Carlyle's most elaborate books, the 'Cromwell' and the 'Frederick,'

are designed to give an explicit answer to the "right" and "might"

problem. Carlyle in both cases seems to be toiling amidst the

dust-heaps of some ancient ruin, painfully disinterring the shattered

and defaced fragments of a noble statue and reconstructing it to be

hereafter placed in a worthy Valhalla. Cromwell, according to the

vulgar legend, was a mere hypocrite, and Frederick a mere cynical

conqueror. The success of both--that is his intended moral--was in

proportion to the clearness with which they recognized the eternal

laws of the universe. Cromwell probably is the more satisfactory hero,

as more really sympathetic to his admirer. But each requires an

interpreter. Cromwell's gifts did not lie in the direction of lucid

utterance; and Frederick, if he could have read, would certainly have

scorned, the doctrine of his eulogist. Carlyle, that is, has to dig

out in the actions of great men a true significance, certainly not

obvious to the actors themselves. Their recognition of the eternal

laws was in one case embodied in obsolete formulae, and in the other,

it might seem, altogether unconscious. The hero's recognition of

divine purposes does not imply then that his own vision is purged from

error, or that his aim is distinctly realized. He may, like Mahomet or

the Abbot Sampson, be full of superstition. His "veracity" does not

mean that his beliefs are true; only that they are sincere and such a

version of the truth as is possible in his dialect. This is connected

with Carlyle's constant insistence upon the superiority of silence to

speech. The divine light shines through many distracting media; it

enlightens many who do not consciously perceive it. It may be

recognized because it gives life; because the work to which it prompts

is lasting. But even the hero who tries to utter himself is sure to

interpolate much that is ephemeral, confused, and imperfect; and

speech in general represents the mere perplexed gabble of men who take

words for thought, and raise a hopeless clamor which drowns the still

small voice of true inspiration. If men are mostly fools, their talk

is mostly folly; forming a wild incoherent Babel in which it is hard

to pick out the few scattered words of real meaning. Carlyle has been

ridiculed for preaching silence in so many words; but then Carlyle was

speaking the truth, and of that, he fully admits, we can never have

too much. The hero may be a prophet, or a man of letters. He is bound

to speak seriously, though not to be literally silent; and his words

must be judged not by the momentary pleasure, but by their ultimate

influence on life.

Carlyle's message to his fellows, which I have tried imperfectly to

summarize, may be condemned on grounds of taste and of morality.

Translated into logical formulae it becomes inconsistent, and it

embodies some narrow prejudices in exaggerated terms. Yet I think that

it has been useful even by the shock it has given to commonplace

optimism. It has been far more useful because in his own dialect,

Carlyle--as I think--expresses some vital truths with surpassing

force. Whatever our creeds, religious or political, he may stimulate

our respect for veracity, in the form of respect for honest work or

contempt for hypocritical conventions; our loyalty to all great

leaders, in the worlds both of thought and action; and our belief that

to achieve any real progress, something is required infinitely deeper

than any mere change in the superficial arrangements of society. These

lessons are expressed, too, as the merely literary critic must admit,

by a series of historical pictures, so vivid and so unique in

character that for many readers they are in the full sense

fascinating. They are revelations of new aspects of the world, never,

when once observed, to be forgotten. And finally, I may add that

Carlyle's autobiographical writings--in which we must include the

delightful 'Life of Sterling'--show the same qualities in a shape

which, if sometimes saddening, is profoundly interesting. No man was

more reticent in his life, though he has been made to deliver a

posthumous confession of extraordinary fullness. We hear all the

groans once kept within the walls of Cheyne Row. After making all

allowance for the fits of temper, the harshness of judgment, and the

willful exaggeration, we see at last a man who under extraordinary

difficulties was unflinchingly faithful to what he took to be his

vocation, and struggled through a long life, full of anxieties and

vexations, to turn his genius to the best account.

[Signature: Leslie Stephen]

LABOR

From 'Past and Present'

For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were

he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always

hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is

there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, _is_ in

communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will

itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and

regulations, which are truth.

The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. "Know

thyself": long enough has that poor "self" of thine tormented thee;

thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe! Think it not thy

business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual:

know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules! That

will be thy better plan.

It has been written, "An endless significance lies in Work;" a man

perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair

seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man

himself first ceases to be jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby.

Consider how even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of

a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets

himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair

itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor

day-worker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valor

against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink

murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed

glow of Labor in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison

is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed

flame!

Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless

Chaos, once set it _revolving_, grows round and ever rounder; ranges

itself by mere force of gravity into strata, spherical courses; is no

longer a Chaos, but a round compacted World. What would become of the

Earth did she cease to revolve? In the poor old Earth, so long as she

revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all

irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on

the Potter's wheel,--one of the venerablest objects; old as the

Prophet Ezekiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin

themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes.

And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to

make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking!

Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and

lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man

the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can

bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what

expensive coloring, what gilding and enameling she will, he is but a

botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling,

squint-cornered, amorphous botch,--a mere enameled vessel of dishonor!

Let the idle think of this.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other

blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will

follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force

through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening

river there, it runs and flows;--draining off the sour festering water

gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead

of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing

stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and _its_

value be great or small! Labor is Life: from the inmost heart of the

Worker rises his God-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence

breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him

to all nobleness,--to all knowledge, "self-knowledge" and much else,

so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold

good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits

that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but

what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of

knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the

clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. "Doubt,

of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone."

* * * * *

And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness

to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time?

All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim brute Powers of

Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such wrestle, there, and elsewhere

not at all, thou wilt continually learn. Set down a brave Sir

Christopher in the middle of black ruined Stone-heaps, of foolish

unarchitectural Bishops, red-tape Officials, idle Nell-Gwynn Defenders

of the Faith; and see whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral

out of all that, yea or no! Rough, rude, contradictory, are all things

and persons, from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen up to the idle

Nell-Gwynn Defenders, to blustering red-tape Officials, foolish

unarchitectural Bishops. All these things and persons are there not

for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's; they are there for their

own sake mainly! Christopher will have to conquer and constrain all

these,--if he be able. All these are against him. Equitable Nature

herself, who carries her mathematics and architectonics not on the

face of her, but deep in the hidden heart of her,--Nature herself is

but partially for him; will be wholly against him, if he constrain her

not! His very money, where is it to come from? The pious munificence

of England lies far-scattered, distant, unable to speak and say, "I am

here";--must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious munificence, and

all help, is so silent, invisible like the gods; impediments,

contradictions manifold, are so loud and near! O brave Sir

Christopher, trust thou in those, notwithstanding, and front all

these; understand all these; by valiant patience, noble effort,

insight, by man's strength, vanquish and compel all these,--and on the

whole, strike down victoriously the last topstone of that Paul's

Edifice; thy monument for certain centuries, the stamp "Great Man"

impressed very legibly on Portland-stone there!

Yes, all manner of help, and pious response from Men of Nature, is

always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light, till it be

seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first "Impossible."

In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie

diffused through Immensity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to

faith. Like Gideon, thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of

thy tent; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any

bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a

miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to Heaven; and

from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind Localities and

town and country Parishes there never could, blessed dew-moisture to

suffice thee shall have fallen!

Work is of a religious nature;--work is of a _brave_ nature; which it

is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is as the swimmer's:

a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it

will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and

buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its

conqueror along. "It is so," says Goethe, "with all things that man

undertakes in this world."

Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,--Columbus, my hero, royalest

Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment, this of thine, in the

waste deep waters; around thee mutinous discouraged souls, behind thee

disgrace and ruin, before thee the equal, unpenetrated veil of Night.

Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from their deep basin

(ten miles deep, I am told), are not entirely there on thy behalf!

Meseems _they_ have other work than floating thee forward:--and the

huge Winds, that sweep from Ursa-Major to the Tropics and Equators,

dancing their giant-waltz through the kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity,

they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small

shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle-skiff of thine! Thou art not

among articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art among

immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling, wide as the world here.

Secret, far off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there lies a help

in them: see how thou wilt get at that. Patiently thou wilt wait till

the mad Southwester spend itself, saving thyself by dexterous science

of defense, the while: valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou

strike in, when the favoring East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny of

men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt

cheerily encourage: thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason,

weariness, weakness of others and thyself;--how much wilt thou

swallow down! There shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than

this Sea, which is but ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable; known to

God only. Thou shalt be a great man. Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of

the World Marine-service,--thou wilt have to be _greater_ than this

tumultuous unmeasured World here round thee is; thou, in thy strong

soul, as with wrestler's arms shalt embrace it, harness it down; and

make it bear thee on,--to new Americas, or whither God wills!

THE WORLD IN CLOTHES

From 'Sartor Resartus'

As Montesquieu wrote a 'Spirit of Laws,'" observes our Professor, "so

could I write a 'Spirit of Clothes'; thus, with an 'Esprit des Lois,'

properly an 'Esprit de Coutumes,' we should have an 'Esprit de

Costumes.' For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man

proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious

operations of the mind. In all his Modes, and habilatory endeavors, an

Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the Cloth are

the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of

a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded

mantles, based on light sandals; tower-up in high headgear, from

amid peaks, spangles, and bell-girdles; swell-out in starched ruffs,

buckram stuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or girth himself into

separate sections, and front the world an Agglomeration of four

limbs,--will depend on the nature of such Architectural Idea: whether

Grecian, Gothic, Later-Gothic, or altogether Modern, and Parisian or

Anglo-Dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in Color! From the soberest

drab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies unfold

themselves in choice of color: if the cut betoken Intellect and

Talent, so does the Color betoken Temper and Heart. In all which,

among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant,

indubitable, though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect:

every snip of the Scissors has been regulated and prescribed by

ever-active Influences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a

superior order are neither invisible nor illegible.

