all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that

man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you

love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is

not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse

to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious

serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as

Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning.

Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle

was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple

in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand

touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator.

Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a

greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than

pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_

and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much

of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation

would involve a course of Metaphysics.

We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life

and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man

with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul

der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted

on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of

humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a

lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have

influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer

titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless

digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_

from the life of Siebenkäs, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like

pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors

much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of

_Schmelzle's Journey to Flätz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and

it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The

following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead

brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself

among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him,

melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire

amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have--

What is life? a thawing ice-board

On a sea with sunny shore.

Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the

passage, "Then begun the Æolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest

pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common

"reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness,

and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign

Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself.

Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating

his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays

were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and

perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round

him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is

good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from

Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between

him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better

qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the

greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be

decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related

proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and

their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and

his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge

of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the

affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet

the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side,

that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and

while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of

having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect,

may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their

assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes

undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had

no sympathy.

Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived beyond the

sea. He has been almost to weariness compared with Emerson, initial

pupil later ally, but their contrasts are more instructive than their

resemblances. They have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked

originality, uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional

methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression; but in Carlyle

this is tempered by greater veneration for the past, in which he holds

out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in it only fingerposts

for the future, and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should

wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates abstraction, delights

to dwell on the minutiæ of biography, and waxes eloquent even on dates.

The other, a brilliant though not always a profound generaliser, tells

us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and

study the sentiment as it appeared in hope not in history ... with the

ideal is the rose of joy. But grief cleaves to names and persons, and

the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a

burden, and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks up at

the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad

sight." The other is blown upon by the fresh breezes of the new world;

his vision ranges over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under

her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I will

make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised

Scotchman, living near the roar of the metropolis, with thoughts of

Weimar and reminiscences of the Covenanting hills. Emerson studies

Swedenborg and reads the _Phædo_ in his garden, far enough from the din

of cities to enable him in calm weather to forget them. "Boston, London,

are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world."

The one is strong where the other is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in

the murk of clouds illumined by bolts of fire; he has never seen the sun

unveiled. Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he

has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing

the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat."

Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one:

self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two

writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its

precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the

fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines,

as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams

from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way.

His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers

are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other

says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in

a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is;

and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the

hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on

justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from

his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and

Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he

balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in

progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to

collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne as the spokesman of a

practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom was justified by the fact that he was

always at first on the unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side.

Casting his rote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide

suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old

American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will

sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is

a raft that will never sink, but then your feet are always in water."

[Footnote: Carlyle, on the other hand, holds "that," as has been said, "we

are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst of

civilisation." His protest, though exuberated, against leniency in dealing

with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore the rigour

of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so.]

Maintaining that the State exists for its members, he holds that the

enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular

governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law

need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men,

"to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired

mouthpieces rather than controlling forces: their prime mission is to

"fortify our hopes," their indirect services are their best. The career

of a great man should rouse us to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought

not to obey, but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. "It is the

imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting the impudence of

power."

It is obvious that many of these views are in essential opposition to the

teaching of Carlyle; and it is remarkable that two conspicuous men so

differing and expressing their differences with perfect candour should

have lived so long on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging

over thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to

Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip to England),

is on the whole one of the most edifying in literary history. The

fundamental accord, unshaken by the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a

testimony to the fact that the common preservation of high sentiments

amid the irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and override

the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew Arnold has gone so far

as to say that he "would not wonder if Carlyle lived in the long run by

such an invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson

and not by his works." This is paradoxical; but the volumes containing

it are in some respects more interesting than the letters of Goethe and

Schiller, as being records of "two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual

claims. The practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is

very beautiful; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole appears the

better man, especially in the almost unlimited tolerance that passes with

a smile even such violences as the "Ilias in nuce"; but Carlyle shows

himself to be the stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit.

Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called anarchy might

be more effective in subduing the wilderness than any despotism; while

the advice to descend from "Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete

life is accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, _Society

and Solitude_ and the _Conduct of Life,_ which Carlyle praises without

stint. Keeping their poles apart they often meet half-way; and in matters

of style as well as judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into each

other, so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to be sure

of the writer. Towards the close of the correspondence Carlyle in this

instance admits his debt.

