ACT I

_The scene is a subterranean vault in the Abbey of

Quedlinburgh, with coffins, 'scutcheons, death's-heads, and

cross-bones; toads and other loathsome reptiles are seen

traversing the obscurer parts of the stage._--Rogero _appears,

in chains, in a suit of rusty armor, with his beard grown, and

a cap of a grotesque form upon his head; beside him a crock,

or pitcher, supposed to contain his daily allowance of

sustenance.--A long silence, during which the wind is heard to

whistle through the caverns._--Rogero _rises, and comes slowly

forward, with his arms folded._

ROGERO.--Eleven years! it is now eleven years since I was first

immured in this living sepulchre;--the cruelty of a Minister--the

perfidy of a Monk--yes, Matilda! for thy sake--alive amidst the

dead--chained--coffined--confined--cut off from the converse of my

fellow-men. Soft! what have we here! [_Stumbles over a bundle of

sticks._] This cavern is so dark that I can scarcely distinguish the

objects under my feet. Oh, the register of my captivity! Let me see;

how stands the account? [_Takes up the sticks and turns them over with

a melancholy air; then stands silent for a few minutes as if absorbed

in calculation._] Eleven years and fifteen days!--Hah! the

twenty-eighth of August! How does the recollection of it vibrate on my

heart! It was on this day that I took my last leave of Matilda. It was

a summer evening; her melting hand seemed to dissolve in mine as I

prest it to my bosom. Some demon whispered me that I should never see

her more. I stood gazing on the hated vehicle which was conveying her

away forever. The tears were petrified under my eyelids. My heart was

crystallized with agony. Anon I looked along the road. The diligence

seemed to diminish every instant; I felt my heart beat against its

prison, as if anxious to leap out and overtake it. My soul whirled

round as I watched the rotation of the hinder wheels. A long trail of

glory followed after her and mingled with the dust--it was the

emanation of Divinity, luminous with love and beauty, like the

splendor of the setting sun; but it told me that the sun of my joys

was sunk forever. Yes, here in the depths of an eternal dungeon, in

the nursing-cradle of hell, the suburbs of perdition, in a nest of

demons, where despair in vain sits brooding over the putrid eggs of

hope; where agony wooes the embrace of death; where patience, beside

the bottomless pool of despondency, sits angling for impossibilities.

Yet even _here_, to behold her, to embrace her! Yes, Matilda, whether

in this dark abode, amidst toads and spiders, or in a royal palace,

amidst the more loathsome reptiles of a court, would be indifferent to

me; angels would shower down their hymns of gratulation upon our

heads, while fiends would envy the eternity of suffering love--Soft;

what air was that? it seemed a sound of more than human warblings.

Again [_listens attentively for some minutes_]. Only the wind: it is

well, however; it reminds me of that melancholy air which has so often

solaced the hours of my captivity. Let me see whether the damps of

this dungeon have not yet injured my guitar. [_Takes his guitar, tunes

it, and begins the following air with a full accompaniment of violins

from the orchestra:--_]

[_Air, 'Lanterna Magica.'_]

SONG

Whene'er with haggard eyes I view

This dungeon that I'm rotting in,

I think of those companions true

Who studied with me at the U--

--niversity of Gottingen,

--niversity of Gottingen.

[_Weeps and pulls out a blue kerchief, with which he wipes his

eyes; gazing tenderly at it, he proceeds:--_]

Sweet kerchief, checked with heavenly blue,

Which once my love sat knotting in!--

Alas! Matilda _then_ was true!

At least I thought so at the U--

--niversity of Gottingen,

--niversity of Gottingen.

[_At the repetition of this line Rogero clanks his chains in

cadence._]

Barbs! barbs! alas! how swift you flew,

Her neat post-wagon trotting in!

Ye bore Matilda from my view;

Forlorn I languished at the U--

--niversity of Gottingen,

--niversity of Gottingen.

This faded form! this pallid hue!

This blood my veins is clotting in!

My years are many--they were few

When first I entered at the U--

--niversity of Gottingen,

--niversity of Gottingen.

There first for thee my passion grew,

Sweet, sweet Matilda Pottingen!

Thou wast the daughter of my Tu-

tor, law professor at the U--

--niversity of Gottingen,

--niversity of Gottingen.

[A]Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu!

That kings and priests are plotting in:

Here doomed to starve on water gru--

el, never shall I see the U--

--niversity of Gottingen,

--niversity of Gottingen.

[_During the last stanza Rogero dashes his head repeatedly

against the walls of his prison, and finally so hard as to

produce a visible contusion. He then throws himself on the

floor in an agony. The curtain drops, the music still

continuing to play till it is wholly fallen._]

[A] This verse is said to have been added by the younger Pitt.

THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE KNIFE-GRINDER

FRIEND OF HUMANITY

Needy Knife-grinder! whither are you going?

Rough is the road; your wheel is out of order--

Bleak blows the blast; your hat has got a hole in't,

So have your breeches!

Weary Knife-grinder! little think the proud ones

Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike

Road, what hard work 'tis crying all day, "Knives and

Scissors to grind O!"

Tell me, Knife-grinder, how you came to grind knives?

Did some rich man tyrannically use you?

Was it some squire? or parson of the parish?

Or the attorney?

Was it the squire, for killing of his game? or

Covetous parson, for his tithes distraining?

Or roguish lawyer, made you lose your little

All in a lawsuit?

Have you not read the 'Rights of Man,' by Tom Paine?

Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids,

Ready to fall, as soon as you have told your

Pitiful story.

KNIFE-GRINDER

Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir;

Only last night a-drinking at the Chequers,

This poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were

Torn in a scuffle.

Constables came up for to take me into

Custody; they took me before the justice;

Justice Oldmixon put me in the parish-

Stocks for a vagrant.

I should be glad to drink your honor's health in

A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence;

But for my part, I never love to meddle

With politics, sir.

FRIEND OF HUMANITY

I give thee sixpence! I will see thee damned first--

Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance!

Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,

Spiritless outcast!

[_Kicks the Knife-grinder, overturns his wheel, and exit

in a transport of republican enthusiasm and universal

philanthropy._]

ON THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION

From the 'Speech on Parliamentary Reform'

Other nations, excited by the example of the liberty which this

country has long possessed, have attempted to copy our Constitution;

and some of them have shot beyond it in the fierceness of their

pursuit. I grudge not to other nations that share of liberty which

they may acquire: in the name of God, let them enjoy it! But let us

warn them that they lose not the object of their desire by the very

eagerness with which they attempt to grasp it. Inheritors and

conservators of rational freedom, let us, while others are seeking it

in restlessness and trouble, be a steady and shining light to guide

their course; not a wandering meteor to bewilder and mislead them.

Let it not be thought that this is an unfriendly or disheartening

counsel to those who are either struggling under the pressure of harsh

government, or exulting in the novelty of sudden emancipation. It is

addressed much rather to those who, though cradled and educated amidst

the sober blessings of the British Constitution, pant for other

schemes of liberty than those which that Constitution sanctions--other

than are compatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the

necessary restraints of social obligation; of some of whom it may be

said, in the language which Dryden puts into the mouth of one of the

most extravagant of his heroes, that

"They would be free as Nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in the woods the noble savage ran."

Noble and swelling sentiments!--but such as cannot be reduced into

practice. Grand ideas!--but which must be qualified and adjusted by a

compromise between the aspirings of individuals and a due concern for

the general tranquillity;--must be subdued and chastened by reason and

experience, before they can be directed to any useful end! A search

after abstract perfection in government may produce in generous minds

an enterprise and enthusiasm to be recorded by the historian and to be

celebrated by the poet: but such perfection is not an object of

reasonable pursuit, because it is not one of possible attainment; and

never yet did a passionate struggle after an absolutely unattainable

object fail to be productive of misery to an individual, of madness

and confusion to a people. As the inhabitants of those burning

climates which lie beneath a tropical sun, sigh for the coolness of

the mountain and the grove; so (all history instructs us) do nations

which have basked for a time in the torrid blaze of an unmitigated

liberty, too often call upon the shades of despotism, even of military

despotism, to cover them,--

"--O quis me gelidis in vallibus Haemi

Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!"

a protection which blights while it shelters; which dwarfs the

intellect and stunts the energies of man, but to which a wearied

nation willingly resorts from intolerable heats and from perpetual

danger of convulsion.

Our lot is happily cast in the temperate zone of freedom, the clime

best suited to the development of the moral qualities of the human

race, to the cultivation of their faculties, and to the security as

well as the improvement of their virtues;--a clime not exempt, indeed,

from variations of the elements, but variations which purify while

they agitate the atmosphere that we breathe. Let us be sensible of the

advantages which it is our happiness to enjoy. Let us guard with pious

gratitude the flame of genuine liberty, that fire from heaven, of

which our Constitution is the holy depository; and let us not, for the

chance of rendering it more intense and more radiant, impair its

purity or hazard its extinction!

ON BROUGHAM AND SOUTH AMERICA

I now turn to that other part of the honorable and learned gentleman's

[Mr. Brougham's] speech; in which he acknowledges his acquiescence in

the passages of the address, echoing the satisfaction felt at the

success of the liberal commercial principles adopted by this country,

and at the steps taken for recognizing the new States of America. It

does happen, however, that the honorable and learned gentleman being

not unfrequently a speaker in this House, nor very concise in his

speeches, and touching occasionally, as he proceeds, on almost every

subject within the range of his imagination, as well as making some

observations on the matter in hand,--and having at different periods

proposed and supported every innovation of which the law or

Constitution of the country is susceptible,--it is impossible to

innovate without appearing to borrow from him. Either, therefore, we

must remain forever absolutely locked up as in a northern winter, or

we must break our way out by some mode already suggested by the

honorable and learned gentleman; and then he cries out, "Ah, I was

there before you! That is what I told you to do; but as you would not

do it then, you have no right to do it now."

In Queen Anne's reign there lived a very sage and able critic named

Dennis, who in his old age was the prey of a strange fancy that he had

himself written all the good things in all the good plays that were

acted. Every good passage he met with in any author he insisted was

his own. "It is none of his," Dennis would always say: "no, it's

mine!" He went one day to see a new tragedy. Nothing particularly good

to his taste occurred till a scene in which a great storm was

represented. As soon as he heard the thunder rolling over his head he

exclaimed, "That's my thunder!" So it is with the honorable and

learned gentleman: it's all his thunder. It will henceforth be

impossible to confer any boon, or make any innovation, but he will

claim it as his thunder.