"For such superior Intelligences a Cause-and-Effect Philosophy of

Clothes, as of Laws, were probably a comfortable winter-evening

entertainment: nevertheless, for inferior Intelligences, like men,

such Philosophies have always seemed to me uninstructive enough. Nay,

what is your Montesquieu himself but a clever infant spelling Letters

from a hieroglyphical prophetic Book, the lexicon of which lies in

Eternity, in Heaven?--Let any Cause-and-Effect Philosopher explain,

not why I wear such and such a Garment, obey such and such a Law; but

even why _I_ am _here_, to wear and obey anything!--Much therefore, if

not the whole, of that same 'Spirit of Clothes' I shall suppress as

hypothetical, ineffectual, and even impertinent: naked Facts, and

Deductions drawn therefrom in quite another than that omniscient

style, are my humbler and proper province."

Acting on which prudent restriction, Teufelsdroeckh has nevertheless

contrived to take-in a well nigh boundless extent of field; at least,

the boundaries too often lie quite beyond our horizon. Selection being

indispensable, we shall here glance over his First Part only in the

most cursory manner. This First Part is, no doubt, distinguished by

omnivorous learning, and utmost patience and fairness: at the same

time, in its results and delineations, it is much more likely to

interest the Compilers of some Library of General, Entertaining,

Useful, or even Useless Knowledge than the miscellaneous readers of

these pages. Was it this Part of the Book which Heuschrecke had in

view, when he recommended us to that joint-stock vehicle of

publication, "at present the glory of British Literature"? If so, the

Library Editors are welcome to dig in it for their own behoof.

To the First Chapter, which turns on Paradise and Fig-leaves, and

leads us into interminable disquisitions of a mythological,

metaphorical, cabalistico sartorial, and quite antediluvian cast, we

shall content ourselves with giving an unconcerned approval. Still

less have we to do with "Lilis, Adam's first wife, whom, according to

the Talmudists, he had before Eve, and who bore him, in that wedlock,

the whole progeny of aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial Devils,"--very

needlessly, we think. On this portion of the Work, with its profound

glances into the _Adam-Kadmon_, or Primeval Element, here strangely

brought into relation with the _Nifl_ and _Muspel_ (Darkness and

Light) of the antique North, it may be enough to say, that its

correctness of deduction and depth of Talmudic and Rabbinical lore

have filled perhaps not the worst Hebraist in Britain with something

like astonishment.

But quitting this twilight region, Teufelsdroeckh hastens from the

Tower of Babel, to follow the dispersion of Mankind over the whole

habitable and habilable globe. Walking by the light of Oriental,

Pelasgic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient and Modern

researches of every conceivable kind, he strives to give us in

compressed shape (as the Nuernbergers give an _Orbis Pictus_) an _Orbis

Vestitus_; or view of the costumes of all mankind, in all countries,

in all times. It is here that to the Antiquarian, to the Historian, we

can triumphantly say: Fall to! Here is learning: an irregular

Treasury, if you will; but inexhaustible as the Hoard of King

Nibelung, which twelve wagons in twelve days, at the rate of three

journeys a day, could not carry off. Sheepskin cloaks and wampum

belts; phylacteries, stoles, albs; chlamydes, togas, Chinese silks,

Afghan shawls, trunk-hose, leather breeches, Celtic philibegs (though

breeches, as the name _Gallia Braccata_ indicates, are the more

ancient), Hussar cloaks, Vandyke tippets, ruffs, fardingales, are

brought vividly before us,--even the Kilmarnock nightcap is not

forgotten. For most part, too, we must admit that the Learning,

heterogeneous as it is, and tumbled-down quite pell-mell, is true,

concentrated and purified Learning, the drossy parts smelted out and

thrown aside.

Philosophical reflections intervene, and sometimes touching pictures

of human life. Of this sort the following has surprised us. The first

purpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was not warmth or

decency, but ornament. "Miserable indeed," says he, "was the condition

of the Aboriginal Savage, glaring fiercely from under his fleece of

hair, which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung round

him like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick

natural fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on

wild-fruits; or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in

morasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements,

without arms, save the ball of heavy Flint, to which, that his sole

possession and defense might not be lost, he had attached a long cord

of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling it with

deadly unerring skill. Nevertheless, the pains of Hunger and Revenge

once satisfied, his next care was not Comfort but Decoration (_Putz_).

Warmth he found in the toils of the chase; or amid dried leaves, in

his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto: but for

Decoration he must have Clothes. Nay, among wild people, we find

tattooing and painting even prior to Clothes. The first spiritual want

of a barbarous man is Decoration, as indeed we still see among the

barbarous classes in civilized countries.

"Reader, the heaven-inspired melodious Singer; loftiest Serene

Highness; nay, thy own amber-locked, snow-and-rose-bloom Maiden,

worthy to glide sylph-like almost on air, whom thou lovest, worshipest

as a divine Presence, which, indeed, symbolically taken, she is,--has

descended, like thyself, from that same hair-mantled, flint-hurling

Aboriginal Anthropophagus! Out of the eater cometh forth meat; out of

the strong cometh forth sweetness. What changes are wrought, not by

Time, yet in Time! For not Mankind only, but all that Mankind does or

beholds, is in continual growth, regenesis and self-perfecting

vitality. Cast forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living,

ever-working Universe: it is a seed-grain that cannot die; unnoticed

to-day (says one), it will be found flourishing as a Banyan-grove

(perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-forest!) after a thousand years.

"He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of _Movable

Types_ was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and

Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented

the Art of Printing. The first ground handful of Nitre, Sulphur, and

Charcoal drove Monk Schwartz's pestle through the ceiling: what will

the last do? Achieve the final undisputed prostration of Force under

Thought, of Animal courage under Spiritual. A simple invention it was

in the old-world Grazier,--sick of lugging his slow Ox about the

country till he got it bartered for corn or oil,--to take a piece of

Leather, and thereon scratch or stamp the mere Figure of an Ox (or

_Pecus_); put it in his pocket, and call it _Pecunia_, Money. Yet

hereby did Barter grow Sale, the Leather Money is now Golden and

Paper, and all miracles have been out-miracled: for there are

Rothschilds and English National Debts; and whoso has sixpence is

sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to

feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over

him,--to the length of sixpence.--Clothes too, which began in

foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! Increased

Security and pleasurable Heat soon followed: but what of these?

Shame, divine Shame (_Scham_, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the

Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; a

mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us

individuality, distinction, social polity; Clothes have made Men of

us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us.

"But, on the whole," continues our eloquent Professor, "Man is a

Tool-using Animal (_Handthierendes Thier_). Weak in himself, and of

small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled,

of some half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his

legs, lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three

quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses

him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise

Tools: with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before

him; he kneads glowing iron, as if it were soft paste; seas are his

smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you

find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is

all."

Here may we not, for a moment, interrupt the stream of Oratory with a

remark, that this Definition of the Tool-using Animal appears to us,

of all that Animal-sort, considerably the precisest and best? Man is

called a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also laugh, or attempt

to do it: and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher?

Teufelsdroeckh himself, as we said, laughed only once. Still less do we

make of that other French Definition of the Cooking Animal: which,

indeed, for rigorous scientific purposes, is as good as useless. Can a

Tartar be said to cook, when he only readies his steak by riding on

it? Again, what Cookery does the Greenlander use, beyond stowing-up

his whale-blubber, as a marmot, in the like case, might do? Or how

would Monsieur Ude prosper among those Orinoco Indians who, according

to Humboldt, lodge in crow-nests, on the branches of trees; and, for

half the year, have no victuals but pipe-clay, the whole country being

under water? But on the other hand, show us the human being, of any

period or climate, without his Tools: those very Caledonians, as we

saw, had their Flint-ball, and Thong to it, such as no brute has or

can have.

"Man is a Tool-using Animal," concludes Teufelsdroeckh in his abrupt

way; "of which truth Clothes are but one example: and surely if we

consider the interval between the first wooden Dibble fashioned by

man, and those Liverpool Steam-carriages, or the British House of

Commons, we shall note what progress he has made. He digs up certain

black stones from the bosom of the earth, and says to them, _Transport

me and this luggage at the rate of five-and-thirty miles an hour_; and

they do it: he collects, apparently by lot, six hundred and

fifty-eight miscellaneous individuals, and says to them, _Make this

nation toil for us, bleed for us, hunger and sorrow and sin for us_;

and they do it."

DANTE

From 'Heroes and Hero-Worship'

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his

Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it

were, irrevocably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering,

sorrow-stricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived;

and the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now

intervenes. It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living

here. After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know

of him. The Book;--and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed

to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think

genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of

all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on

vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow

and pain, the known victory which is also deathless;--significant of

the whole history of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face that

ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting

face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness,

gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into

sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain.

A soft, ethereal soul, looking-out so stern, implacable,

grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is

a silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind

of godlike disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart, as if it

were withal a mean, insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to

torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in

protest, and lifelong, unsurrendering battle, against the world.

Affection all converted into indignation: an implacable indignation;

slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye, too, it looks out

in a kind of _surprise_, a kind of inquiry--Why the world was of such

a sort? This is Dante: so he looks, this "voice of ten silent

centuries," and sings us "his mystic unfathomable song."

The little that we know of Dante's life corresponds well enough with

this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper

class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then

going; much school-divinity, Aristotelian logic, some Latin

classics,--no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things:

and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt,

learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear

cultivated understanding, and great subtlety; this best fruit of

education he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. He knows

accurately and well what lies close to him; but in such a time,

without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what

was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near,

breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on what is far off.

This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone

through the usual destinies: been twice out campaigning as a soldier

for the Florentine State; been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth

year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the

Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain

Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank,

and grown-up henceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant

intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account

of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to

another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in

Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all

beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last

in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole

strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but

it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy the rigorous earnest

man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make

happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him

as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta or whatsoever they

call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,--and the world

had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence

would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb

centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries

(for there will be ten of them and more) had no 'Divina Commedia' to

hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for

this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and

crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of

his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy,

what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some

other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose

party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly

forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and

wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the

fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight

of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even

by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad

only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in

the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be

burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious civic

document. Another curious document, some considerable number of years

later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, written

in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return on

condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed

stern pride:--"If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I

will never return (_nunquam revertar_)."