I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can

speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him.

Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes

to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world

there were still but this one voice that responded

intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all

hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive.

My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo.

Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed edition of his

friend's work: "You shall wear the crown at the Pan-Saxon games, with no

competitor in sight ... well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and

with nations for your pupils and praisers."

The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns to him the first

place among the British authors of his time. No writer of our generation,

in England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his

rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the

irregularities and eccentricities of his style are bound up with its

richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must discriminate

between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has

taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answer must be,

"few." This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing,

or rather of the nature of his mind. Aside from political parties, he

helped to check their exaggerations by his own; seeing deeply into the

under-current evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he

was of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust

themselves--what has been called "the policy of drifting"--or of dealing

with them only by catchwords. No one set a more incisive brand on the

meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities;

no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation

of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with

such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age. Everything he

writes comes home to the individual conscience: his claim to be regarded

as a moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an ethical

teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly observed that he helped

to modify "the thought rather than the opinion of two generations." His

message, as that of Emerson, was that "life must be pitched on a higher

plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that Carlyle was a moral force

so great that he could not tell what he might produce. His influence has

been, though not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any

of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, certainly the

most imposing personality. It had two culminations; shortly after the

appearance of _The French Revolution,_ and again towards the close of the

seventh decade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of his

works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne eloquent testimony, and

the more reserved Matthew Arnold admits that "the voice of Carlyle,

overstrained and misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and

comparatively sound," though, he adds, "The friends of one's youth cannot

always support a return to them." In the striking article in the _St.

James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who

had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable

men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the

most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most

forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles]

that general impression of genius and force of character which it is

impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin

and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _métier_,

his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement,

confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right

direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more

intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician,

declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge,

kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than

informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light,

like the Jöthuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too

much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He

makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is

impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear

goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exaggerates. Yes; but he makes

the hour great, the picture bright, the reverence and admiration strong;

while mere precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal on the

morning after Carlyle's death wrote of him in a tone of well-tempered

appreciation: "We have had no such individuality since Johnson. Whether

men agreed or not, he was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were

brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always in his pulpit

and audible, he denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without

respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim." To this we may add

the testimony of another high authority in English letters, politically

at the opposite pole: "Carlyle's influence in kindling enthusiasm for

virtues worthy of it, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one

hand and the unreality on the other, of all that men can do and suffer,

has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers

may have done in definitely shaping opinion ... here is the friendly

fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark; here the prophet who

first smote the rock." Carlyle, writes one of his oldest friends, "may

be likened to a fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and

showed in word and action his notion of the proper attitude and action of

men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and he has left his gospels." To those

who contest that these gospels are for the most part negative, we may

reply that to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the way

to do.

In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be unjust to a fresh

thinker as with regard to his originality. A physical discovery, as

Newton's, remains to ninety-nine out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a

great moral teacher "labours to make himself forgotten." When he begins

to speak he is suspected of insanity; when he has won his way he receives

a Royal Commission to appoint the judges; as a veteran he is shelved for

platitude. So Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin,

Bacon in his _Essays_, of the English, wisdom, which they each in

fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been exaggerated, his

partialities intensified, in his followers; his critical readers, not his

disciples, have learnt most from him; he has helped across the Slough of

Despond only those who have also helped themselves. When all is said of

his dogmatism, his petulance, his "evil behaviour," he remains the master

spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and

Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic,

and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is

ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning,

more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation.

His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents,

in both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pilgrims. Not a

few could speak in the words of the friend whose memory he has so

affectionately preserved, "Towards me it is still more true than towards

England that no one has been and done like you." A champion of ancient

virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as "a Cato Major

among degenerate men." Carlyle had more than the shortcomings of a Cato;

he had all the inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind;

but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the

modern preacher transcended all mere applications of the text _delenda

est._ He denounced, but at the same time nobly exhorted, his age. A

storm-tossed spirit, "tempest-buffeted," he was "citadel-crowned" in his

unflinching purpose and the might of an invincible will.