But it is due to him to acknowledge that he does not claim everything;

he will be content with the exclusive merit of the liberal measures

relating to trade and commerce. Not desirous of violating his own

principles by claiming a monopoly of fore-sight and wisdom, he kindly

throws overboard to my honorable and learned friend [Sir J.

Mackintosh] near him, the praise of South America. I should like to

know whether, in some degree, this also is not his thunder. He thinks

it right itself; but lest we should be too proud if he approved our

conduct _in toto_, he thinks it wrong in point of time. I differ from

him essentially; for if I pique myself on anything in this affair, it

is the time. That at some time or other, States which had separated

themselves from the mother country should or should not be admitted to

the rank of independent nations, is a proposition to which no possible

dissent could be given. The whole question was one of time and mode.

There were two modes: one a reckless and headlong course by which we

might have reached our object at once, but at the expense of drawing

upon us consequences not lightly to be estimated; the other was more

strictly guarded in point of principle, so that while we pursued our

own interests, we took care to give no just cause of offense to other

Powers.

CESARE CANTU

(1805-1895)

Cesare Cantu, an Italian historian, was born at Brivio on the Adda,

December 2d, 1805. The eldest of ten children, he belonged to an old

though impoverished family. To obtain for him a gratuitous education

his parents destined him for the priesthood. On the death of his

father in 1827 he became the sole support of his mother, brothers, and

sisters. In 1825 he had made his appearance as a writer with a poem

entitled 'Algiso and the Lombard League.' His 'History of Como,'

following in 1829, gave him a standing in the world of letters.

Although not a member of the revolutionary society 'Young Italy,' he

was the confidant of two of its leaders, Albera and Balzetti, a

circumstance which led to his arrest in 1833. Seized by the Austrian

officials in the midst of his lecture at the Lyceum in Milan, he was

incarcerated in the prison in the Convent of Santa Margherita.

Although deprived of books and pen, he beguiled the time by writing

with a toothpick and candle-smoke on the back of a map and on scraps

of paper, 'Margherita Pusteria,' with one exception the most popular

historical novel in the Italian language.

Liberated at the end of a year, but deprived of his professorship, he

and his family would probably have starved had he not chanced to meet

a publisher who wanted a history of the world. The result of this

meeting was his 'Universal History' in thirty-five volumes (Turin,

1836 _et seq._), which has gone through forty editions and been

translated into many languages. It brought the publisher a fortune and

Cantu a modest independence.

Up to the time of his death in 1895, Cantu wrote almost without

intermission. Besides the books already mentioned, the most notable

are the 'History of a Hundred Years, 1750-1850' (1864), and the 'Story

of the Struggles for Italian Independence' (1873). His masterpiece is

the 'Universal History,' the best work of its kind in Italian and

perhaps in any language for lucidity and rapidity of narration, unity

of plan, justness of proportion, and literary art. It is however

written from the clerical point of view, and is not based on a

critical study of documentary sources. The political offenses for

which Cantu suffered persecution were his attempts to secure a federal

union of the Italian States under the hegemony of Austria and the

Papacy.

THE EXECUTION

From 'Margherita Pusterla'

The beautiful sunshine which one sees in Lombardy only at the season

of vintage, spread its white light and gentle warmth upon the sombre

facades of Broletto. The Piazza was packed with people; the balconies

and belvideres were filled with motley groups. Even ladies were

contending for the best places to see the horrible sight. One mother

showed her little boy all this preparation for death, and said to

him:--

"Do you see that man yonder with the long black beard and rough skin?

He devours bad boys in two mouthfuls: if you cry, he will carry you

off."

The frightened child tightly clasped his mother's neck with his small

arms, and hid his face in her breast. Another, half ashamed at being

seen there, asked, "Who is the victim?"

"It is," replied a neighboring stranger, "the wife of the man who was

beheaded yesterday."

"Ah, ah!" put in a third, "then it is the mother of the little boy who

was executed yesterday with Signor Pusterla?"

"How was that?" resumed the first speaker; "did they behead a child?"

"It is only too true," said a woman, joining in the conversation; "and

such a pretty little boy! Two blue eyes, bluer than the sky, and a

face as gentle and sweet as that of the Christ-child, and hair like

threads of gold. I came here to show my boy how the wicked are

punished, and as I stood near the scaffold, I heard and saw

everything!"

"Tell us, tell us, Mother Radegonda." And Radegonda, enchanted at

occupying the centre of attention, began.

"I will tell you," she said. "When he was there--but for the love of

charity, give me more room; you do not wish to stifle my little

Tanuccio?--Well, when he began to ascend the ladder, ah, see, the

child does not wish to go! He stamps his foot, he weeps, he cries--"

"I believe you," interrupted a person named Pizzabrasa, "for I heard

all the way from the Loggia dei Mercanti, where I was being crushed,

his cries of 'Papa! Mamma!'"

"That was it," continued Radegonda; "and he recoiled with horror

before that savage figure," she said, pointing with her forefinger to

Mastro Impicca. "His father sobbed, and could not speak; but his

confessor whispered in his ear--"

"I saw also," interrupted Pizzabrasa, determined to show that he had

been an eye-witness, and he continued:--"the golden hair of the child

soon mingled with the black hair and beard of the father. One would

have said they were yellow flames on a funeral pall. I also saw the

child caress the priest who talked to him, and the priest--"

"Who is the priest?" interrupted the first speaker. The question was

passed from lip to lip, until finally a man, dressed somewhat after

the ecclesiastical fashion and having a serene and devout face,

replied:--

"He is the one who preached at Lent last year at Santa-Maria del

Sacco. He could have converted Herod himself. But the world is so

wicked! He had no more success than if he had preached in the desert."

"His name?"

"Fra Buonvicino of the monastery Della Ricchezza de Brera. But the

riches that he covets are not those which one acquires in sewing

cloaks. Do you know him? Ah, what a man! question him, talk to him, he

knows everything, and--"

"But what did he say to the child?"--"And what did the child

say?"--"And the child's father, what did he do?"--It was thus they

interrupted the speaker, without listening to his eulogy.

Here Radegonda, regretting that she had been deposed from her throne,

took occasion to resume her speech, for no one was able to give more

details. She began again.

"Here, here," she said, "who is to talk, you or I? There are some

people who stick their noses everywhere and who--Now do you want to

know what the priest said? and how the poor condemned creature walked

with courage? and how in one instant he was in heaven in the company

of the angels?"

"And what did the child say?"

"The little child did not want to go along. He said:--'I know that it

is beautiful in Paradise, that the angels live there, and the kind

God, and there lives the good Madonna: but I would rather stay here

with Papa and Mamma; I would rather stay with them!' he repeated, and

cried."

"Sacred innocence!" exclaimed one of the listeners by an instinctive

compassion, and shed a few tears; but if any one had questioned him

regarding the justice of putting the child to death, he would have

unhesitatingly answered in the affirmative.

Our eloquent Radegonda continued:--

"But the priest! Is there any one here who did not see his face? Well,

you know how it looks when it rains and shines at the same time,--when

they say the Devil beats his wife,--that was the face of the good

monk. Tears large as the beads of a rosary ran down his cheeks, and at

the same time he had a smile like an angel.... He said to the boy,

'Your father goes with you to Paradise!' The child looked at him with

sad eyes, and asked, 'But Mamma?'--'Your mother,' replied the priest,

'will come with us.'--'If I stay on earth,' said the child, 'I must

then live without them?' The monk answered 'Yes'; and then the little

one consented to kneel."

Here sobs checked the course of the narrative; and the narrator was

half ashamed at being affected by the fate of the condemned ones, just

as a young lady is ashamed when she is caught weeping at the theatre.

Pizzabrasa concluded the recital:

"The child dropped upon his knees, and raised towards heaven his

little hands that were whiter than snow, and then the executioner cut

his hair and opened his great eyes to frighten him."

"How much I would have been willing to pay to have been present,"

exclaimed one of the group; "such affecting scenes delight me."

"Then why didn't you come?" asked a neighbor.

The other replied, "What do you think? I had to take to Saint-Victor a

saddle and bridle which I had mended."

And then with that indifference such compassionate souls have for the

sorrows of others which have affected them for a moment, they turned

the conversation on a thousand unrelated topics....

On the balconies, on the platforms, and in the magistrates' halls,

conversation of another description was held. Ladies and gentlemen of

high degree discussed arms and battles, inconstant favors of the

court, passage of birds, and the scarcity of hares; they demanded and

related news; and read from the books of this one and that one.

Signora Theodora, the young wife of Francesco dei Maggi, one of the

most famous beauties, asked in the most nonchalant way as she drew on

her gloves, "Who is this one about to be executed?"

"Margherita Visconti," replied Forestino, one of the sons of the Duke,

who was playing the gallant with all the ladies present.

"Visconti!" exclaimed the young woman. "She is then a relative of

Signor Vicario?"

"Yes, a distant relative," responded the young man.

But the jester Grillincervello interposed:--"She might have been a

nearer relative, but as she refused this, you see what has happened."

"She must regret her action," said another; "she is so young and

beautiful!"

"And then she is not accustomed to dying," put in the fool, a

reflection which caused peals of laughter around him.

Then he turned towards Forestino and his brother Bruzio, around whom

all had gathered in homage: "Serene Princes, it is my opinion that if

you wish to render attentions to the lady of Signor Franciscolo del

Maggi, she will not imitate Margherita."

At this moment the clock struck again. There was sullen silence--then

a second stroke--then a third, vibrating with a moribund horror.

"She has arrived?"

"No."

"Why is she so late?" was the universal question; for the spectators

were impatient, and imbued with expectation and curiosity, as if they

were in a theatre waiting for the curtain to rise.

"Perhaps they have pardoned her?" said one.

"Well, for my part, I should be glad." And the people seemed to find

as much pleasure in imagining a pardon as in watching the execution:

either way it gave them material for applause, emotion, criticism, and

discussion.

Soon all observations were interrupted, for upon the _parlera_, which

was covered with black cloth and velvet cushions, they saw appear the

magistrates, the podesta, his lieutenant, and finally the captain

Lucio. As I have told you, justice was then barbarous but honest, and

these men came to admire their work.

Through all the narrow streets, which terminated at this point, ran a

whisper; and the murmurs grew more excited towards the large gate

which gave entrance to the Pescheria Vecchia. Here was seen the

winding funeral procession, which made a long circuit to let the

multitude profit by the lesson.

"Here she is! Here she is!" they cried, and exactly like a regiment of

infantry in obedience to the commands of a sergeant, the entire crowd

stood on tiptoe, stretched their necks, and turned heads and eyes to

the scene.