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron

to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, "How

hard is the path (_Come e duro calle_)." The wretched are not cheerful

company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with

his moody humors, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of

him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for his

gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della

Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulones

ac histriones_) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he

said:--"Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make

himself so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after

day, and have nothing to amuse us with at all?" Dante answered

bitterly:--"No, not strange; your Highness is to recollect the

Proverb, '_Like to Like_;'"--given the amuser, the amusee must also be

given! Such a man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and

sorrows, was not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be

evident to him that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of

benefit, in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to

wander, wander; no living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries

there was no solace here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;

that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its

Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence

thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt

surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life

altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou

and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made

its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his

thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied

or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante,

in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he

no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there with

its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he himself should

see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went

thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in

speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic

unfathomable song"; and this his 'Divine Comedy,' the most remarkable

of all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see,

a proud thought for him at times, that he, here in exile, could do

this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from

doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that

it was great; the greatest a man could do. "If thou follow thy star,

_Se tu segui tua stella_,"--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness,

in his extreme need, still say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou

shalt not fail of a glorious haven!" The labor of writing, we find,

and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he

says, "This Book, which has made me lean for many years." Ah yes, it

was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,--not in sport, but in

grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been

written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole

history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at

the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies

buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris

ab oris_. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after;

the Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am I, Dante, laid,

shut-out from my native shores."

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it "a mystic

unfathomable Song"; and such is literally the character of it.

Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a

sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words,

there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and

soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song:

we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's

and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness,

that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no

Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,--to the great

injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most

part! What we want to get at is the _thought_ the man had, if he had

any; why should he twist it into jingle, if he _could_ speak it out

plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of

melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark,

become musical by the greatness, depth, and music of his thoughts,

that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet,

and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech _is_ Song.

Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is

for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business,

that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be

rhymed:--it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it

was aiming at. I would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought,

not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious

men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love

the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall

we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing

hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his 'Divine Comedy' that

it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there

is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his

simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along

naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be

otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves

rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it

musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward

symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,

proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the

character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,

_Paradiso_, look-out on one another like compartments of a great

edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern,

solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the

_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the

measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts;

and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people

of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l'

nom ch' e stato all' Inferno_" (See, there is the man that was in

Hell). Ah yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe

sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.

Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise.

Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the

daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_,

in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.

In all ways we are "to become perfect through suffering."--But as I

say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has

all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made

him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole only; every

compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth,

into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its

place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the

soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered

forever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense

one: but a task which is _done_.

Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that depends on it, is

the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come before

us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian

mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too

of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself

into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is

world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects he

pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so

intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost

development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great

power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and

nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of

Dite: _red_ pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim

immensity of gloom;--so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and

forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a

brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more

condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation,

spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence,

nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is

strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness

of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the

blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails

sink, the mast being suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunette Latini,

with the _cotto aspetto_, "face _baked_", parched brown and lean; and

the "fiery snow" that falls on them there, a "fiery snow without

wind," slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs;

square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its

Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the

Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how

Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the past tense "_fue_"!

The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive,

almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius, this sort

of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent,

passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale rages",

speaks itself in these things.

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a

man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is

physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a

likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of

doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could

not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it,

unless he had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy

in him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too;

sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the

likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and

trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that

intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what

an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come

out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man

is he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as

surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that

he discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the

thing he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind

of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it

brought with it the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are

trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael,

the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No

most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the

commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with

him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness

as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way

noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what

qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of

eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into

our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella

persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a

solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these

_alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them

away again, to wail forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend

of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon

the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet

also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante

discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his

'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel;

putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I

suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any

man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigor cannot pity

either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or

little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of

Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like

the wail of AEolian harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;--and

then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards

his Beatrice; their meeting together in the 'Paradiso'; his gazing in

her pure transfigured eyes, hers that had been purified by death so

long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the song of angels;

it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very

purest, that ever came out of a human soul.

For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the

essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too

as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity.

Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of

all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed,

what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? "_A Dio

spiacenti ed a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of

God:" lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; "_Non

ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass." Or

think of this: "They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di

morte_." One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of

Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full

surely _die_; "that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die."

Such words are in this man. For rigor, earnestness, and depth, he is

not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must

go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the

_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the 'Divina Commedia.' Such

preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and

is like to be a transient feeling. The 'Purgatorio' and

'Paradiso,'--especially the former, one would almost say, is even more

excellent than it. It is a noble thing, that _Purgatorio_, "Mountain

of Purification"; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If

Sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in

Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act.

It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_,

that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of

morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an

altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company

still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and reprobates

is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher,

to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that

Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, my

daughter Giovanna; I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil

painfully up by that winding steep, "bent-down like corbels of a

building," some of them,--crushed together so "for the sin of pride";

yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached

the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted

in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain

shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises when one soul has

perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind! I call

all this a noble embodiment of a true, noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are

indispensable to one another. The 'Paradiso,' a kind of inarticulate

music to me, is the redeeming side of the 'Inferno'; the 'Inferno'

without it were untrue. All three make-up the true Unseen World, as

figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever

memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was

perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in

this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable.

Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day

reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we

find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among

things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_ so; the real world,

as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely

higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_natural as

the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but

is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes

it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say

again, is the saving merit, now as always.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic

representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a

future age, like some Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased

altogether to think as Dante did, may find this, too, all an

"Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or

sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge

world-wide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good

and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it

all turns; that these two differ not by _preferability_ of one to the

other, but by incompatibility, absolute and infinite; that the one is

excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as

Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence,

with everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages

had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day,

with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming!

Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems:

was there in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their

being emblems? Were they not indubitable awful facts, the whole heart

of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere

confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe

an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who

considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an Allegory, will

commit one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognize as a veracious

expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the

Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us.

But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great

difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the

destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in

this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law

of Man. One was for the sensuous nature; a rude helpless utterance of

the _first_ Thought of men,--the chief recognized Virtue, Courage,

Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but

for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!

* * * * *

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very

strange way, found a voice. The 'Divina Commedia' is of Dante's

writing; yet in truth _it_ belongs to ten Christian centuries, only

the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the

smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning

methods,--how little of all he does is properly _his_ work! All past

inventive men work there with him;--as indeed with all of us, in all

things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they

lived by stands here, in everlasting music.

CROMWELL

From 'Heroes and Hero-Worship'

Poor Cromwell,--great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who

could not _speak_. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with

his savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange,

among the elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic

Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull

of chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost

semi-madness; and yet such a clear determinate man's energy working in

the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight

and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria,

_un_formed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria, what

was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and tenderness

of his wild affections: the quantity of _sympathy_ he had with

things,--the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart

of things, the mastery he would yet get over things: this was his

hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always does,

came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man.

Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful _black_

enveloping him,--wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic

man; a man with his whole soul _seeing_, and struggling to see.

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion

of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but the

material with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. He

had _lived_ silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round him all his

days; and in his way of life little call to attempt _naming_ or

uttering that. With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of

action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and

speak fluently enough;--he did harder things than writing of Books.

This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all

things you will set him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and

logicizing; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, _Vir-tus_, manhood,

_hero_hood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of

all, what the Germans well name it, _Tugend_ (_Taugend_, _dow_-ing, or

_Dough_-tiness), Courage and the Faculty to _do_. This basis of the

matter Cromwell had in him.

One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament,

he might _preach_, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might be

great in extempore prayer. These are the free out-pouring utterances

of what is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth,

depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer

is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced

with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers

and he used to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for days,

till some definite resolution rose among them, some "door of hope," as

they would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in

fervent prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to

make His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as

they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian Brothers, who

had drawn the sword against a great black devouring world not

Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,--they cried to God in their

straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the Cause that was His.

The light which now rose upon them,--how could a human soul, by any

means at all, get better light? Was not the purpose so formed like to

be precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed without

hesitation any more? To them it was as the shining of Heaven's own

Splendor in the waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night,

that was to guide them on their desolate perilous way. _Was_ it not

such? Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method

than intrinsically by that same,--devout prostration of the earnest

struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such

_prayer_ a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one?

There is no other method. "Hypocrisy"? One begins to be weary of all

that. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters.

They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went

about balancing expediencies, plausibilities; gathering votes,

advices; they never were alone with the _truth_ of a thing at

all.--Cromwell's prayers were likely to be "eloquent," and much more

than that. His was the heart of a man who _could_ pray.

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly so

ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all speakers

aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament; one who, from

the first, had weight. With that rude passionate voice of his, he was

always understood to _mean_ something, and men wished to know what.

He disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke always

without premeditation of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too,

in those days seem to have been singularly candid; and to have given

the Printer precisely what they found on their own note-paper. And

withal, what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the

premeditative ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the

world, that to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! How

came he not to study his words a little, before flinging them out to

the public? If the words were true words, they could be left to shift

for themselves.

But with regard to Cromwell's "lying," we will make one remark. This,

I suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of it. All

parties found themselves deceived in him; each party understood him to

be meaning _this_, heard him even say so, and behold he turns-out to

have been meaning _that_! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But

now, intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable fortune, not of a

false man in such times, but simply of a superior man? Such a man must

have _reticences_ in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve

for daws to peck at, his journey will not extend far! There is no use

for any man's taking-up his abode in a house built of glass. A man

always is to be himself the judge how much of his mind he will show to

other men; even to those he would have work along with him. There are

impertinent inquiries made: your rule is, to leave the inquirer

_un_informed on that matter; not, if you can help it, _mis_informed,

but precisely as dark as he was!

This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the wise and

faithful man would aim to answer in such a case.

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small

subaltern parties; uttered to them a _part_ of his mind. Each little

party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to find

him not of their party, but of his own party! Was it his blame? At all

seasons of his history he must have felt, among such people, how if he

explained to them the deeper insight he had, they must either have

shuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compact

hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not have worked

in his province any more; nay perhaps they could not have now worked

in their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man

among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen

everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to

you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an _error_. But

would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to

disturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands

only on some thin traditionality, conventionality to him indubitable,

to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths!

"I might have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only

my little finger."