APPENDIX

CARLYLE'S RELIGION

The _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11, 1881, writes:--

"It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to believe, in

its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He never affected

to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too manly and

simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest transmutations

of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which had so great a

charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On the other hand, it is

equally true that he never plainly avowed his unbelief. The line he took

up was that Christianity, though not true in fact, had a right to be

regarded as the noblest aspiration after a theory of the Universe and of

human life ever formed: and that the Calvinistic version of Christianity

was on the whole the best it ever assumed; and the one which represented

the largest proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also

thought that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded

in expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the

ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose systematic

neglect in this age nothing but evil could come.

"Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist by stating

his views plainly--indeed if he had done so sixty years ago he might have

starved--the only resource left to him was that of approaching all the

great subjects of life from the point of view of grim humour, irony, and

pathos. This was the real origin of his unique style; though no doubt its

special peculiarities were due to the wonderful power of his imagination,

and to some extent--to a less extent we think than has been usually

supposed--to his familiarity with German.

"What then was his creed? What were the doctrines which in his view

Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, so ennobling

to human life? First, he believed in God; secondly, he believed in an

absolute opposition between good and evil; thirdly, he believed that

all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great

struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or bad; fourthly, he

believed that good is stronger than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees

gets the better of it, but that this process is so slow as to be

continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences of various

kinds--one of which he believed to be specially powerful in the present

day.

"God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Christian

God--still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ; who,

though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in his

writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The God in

which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a

Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and

personifying the elementary principles of morals--Justice, Benevolence

(towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance--to such a pitch that

they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively the will of

God.... That there is some one who--whether by the earthquake, or

the fire, or the still small voice--is continually saying to

mankind--'_Discite justitiam moniti'_; and that this Being is the

ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems to

have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the trouble to

refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Confession, and to

divest them of their references to Christianity and to the Bible, he will

find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle there is the closest

possible similarity.... The great fact about each particular man is the

relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in which he stands to God. In

the one case he is on the side which must ultimately prevail, ... in the

other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation

to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to

live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a

third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves

Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him

or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be

asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this

mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true

colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad

are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a

man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the

hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr.

Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and

morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in

either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might

regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the

inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of

the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and

philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution,

comes practically to much the same result as predestination."

INDEX

Aberdour

Addiscombe

Addison

Æschylus

Ailsa Craig

Airy (the astronomer)

Aitken, James

Aitken, Mary

Aitken, Mrs.

Aix-la-Chapelle

Albert, Prince

Alison

Alma

America

Annan

Annandale

Annual Register

Antoinette, Marie

Aristotle

Arndt

Arnold, Dr.

Arnold, Matthew

Ashburton, Lord and Lady

Assaye

Atheism

_Athenæum_

Augustenburg

Austerlitz

Austin

Austin, Mrs.

Azeglio

Bacon

Badams

Badcort

Balaclava

Balzac

Bamford, Samuel

Barbarossa

Baring, see Ashburton

Bassompierre

Beaconsfield, Lord

Beaumarchais

Beethoven

Belgium

Bellamy

Bentham

Berkeley

Berlin

Bernstoff, Count

Biography (by Froude)

Birmingham

Bismarck

_Blackwood,_

Boehm

Bohemia

Bolingbroke

Bonn

Boston

Boswell

Breslau

Brewster, Sir David

Bright

Brocken, spectre of the

Bromley, Miss

Bronte, Emily

Brougham

Brown, Prof.

Browne, Sir Thomas

Browning

Bryant _note_

Buckle

Buller, Charles

Buller, Mrs.

Bunsen

Burke

Burness, William

Burns

Byron

Caesar

_Cagliostro, Count_

Cairnes

Calderon

Calvin

Campbell, Macleod

Campbell, Thomas

Carleton

Carlyle (family)

Carlyle, Alexander

Carlyle, James (brother)

Carlyle, James (father)

Carlyle, John, Dr.