Then appeared a yellow standard bordered with gold lace, upon which

was painted a skeleton, erect. In one hand it held a scythe and in the

other an hour-glass. At the right of the skeleton there was painted a

man with a cord around his neck, and to the left a man carrying his

head in his hands. Behind this gonfalon advanced two by two the

Brothers of the Consolation. This was a pious fraternity founded in

the chapel of Santa Maria dei Disciplini; this chapel was afterwards

changed into a church, which yielded to none other in Milan for its

beauty of architecture. To-day it is a common school. This fraternity,

which was transferred to San Giovanni _alle Case rotte_, had for its

one aim to succor the condemned and to prepare them for death. The

brothers advanced. They were attired in white habits, fitting tightly

around their figures, and their cowls were sewn around their heads.

Instead of a face, one saw a cross embroidered in red, and at the arms

of this cross tiny holes were made for the eyes to peer forth. On

their breasts they wore a black medal representing the death of

Christ, and at the foot of the cross was engraved the head of Saint

John the Baptist. With their long unbelted robes, the chains on their

wrists, they resembled nocturnal phantoms.

The last ones bore a coffin, and sang in lugubrious tones the doleful

'Miserere.' Chanting a service and carrying the bier of a person still

in the flesh! Breaking through the crowd, they arrived near the

scaffold and placed the bier upon the ground. Then they arranged

themselves in two cordons around the block, so that they could receive

the victim among them, and also to form a guard between the world and

her who was to leave it. Now a car came, moving slowly and drawn by

two oxen caparisoned in black. In this car was our poor Margherita.

In obedience to the curious sentiment which commands one to adorn

one's self for all occasions, even the melancholy ones, Margherita had

dressed herself in a rich robe of sombre hue. With great pains she had

arranged her black hair, which set off to advantage the delicate

pallor of the face revealing so much suffering. Upon her neck, which

had so often disputed whiteness with pearls, she now wore her rosary,

which seemed to outline the circle of the axe. In her hands she

clasped the crucifix attached to the chapelet, and from this she never

removed her eyes,--eyes which had always beamed with kindness and

sweetness, but which were now full of sorrow. They could only look

upon one object--the cross, the one hope of salvation.

By her side was seated Buonvicino, even paler, if possible, than she.

In his hand he held an image of the Crucified God who has suffered for

us. From time to time he spoke some consoling words to the young

victim,--a simple prayer such as our mothers have taught us in

infancy, and which come to us again in the most critical moments of

life:--"Savior, unto thee I yield my spirit. Maria, pray for me at the

hour of death. Depart, Christian soul, from this world, which is but a

place of exile, and return into that celestial country sanctified by

thy suffering, so that angels may bear thee to Paradise!"...

When Margherita appeared, every one exclaimed: "Oh, how beautiful she

is! She is so young!"

Then tears flowed. Many a silken handkerchief hid the eyes of fair

ladies, and many a hand, accustomed to a sword, tried to retard tears.

Every one looked towards Lucio to see if he would not wave a white

handkerchief--the signal of pardon.

Translated through the French by Esther Singleton, for the

'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

GIOSUE CARDUCCI

(1836-)

BY FRANK SEWALL

Rarely in the history of ancient or modern literature has a writer,

while living, been so generally recognized by his countrymen as their

national prophet as has the Italian poet and essayist Carducci. In

January, 1896, he completed his thirty-fifth year as Professor of

Belles-Lettres in the University of Bologna; and the solemn and

brilliant festivities with which the event was celebrated, extending

over three days and including congratulatory addresses from the king,

from the municipality, from the students and graduates, from foreign

universities, and from distinguished scholars at home and abroad,

testified to the remarkable hold this poet has gained on the

affections and esteem of the Italian people, and the deep impress

his writing has made on the literature of our time.

Born in northern Italy in the year 1836, and entering upon his

literary career at a time coincident with the downfall of foreign

power in Tuscany, the history of his authorship is a fair reflection

of the growth of the new Italy of to-day. In an autobiographical

sketch with which he prefaces his volume of 'Poesie' (1871) he depicts

with the utmost sincerity and frankness the transition through which

his own mind has passed, in breaking from the old traditions in which

he had been nursed at his mother's knee, and in meeting the dazzling

radiance of modern thought and feeling; the thrill of national liberty

and independence,--no longer a glory dreamed of, as by Alfieri, nor

sung in tones of despair, as by Leopardi, but as a living experience

of his own time. He felt the awakening to be at once a literary,

political, and religious one; and following his deep Hellenic

instincts, the religious rebound in him was rather to the paganism of

the ancient Latin forefathers than to the spiritual worship that had

come in with the infusion of foreign blood.

"This paganism," he says, "this cult of form, was naught else but the

love of that noble nature from which the solitary Semitic

estrangements had alienated hitherto the spirit of man in such bitter

opposition. My sentiment of opposition, at first feebly defined, thus

became confirmed conceit, reason, affirmation; the hymn to Apollo

became the hymn to Satan. Oh! the beautiful years from 1861 to 1865,

passed in peaceful solitude and quiet study, in the midst of a home

where the venerable mother, instead of fostering superstition, taught

us to read Alfieri. But as I read the codices of the fourteenth

century, the ideas of the Renaissance began to appear to me in the

gilded initial letters like the eyes of nymphs in the midst of

flowers, and between the lines of the spiritual _laude_ I detected the

Satanic strophe."

So long had Italy lived in passive dependence on the fame of her great

writers of the times of Augustus and of the Medici, and in the apathy

of a long-abandoned hope of political independence and achievement,

that it required a man of powerful instinct and genius to rouse the

people to a sense of their actual possession of a national life and of

a literature that is not alone of the past, and so to throw off both

the "livery of the slave and the mask of the courtesan." Such was the

mission of Carducci. As Howells in his 'Modern Italian Poets' remarks

of Leopardi:--"He seems to have been the poet of the national mood; he

was the final expression of that hopeless apathy in which Italy lay

bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his

governments." So it may be said of Carducci that in him speaks the

hope and joy of a nation waking to new life, and recalling her past

glories, no longer with shame but a purpose to prove herself worthy of

such a heritage.

A distinguished literary contemporary, Enrico Panzacchi, says of

Carducci:--

"I believe that I do not exaggerate the importance of Carducci when I

say that to him and to his perseverance and steadfast work we owe in

great part the poetic revival in Italy."

Cesar Lombroso, in the Paris Revue des Revues, says:--"Among the stars

of first magnitude shines one of greatest brilliance, Carducci, the

true representative of Italian literary genius."

The poem that first attracted attention and caused no little flutter

of ecclesiastical gowns was the 'Hymn to Satan,' which appeared in

1865 in Pistoja, over the signature "Enotrio Romaho," and bore the

date "MMDCXVIII from the foundation of Rome." It is not indeed the

sacrilegious invective that might be imagined from the title, but

rather a hymn to Science and to Free Thought, liberated from the

ancient thraldom of dogma and superstition. It reveals the strong

Hellenic instinct which still survives in the Italian people beneath

the superimposed Christianity, and which here, as in many other of

Carducci's poems, stands out in bold contrast with the subjective and

spiritual elements in religion. It is this struggle of the pagan

against the Christian instinct that accounts for the commingled

sentiment of awe and of rebellion with which Carducci contemplates his

great master Dante; for while he must revere him as the founder of

Italian letters and the immortal poet of his race, he cannot but see

both in the spirituality of Dante's conception of the Church and in

his absolute loyalty to the Empire, motives wholly foreign to the

ancient national instinct. Referring again to his transition years, he

writes:

"Meanwhile the shadow of Dante looked down reproachfully upon me; but

I might have answered:--'Father and Master, why didst thou bring

learning from the cloister to the piazza, from the Latin to the vulgar

tongue? Thou first, O great public accuser of the Middle Ages, gavest

the signal for the rebound of thought. That the alarm was sounded from

the bells of a Gothic campanile mattered but little.'"

Without a formal coronation, Carducci may be regarded as the actual

poet laureate of Italy. He is still, at sixty years of age, an active

and hard-working professor at the University of Bologna, where his

popularity with his students in the lecture-room is equal to that

which his writings have gained throughout the land. A favorite with

the Court, and often invited to lecture before the Queen, he is still

a man of great simplicity, even to roughness, of manners, and of a

genial and cordial nature. Not only do the Italians with one voice

call him their greatest author, but many both in Italy and elsewhere

are fain to consider him the foremost living poet in Europe.

The citations here given have been selected as illustrating the

prominent features of Carducci's genius. His joy in mental

emancipation from the thraldom of dogma and superstition is seen in

the 'Roma' and in the 'Hymn to Satan.' His paganism and his "cult of

form," as also his Homeric power of description and of color, are seen

in 'The Ox' and in 'To Aurora.' His veneration for the great masters

finds expression in the sonnets to Homer and Dante, and the revulsion

of the pagan before the spiritual religious feeling is shown in the

lines 'In a Gothic Church' and in the sonnet 'Dante.'

The poems of Carducci have appeared for the most part in the following

editions only:--'Poesie,' embracing the 'Juvenilia,' 'Levia Gravia,'

and the 'Decennali'; 'Nuove Poesie,' 'Odi Barbare,' 'Nuove Rime.'

Zanichelli in Bologna publishes a complete edition of his writings.

His critical essays have appeared generally in the Nuova Antologia,

and embrace among the more recent a history and discussion of Tasso's

'Aminta,' and the 'Ancient Pastoral Poetry': a preface to the

translation by Sanfelice of Shelley's 'Prometheus'; the 'Torrismondo'

of Tasso: 'Italian Life in the Fifteenth Century,' etc. Eight 'Odes'

of Carducci have been translated into Latin by Adolfo Gandiglo of

Ravenna, and published by Calderini of that city in 1894.

[Illustration: _HOMER._

THE BLIND POET.

Photogravure from a Painting by W. A. Bouguereau.]

* * * * *

Translations from Frank Sewall's 'Giosue Carducci and the

Hellenic Reaction in Italy' and 'Carducci and the Classic

Realism.' By permission of Dodd, Mead and Company, copyright

1892.

ROMA

From the 'Poesie'

Give to the wind thy locks; all glittering

Thy sea-blue eyes, and thy white bosom bared.

Mount to thy chariot, while in speechless roaring

Terror and Force before thee clear the way!

The shadow of thy helmet, like the flashing

Of brazen star, strikes through the trembling air.

The dust of broken empires, cloud-like rising,

Follows the awful rumbling of thy wheels.

So once, O Rome, beheld the conquered nations

Thy image, object of their ancient dread.[A]

To-day a mitre they would place upon

Thy head, and fold a rosary between

Thy hands. O name! again to terrors old

Awake the tired ages and the world!