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in

all departments of practice! He that cannot withal _keep his mind to

himself_ cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call

it "dissimulation," all this? What would you think of calling the

general of an army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal

and private soldier who pleased to put the question, what his thoughts

were about everything?--Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all

this in a manner we must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex

of such questioning "corporals" rolled confusedly round him through

his whole course; whom he did answer. It must have been as a great

true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not one proved falsehood, as

I said; not one! Of what man that ever wound himself through such a

coil of things will you say so much?

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert to

the very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell; about

their "ambition," "falsity," and suchlike. The first is what I might

call substituting the _goal_ of their career for the course and

starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that

he had determined on being Protector of England, at the time when he

was plowing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all

mapped-out: a program of the whole drama; which he then step by step

dramatically unfolded with all manner of cunning, deceptive

dramaturgy, as he went on,--the hollow scheming [Greek: Ypochrites],

or Play-actor, that he was! This is a radical perversion; all but

universal in such cases. And think for an instant how different the

fact is! How much does one of _us_ foresee of his own life? Short way

ahead of us it is all dim; an _un_wound skein of possibilities, of

apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell

had _not_ his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he

needed then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enact

dramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it so; but to him it

was in no measure so. What absurdities would fall away of themselves,

were this one undeniable fact kept honestly in view by History!

Historians indeed will tell you that they do keep it in view;--but

look whether such is practically the fact! Vulgar History, as in this

Cromwell's case, omits it altogether; even the best kinds of History

only remember it now and then. To remember it duly with rigorous

perfection, as in the fact it _stood_, requires indeed a rare faculty;

rare, nay impossible. A very Shakespeare for faculty; or more than

Shakespeare; who could _enact_ a brother man's biography, see with the

brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things _he_ saw;

in short, _know_ his course and him, as few "Historians" are like to

do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which distort our

image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try to

represent them so; in sequence, as they _were_; not in the lump, as

they are thrown down before us.

But a second error which I think the generality commit refers to this

same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great Men; we

mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious in that

sense; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man

who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who

goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and

claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody

for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the

heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen

under this sun. A _great_ man? A poor morbid prurient empty man;

fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I

advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths;

unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about

him, he cannot live. It is the _emptiness_ of the man, not his

greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts

that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe no

great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real

substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in

this way.

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by noisy

crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was

already there; no notice would make _him_ other than he already was.

Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the down-hill slope was

all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable

matter _how_ it went,--he had been content to plow the ground, and

read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer,

without selling himself to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt

carriages to Whitehall, and have clerks with bundles of papers

haunting him, "Decide this, decide that," which in utmost sorrow of

heart no man can perfectly decide! What could gilt carriages do for

this man? From of old was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a

terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His existence there as man

set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment, and Eternity:

these already lay as the background of whatsoever he thought or did.

All his life lay begirt as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no

speech of a mortal could name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of

that time had read it: this was great, and all else was little to him.

To call such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag

described above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will

say: "Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape

clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me

alone, leave me alone; there is _too much of life_ in me already!" Old

Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not

ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with printed

ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home. The

world-wide soul, wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its sorrows;--what could

paradings and ribbons in the hat, do for it?

Ah yes, I will say again: The great _silent_ men! Looking round on the

noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with

little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of _Silence_.

The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his own

department; silently thinking; silently working; whom no Morning

Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country

that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had

no _roots_; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;--which must

soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what

we can _show_, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher

than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great;

all else is small.--I hope we English will long maintain our _grand

talent pour le silence_. Let others that cannot do without standing on

barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, cultivate

speech exclusively,--become a most green forest without roots! Solomon

says, There is a time to speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of

some great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson

says he was, by _want of money_ and nothing other, one might ask, "Why

do not you too get up and speak; promulgate your system, found your

sect?" "Truly," he will answer, "I am _continent_ of my thought

hitherto; happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no

compulsion strong enough to speak it. My 'system' is not for

promulgation first of all; it is for serving myself to live by.

That is the great purpose of it to me. And then the 'honor'? Alas,

yes;--but as Cato said of the statue: So many statues in that Forum of

yours, may it not be better if they ask, Where is Cato's statue?"

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me say that

there are two kinds of ambition: one wholly blamable, the other

laudable and inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silent

Samuel shall not be silent too long. The selfish wish to shine over

others, let it be accounted altogether poor and miserable. "Seekest

thou great things, seek them not:" this is most true. And yet, I say,

there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself

according to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out,

to act out, what Nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit,

inevitable; nay, it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a

man. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting

in this: To unfold your _self_, to work what thing you have the

faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of

our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to

_speak_ by this necessity it feels.--We will say therefore: To decide

about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to take

into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness for

the man of the place withal: that is the question. Perhaps the place

was _his_, perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation to seek

the place! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we

blame it, if he were "the only man in France that could have done any

good there"? Hopefuler perhaps had he not so clearly _felt_ how much

good he could do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had

even felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because

they had flung him out and he was now quit of it, well might Gibbon

mourn over him.--Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silent

great man shall strive to speak withal; _too_ amply, rather!

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson,

in his shrouded-up existence, that it was possible for him to do

priceless divine work for his country and the whole world. That the

perfect Heavenly Law might be made Law on this Earth; that the prayer

he prayed daily, "Thy kingdom come," was at length to be fulfilled! If

you had convinced his judgment of this; that it was possible,

practicable; that he the mournful silent Samuel was called to take a

part in it! Would not the whole soul of the man have flamed-up into a

divine clearness, into noble utterance and determination to act;

casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting all

affliction and contradiction small,--the whole dark element of his

existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning? It

were a true ambition this! And think now how it actually was with

Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, true zealous

Preachers of the truth flung into dungeons, whipt, set on pillories,

their ears cropt off, God's Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the

unworthy: all this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had

looked upon it in silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth;

trusting well that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come,--that

such a course was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And now

behold the dawn of it; after twelve years' silent waiting, all England

stirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right will

get a voice for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has come

again into the Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth being a member

of? Cromwell threw down his plow, and hastened thither.

He spoke there,--rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen truth,

where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he fought and strove,

like a strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult and all

else,--on and on, till the Cause _triumphed_, its once so formidable

enemies all swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had become

clear light of victory and certainty. That _he_ stood there as the

strongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero of all England,--what

of this? It was possible that the Law of Christ's Gospel could now

establish itself in the world! The Theocracy which John Knox in his

pulpit might dream of as a "devout imagination," this practical man,

experienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to

consider as capable of being _realized_. Those that were highest in

Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land: in

some considerable degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not

_true_, God's truth? And if _true_, was it not then the very thing to

do? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to answer, Yes!

This I call a noble true purpose; is it not, in its own dialect, the

noblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For a

Knox to take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great

sound sense and experience of what our world _was_,--History, I think,

shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating

point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in the

Bible" was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it were

made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely

victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for, as

the highest good to England and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the _vulpine_ intellect, with its knowingness, its

alertness and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to me a

rather sorry business. We have had but one such Statesman in England;

one man, that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any

such purpose at all. One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years;

and this was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten;

opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round him,--why,

then, England might have been a _Christian_ land! As it is, vulpine

knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, "Given a world of

Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;"--how cumbrous a

problem, you may see in Chancery Law Courts, and some other places!

Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great

grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to

all men a _palpably_ hopeless one.

THE PROCESSION

From 'The French Revolution'

We dwell no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude, for now, behold,

the Commons Deputies are at hand! Which of these Six Hundred

individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate

France, might one guess would become their _king_? For a king or

leader they, as all bodies of men, must have, be their work what it

may; there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, is

fittest of all to do it; that man, as future, not-yet-elected king

walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be?

With the _hure_, as himself calls it, or black _boar's-head_, fit to

be "shaken" as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows

and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face there look natural ugliness,

small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,--and burning fire of genius, like

comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions? It is

Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau, the world-compeller; man-ruling

Deputy of Aix! According to the Baroness de Stael, he steps proudly

along, though looked at askance here, and shakes his black

_chevelure_, or lion's mane, as if prophetic of great deeds.

Yes, Reader, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch, as Voltaire was

of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his

virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than any other man;--and

intrinsically such a mass of manhood too. Mark him well. The National

Assembly were all different without that one; nay, he might say, with

the old Despot:--"The National Assembly? I am that."

Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood:--for the Riquettis, or

Arrighettis, had to fly from Florence and the Guelfs, long centuries

ago, and settled in Provence, where from generation to generation they

have ever approved themselves a peculiar kindred, irascible,

indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like the steel they wore; of an

intensity and activity that sometimes verged towards madness, yet did

not reach it. One ancient Riquetti, in mad fulfillment of a mad vow,

chains two Mountains together, and the chain, with its "iron star of

five rays," is still to be seen. May not a modern Riquetti _un_chain

so much, and set it drifting--which also shall be seen?

Destiny has work for that swart, burly-headed Mirabeau; Destiny has

watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not his Grandfather,

stout Col-d'Argent (Silver-Stock, so they named him), shattered and

slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one fell day, lie sunk together

on the Bridge at Casano, while Prince Eugene's cavalry galloped and

regalloped over him--only the flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle

over that loved head; and Vendome, dropping his spy-glass, moaned out,

"Mirabeau is _dead_, then!" Nevertheless he was not dead; he awoke to

breath and miraculous surgery--for Gabriel was yet to be. With his

_silver stock_ he kept his scarred head erect, through long years,

and wedded, and produced tough Marquis Victor, the _friend of men_.

Whereby at last in the appointed year, 1749, this long-expected,

rough-hewn Gabriel Honore did likewise see the light; roughest

lion's-whelp ever littered of that rough breed. How the old lion (for

our old Marquis, too, was lion-like, most unconquerable,

kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wondering on his offspring, and

determined to train him as no lion had yet been! It is in vain, O

Marquis! This cub, though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn

to draw in dog-cart of Political Economy, and be a _friend of men_; he

will not be Thou, but must and will be Himself, another than Thou.

Divorce law-suits, "whole family save one in prison, and threescore

_lettres-de-cachet_" for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.

Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the Isle

of Rhe, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the Castle of If,

and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has been in the Fortress

of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in

the Dungeon of Vincennes;--all by _lettre-de-cachet_, from his lion

father. He has been in Pontarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner);

was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight

from the face of men. He has pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get

back his wife), the public gathering on roofs, to see, since they

could not hear: "The clatter-teeth (_claque-dents_)!" snarls singular

old Mirabeau; discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing

but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum

species.

But as for Gabriel Honore, in these strange wayfarings, what has he

not seen and tried! From drill-sergeants to prime ministers, to

foreign and domestic booksellers, all manner of men he has seen. All

manner of men he has gained; for at bottom it is a social loving

heart, that wild unconquerable one--more especially all manner of

women. From the Archer's Daughter at Saintes to that fair young

Sophie, Madame Monnier, whom he could not but "steal" and be beheaded

for--in effigy! For indeed, hardly since the Arabian Prophet lay dead,

to Ali's admiration, was there seen such a Love-hero, with the

strength of thirty men. In War again, he has helped to conquer

Corsica; fought duels, irregular brawls; horsewhipped calumnious

barons. In Literature, he has written on 'Despotism,' on

'Lettres-de-Cachet'; Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities,

Profanities; Books on the 'Prussian Monarchy,' on 'Cagliostro,' on

'Calonne,' on 'The Water-Companies of Paris':--each book comparable,

we will say, to a bituminous alarum-fire, huge, smoky, sudden! The

fire-pan, the kindling, the bitumen, were his own; but the lumber, of

rags, old wood, and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel

to him), was gathered from hucksters and ass-panniers of every

description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have been

heard to exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is _mine_!

Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for

borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man, he can make his; the

man himself he can make his. "All reflex and echo (_tout de reflet et

de reverbere_)!" snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not.

Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his aggregative

nature; and will now be the quality of qualities for him. In that

forty years' "struggle against despotism," he has gained the glorious

faculty of _self-help_, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of

_fellowship_, of being helped. Rare union: this man can live

self-sufficing--yet lives also in the life of other men; can make men

love him, work with him; a born king of men!

But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has

"made away with (_hume_, swallowed, snuffed-up) all _Formulas_"; a

fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is

no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and insights.

A man, nevertheless, who will glare fiercely on any object, and see

through it, and conquer it: for he has intellect, he has will, force

beyond other men. A man not with _logic-spectacles_, but with an

_eye_! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed

sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity

there; a Reality, not an artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having

struggled "forty years against despotism," and "made away with all

formulas," shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the

same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off

despotism, to make away with _her_ old formulas,--having found them

naught, worn out, far from the reality? She will make away with _such_

formulas;--and even go _bare_, if need be, till she have found new

ones.

Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Riquetti

Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the

slouch hat, he steps along there. A fiery, fuliginous mass, which

could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with

smoke! And now it has got _air_; it will burn its whole substance, its

whole smoke-atmosphere too, and fill all France with flame. Strange

lot! Forty years of that smoldering, with foul fire-damp and vapor

enough; then victory over that, and like a burning mountain he blazes

heaven-high; and for twenty-three resplendent months, pours out, in

flame and molten fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and

Wonder-sign of an amazed Europe;--and then lies hollow, cold forever!

Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honore, the greatest of them all:

in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation, there is none

like and none second to thee.

But now, if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six Hundred may be

the meanest? Shall we say that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking

man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes (were the glasses off)

troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain

future time; complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar color, the final

shade of which may be the pale sea-green. That greenish-colored

(_verdatre_) individual is an Advocate of Arras; his name is

Maximilien Robespierre. The son of an Advocate; his father founded

Mason-lodges under Charles Edward, the English Prince or Pretender.

Maximilien, the first-born, was thriftily educated; he had brisk

Camille Desmoulins for schoolmate in the College of Louis le Grand, at

Paris. But he begged our famed Necklace-Cardinal, Rohan, the patron,

to let him depart thence, and resign in favor of a younger brother.

The strict-minded Max departed, home to paternal Arras; and even had a

Law-case there, and pleaded, not unsuccessfully, "in favor of the

first Franklin thunder-rod." With a strict, painful mind, an

understanding small but clear and ready, he grew in favor with

official persons, who could foresee in him an excellent man of

business, happily quite free from genius. The Bishop, therefore,

taking counsel, appoints him Judge of his diocese, and he faithfully

does justice to the people: till behold, one day, a culprit comes

whose crime merits hanging, and the strict-minded Max must abdicate,

for his conscience will not permit the dooming of any son of Adam to

die. A strict-minded, strait-laced man! A man unfit for Revolutions?

whose small soul, transparent wholesome-looking as small-ale, could by

no chance ferment into virulent _alegar_,--the mother of ever-new

alegar;--till all France were grown acetous virulent? We shall see.

Between which two extremes of grandest and meanest, so many grand and

mean roll on, towards their several destinies, in that Procession!

There is Cazales, the learned young soldier, who shall become the

eloquent orator of Royalism, and earn the shadow of a name.

Experienced Mounier, experienced Malouet, whose Presidential

Parlementary experience the stream of things shall soon leave

stranded. A Petion has left his gown and briefs at Chartres for a

stormier sort of pleading; has not forgotten his violin, being fond of

music. His hair is grizzled, though he is still young; convictions,

beliefs placid-unalterable, are in that man; not hindmost of them,

belief in himself. A Protestant-clerical Rabaut-St.-Etienne, a slender

young eloquent and vehement Barnave, will help to regenerate France.

There are so many of them young. Till thirty the Spartans did not

suffer a man to marry: but how many men here under thirty; coming to

produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a world of such!

The old to heal up rents, the young to remove rubbish:--which latter

is it not, indeed, the task here?

Dim, formless from this distance, yet authentically there, thou

noticest the Deputies from Nantes? To us mere clothes-screens, with

slouch-hat and cloak, but bearing in their pocket a _Cahier_ of

_doleances_ with this singular clause, and more such, in it:--"That

the master wigmakers of Nantes be not troubled with new

guild-brethren, the actually existing number of ninety-two being more

than sufficient!" The Rennes people have elected farmer Gerard, "a man

of natural sense and rectitude without any learning." He walks there

with solid step; unique, "in his rustic farmer-clothes;" which he will

wear always, careless of short-cloaks and costumes. The name Gerard,

or "Pere Gerard, Father Gerard," as they please to call him, will fly

far, borne about in endless banter, in Royalist satires, in Republican

Didactic Almanacks. As for the man Gerard, being asked once what he

did, after trial of it, candidly think of this Parlementary work,--"I

think," answered he, "that there are a good many scoundrels among us."

So walks Father Gerard, solid in his thick shoes, whithersoever bound.

And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one other time?

If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see him with the eye of

prophecy; for indeed the Parisian Deputies are all a little late.

Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner: doomed by a satiric

destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal

from his resting-place, the bosom of oblivion! Guillotin can improve

the ventilation of the Hall; in all cases of medical police and

_hygiene_ be a present aid: but greater far, he can produce his

'Report on the Penal Code,' and reveal therein a cunningly devised

Beheading Machine, which shall become famous and world-famous. This is

the product of Guillotin's endeavors, gained not without meditation

and reading; which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a

feminine derivative name, as if it were his daughter: _La Guillotine_!

"With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter

la tete) in a twinkling, and you have no pain;"--whereat they all

laugh. Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined,

shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then

dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate

ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive

Caesar's.

See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honored Historian of Astronomy

Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful

Philosophizing, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends

in foul thick confusion--of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic

officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness!

Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the _Drapeau Rouge_:

beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last hell-day, thou must

"tremble", though only with cold--"_de froid_." Speculation is not

practice: to be weak is not so miserable, but to be weaker than our

task. Woe the day when they mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on

that wild Hippogriff of a Democracy, which, spurning the firm earth,

nay, lashing at the very _stars_, no yet known Astolpho could have

ridden!

In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of Letters;

374 Lawyers, and at least one Clergyman, the Abbe Sieyes. Him also

Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him, the light, thin man; cold,

but elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic; passionless, or

with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that can be

called a passion, which in its independent concentrated greatness,

seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to sit there with a

kind of godlike indifference, and look down on passion! He is the man,

and wisdom shall die with him. This is the Sieyes who shall be

System-builder, Constitution-builder General, and build Constitutions

(as many as wanted) sky-high,--which shall all unfortunately fall

before he get the scaffolding away. "_La Politique_", said he to

Dumont, "polity is a science I think I have completed (_achevee_)."

What things, O Sieyes, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou to see!

But were it not curious to know how Sieyes, now in these days (for he

is said to be still alive) looks out on all that Constitution masonry,

through the rheumy soberness of extreme age? Might we hope, still with

the old irrefragable transcendentalism? The victorious cause pleased

the gods, the vanquished one pleased Sieyes (_victa Catoni_).

Thus, however, amid sky-rending _vivats_, and blessings from every

heart, has the Procession of the Commons Deputies rolled by.

Next follow the Noblesse, and next the Clergy; concerning both of whom

it might be asked What they specially have come for. Specially, little

as they dream of it, to answer this question, put in a voice of

thunder: What are you doing in God's fair Earth and Task-garden; where

whosoever is not working is begging or stealing? Woe, woe to

themselves and to all, if they can only answer; Collecting tithes,

Preserving game! Remark, meanwhile, how D'Orleans affects to step

before his own Order and mingle with the Commons. For him are

_vivats_; few for the rest, though all wave in plumed "hats of a

feudal cut," and have sword on thigh; though among them is

D'Antraigues, the young Languedocian gentleman,--and indeed many a

peer more or less noteworthy.

There are Liancourt and La Rochefoucault, the liberal Anglo-maniac

Dukes. There is a filially pious Lally; a couple of liberal

Lameths. Above all, there is a Lafayette; whose name shall be

Cromwell-Grandison, and fill the world. Many a "formula" has this

Lafayette, too, made away with; yet not _all_ formulas. He sticks by

the Washington-formula; and by that he will stick;--and hang by it, as

by sure bower-anchor hangs and swings the tight war-ship, which, after

all changes of wildest weather and water, is found still hanging.