Carlyle, Margaret (mother)

Carlyle, Margaret (sister)

Carlyle, Mrs. (Jane Welsh)(wife)

Carlyle, Thomas (grandfather)

Carlyle, Thomas,

birth;

education;

studies German;

lives in Edinburgh and takes pupils;

studies law;

tutor to the Bullers;

goes to London;

at Hoddam Hill;

marriage;

Edinburgh life;

married life;

life at Craigenputtock;

second visit to London;

publishes _Sartor_;

takes house in Chelsea;

life and work in London;

loss of first volume of _French Revolution_;

rewrites first volume of _French Revolution_;

lectures;

founds London Library;

publishes _Chartism_;

writes _Past and Present_;

writes _Life of Cromwell_;

visits Ireland;

visits Paris;

writes _History of Friedrich II._;

excursions to Germany;

nominated Lord Rector of Glasgow;

success of _Friedrich II._;

Lord Rector of Edinburgh;

death of his wife;

writes his _Reminiscences_;

defends Governor Eyre;

writes on Franco-German War;

writes on Russo-Turkish War;

honours;

declining years;

death;

Appreciation of;

authorities for his life;

complaints;

contemporary history;

conversation;

critic, as;

descriptive passages;

domestic troubles;

dreams;

dyspepsia;

elements of his character;

estimates (his) of contemporaries;

ethics;

financial affairs;

friends;

genius; historian, as;

ignorance;

influence;

journal;

jury, serves on a;

letters;

literary artist

mission

nicknaming

mania

noises

opinions

paradoxes

polities

popularity and praise

preacher, as,

rank as a writer

relations to other thinkers

religion

routine

scepticism

sound-proof room,

style

teaching

translations

travels, and visits

truth

verses

views, change of

walks

worker, as

Cassel

Castlebar

Cato

Cavaignac, General

Cervantes

Chalmers, Dr.

Changarnier, General

_Characteristics,_

Charlemagne

_Chartism,_

Chatham

Chaucer

Chelsea

Cheyne Row

China

Chotusitz

Christianity

Church, English

Cicero

Cid, the

Civil War

Civil War (American)

Clare, Lady

Clarendon

Clerkenwell explosions

Clough, Arthur

Cobden

Coblenz

Cockburn

Colenso, Bishop

Coleridge

Colonies

Columbus

Comte

Conservatism

Conway, Moncure

Cooper, Thomas

Cornelius

_Correspondence,_

Cortes

Cousin

Craigcrook

Craigenputtock

Crimean War

Cromwell

_Cromwell, Life and Letters of,_

Crystal Palace Exhibition

Cushman, Miss

Cüstrin

Cuvier

Czars, the

Dante

Danton

Dardanelles

Darwin

David II.

_Deism,_

Democracy,

De Morgan

Demosthenes

De Quincey

Derby, Countess of

Desmoulins

_Dial, The,_

_Diamond Necklace,_

Dickens

Diderot

Diogenes

Disraeli. _See_ Beaconsfield

Dobell

_Don Quixote,_

Döring, Herr

Dresden

Drogheda

Drumclog

Dryden

Duffy, Sir C. Gavan

Dumfries

Dunbar

Dunbar (poet)

Duty

Ecclefechan

Eckermann

Edinburgh

_Edinburgh Encyclopaedia_

_Edinburgh Review_

Education

Eisenach

Eldin, Lord

Eliot, George

Emerson

_Emigration_

Ems

England

_English Traits_ (Emerson's)

Erasmus

Erfurt

Erskine

_Essay on Proportion_

_Essays_ (Carlyle's)

Everett, Alexander

_Examiner,_

"Exodus from Houndsditch,"

Eyre, Governor

Eyre, Jane

Faber

Factory Acts

Faust

Fawcett

Fergusson, Dr. John

Fichte

FitzGerald, Edward

Flaxman

_Foreign Quarterly Preview_

_Foreign Review_

Förster

Forster, John

Forster, W.E.

Fouqué

Fourier

Foxton, Mr.

France

Franchise

Francia, Dr.

Frankenstein

Frankfort

_Fraser_

Free Trade

French Directory

French literature

_French Revolution_

Friedrich II.

_Friedrich II., History of_

Fritz. _See_ Friedrich

Fritz (Carlyle's horse)

Froude, Mr.