[A] The allusion is to the figure of 'Roma' as seen on ancient

coins.

HOMER

From the 'Levia Gravia'

And from the savage Urals to the plain

A new barbarian folk shall send alarms,

The coast of Agenorean Thebes again

Be waked with sound of chariots and of arms;

And Rome shall fall; and Tiber's current drain

The nameless lands of long deserted farms:

But thou like Hercules shalt still remain,

Untouched by fiery Etna's deadly charms;

And with thy youthful temples, laurel-crowned,

Shalt rise to the eternal Form's embrace

Whose unveiled smile all earliest was thine;

And till the Alps to gulfing sea give place,

By Latin shore or on Achaean ground,

Like heaven's sun shalt thou, O Homer, shine!

IN A GOTHIC CHURCH

From the 'Poesie'

They rise aloft, marching in awful file,

The polished shafts immense of marble gray,

And in the sacred darkness seem to be

An army of giants

Who wage a war with the invisible;

The silent arches soar and spring apart

In distant flight, then re-embrace again

And droop on high.

So in the discord of unhappy men,

From out their barbarous tumult there go up

To God the sighs of solitary souls

In Him united.

Of you I ask no God, ye marble shafts,

Ye airy vaults! I tremble--but I watch

To hear a dainty well-known footstep waken

The solemn echoes.

'Tis Lidia, and she turns, and slowly turning,

Her tresses full of light reveal themselves,

And love is shining from a pale shy face

Behind the veil.

ON THE SIXTH CENTENARY OF DANTE

From the 'Levia Gravia'

I saw him, from the uncovered tomb uplifting

His mighty form, the imperial prophet stand.

Then shook the Adrian shore, and all the land

Italia trembled as at an earthquake drifting.

Like morning mist from purest ether sifting,

It marched along the Apenninian strand,

Glancing adown the vales on either hand,

Then vanished like the dawn to daylight shifting.

Meanwhile in earthly hearts a fear did rise,

The awful presence of a god discerning,

To which no mortal dared to lift the eyes.

But where beyond the gates the sun is burning,

The races dead of warlike men and wise

With joy saluted the great soul's returning.

THE OX

From the 'Poesie'

I love thee, pious ox; a gentle feeling

Of vigor and of peace thou giv'st my heart.

How solemn, like a monument, thou art!

Over wide fertile fields thy calm gaze stealing,

Unto the yoke with grave contentment kneeling,

To man's quick work thou dost thy strength impart.

He shouts and goads, and answering thy smart,

Thou turn'st on him thy patient eyes appealing.

From thy broad nostrils, black and wet, arise

Thy breath's soft fumes; and on the still air swells,

Like happy hymn, thy lowing's mellow strain.

In the grave sweetness of thy tranquil eyes

Of emerald, broad and still reflected dwells

All the divine green silence of the plain.

DANTE

From the 'Levia Gravia'

O Dante, why is it that I adoring

Still lift my songs and vows to thy stern face,

And sunset to the morning gray gives place

To find me still thy restless verse exploring?

Lucia prays not for my poor soul's resting;

For me Matilda tends no sacred fount;

For me in vain the sacred lovers mount,

O'er star and star, to the eternal soaring.

I hate the Holy Empire, and the crown

And sword alike relentless would have riven

From thy good Frederic on Olona's plains.

Empire and Church to ruin have gone down,

And yet for them thy songs did scale high heaven.

Great Jove is dead. Only the song remains.

TO SATAN

From the 'Poesie'

To thee my verses,

Unbridled and daring,

Shall mount, O Satan,

King of the banquet!

Away with thy sprinkling,

O Priest, and thy droning,

For never shall Satan,

O Priest, stand behind thee.

See how the rust is

Gnawing the mystical

Sword of St. Michael;

And how the faithful

Wind-plucked archangel

Falls into emptiness;

Frozen the thunder in

Hand of Jehovah.

Like to pale meteors, or

Planets exhausted,

Out of the firmament

Rain down the angels.

Here in the matter

Which never sleeps,

King of phenomena,

King of all forms,

Thou, Satan, livest.

Thine is the empire

Felt in the dark eyes'

Tremulous flashing,

Whether their languishing

Glances resist, or

Glittering and tearful, they

Call and invite.

How shine the clusters

With happy blood,

So that the furious

Joy may not perish,

So that the languishing

Love be restored,

And sorrow be banished

And love be increased.

Thy breath, O Satan!

My verse inspires,

When from my bosom

The gods I defy

Of kings pontifical,

Of kings inhuman.

Thine is the lightning that

Sets minds to shaking.

For thee Arimane,

Adonis, Astarte;

For thee lived the marbles,

The pictures, the parchments,

When the fair Venus

Anadyomene

Blessed the Ionian

Heavens serene.

For thee were roaring the

Forests of Lebanon,

Of the fair Cypri

Lover re-born;

For thee rose the chorus,

For thee raved the dances,

For thee the pure shining

Loves of the virgins,

Under the sweet-odored

Palms of Idume,

Where break in white foam

The Cyprian waves.

What if the barbarous

Nazarene fury,

Fed by the base rites

Of secret feastings,

Lights sacred torches

To burn down the temples,

Scattering abroad

The scrolls hieroglyphic?

In thee find refuge

The humble-roofed plebs,

Who have not forgotten

The gods of their household.

Thence comes the power,

Fervid and loving, that,

Filling the quick-throbbing

Bosom of woman,

Turns to the succor

Of nature enfeebled;

A sorceress pallid,

With endless care laden.

Thou to the trance-holden

Eye of the alchemist,

Thou to the view of the

Bigoted mago,

Showest the lightning-flash

Of the new time

Shining behind the dark

Bars of the cloister.

Seeking to fly from thee,

Here in the world-life

Hides him the gloomy monk

In Theban deserts.

O soul that wanderest

Far from the straight way,

Satan is merciful.--

See Heloisa!

In vain you wear yourself

Thin in rough gown; I

Still murmur the verses

Of Maro and Flaccus

Amid the Davidic

Psalming and wailing,

And--Delphic figures

Close at thy side--

Rosy, amid the dark

Cowls of the friars,

Enters Licorida,

Enters Glicera.

Then other images

Of days more fair

Come to dwell with thee

In thy secret cell.

Lo! from the pages of

Livy, the Tribunes

All ardent, the Consuls,

The crowds tumultuous,

Awake; and the fantastic

Pride of Italians

Drives them, O Monk,

Up to the Capitol;

And you whom the flaming

Fire never melted,

Conjuring voices,

Wickliffe and Huss,

Send to the broad breeze

The cry of the watchman:--

"The age renews itself;

Full is the time."

Already tremble

The mitres and crowns.

Forth from the cloister

Moves the rebellion.

Under his stole, see,

Fighting and preaching,

Brother Girolamo

Savonarola.

Off goes the tunic

Of Martin Luther;

Off go the fetters

That bound human thought.

It flashes and lightens,

Girdled with flame;

Matter, exalt thyself;

Satan has won!

A fair and terrible

Monster unchained

Courses the ocean,

Courses the earth.

Flashing and smoking,

Like the volcanoes, he

Climbs over mountains,

Ravages plains,

Skims the abysses;

Then he is lost

In unknown caverns

And ways profound,

Till lo! unconquered,

From shore to shore,

Like to the whirlwind,

He sends forth his cry.

Like to the whirlwind

Spreading his wings,...

He passes, O people,

Satan the great!

Hail to thee, Satan;

Hail the rebellion!

Hail, of the reason the

Great Vindicator!

Sacred to thee shall rise

Incense and vows.

Thou hast the god

Of the priest disenthroned!

TO AURORA

From the 'Odi Barbare'

Thou risest and kissest, O Goddess, with thy rosy breath, the clouds,

Kissest the dusky pinnacles of marble temples.

The forests feel thee, and with a cool shiver awake;

Up soars the falcon, flashing in eager joy.

Meanwhile amid the wet leaves mutter the garrulous nests,

And far off the gray gull screams over the purple sea.

First to delight in thee, down in the laborious plain,

Are the streams which glisten amid the rustling poplars.

Daringly the sorrel colt breaks away from his feeding,

Runs to the brooks with high-lifted mane, neighing in the wind.

Wakeful answer from the huts the great pack of the hounds,

And the whole valley is filled with the noisy sound of their barking.

But the man whom thou awakest to life-consuming labor,

He, O ancient Youth, O Youth eternal,

Still thoughtful admires thee, even as on the mountain

The Aryan Fathers adored thee, standing amid their white oxen.

Again upon the wing of the fresh morning flies forth

The hymn which to thee they sang over their heaped-up spears:--

"Shepherdess thou of heaven! from the stalls of thy jealous sister

Thou loosest the rosy kine, and leadest them back to the skies;

"Thou leadest the rosy kine, and the white herds, and the horses

With the blond flowing manes dear to the brothers Asvini."

Like the youthful bride who goes from her bath to her spouse,

Reflecting in her eyes the love of him her lover,

So dost thou smiling let fall the light garments that veil thee,

And serene to the heavens thy virgin figure reveal.

Flushed thy cheeks, with white breast panting, thou runnest

To the sovereign of worlds, to the fair flaming Suria.

And he joins, and, in a bow, stretches around his mighty neck

Thy rosy arms; but at his terrible glances thou fleest.

'Tis then the Asvinian Twins, the cavaliers of heaven,

Welcome thee rosily trembling in thy chariot of gold,

And thither thou turnest where, measured the road of glory,

Wearied, the god awaits thee in the dull gloaming of eve.

"Gracious thy flight be above us! so invoked thee the fathers;

Gracious the going of thy radiant car over our houses!

"Come from the coasts of the East with thy good fortune,

Come with thy flowering oats and thy foaming milk;

"And in the midst of the calves, dancing, with yellow locks,

All offspring shall adore thee, O Shepherdess of heaven!"

So sang the Aryans. But better pleased thee Hymettus,

Fresh with the twenty brooks whose banks smelt to heaven of thyme;

Better pleased thee on Hymettus the nimble-limbed, mortal huntsman,

Who with the buskined foot pressed the first dews of the morn.

The heavens bent down. A sweet blush tinged the forest and the hills

When thou, O Goddess, didst descend.

But thou descendedst not; rather did Cephalus, drawn by thy kiss,

Mount all alert through the air, fair as a beautiful god,--

Mount on the amorous winds and amid the sweet odors,

While all around were the nuptials of flowers and the marriage of

streams.