Happy for him, be it glorious or not! Alone of all Frenchmen he has a

theory of the world, and right mind to conform thereto; he can become

a hero and perfect character, were it but the hero of one idea. Note

further our old parlementary friend, Crispin-Catiline d'Espremenil. He

is returned from the Mediterranean islands, a red-hot royalist,

repentant to the finger-ends;--unsettled-looking; whose light,

dusky-glowing at best, now flickers foul in the socket; whom the

National Assembly will by and by, to save time, "regard as in a state

of distraction." Note lastly that globular _Younger_ Mirabeau,

indignant that his elder Brother is among the Commons; it is

_Viscomte_ Mirabeau; named oftener Mirabeau _Tonneau_ (Barrel

Mirabeau), on account of his rotundity, and the quantities of strong

liquor he contains.

There, then, walks our French noblesse. All in the old pomp of

chivalry; and yet, alas, how changed from the old position; drifted

far down from their native latitude, like Arctic icebergs got into the

Equatorial sea, and fast thawing there! Once these Chivalry _Duces_

(Dukes, as they are still named) did actually _lead_ the world,--were

it only toward battle-spoil, where lay the world's best wages then;

moreover, being the ablest leaders going, they had their lion's share,

these _Duces_, which none could grudge them. But now, when so many

Looms, improved Plow-shares, Steam-Engines, and Bills of Exchange have

been invented; and for battle-brawling itself, men hire

Drill-Sergeants at eighteen pence a day,--what mean these gold-mantled

Chivalry Figures, walking there in "black-velvet cloaks," in

high-plumed "hats of a feudal cut"? Reeds shaken in the wind!

The clergy have got up; with _Cahiers_ for abolishing pluralities,

enforcing residence of bishops, better payment of tithes. The

Dignitaries, we can observe, walk stately, apart from the numerous

Undignified,--who, indeed, are properly little other than Commons

disguised in Curate-frocks. Here, however, though by strange ways,

shall the Precept be fulfilled, and they that are greatest (much to

their astonishment) become least. For one example out of many, mark

that plausible Gregoire: one day Cure Gregoire shall be a Bishop, when

the now stately are wandering distracted, as Bishops _in partibus_.

With other thought, mark also the Abbe Maury; his broad bold face,

mouth accurately primmed, full eyes, that ray out intelligence,

falsehood,--the sort of sophistry which is astonished you should find

it sophistical. Skillfulest vamper-up of old rotten leather, to make

it look like new; always a rising man; he used to tell Mercier, "You

will see; I shall be in the Academy before you." Likely indeed, thou

skillfulest Maury; nay thou shalt have a Cardinal's hat, and plush and

glory; but alas, also, in the long run--mere oblivion, like the rest

of us, and six feet of earth! What boots it, vamping rotten leather on

these terms? Glorious in comparison is the livelihood thy good old

Father earns by making shoes,--one may hope, in a sufficient manner.

Maury does not want for audacity. He shall wear pistols by-and-by; and

at death-cries of "_La lanterne_, The Lamp-iron!" answer coolly,

"Friends, will you see better there?"

But yonder, halting lamely along, thou noticest next Bishop

Talleyrand-Perigord, his Reverence of Autun. A sardonic grimness lies

in that irreverend Reverence of Autun. He will do and suffer strange

things; and will _become_ surely one of the strangest things ever

seen, or like to be seen. A man living in falsehood and on falsehood;

yet not what you can call a false man: there is the specialty! It will

be an enigma for future ages, one may hope; hitherto such a product of

Nature and Art was possible only for this age of ours--Age of Paper,

and of the Burning of Paper. Consider Bishop Talleyrand and Marquis

Lafayette as the topmost of their two kinds; and say once more,

looking at what they did and what they were. _O tempus ferax rerum_!

On the whole, however, has not this unfortunate clergy also drifted in

the Time-stream, far from its native latitude? An anomalous mass of

men; of whom the whole world has already a dim understanding that it

can understand nothing. They were once a Priesthood, interpreters of

Wisdom, revealers of the Holy that is in Man; a true Clerus (or

Inheritance of God on Earth): but now?--They pass silently, with such

_Cahiers_ as they have been able to redact; and none cries, God bless

them.

King Louis with his Court brings up the rear: he cheerful, in this day

of hope, is saluted with plaudits: still more Necker his Minister. Not

so the Queen, on whom hope shines not steadily any more. Ill-fated

Queen! Her hair is already gray with many cares and crosses; her

first-born son is dying in these weeks: black falsehood has

ineffaceably soiled her name--ineffaceably while this generation

lasts. Instead of _Vive la reine_, voices insult her with _Vive

d'Orleans_. Of her queenly beauty little remains except its

stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid, silently enduring.

With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no part, she resigns

herself to a day she hoped never to have seen. Poor Marie Antoinette;

with thy quick, noble instincts, vehement glancings, vision all-too

fitful narrow for the work thou hast to do! O there are tears in store

for thee, bitterest wailings, soft womanly meltings, though thou hast

the heart of an imperial Theresa's Daughter. Thou doomed one, shut thy

eyes on the future!

And so in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France. Some

toward honor and quick fire-consummation; most toward dishonor; not a

few toward massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation: all toward

Eternity!--So many heterogeneities cast together into the

fermenting-vat; there, with incalculable action, counteraction,

elective affinities, explosive developments, to work out healing for a

sick, Moribund System of Society! Probably the strangest Body of Men,

if we consider well, that ever met together on our Planet on such an

errand. So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst up from its

infinite depths; and these men, its rulers and healers, without

life-rule for themselves,--other life-rule than a Gospel according to

Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man

is properly an Accident under the sky. Man is without Duty round him;

except it be "to make the Constitution." He is without Heaven above

him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

What further or better belief can be said to exist in these Twelve

Hundred? Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic

scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine right of

Game-Destroyers. Belief, or what is still worse, canting half-belief;

or worst of all, mere Machiavellic pretense-of-belief,--in consecrated

dough-wafers, and the godhood of a poor old Italian Man! Nevertheless,

in that immeasurable Confusion and Corruption, which struggles there

so blindly to become less confused and corrupt, there is, as we said,

this one salient point of a New Life discernible--the deep fixed

Determination to have done with Shams. A determination which,

consciously or unconsciously, is _fixed_; which waxes ever more fixed,

into very madness and fixed-idea; which, in such embodiment as lies

provided there, shall now unfold itself rapidly: monstrous,

stupendous, unspeakable; new for long thousands of years!--How has the

heaven's _light_, oftentimes in this Earth, to clothe itself in

thunder and electric murkiness, and descend as molten _lightning_,

blasting, if purifying! Nay, is it not rather the very murkiness, and

atmospheric suffocation, that _brings_ the lightning and the light?

The new Evangel, as the old had been, was it to be born in the

Destruction of a World?

THE SIEGE OF THE BASTILLE

From 'The French Revolution'

But, to the living and the struggling, a new, Fourteenth morning

dawns. Under all roofs of this distracted City is the nodus of a

Drama, not untragical, crowding toward solution. The bustlings and

preparings, the tremors and menaces; the tears that fell from old

eyes! This day, my sons, ye shall quit you like men. By the memory of

your fathers' wrongs; by the hope of your children's rights! Tyranny

impends in red wrath: help for you is none, if not in your own right

hands. This day ye must do or die.

From earliest light, a sleepless Permanent Committee has heard the old

cry, now waxing almost frantic, mutinous: Arms! Arms! Provost

Flesselles, or what traitors there are among you, may think of those

Charleville Boxes. A hundred-and-fifty thousand of us, and but the

third man furnished with so much as a pike! Arms are the one thing

needful: with arms we are an unconquerable man-defying National Guard;

without arms, a rabble to be whiffed with grape-shot.

Happily the word has arisen, for no secret can be kept,--that there

lie muskets at the Hotel des Invalides. Thither will we: King's

Procureur M. Ethys de Corny, and whatsoever of authority a Permanent

Committee can lend, shall go with us. Besenval's Camp is there;

perhaps he will not fire on us; if he kill us, we shall but die.

Alas! poor Besenval, with his troops melting away in that manner, has

not the smallest humor to fire! At five o'clock this morning, as he

lay dreaming, oblivious in the Ecole Militaire, a "figure" stood

suddenly at his bedside; "with face rather handsome, eyes inflamed,

speech rapid and curt, air audacious:" such a figure drew Priam's

curtains! The message and monition of the figure was that resistance

would be hopeless; that if blood flowed, woe to him who shed it. Thus

spoke the figure: and vanished. "Withal there was a kind of eloquence

that struck one." Besenval admits that he should have arrested him,

but did not. Who this figure with inflamed eyes, with speech rapid and

curt, might be? Besenval knows, but mentions not. Camille Desmoulins?

Pythagorean Marquis Valadi, inflamed with "violent motions all night

at the Palais Royal"? Fame names him "Young M. Meillar"; then shuts

her lips about him forever.

In any case, behold, about nine in the morning, our National

Volunteers, rolling in long wide flood south-westward to the Hotel des

Invalides, in search of the one thing needful. King's Procureur M.

Ethys de Corny and officials are there; the Cure of Saint-Etienne du

Mont marches unpacific at the head of his militant Parish; the Clerks

of the Basoche in red coats we see marching, now Volunteers of the

Palais Royal;--National Volunteers, numerable by tens of thousands; of

one heart and mind. The King's Muskets are the Nation's; think, old M.

de Sombreuil, how, in this extremity, thou wilt refuse them! Old M. de

Sombreuil would fain hold parley, send couriers, but it skills not:

the walls are scaled, no Invalide firing a shot; the gates must be

flung open. Patriotism rushes in tumultuous, from grunsel up to

ridge-tile, through all rooms and passages; rummaging distractedly for

arms. What cellar or what cranny can escape it? The arms are found;

all safe there, lying packed in straw,--apparently with a view to

being burnt! More ravenous than famishing lions over dead prey, the

multitude, with clangor and vociferation, pounces on them; struggling,

dashing, clutching,--to the jamming-up, to the pressure, fracture, and

probable extinction of the weaker Patriot. And so, with such

protracted crash of deafening, most discordant Orchestra-music, the

Scene is changed; and eight-and-twenty thousand sufficient firelocks

are on the shoulders of as many National Guards, lifted thereby out of

darkness into fiery light.

Let Besenval look at the glitter of these muskets as they flash by!