Fryston

Fuchs, Reinecke

Galileo

Gallipoli

Galway

Game Laws

Gavazzi, Father

Georgel, Abbé

German literature

German worthies

Germany

Gibbon

Gladstone, Sir T

Gladstone, W. E.

Glasgow

_Glasgow Herald_

Goethe

Goldsmith

Gordon, Margaret

Gordon (quadroon preacher)

Gotha

Grant, J.

Greek thought

Grimm's law

Gronlund

Grote

Guizot

Gully, Dr.

Gully, Miss

Guntershausen

Haddington

Hafiz

Hakluyt

Hallam

Hallam, Arthur

Hamburg

Hamilton, Sir William

Hare, Archdeacon

Harrison, Frederick

_Harvard Discourse_ (Emerson's)

Hawthorne

Hayti

Heath (royalist writer)

Hedonism

Hegel

Heine, Heinrich

_Helena_

Helps

Henry VIII.

_Hero-Worship_ (and _On Heroes_}

Herrnhut

Hertzka

Heyne

Hildebrand

Hill, Lord George

_Histories_ (Carlyle's)

History, definition of

_History_ review of

Hobbes

Hochkirk

Hoddam Hill

Hoffmann

Holinshed

Homburg

Homer

Home Rule

Horace

Home, E.H.

Houghton, Lord

Hudson (Railway King)

Hughes, T.

Hugo, Victor

Humboldt

Hume

Hunef

Hunt, Leigh

Huxley, Professor

"Ilias Americana in nuce"

Immortality

Inkermann

_In Memoriam_ (Tennyson's)

Inquisition

Ireland

Ireland, Mrs.

Irish Question

Irving, Edward

Jamaica

Jeffrey

Jena

Jerrold, Douglas

Jewsbury, Geraldine

_Jocelin de Brakelond_

Johnson

_Johnson_ Review of Boswell's

Johnston, James

Jomini

Jonson, Ben

Journalism, definition of

Judengasse

Junius

Juvenal

Kant

Keats

Keble

Kingsley, Charles

Kingsley, Henry

Kinnaird

Kirkcakly

Knox

Kolin

Körner

Kossuth

Kunersdorf

Lamb

Landor

Landshut

Lanin, M.

Laplace

Larkin

_Latter-Day Pamphlets_

Law, Carlyle's study of

Lawson, Mr., James Carlyle's estimate of

_Lectures_

Legendre

Leibnitz

Leipzig

Leith

Leslie, Prof.

Leuthen

Leyden

"Liberal Association"

Liberalism

Liegnitz

Literature as a profession

Liverpool

Livy

Lobositz

Locke

"Locksley Hall"

London

London Library

_London Magazine_

London Peace Congress

Longfellow

Longmans (the publisher)

Louis XIV.

Louis XV.

Louis XVIII.

Louisa, Electress

Lowell

Lucilius

Luichart, Loch

"Luria"

Luther

Macaulay

Macbeth

Machiavelli

Mackenzie, Miss Stuart

Mahon, Lord

Mainhill

Mainz

Malthusianism

Malvern

Marat

Marburg

Marcus Aurelius

Marlborough

_Marseillaise_

Marshall

Mavtineau, Miss H.

Marx, Carl

Massou, Prof.

_Materialism_

Mathematics

Maurice, F. D.

Mazzini

M'Crie

_Meister, Wilhelm_

Melanchthen

Mentone

Meredith, George

Mericourt

Merimée, Prosper

Metaphysics, Scotch

Michelet

Middle Ages

Mill, J.S.

Millais

Milman

Milton

Mirabeau

_Miscellanies_

Mitchell, Robert

Mitchell (Young Ireland leader)

Model Prisons

Mohammed

Molesworth

Molwitz

Montague, Basil

Montaigne

Montgomery, Robert

More, Sir Thomas

Morris, William

Motley

Motte, Countess de la

Muirkirk

Murchison, Sir R.

Murray (the publisher)

Murray, Thomas

Musæus

Napier, Macvey

Napoleon I.

Napoleon III.

Naseby

Nassau

Necker

Negroes

Nelson

"Nero" (Mrs. Carlyle's dog)

Neuberg

New England

Newman, Cardinal

Newspapers

Newton

Nibelungen Lied

Nicholas the Czar

"Nigger Question"

Noble (biographer of Cromwell)

North, Christopher

Norton, Charles E.