Wet lies upon his neck the heavy tress of gold, and the golden quiver

Reaches above his white shoulder, held by the belt of vermilion.

O fragrant kisses of a goddess among the dews!

O ambrosia of love in the world's youth-time!

Dost thou also love, O Goddess? But ours is a wearied race;

Sad is thy face, O Aurora, when thou risest over our towers.

The dim street-lamps go out; and without even glancing at thee,

A pale-faced troop go home, imagining they have been happy.

Angrily at his door is pounding the ill-tempered laborer,

Cursing the dawn that only calls him back to his bondage.

Only the lover, perhaps, fresh from the dreams of the loved one,

His blood still warm from her kisses, salutes with joy,

Beholds with delight thy face, and feels thy cool breathing upon him:

Then cries, "O bear me, Aurora, upon thy swift courser of flame;

"Bear me up into the fields of the stars, that there, looking down,

I may behold the earth beneath thy rosy light smiling;

"Behold my fair one, in the face of the rising day,

Let fall her black tresses down over her blushing bosom."

RUIT HORA

O green and silent solitudes, far from the rumors of men

Hither come to meet us true friends divine, O Lidia,

Wine and love.

O tell me why the sea, far under the flaming Hesperus

Sends such mysterious moanings; and what songs are these, O Lidia,

The pines are chanting.

See with what longing the hills stretch their arms to the setting sun.

The shadow lengthens and holds them; they seem to be asking

A last kiss, O Lidia!

THE MOTHER

(A GROUP BY ADRIAN CECIONI)

Surely admired her the rosy day-dawn, when,

summoning the farmers to the still gray fields,

it saw her barefooted, with quick step passing

among the dewy odors of the hay.

Heard her at mid-day the elm-trees white with dust,

as, with broad shoulders bent o'er the yellow winrows,

she challenges in cheery song the grasshoppers,

whose hoarse chirping rings from the hot hillsides.

And when from her toil she lifted her turgid bosom,

her sun-browned face with glossy curls surrounded,

how then thy vesper fires, O Tuscany,

did richly tinge with color her bold figure!

'Tis then the strong mother plays at ball with her infant,

the lusty child whom her naked breasts have just sated;

tosses him on high and prattles sweetly with him,

while he, with eye fixed on the shining eyes of his mother,

His little body trembling all over with fear, holds out

his tiny fingers imploring; then loud laughs the mother,

and into the one great embrace of love

lets him fall, clasped close to her bosom.

Around her smiles the scene of homely labor;

tremulous nod the oats on the green hillsides;

one hears the distant mooing of the ox,

and on the barn-roof the gay plumed cock is crowing.

* * * * *

Nature has her brave ones, who for her despise

the masks of glory dear to the vulgar throng.

'Tis thus, O Adrian, with holy visions

thou comfortest the souls of fellow-men.

'Tis thus, O artist, with thy blows severe

thou putt'st in stone the ages' ancient hope,

the lofty hope that cries, "Oh, when shall labor

be happy, and faithful love secure from harm?

"When shall a mighty nation of freemen

say in the face of the sun, 'Shine no more

on the idle ease and the selfish wars of tyrants,

but on the pious justice of labor?'"

THOMAS CAREW

(1598?-1639)

Thomas Carew is deservedly placed among the most brilliant

representatives of a class of lyrists who were not only courtiers but

men of rank; who, varied in accomplishments, possessing culture and

taste, expressed their play of fancy with elegance and ease. The lyre

of these aristocratic poets had for its notes only love and beauty,

disdain, despair, and love's bounty, sometimes frivolous in sound and

sometimes serious; and their work may be regarded as the ancestor of

the _vers de societe_, which has reached its perfection in Locker and

Austin Dobson. To Carew's lyrics we may apply Izaak Walton's famous

criticism: "They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good."

Thomas Carew, son of Sir Matthew Carew, was born in London about 1598.

He left Corpus Christi, Oxford, without a degree, and early fell into

wild habits. In 1613 his father wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton that "one

of his sons was roving after hounds and hawks, and the other [Thomas]

studying in the Middle Temple, but doing little at law." The result

was that Carleton made Thomas his secretary, and took him to Venice

and Turin, returning in 1615. Carew accompanied him to the Hague also,

but resigned his post and again returned to England. In 1619 he went

with Lord Herbert of Cherbury to the French court. He became sewer in

ordinary to Charles I., and a gentleman of his privy chamber; and the

King, who was particularly fond of him, gave him the royal domain of

Sunninghill in Windsor Forest. Carew was an intimate friend of Ben

Jonson, Sir John Suckling, John Selden, Sir Kenelm Digby, Davenant,

Charles Cotton, and also of Lord Clarendon; who writes:--"Carew was a

person of a pleasant and facetious wit, and made many poems

(especially in the amorous way) which for the sharpness of the fancy

and the elegance of the language in which that fancy was spread, were

at least equal, if not superior, to any of that time."

Four editions of Carew's poems appeared between 1640 and 1671, and

four have been printed within the present century, the best being a

quarto published by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in 1870. His longest work was a

masque called 'Coelum Britannicum,' performed at Whitehall, February

18th, 1633. Inigo Jones arranged the scenery, Henry Lawes the music,

and the King, the Duke of Lennox, and other courtiers played the chief

parts. Carew's death is supposed to have occurred in 1639.

A SONG

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,

When June is past, the fading rose;

For in your beauty's orient deep,

These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

Ask me no more whither doth stray

The golden atoms of the day;

For in pure love heaven did prepare

These powders to enrich your hair.

Ask me no more whither doth haste

The nightingale when May is past;

For in your sweet dividing throat,

She winters and keeps warm her note.

Ask me no more where those stars light

That downward fall in dead of night;

For in your eyes they sit, and there

Fixed become as in their sphere.

Ask me no more if east or west

The Phoenix builds her spicy nest;

For unto you at last she flies,

And in your fragrant bosom dies.

THE PROTESTATION

No more shall meads be deckt with flowers,

Nor sweetness dwell in rosy bowers,

Nor greenest buds on branches spring,

Nor warbling birds delight to sing,

Nor April violets paint the grove,

If I forsake my Celia's love.

The fish shall in the ocean burn,

And fountains sweet shall bitter turn;

The humble oak no flood shall know,

When floods shall highest hills o'erflow;

Black Lethe shall oblivion leave,

If e'er my Celia I deceive.

Love shall his bow and shaft lay by,

And Venus's doves want wings to fly;

The Sun refuse to shew his light,

And day shall then be turned to night;

And in that night no star appear,

If once I leave my Celia dear.

Love shall no more inhabit earth,

Nor lovers more shall love for worth,

Nor joy above the heaven dwell,

Nor pain torment poor souls in hell;

Grim death no more shall horrid prove,

If I e'er leave bright Celia's love.

SONG

Would you know what's soft? I dare

Not bring you to the down, or air,

Nor to stars to shew what's bright,

Nor to snow to teach you white;

Nor, if you would music hear,

Call the orbs to take your ear;

Nor, to please your sense, bring forth

Bruised nard, or what's more worth;

Or on food were your thoughts placed,

Bring you nectar, for a taste:

Would you have all these in one,

Name my mistress, and 'tis done.

THE SPRING

Now that the winter's gone, the earth hath lost

Her snow-white robes; and now no more the frost

Candies the grass or casts an icy cream

Upon the silver lake or crystal stream;

But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,

And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth

To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree

The drowsy cuckoo and the bumble-bee.

Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring

In triumph to the world the youthful Spring:

The valleys, hills, and woods, in rich array,

Welcome the coming of the longed-for May.

Now all things smile; only my love doth lower;

Nor hath the scalding noonday sun the power

To melt that marble ice which still doth hold

Her heart congealed, and makes her pity cold.

The ox, which lately did for shelter fly

Into the stall, doth now securely lie

In open fields; and love no more is made

By the fireside; but, in the cooler shade,

Amyntas now doth with his Cloris sleep

Under a sycamore, and all things keep

Time with the season--only she doth carry

June in her eyes, in her heart January.

THE INQUIRY[1]

Amongst the myrtles as I walked,

Love and my sighs together talked;

Tell me (said I in deep distress)

Where I may find my shepherdess?

Thou fool (said Love), know'st thou not this,--

In everything that's good she is:

In yonder tulip go and seek;

There thou mayst find her lip, her cheek.

In yonder enameled pansy by,

There thou shalt have her curious eye;

In bloom of peach, in rosy bud,

There wave the streamers of her blood;

In brightest lilies that there stands,

The emblems of her whiter hands;

In yonder rising hill there swells

Such sweets as in her bosom dwells.

'Tis true (said I), and thereupon

I went to pluck them one by one,

To make of parts a union;

But on a sudden all was gone.

With that I stopped. Said Love, These be

(Fond man) resemblances of thee;

And in these flowers thy joys shall die,

Even in the twinkling of an eye,

And all thy hopes of her shall wither,

Like these short sweets thus knit together.

[1] Attributed to Herrick in Drake's 'Literary Hours.'

EMILIA FLYGARE-CARLEN

(1807-1892)

[Illustration: EMILIA CARLEN]

Emilia Smith Flygare-Carlen was born at Stroemstad, Sweden, August 8th,

1807. She was the daughter of Rutger Smith, a merchant of that place,

and here her childhood was passed, varied by frequent sea trips with

her father, and excursions to different parts of the coast. It was

probably these early maritime experiences that laid the foundation of

her accurate knowledge of the character and habits of the Swedish

fisherfolk. In 1827 she was married to Dr. Flygare, a physician of

Kronbergslaen, but after his death in 1833 she returned to her native

place. As a child her talent for imaginative literature was known

among her friends, but nothing of any permanent value was developed

until after her thirtieth year, when her first novel, 'Waldemar

Klein,' was published anonymously (1838). After this first successful

literary attempt, she went to Stockholm upon the advice of her father

(1839), and shortly after she was married to a lawyer of that city,

Johan Gabriel Carlen, a Swedish poet and author. Her novels appeared

in quick succession; she at once became popular, and her books were

widely read. Her productivity was remarkable. The period of her

highest accomplishment was from 1838 to 1852, when a great affliction

in the loss of her son suspended her activities for several years. It

was not until 1858 that she again resumed her writing.

She was honored by the gold medal of the Swedish Academy (1862), and

the success of her books was followed by abundant pecuniary reward as

well as distinction. Her house in Stockholm was the centre of the

literary life of the capital until the death of her husband in 1875,

when she completely retired from the world. She established the

"Rutger Smith Fund" for poor fishermen and their widows, made an

endowment for students to the University of Upsala in memory of her

son, and also founded in memory of her husband a fund for the

assistance of teachers. She died at Stockholm, February 5th, 1892.