Gardes Francaises, it is said, have cannon leveled on him; ready to

open, if need were, from the other side of the river. Motionless sits

he; "astonished," one may flatter one's self, "at the proud bearing

(_fiere contenance_) of the Parisians." And now to the Bastille, ye

intrepid Parisians! There grape-shot still threatens; thither all

men's thoughts and steps are now tending.

Old De Launay, as we hinted, withdrew "into his interior" soon after

midnight of Sunday. He remains there ever since, hampered, as all

military gentlemen now are, in the saddest conflict of uncertainties.

The Hotel-de-Ville "invites" him to admit National Soldiers, which is

a soft name for surrendering. On the other hand, his Majesty's orders

were precise. His garrison is but eighty-two old Invalides, reinforced

by thirty-two young Swiss; his walls, indeed, are nine feet thick; he

has cannon and powder, but alas! only one day's provision of victuals.

The city, too, is French, the poor garrison mostly French. Rigorous

old De Launay, think what thou wilt do!

All morning, since nine, there has been a cry everywhere: To the

Bastille! Repeated "deputations of citizens" have been here,

passionate for arms, whom De Launay has got dismissed by soft speeches

through port-holes. Towards noon, Elector Thuriot de la Rosiere gains

admittance, finds De Launay indisposed for surrender, nay, disposed

for blowing up the place, rather. Thuriot mounts with him to the

battlements; heaps of paving-stones, old iron, and missiles lie piled;

cannon all duly leveled; in every embrasure a cannon,--only drawn back

a little! But outwards, behold, O Thuriot, how the multitude flows on,

welling through every street, tocsin furiously pealing, all drums

beating the _generale_; the suburb Saint-Antoine rolling hitherward

wholly as one man! Such vision (spectral, yet real) thou, O Thuriot,

as from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this moment: prophetic of

what other Phantasmagories and loud-gibbering Spectral Realities which

thou yet beholdest not, but shalt! "_Que voulez-vous?_" said De

Launay, turning pale at the sight, with an air of reproach, almost of

menace. "Monsieur," said Thuriot, rising into the moral-sublime, "what

mean _you_? Consider if I could not precipitate _both_ of us from this

height,"--say only a hundred feet, exclusive of the walled ditch!

Whereupon De Launay fell silent. Thuriot shows himself from some

pinnacle to comfort the multitude becoming suspicious, fremes-cent,

then descends, departs with protest, with warning addressed also to

the Invalides, on whom however it produces but a mixed, indistinct

impression. The old heads are none of the clearest; besides, it is

said, De Launay has been profuse of beverages (_prodigue des

buissons_). They think they will not fire--if not fired on--if they

can help it; but must, on the whole, be ruled considerably by

circumstances.

Wo to thee, De Launay, in such an hour, if thou canst not, taking some

one firm decision, _rule_ circumstances! Soft speeches will not serve,

hard grape-shot is questionable, but hovering between the two is

_un_questionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men; their infinite

hum waxing ever louder, into imprecations, perhaps into crackle of

stray musketry,--which latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot do

execution. The Outer Drawbridge has been lowered for Thuriot; now

_deputation of citizens_ (it is the third and noisiest of all)

penetrates that way into the Outer Court; soft speeches producing no

clearance of these, De Launay gives fire; pulls up his drawbridge. A

slight sputter, which has _kindled_ the too combustible chaos, made it

a roaring fire-chaos! Bursts forth Insurrection, at sight of its own

blood (for there were deaths by that sputter of fire), into endless,

rolling explosion of musketry, distraction, execration;--and over

head, from the fortress, let one great gun, with its grape-shot, go

booming, to show what we _could_ do. The Bastille is besieged!

On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in your bodies! Roar with all

your throats of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of Liberty; stir

spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or

spirit; for it is the hour! Smite thou, Louis Tournay, cartwright of

the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment Dauphine; smite at that Outer

Drawbridge chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee! Never,

over nave or felloe, did thy axe strike such a stroke. Down with it,

man; down with it to Orcus: let the whole accursed edifice sink

thither, and tyranny be swallowed up forever! Mounted, some say, on

the roof of the guard-room, some "on bayonets stuck into joints of the

wall," Louis Tournay smites, brave Aubin Bonnemere (also an old

soldier) seconding him; the chain yields, breaks; the huge Drawbridge

slams down, thundering (_avec fracas_). Glorious! and yet, alas! it is

still but the outworks. The Eight Grim Towers, with their _Invalide_

musketry, their paving-stones and cannon-mouths, still soar aloft

intact;--Ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the inner Drawbridge

with its _back_ toward us; the Bastille is still to take!

To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most

important in History) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could

one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan

of the building! But there is open Esplanade at the end of the Rue

Saint-Antoine; there are such Forecourts (_Cour Avance_), _Cour de

l'Orme_, arched gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new

drawbridges, dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight

Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from

twenty years to four hundred and twenty;--beleaguered, in this its

last hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance of all

calibres; throats of all capacities; men of all plans, every man his

own engineer; seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was there

seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit of

regimentals; no one would heed him in colored clothes; half-pay Hulin

is haranguing Gardes Francaises in the Place de Greve. Frantic

patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot (or seemingly

so), to the Hotel-de-Ville:--Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt!

Flesselles is "pale to the very lips," for the roar of the multitude

grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled,

all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls

simmering a minor whirlpool,--strengthening the barricade, since God

knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into

that grand Fire-Maelstrom which is lashing round the Bastille.

And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has become an

impromptu cannoneer. See Georget of the marine service, fresh from

Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we were not used to

the like). Georget lay, last night, taking his ease at his inn; the

King of Siam's cannon also lay, knowing nothing of _him_, for a

hundred years; yet now, at the right instant, they have got together,

and discourse eloquent music. For hearing what was toward, Georget

sprang from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Francaises, also,

will be here, with real artillery: were not the walls so

thick!--Upward from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighboring

roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without

effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease

from behind stone; hardly through port-holes show the tip of a nose.

We fall, shot; and make no impression!

Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guardrooms are

burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted "Peruke-maker with two fiery

torches" is for burning "the saltpetres of the Arsenal," had not a

woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural

Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on

pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring element.

A young beautiful lady, seized, escaping, in these Outer Courts, and

thought falsely to be De Launay's daughter, shall be burnt in De

Launay's sight; she lies, swooned, on a _paillasse_; but again a

Patriot--it is brave Aubin Bonnemere, the old soldier--dashes in, and

rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled hither, go

up in white smoke, almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that

Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart, and Reole the

"gigantic haberdasher" another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of

Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!

Blood flows; the ailment of new madness. The wounded are carried into

houses of the Rue Cerisaie; the dying leave their last mandate not to

yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas! how fall? The

walls are so thick! Deputations, three in number, arrive from the

Hotel-de-Ville; Abbe Fauchet (who was of one) can say with what almost

superhuman courage of benevolence. These wave their Town-flag in the

arched Gateway, and stand, rolling their drum, but to no purpose. In

such Crack of Doom, De Launay cannot hear them, dare not believe them;

they return, with justified rage, the whew of lead still singing in

their ears. What to do? The Firemen are here, squirting with their

fire-pumps on the Invalides cannon, to wet the touch-holes; they

unfortunately cannot squirt so high; but produce only clouds of spray.

Individuals of classical knowledge propose _catapults_. Santerre, the

sonorous Brewer of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, advises rather that the

place be fired by a "mixture of phosphorus and oil of turpentine

spouted up through forcing-pumps." O Spinola-Santerre, hast thou the

mixture _ready_? Every man his own engineer! And still the fire-deluge

abates not; even women are firing, and Turks; at least one woman (with

her sweetheart), and one Turk. Gardes Francaises have come; real

cannon, real cannoneers. Usher Maillard is busy; half-pay Elie,

half-pay Hulin, rage in the midst of thousands.

How the great Bastille clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner Court,

there, at its ease, hour after hour; as if nothing special, for it or

the world, were passing! It tolled One when the firing began, and is

now pointing toward Five, and still the firing slakes not.--Far down,

in their vaults, the seven Prisoners hear muffled din as of

earthquakes; their Turnkeys answer vaguely.

Woe to thee, De Launay, with thy poor hundred Invalides! Broglie is

distant, and his ears heavy; Besenval hears, but can send no help. One

poor troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoitring, cautiously along the

Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf. "We are come to join you," said the

Captain; for the crowd seems shoreless. A large-headed dwarfish

individual, of smoke-bleared aspect, shambles forward, opening his

blue lips, for there is sense in him; and croaks, "Alight then, and

give up your arms!" The Hussar-Captain is too happy to be escorted to

the barriers and dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual was?

Men answer, It is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific 'Avis au

Peuple'! Great, truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of

emergence and new-birth; and yet this same day come four years!--But

let the curtains of the Future hang.

What shall De Launay do? One thing only De Launay could have done:

what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from the first, with

lighted taper, within arm's-length of the Powder-Magazine; motionless,

like old Roman Senator, or Bronze Lamp-holder; coldly apprising

Thuriot, and all men, by a slight motion of his eye, what his

resolution was:--Harmless he sat there, while unharmed; but the King's

Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would, or should in nowise be

surrendered save to the King's Messenger; one old man's life is

worthless, so it be lost with honor: but think, ye brawling

_canaille_, how will it be when a whole Bastille springs skyward? In

such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies De Launay might

have left Thuriot, the red clerks of the Basoche, Cure of

Saint-Stephen, and all the tagrag and bobtail of the world, to work

their will.

And, yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered how each

man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men?

Hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How

their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of

contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck confessed that

the ground-tone of the noblest passage in one of his noblest Operas

was the voice of the populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their

Kaiser, Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice of men, the

utterance of their _instincts_, which are truer than their _thoughts_;

it is the greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows

which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his

footing somewhere _beyond_ Time. De Launay could not do it.

Distracted, he hovers between two; hopes in the middle of despair;

surrenders not his Fortress; declares that he will blow it up, seizes

torches to blow it up, and does not blow it. Unhappy old De Launay, it

is the death-agony of thy Bastille and thee! Jail, Jailoring, and

Jailor, all three, such as they may have been, must finish.