_Norway, Early Kings of_

Novalis

O'Brien, Smith

O'Connell

Optimism

Orsay, Count d'

Orthodoxy vetoed

Ossoli, Countess (Margaret Fuller)

Owen

Oxford

Oxford, Bishop of

Paraguay

Pardubitz

Paris

_Past and Present_

Paton, Noel

Paulets, the

Peel

Pericles

Peter the Hermit

Philanthropy

Philip of Hesse

Plato

Playfair

Political economy

Political philosophy

Pope

Popes

Prague

Prayer

Prescott

Preuss

_Prinzenraub_

Procter

Procter, Mrs. Anne

Puritanism

Pusey

Putbus

_Quarterly Review_

Queen Victoria

Radicalism

Railways

Raleigh

Ranke

Ranch

"Reading of Books"

Redwood

Reform Bills

_Reminiscences_

Renan

Rennie, George

Revolution years

Rhine

Ricardo

Richter

Riesen-Gebirge

Riquetti

Ritualism

Robertson

Robespierre

Roland, Madame

Rolandseck

Romans

Rome, cause of its preservation

Romilly, Sir Samuel

Rossbach

Rossetti, Dante

Rotterdam

Rousseau

Rugby

Rügen

Rushworth

Ruskin

Russell, Lord John

Russell, Mrs., at Thornhill

Russia

Russo-Turkish War

Sadowa

St. Andrews

St. Ives

_St. James's Gazette_

St. Simon

Samson, Abbot

Sand, George

_Sartor Resartus_

Saunders and Otley (publishers)

Saxons

Scepticism

Schiller

Schlosser

Science

Scotland

Scotsbrig

_Scotsman_ newspaper

Scott, W.B.

Scott, Sir Walter

Sedan

Sepoy rebellion

Seven Years' War

Shaftesbury, Lord

Shakespeare

Shelley

_Shooting Niagara_

Sidney, Sir Philip

_Signs of the Times_

Simon de Montfort

Sinclair, Sir George

Slavery

Sloane, Sir Hans

Smail, Tom

Smith, Adam

Smith, Goldwin

Smith, Sydney

Smollett

Snowdon

Socrates

Sophocles

Southey

Spain

Spedding

Spencer, Herbert

Spenser

Stanley, Dean

Stanley, Lady Augusta

Stanleys (of Alderley)

Steele

Stein

Stephen, Fitzjames

Stephen, Sir James

Sterling

_Sterling, Life of_

Sterne

Stewart, Dugald

Stodart, Miss Eliza

Stonehenge

Strachey, Mr.

Strachey, Mrs.

Stralsund

Strauss

Stuart, Mary

Sturge

_Sun,_ newspaper

Swift

Swinburne

Switzerland

Tacitus

Taine, M.

_Tale of a Tub_ (Swift's)

Talleyrand

Talma

Taylor, Henry

Taylor's _German Literature_

Taylor, Mrs.

Tennyson

Teufelsdröckh

Thackeray

Theism

Thierry, M.

Thiers

Thirlwall, Bishop

Thoreau

Thucydides

Tieck

_Times,_ the

Toplitz

Torgau

Trafalgar

Turgot

Turks

Turner

Tyndall

_Unto this Last_ (Ruskin's)

Usedom, Baron

Varennes

Vauvenargues

Vehse

Verses (Carlyle's)

Verses (Mrs. Carlyle's)

Virginia

Voltaire

_Wanderjahre_

Wartburg

Washington

Waterloo

Watts, G. F.

Webster, Daniel

Weimar

Weissenfels

Wellington (Duke of)

Welsh, Jane. _See_ Mrs. Carlyle

Welsh, Mrs.

_Werner_

_Werther_ (Goethe's)

Westminster Abbey

Westminster Confession

_Westminster Review_

Westport

Wilberforce (Bishop)

William the Conqueror

William the Silent

Willis's Rooms

Wilson

Wolseley

Worcester

Wordsworth

_Work_

Working classes

_World_ (newspaper)

_Wotton Reinfred_

Yarmouth

Zittau

Zorndorf