As a novelist she shares national honors with her countrywoman,

Fredrika Bremer. Her range in fiction was not confined to a single

field, but embraced all classes and conditions of Swedish life. Her

stories are full of action and rich in incident, and her delineation

of character is natural and shows her real experience of human nature.

She is most happy in depicting the humble fisherfolk and peasants. The

stirring incidents of the adventurous life of the smugglers were

congenial themes, and her graphic descriptions give typical pictures

of the rough coast life among sailors, fishers, and revenue officers.

Among her best and most characteristic works are: 'Gustav Lindorm'

(1835); 'Rosen pa Tisteloen' (The Rose of Tisteloen), 1842;

'Jungfrutornet' (The Maiden's Tower), 1848; 'Enslingen pa

Johannisskaeret' (The Hermit of the Johannis Rock), 1846. Her

autobiography, written in her later years, is sprightly and

interesting. Her collected works number more than thirty volumes, the

greater part of which have been translated into German, French, and

English.

THE PURSUIT OF THE SMUGGLERS

From 'The Merchant House among the Islands'

He [Olagus] thundered his command to his companions:--"Row, row as

fast as you can to the open sea!" And as though it had invisible

wings, the boat turned and shot forward.

"Halt! halt!" cried the lieutenant, whose blood was now up. "In the

name of his Majesty and of the Crown, down with the sails."

Loud laughter from the smugglers' boat sounded across the water.

This scornful laughter was answered from the yacht by the firing of

the second cannon, which was fully loaded. The ball fell into the

water close to the windward of the boat.

The answer was renewed laughter from the smugglers' boat; whose crew,

urged by the twofold desire to save their cargo and to make fools of

the Custom-house officers, continued to increase the distance between

themselves and the yacht. In spite of the more skillful guidance, the

two oars of the latter could not overtake the four men. But the

lieutenant's full strong voice could still be heard:--

"Stop, or I will shoot you to the bottom!"

But he did not shoot, for the smugglers' boat was already out of the

reach of shot.

At this moment it would have been impossible to detect the least trace

of the amiable, good-natured Gudmar Guldbrandsson, the favorite of all

the ladies, with his light yellow curls and his slightly arched

forehead, and the beautiful dark blue eyes, which when not enlivened

by the power of some passion, sometimes revealed that half-dreamy

expression that women so often admire.

Majke ought to have seen her commander now, as he stood for a moment

on the deck, leaning on his gun, his glass in his hand.

"Row, boys, row with all your might! I will not allow--" The remainder

of the sentence was lost in inarticulate tones.

Once more he raised the glass to his eyes.

The chase lasted some time, without any increase of the intervening

distance, or any hope of its diminution. It was a grave, a terrible

chase.

Meantime new and strange intentions had occurred to the commander of

the smugglers' boat. From what dark source could he have received the

inspiration that dictated the command?

"Knock out the bung of the top brandy-barrel, and let us drink; that

will refresh our courage and rejoice our hearts. Be merry and drink as

long as you like."

And now ensued a wild bacchanalia. The men drank out of large mugs,

they drank out of cans, and the result was not wanting, while the boat

was nearing the entrance to the sea.

"Now, my men," began Olagus in powerful penetrating tones, as he

stroked his reddish beard, "shall we allow one of those government

fools to force us to go a different way from the one we ourselves wish

to go?"

"Olagus," Tuve ventured to interpose,--for Tuve still possessed full

consciousness, as he had only made a pretense of drinking,--"dear

Olagus, let us be content if we can place the goods in safety. I think

I perceive that you mean something else--something dangerous."

"Coward! You ought to sit at home and help your father weave nets. If

you are afraid, creep under the tarpaulin; there are others here who

do not get the cramp when they are to follow the Moerkoe Bears."

"For my part," thought Boerje, as he bent over his oar, "I should like

to keep away from this hunt. But who dare speak a word? I feel as

though I were already in the fortress, the ship and crew in the

service of the Crown."

Perhaps Ragnar thought so too; but the great man was so much feared

that when he commanded no contradiction was ever heard.

It was almost the first time that Tuve had made an objection, and his

brother's scornful rebuke had roused his blood also; but still he

controlled himself.

What was resolved on meantime will be seen from what follows.

"Why, what is that?" exclaimed the lieutenant of the yacht. "The oars

are drawn in! He is turning,--on my life, he is turning!"

"He knew that we should catch him up," said Sven, delighted once more

to be able to indulge in his usual humor. "Fists and sinews like mine

are worth as much as four of them; and if we take Pelle into account,

they might easily recognize that the best thing they can do is to

surrender at once."

"Silence, you conceited idiot!" commanded the lieutenant; "this is no

matter of parley. He is making straight for us. The wind is falling;

it is becoming calm."

"What does the lieutenant think, Pelle?" asked Sven, in a loud

whisper. "Can Olagus have weapons on board and want to attack us?"

"It almost looks like it," answered Pelle shortly.

Meantime the two boats approached one another with alarming speed.

"Whatever happens," said the lieutenant, with icy calm,--"and the game

looks suspicious, you know, my friends,--would that the

coast-guardsman may not look behind him! The flag of the Crown may

wave over living or dead men; that is no matter so long as it does not

wave over one who has not done his duty."

"Yes," answered Pelle.

Sven spread out his arms in a significant gesture.

"They may be excited by drink,--their copper-colored faces show that;

but here stands a man who will not forget that his name is Sven

Dillhufvud. There, I have spoken! But, dear sir, do take care of

yourself. They have torn up the boards, and are fetching up stones and

pieces of iron."

"Yes, I see. If they attack us, take care of the oars. Do not lay-to

on the long side; but row past, and then turn. If they throw, watch

their movements carefully; in that way you can escape the danger."

The boats, which were only a few fathoms apart, glided gently towards

one another.

The lieutenant's command was punctually executed by his people.

"Olagus Esbjoernsson," exclaimed the commander of the Custom-house

yacht, "I charge you once more in the King's name to surrender!"

"O dear, yes," exclaimed the worthy descendant of the Vikings. "I have

come back just with that intention. Perhaps I also wanted to fulfill

an old vow. Do you remember what I vowed that night by the Oternnest?"

At the same moment a whole shower of pieces of iron whistled through

the air, and fell rattling on to the yacht; but the sharp piece of

iron thrown by Olagus's own hands was aimed at the lieutenant himself.

He however darted aside so quickly that he was not wounded, although

it flew so close past him that it tore off his straw hat and dashed it

into the sea.

"Olagus, and you others," sounded his voice, in all its youthful

power, "consider what you do; consider the price of an attack on a

royal boat and crew! The responsibility may cost you dear. I charge

you to cease at once."

"What! Are you frightened, you Crown slaves?" roared Olagus, whose

sparkling eyes and flushed face, so different from his usual calm in

peaceful circumstances, lent increased wildness to his form and

gestures. "Come, will this warm you?" And at the same moment another

piece of iron flew past, aimed with such certainty that it would have

cut off the thread of the lieutenant's life if he had not taken

shelter behind the mast. The iron was firmly fixed in the mast.

The yacht was now bombarded on all sides. Here hung a torn sail, there

an end of rope; and the side planks had already received a good deal

of injury, so that the yacht was threatened with a leak. But now was

heard for the last time the young commander's warning:--

"Stop, Olagus, and tell your people to put aside their wretched arms;

for, on my life, this gun is loaded with a ball, and the first of you

who throws another piece shall be shot down like a stag."

"Do it if you dare! But there, see, miserable Custom-house dog, how

the Moerkoe Bears respect your threats!"

The third piece of iron was just about to be thrown; but at the same

moment the lieutenant took aim.

The shot was fired.

During the long chase and the attack which followed it, the sun had

been approaching the horizon, and now might be seen one of those

beautiful sunsets which so often delight the eye on this blue-green

sea. They are the counterpart of the autumn apparitions during the

dark fogs, when the ships wander about seeking their way among the

cliffs, then glimmering whitely, and now shining red.

Worthy the inspiration of poet and painter, this warm, divinely

peaceful, and lovely scene of nature offered a new, bitter contrast to

the terrible picture which human passion and the claims of duty had

conjured with lightning speed into these two spots in the sea--the

smugglers' boat and the Custom-house yacht.

The shot was fired, and the mighty giant of Moerkoe, Olagus Esbjoernsson,

sank back into the tarpaulin.

"The accursed devil has shot right into my heart!"

Pale as death, Tuve sprang forward, and wanted to stay the blood.

"Leave it alone," panted Olagus. "It is no use. Give my love to father

and Britje; she was a good wife. You must be a father to--my boy. The

business may cease."

The subduing touch of death had already extinguished the wild light

which the fire of hatred had kindled in these eyes. And the last

glance that sought his brother's gaze was gentle.

Suddenly he was once more fired by the remembrance of the earthly life

which was fast retreating from him.

"Quickly away with the cargo! No one must know that Olagus Esbjoernsson

fell from a shot out of the Custom-house yacht. I--I--fell upon them."

They were his last words.

Tuve's head fell, sobbing, on the man whom he had so completely

honored as his superior.

Tuve was now the first in Moerkoe, and as though a stronger spirit had

come over him, he began to feel his duty. He rose, and gave orders to

turn toward the sea, but the crew stood motionless with terror.

THOMAS CARLYLE

(1795-1881)

BY LESLIE STEPHEN

The hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Carlyle--(December

4th, 1795)--was lately commemorated. The house in Cheyne Walk,

Chelsea, which he had occupied from 1834 till his death (February 4th,

1881), was handed over to trustees to be preserved as a public

memorial. No house in the British islands has more remarkable

associations. Thither Carlyle had come in his thirty-eighth year,

still hardly recognized by the general public, though already regarded

by a small circle as a man of extraordinary powers. There he went

through the concluding years of the long struggle which ended by a

hard-won and scarcely enjoyed victory. There he had been visited by

almost all the most conspicuous men of letters of his time: by

Jeffrey, Southey, and J. S. Mill; by Tennyson and Browning, the

greatest poets, and by Thackeray and Dickens, the greatest novelists

of his generation; by the dearest friends of his youth, Irving and

Emerson and John Sterling, and by his last followers, Froude and

Ruskin. There too had lived until 1866 the woman who had shared his

struggles, whom he loved and admired without stint, and whom he was

yet destined to remember with many bitter pangs of remorse. Their

story, laid bare with singular fullness, has invested the scene of

their joys and sorrows, their alienation and reconciliations, with

extraordinary interest. Every one who has read the "Reminiscences" and

the later mass of biographical matter must be glad to see the

"sound-proof" room, and the garden haunted by the "demon-fowls" and

the other dumb witnesses of a long tragi-comedy. No one was so keenly

sensitive as Carlyle to the interest of the little gleams of light

which reveal our ancestors not only stirred by the great passions, but

absorbed like ourselves by the trivialities of the day. A similar

interest will long attach to the scene of his own trials.

Carlyle's life was a struggle and a warfare. Each of his books was

wrenched from him, like the tale of the 'Ancient Mariner,' by a

spiritual agony. The early books excited the wrath of his

contemporaries, when they were not ridiculed as the grotesque

outpourings of an eccentric humorist. His teaching was intended to

oppose what most people take to be the general tendency of thought,

and yet many who share that tendency gladly acknowledge that they owe

to Carlyle a more powerful intellectual stimulus than they can

attribute even to their accepted teachers. I shall try briefly to

indicate the general nature of his message to mankind, without

attempting to consider the soundness or otherwise of particular views.

Carlyle describes what kind of person people went to see in Cheyne

Row. "The very sound of my voice," he says, "has got something

savage-prophetic: I am as a John the Baptist girt about with a leather

girdle, whose food is locusts and wild honey." Respectable literary

society at "aesthetic tea-parties" regarded him as the Scribes and

Pharisees regarded the Hebrew prophet. He came among them to tear the

mask from their hypocritical cant. Carlyle was not externally a

Diogenes. Though the son of peasants, he had the appearance and manner

of a thorough gentleman in spite of all his irritable outbreaks. But

he was not the less penetrated to the core with the idiosyncrasies of

his class. The father, a Davie Deans of real life, had impressed the

son profoundly. Carlyle had begun life on the same terms as

innumerable young Scots. Strict frugality had enabled him to get a

college training and reach the threshold of the ministry. His mother

could look forward to the exquisite pleasure of seeing "her own bairn

wag his head in a pulpit!" But at this point Carlyle's individuality

first asserted itself. He could not step into any of the ordinary

grooves. His college teachers appeared to him to offer "sawdust"

instead of manna from heaven. The sacred formulae of their ancestral

creed had lost their savor. Words once expressive of the strongest

faith were either used to utter the bigotry of narrow pedants, or were

adopted only to be explained away into insipid commonplace. Carlyle

shared the intellectual movement of his time too much to profess any

reverence for what he called the "Hebrew old-clothes." Philosophers

and critics had torn them to rags. His quarrel however was with the

accidental embodiment, not with the spirit of the old creeds. The old

morality was ingrained in his very nature; nor was he shocked, like

some of his fellows, by the sternness of the Calvinistic views of the

universe and life. The whole problem was with him precisely to save

this living spirit. The skeptics, he thought, were, in the German

phrase, "emptying out the baby with the bath." They were at war with

the spirit as well as with the letter; trying to construct a Godless

universe; to substitute a dead mechanism for the living organism; and

therefore to kill down at the root every noble aspiration which could

stimulate the conscience, or strengthen a man to bear the spectacle of

the wrongs and sufferings of mankind.

[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE.]

The crisis of this struggle happened in 1821. After giving up the

ministry, Carlyle had tried "schoolmastering" and found himself to

be least fitted of mankind for a function which demands patience

with stupidity. He had just glanced at the legal profession only to be

disgusted with its chicaneries. Hack authorship was his only chance.

The dyspeptic disorder which tormented him through life was tormenting

him. "A rat was gnawing at the pit of his stomach." Then he was

embittered by the general distress of his own class. Men out of work

were threatening riots and the yeomanry being called out to suppress

them. Carlyle was asked by a friend why he too did not come out with a

musket. "Hm! yes," he replied, "but I haven't quite settled on which

side." It was while thus distracted, that after three weeks of

sleeplessness he experienced what he called his "conversion." The

universe had seemed to him "void of life, of purpose, of volition,

even of hostility; it was one huge and immeasurable steam-engine,

rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh,

the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death!" And then he

suddenly resolved to resist. Why go on trembling like a coward?--"As

I so thought, there rushed a stream of fire over my whole soul, and

I shook base fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown

strength; a spirit; almost a god: ever from that time the temper

of my misery was changed; not fear or whining sorrow was in it, but

indignation and grim, fell-eyed defiance." These are the phrases of

his imaginary hero in 'Sartor Resartus.' In the 'Reminiscences' he

repeats the statement in his own person. He had won "an immense

victory"; he had escaped from the "foul mud gods" and soared into the

"eternal blue of ether" where he had "for the spiritual part ever

since lived." He could look down upon his fellow creatures still

"weltering in that fatal element," "pitying the religious part of them

and indignant against the frivolous"; enjoying an inward and supreme

happiness which still remained to him, though often "eclipsed" in

later years.

To understand this crisis is to understand his whole attitude. The

change was not of the purely logical kind. Carlyle was not converted

by any philosophical system. Coleridge, not long before, had found in

Kant and Schelling an answer to similar perplexities. Carlyle, though

he respected the German metaphysicians, could never find their dogmas

satisfactory to his shrewd Scottish sense. His great helper, he tells

us, in the strait, was not Kant but Goethe. The contrast between that

serene prophet of culture and the rugged Scottish Puritan is so marked

that one may be tempted to explain the influence partly by personal

accident. Carlyle grew up at a time when the British public was just

awaking to the existence of Germany; and not only promoted the

awakening but was recognized by the great Goethe himself. He may well

have been inclined in later years to exaggerate a debt due to so

welcome a recognition. And yet it is intelligible that in Goethe,

Carlyle saw what he most required. A man of the highest genius and a

full representative of the most advanced thought could yet recognize

what was elevating in the past as clearly as what was the true line of

progress for us to pursue; and while casting aside the dead trappings

as decidedly as Carlyle, could reach serene heights above the petty

controversies where men wrangled over extinct issues. Goethe had

solved the problem which vexed Carlyle's soul, and set an inspiring

example of the true spirit and its great reward.

Carlyle, however, was not qualified by temperament or mental

characteristics to follow Goethe's steps. If not primarily a reasoner,

and too impatient perhaps for slow logical processes, he was also not

a poet. Some of the greatest English teachers of his period embodied

their conceptions of the world in poetry. Wordsworth and Shelley and

Byron, in particular, were more effective representatives of the chief

spiritual influences of the day than the few speculative writers.

Carlyle thought for a time that he could utter himself in verse, or at

least in prose fiction. He tried, only to feel his incompetence. As

Froude observes, he had little ear for metrical composition. There

were other and perhaps greater obstacles. A poet must be capable of

detachment from the actual world in which he lives, however profound

his interest in its great problems. He must be able to dwell with

"seraph contemplation" and stand aside from the actual contest. To

Carlyle such an attitude was partly impossible, partly contemptible.

He had imbibed the Puritan aversion to aesthetic enjoyments. He had

been brought up in circles where it was thought wrong for a child to

read the 'Arabian Nights,' and where Milton could only obtain a

doubtful admission as a versifier of the Scriptural narrative. Carlyle

retained the prejudice. He always looked askance at poetry which had

no immediate bearing upon conduct, and regarded "aesthetic" as

equivalent to frivolous. "May the devil fly away with the fine arts"

is a sentiment which he quotes with cordial sympathy. This view was

congenial to his inborn characteristics.

One striking peculiarity was his extraordinary "receptivity" of all

outward impressions. The strange irritability which he set down to the

"hag Dyspepsia" made him resemble a patient in whom disease has

produced a morbidly excessive sensibility. Little annoyances were

magnified into tragic dimensions. The noises in a next-door house

affected him as an earthquake might affect others. His memory was as

retentive as his impressions were strong. Froude testifies that his

account of a little trip to Paris, written forty years later without

reference to memoranda, is verified down to the minutest details by

contemporary letters. Scenes instantaneously photographed on his

memory never faded. No one had a keener eye for country. When he

visited Germany he brought back pictures of the scenes of Frederick's

battles, which enabled him to reproduce them with such startling

veracity that after reading you seem to remember the reality, not the

book. In history he seeks to place before us a series of visions as

distinct as actual eyesight: to show us Cromwell watching the descent

of the Scottish army at Dunbar, or the human whirlpool raging round

the walls of the Bastille. We--the commonplace spectators--should not,

it is true, even at present see what was visible to Carlyle, any more

than we see a landscape as Turner saw it. We may wish that we could.

At any rate, we have the conviction of absolute truthfulness to the

impression made on a powerful idiosyncrasy. We perceive, as by the

help of a Rembrandt, vast chaotic breadths of gloomy confusion, with

central figures thrown out by a light of extraordinary brilliancy.

Carlyle, indeed, always has it in mind that what we call reality is

but a film on the surface of mysterious depths. We are such stuff, to

repeat his favorite quotation, as dreams are made of. Past history is

a series of dreams; the magic of memory may restore them for an

instant to our present consciousness. But the most vivid picture of

whatever is not irrecoverably lost always brings, too, the pathetic

sense that we are after all but ephemeral appearances in the midst of

the eternities and infinities. Overwhelmed by this sense of the

unsubstantiality even of the most real objects, Carlyle clutches, as

it were with the energy of despair, every fading image; and tries to

invest it with something of its old brightness. Carlyle was so

desirous to gain this distinctness of vision that he could not be

happy in personal descriptions till, if possible, he had examined the

portrait of his hero and satisfied himself that he could reproduce the

actual bodily appearance. The face, he holds, shows the soul. And then

his shrewd Scottish sagacity never deserts him. If the hero sometimes

becomes, like most heroes, a little too free from human infirmities,

the actors in his dramas never become mere walking gentlemen. In

Dryasdust he gives us lay figures, bedizened at times with shallow

paradoxes; but Carlyle always deals in genuine human nature. His

judgment may not be impartial, but at least it is not nugatory. He

sees the man from within and makes him a credible individual, not a

mere bit of machinery worked by colorless formulae. With this eye for

character goes the keen sense of grim humor which keeps him in touch

with reality. Little incidents bring out the absurd side of even the

heroic. The most exciting scenes of his 'French Revolution' are

heightened by the vision of the shivering usher who "accords the grand

entries" when the ferocious mob is rushing into the palace--not

"finding it convenient," as Carlyle observes, "to refuse them"; and

of the gentleman who continues for an hour to "demand the arrestment

of knaves and dastards"--a most comprehensive of all known petitions.

Carlyle's "mannerism" is one result of this strain to be graphic. It

has been attributed to readings of Jean Paul, and by Carlyle himself,

partly to Irving and partly to the early talk in his father's home. It

appears at any rate as soon as Carlyle gets confidence enough in

himself to trust to his own modes of impression; and if it may fairly

be called a mannerism, was not an affectation. It was struck out in

the attempt to give most effective utterance to his genuine thought,

and may be compared, as Burke said of Johnson's conversation, to the

"contortions of the Sibyl."

It is time, however, to try to say what was the prophetic message thus

delivered. Carlyle, I have said, had no logical system of philosophy,

and was too much of a "realist" (in one sense) to find poetry

congenial. He has to preach by pictures of the past; by giving us

history, though history transfused with poetry; an account of the

external fact which shall reveal the real animating principle, quietly

omitted by statisticians and constitutional historians. The doctrine

so delivered appears to be vague. What, the ordinary believer may ask,

would be left of a religion if its historical statements should turn

out to be mere figments and its framework of dogmas to be nonsense? He

would naturally reply, Nothing. Carlyle replies, Everything. The

spirit may survive, though its whole visible embodiment should be

dissolved into fiction and fallacy. But to define this spirit is

obviously impossible. It represents a tone of thought, a mode of

contemplating life and the world, not any distinct set of definite

propositions. Carlyle was called a "mystic," and even, as he says,

was made into a "mystic school." We may accept the phrase, so far as

mysticism means the substitution of a "logic of the heart" for a

"logic of the head"--an appeal to sentiment rather than to any

definite reasoning process. The "mystic" naturally recognizes the

inner light as shining through many different and even apparently

contradictory forms. But most mystics retain, in a new sense perhaps,

the ancient formulae. Carlyle rejected them so markedly that he shocked

many believers, otherwise sympathetic. His early friend Irving, who

tried to restore life to the old forms, and many who accepted

Coleridge as their spiritual guide, were scandalized by his

utterances. He thought, conversely, that they were still masquerading

in "Hebrew old-clothes," or were even like the apes who went on

chattering by the banks of the Dead Sea, till they ceased to be human.

He regards the "Oxford movement" with simple contempt. His dictum that

Newman had "no more brain than a moderate-sized rabbit" must have been

followed, as no one will doubt who heard him talk, by one of those

gigantic explosions of laughter which were signals of humorous

exaggeration. But it meant in all seriousness that he held Newman to

be reviving superstitions unworthy of the smallest allowance of brain.

Yet Carlyle's untiring denunciation of "shams" and "unrealities" of

this, as of other varieties, does not mean unqualified antipathy. He

feels that the attempt to link the living spirit to the dead externals

is a fatal enterprise. That may be now a stifling incumbrance, which

was once the only possible symbol of a living belief. Accordingly,

though Carlyle's insistence upon the value of absolute intellectual

truthfulness is directed against this mode of thought, his attack upon

the opposite error is more passionate and characteristic. The 'Sartor

Resartus,' his first complete book (1833-4), announced and tried to

explain his "conversion." To many readers it still seems his best

work, as it certainly contains some of his noblest passages. It was

unpopular in England, and (an Englishman must say it with regret)

seems to have been first appreciated in America. It gave indeed many

sharp blows at English society: it expresses his contempt for the

upper literary strata, who like Jeffrey complained of him for being so

"desperately in earnest"; and for the authors, who were not

"prophets," but mere caterers to ephemeral amusement. But the satire,

I cannot but think, is not quite happy. The humor of the "Clothes

Philosophy" is a little strained; to me, I confess, rather tiresome:

and the impressive passages just those where he forgets it.

His real power became obvious beyond all cavil on the publication of

the 'French Revolution' (1837). Not for a hundred years, he declared,

had the public received any book that "came more direct and flamingly

from the heart of a living man." That expresses, as I think, the

truth. The book is not to be "read for information." The facts would

now require much restatement; and moreover, the narrative is too apt

to overleap prosaic but necessary facts in order to fasten upon the

picturesque passages. But considered as what it is, a "prose epic," a

moving panorama, drawn with astonishing force and perception of the

tremendous tragi-comedy involved, it is unequaled in English

literature. The doctrine inculcated is significant. Carlyle's

sympathies were in one sense with the Revolution. He felt, he says,

that the Radicals were "guild-brothers," while the Whigs were mere

"amateurs." He was even more thoroughly convinced than the Radicals

that a thoroughgoing demolition of the old order was essential. The

Revolution was but the first volcanic outburst of the great forces

still active below the surface. Europe, he says ('Chartism'), lay

"hag-ridden" and "quack-ridden." The quack is the most hideous of

hags; he is a "falsehood incarnate." To blow him and his to the four

winds was the first necessity. The French Revolution was "the

inevitable stern end of much: the fearful but also wonderful,

indispensable, and sternly beneficent beginning of much." So far,

Carlyle was far more in agreement with Paine than with Burke. But what

was to follow when the ground was cleared? When you have cut off your

king's head and confiscated the estates of the nobility and the

church, you have only begun. A new period is to be born with

death-throes and birth-throes, and there are, he guesses ('French

Revolution,' Book iv., chapter 4), some two centuries of fighting

before "Democracy go through its dire, most baleful stage of

'Quackocracy.'" The radicals represent this coming "Quackocracy."

What was their root error? Briefly (I try to expound, not to enlarge),

that they were materialists. Their aim was low. They desired simply a

multiplication of physical comforts, or as he puts it, a boundless

supply of "pigs-wash." Their means too were futile. Society, on their

showing, was a selfish herd hungering for an equal distribution

of pigs-wash. They put unlimited faith in the mere mechanism of

constitution-mongering; in ballot-boxes and manipulation of votes and

contrivances by which a number of mean and selfish passions might be

somehow so directed as to balance each other. It is not by any such

devices that society can really be regenerated. You must raise men's

souls, not alter their conventions. They must not simply abolish

kings, but learn to recognize the true king, the man who has the

really divine right of superior strength and wisdom, not the sham

divine right of obsolete tradition. You require not paper rules, but a

new spirit which spontaneously recognizes the voice of God. The true

secret of life must be to him, as to every "mystic," that we should

follow the dictates of the inner light which speaks in different

dialects to all of us.

But this implies a difficulty. Carlyle, spite of his emergence into

"blue ether," was constitutionally gloomy. He was more alive than any

man since Swift to the dark side of human nature. The dullness of

mankind weighed upon him like a nightmare. "Mostly fools" is his pithy

verdict upon the race at large. Nothing then could be more idle than

the dream of the revolutionists that the voice of the people could be

itself the voice of God. From millions of fools you can by no

constitutional machinery extract anything but folly. Where then is the

escape? The millions, he says (essay on Johnson), "roll hither and

thither, whithersoever they are led"; they seem "all sightless and

slavish," with little but "animal instincts." The hope is that, here

and there, are scattered the men of power and of insight, the

heaven-sent leaders; and it is upon loyalty to them and capacity for

recognizing and obeying them that the future of the race really

depends. This was the moral of the lectures on 'Hero-Worship' (1840).

Odin, Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Cromwell, and Napoleon, are

types of the great men who now and then visit the earth as prophets or

rulers. They are the brilliant centres of light in the midst of the

surrounding darkness; and in loyal recognition of their claims lies

our security for all external progress. By what signs, do you ask, can

they be recognized? There can be no sign. You can see the light if you

have eyes; but no other faculty can supply the want of eyesight. And

hence arise some remarkable points both of difference from and

coincidence with popular beliefs.

In the 'Chartism,' 'Past and Present,' and 'Latter-Day Pamphlets'

(1839, 1843, and 1850), Carlyle applied his theories to the problems

of the day. They had the disadvantage which generally attaches to the

writings of an outsider in politics. They were, said the average

reader, "unpractical." Carlyle could not recommend any definite

measures; an objection easy to bring against a man who urges rather a

change of spirit than of particular measures. Yet it is noticeable

that he recommends much that has since become popular. Much of his

language might be used by modern Socialists. In 'Past and Present,'

for example (Book iii., Chapter 8), he gives the principle of "land

nationalization." The great capitalist is to be turned into a "captain

of industry," and government is to undertake to organize labor, to

protect health, and to enforce education. Carlyle so far sympathizes

with the Socialist, not only as agreeing that the great end of

government is the raising of the poor, but as denouncing the

_laissez-faire_ doctrine. The old-fashioned English Radical had

regarded all government as a necessary evil, to be minimized as much

as possible. When it had armed the policemen, it had fulfilled its

whole duty. But this, according to Carlyle, was to leave the "dull

multitude" to drift into chaos. Government should rest upon the

loyalty of the lower to the higher. Order is essential; and good order

means the spontaneous obedience to the heaven-sent hero. He, when

found, must supply the guiding and stimulating force. The Socialist,

like Carlyle, desires a strong government, but not the government of

the "hero." Government of which the moving force comes from above

instead of below will be, he thinks, a government of mere force. And

here occurs the awkward problem to which Carlyle is constantly

referring. He was generally accused of identifying "right" with

"might." Against this interpretation he always protested. Right and

Might, he says often, are in the long run identical. That which is

right and that alone is ultimately lasting. Your rights are the

expression of the divine will; and for that reason, whatever endures

must be right. Work lasts so far as it is based upon eternal

foundations. The might, therefore, is in the long run the expression

of the right. The Napoleonic empire, according to a favorite

illustration, could not last because it was founded upon injustice.

The two tests then must coincide: what is good proves itself by

lasting, and what lasts, lasts because good; but the test of endurance

cannot, it is clear, be applied when it is wanted. Hence arises an

ambiguity which often gives to Carlyle the air of a man worshiping

mere success; when, if we take his own interpretation, he takes the

success to be the consequence, not the cause, of the rightness. The

hero is the man who sees the fact and disregards the conventional

fiction; but for the moment he looks very like the man who disregards

principles and attends to his own interest.

Here again Carlyle approximates to a doctrine to which he was most

averse, the theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of

the fittest. The Darwinian answers in this way Carlyle's problem, how

it is to come to pass that the stupidity of the masses comes to

blunder into a better order? Here and there, as in his accounts of the

way in which the intensely stupid British public managed to blunder

into the establishment of a great empire, Carlyle seems to fall in

with the Darwinian view. That view shocked him because he thought it

mechanical. To him the essence of history was to be found not in the

blind striving of the dull, but in the lives of great men. They

represent the incarnate wisdom which must guide all wholesome

aspiration. History is really the biography of the heroes. All

so-called philosophies of history, attempts to discover general laws

and to dispense with the agency of great men, are tainted with

materialism. They would substitute "blind laws" for the living spirit

which really guides the development of the race. But if you ask how

your hero is to be known, the only answer can be, Know him at your

peril.