For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared; call it the

World-Chimaera, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their

battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets; they have made a

white flag of napkins; go beating the _chamade_, or seeming to beat,

for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary

of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge; a port-hole at the

drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier

Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank swinging over the abyss of that

stone Ditch; plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots,

he hovers perilous; such a Dove toward such an Ark! Deftly, thou

shifty Usher; one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there,

against the masonry! Usher Maillard falls not; deftly, unerring, he

walks, with out-spread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his

port-hole; the shifty Usher snatches it and returns. Terms of

surrender, Pardon, immunity to all! Are they accepted? _"Foi

d'officier_, On the word of an officer," answers half-pay Hulin, or

half-pay Elie--for men do not agree on it--"they are!" Sinks the

drawbridge,--Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes in the living

deluge; the Bastille is fallen! _Victoire! La Bastille est prise_!

* * * * *

Why dwell on what follows? Hulin's _foi d'officier_ should have been

kept, but could not. The Swiss stand drawn up, disguised in white

canvas smocks; the Invalides without disguise, their arms all piled

against the wall. The first rush of victors, in ecstasy that the death

peril is passed, "leaps joyfully on their necks"; but new victors

rush, and ever new, also in ecstasy not wholly of joy. As we said, it

was a living deluge, plunging headlong; had not the Gardes

Francaises, in their cool military way, "wheeled round with arms

leveled," it would have plunged suicidally, by the hundred or the

thousand, into the Bastille-ditch.

And so it goes plunging through court and corridor; billowing

uncontrollable, firing from windows--on itself; in hot frenzy of

triumph, of grief and vengeance for its slain. The poor Invalides will

fare ill; one Swiss, running off in his white smock, is driven back,

with a death-thrust. Let all prisoners be marched to the Town-hall to

be judged! Alas, already one poor Invalide has his right hand slashed

off him; his maimed body dragged to the Place de Greve, and hanged

there. This same right hand, it is said, turned back De Launay from

the Powder-Magazine, and saved Paris.

De Launay, "discovered in gray frock with poppy-colored riband," is

for killing himself with the sword of his cane. He shall to the

Hotel-de-Ville; Hulin, Maillard, and others escorting him, Elie

marching foremost, "with the capitulation-paper on his sword's point."

Through roarings and cursings; through hustlings, clutchings, and at

last through strokes! Your escort is hustled aside, fell down; Hulin

sinks exhausted on a heap of stones. Miserable De Launay! He shall

never enter the Hotel-de-Ville; only his "bloody hair-queue, held up

in a bloody hand"; that shall enter, for a sign. The bleeding trunk

lies on the steps there; the head is off through the streets, ghastly,

aloft on a pike.

Rigorous De Launay has died; crying out, "O friends, kill me fast!"

Merciful De Losme must die; though Gratitude embraces him, in this

fearful hour, and will die for him, it avails not. Brothers, your

wrath is cruel! Your Place de Greve is become a Throat of the Tiger,

full of mere fierce bellowings, and thirst of blood. One other officer

is massacred; one other Invalide is hanged on the Lamp-iron; with

difficulty, with generous perseverance, the Gardes Francaises will

save the rest. Provost Flesselles, stricken long since with the

paleness of death, must descend from his seat, "to be judged at the

Palais Royal"; alas, to be shot dead by an unknown hand at the turning

of the first street!

O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on

reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages;

on ships far out on the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of

Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now

dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-Officers;--and also on this

roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel-de-Ville! Babel Tower, with the

confusion of tongues, were not Bedlam added with the conflagration of

thoughts, was no type of it. One forest of distracted steel bristles,

endless, in front of an Electoral Committee; points itself, in horrid

radii, against this and the other accused breast. It was the Titans

warring with Olympus; and they, scarcely crediting it, have

_conquered_; prodigy of prodigies; delirious,--as it could not but be.

Denunciation, vengeance; blaze of triumph on a dark ground of terror;

all outward, all inward things fallen into one general wreck of

madness!

CHARLOTTE CORDAY

From 'The French Revolution'

In the leafy months of June and July, several French Departments

germinate a set of rebellious _paper_-leaves, named Proclamations,

Resolutions, Journals, or Diurnals, "of the Union for Resistance to

Oppression." In particular, the Town of Caen, in Calvados, sees its

paper-leaf of Bulletin de Caen suddenly bud, suddenly establish itself

as Newspaper there; under the Editorship of Girondin National

Representatives!

[Illustration: _CHARLOTTE CORDAY IN PRISON._

Photogravure from a painting by C. L. Muller.

Original in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d'Armans, a French young woman of

noble birth, filled with horror at the excesses of the Reign

of Terror, gained admission to the private apartments of Marat

and stabbed him to death July 13, 1793. She was convicted by

the Revolutionary tribunal and died by the guillotine July 17,

1793.]

For among the proscribed Girondins are certain of a more desperate

humor. Some, as Vergniaud, Valaze, Gensonne, "arrested in their own

houses," will await with stoical resignation what the issue may be.

Some, as Brissot, Rabaut, will take to flight, to concealment; which,

as the Paris Barriers are opened again in a day or two, is not yet

difficult. But others there are who will rush, with Buzot, to

Calvados; or far over France, to Lyons, Toulon, Nantes and

elsewhither, and then rendezvous at Caen: to awaken as with

war-trumpet the respectable Departments; and strike down an anarchic

Mountain Faction; at least not yield without a stroke at it. Of this

latter temper we count some score or more, of the Arrested, and of the

Not-yet-arrested: a Buzot, a Barbaroux, Louvet, Guadet, Petion,

who have escaped from Arrestment in their own homes; a Salles, a

Pythagorean Valady, a Duchatel, the Duchatel that came in blanket and

night-cap to vote for the life of Louis, who have escaped from danger

and likelihood of Arrestment. These, to the number at one time of

Twenty-seven, do accordingly lodge here, in the "Intendance," or

Departmental Mansion, of the town of Caen in Calvados; welcomed by

Persons in Authority; welcomed and defrayed, having no money of their

own. And the Bulletin de Caen comes forth, with the most animating

paragraphs: How the Bordeaux Department, the Lyons Department, this

Department after the other is declaring itself; sixty, or say

sixty-nine, or seventy-two respectable Departments either declaring,

or ready to declare. Nay, Marseilles, it seems, will march on Paris by

itself, if need be. So has Marseilles Town said that she will march.

But on the other hand, that Montelimart Town has said, No

thoroughfare; and means even to "bury herself" under her own stone and

mortar first,--of this be no mention in Bulletin de Caen.

Such animating paragraphs we read in this new Newspaper; and fervors

and eloquent sarcasm: tirades against the Mountain, from the pen of

Deputy Salles; which resemble, say friends, Pascal's "Provincials."

What is more to the purpose, these Girondins have got a General in

chief, one Wimpfen, formerly under Dumouriez; also a secondary

questionable General Puisaye, and others; and are doing their best to

raise a force for war. National Volunteers, whosoever is of right

heart: gather in, ye National Volunteers, friends of Liberty; from our

Calvados Townships, from the Eure, from Brittany, from far and near:

forward to Paris, and extinguish Anarchy! Thus at Caen, in the early

July days, there is a drumming and parading, a perorating and

consulting: Staff and Army; Council; Club of Carabots, Anti-jacobin

friends of Freedom, to denounce atrocious Marat. With all which, and

the editing of Bulletins, a National Representative has his hands

full.

At Caen it is most animated; and, as one hopes, more or less animated

in the "Seventy-two Departments that adhere to us." And in a France

begirt with Cimmerian invading Coalitions, and torn with an internal

La Vendee, _this_ is the conclusion we have arrived at: To put down

Anarchy by Civil War! _Durum et durum_, the Proverb says, _non faciunt

murum_. La Vendee burns; Santerre can do nothing there; he may return

home and brew beer. Cimmerian bombshells fly all along the North. That

Siege of Mentz is become famed;--lovers of the Picturesque (as Goethe

will testify), washed country-people of both sexes, stroll thither on

Sundays, to see the artillery work and counter-work; "you only duck a

little while the shot whizzes past." Conde is capitulating to the

Austrians; Royal Highness of York, these several weeks, fiercely

batters Valenciennes. For, alas, our fortified Camp of Famars was

stormed; General Dampierre was killed; General Custine was

blamed,--and indeed is now come to Paris to give "explanations."

Against all which the Mountain and atrocious Marat must even make head

as they can. They, anarchic Convention as they are, publish Decrees,

expostulatory, explanatory, yet not without severity: they ray-forth

Commissioners, singly or in pairs, the olive-branch in one hand, yet

the sword in the other. Commissioners come even to Caen; but without

effect. Mathematical Romme, and Prieur named of the Cote d'Or,

venturing thither, with their olive and sword, are packed into prison:

there may Romme lie, under lock and key, "for fifty days"; and

meditate his New Calendar, if he please. Cimmeria, La Vendee, and

Civil War! Never was Republic One and Indivisible at a lower ebb.

Amid which dim ferment of Caen and the World, History specially

notices one thing: in the lobby of the Mansion de l'Intendance, where

busy Deputies are coming and going, a young Lady with an aged valet,

taking grave graceful leave of Deputy Barbaroux. She is of stately

Norman figure: in her twenty-fifth year; of beautiful still

countenance: her name is Charlotte Corday, heretofore styled D'Armans,

while Nobility still was. Barbaroux has given her a Note to Deputy

Duperret,--him who once drew his sword in the effervescence.

Apparently she will to Paris on some errand? "She was a Republican

before the Revolution, and never wanted energy." A completeness, a

decision is in this fair female Figure: "By energy she means the

spirit that will prompt one to sacrifice himself for his country."

What if she, this fair young Charlotte, had emerged from her secluded

stillness, suddenly like a Star; cruel-lovely, with half-angelic,

half-demonic splendor; to gleam for a moment, and in a moment be

extinguished: to be held in memory, so bright complete was she,

through long centuries!--Quitting Cimmerian Coalitions without, and

the dim-simmering twenty-five million within, History will look

fixedly at this one fair Apparition of a Charlotte Corday; will note

whither Charlotte moves, how the little Life burns forth so radiant,

then vanishes swallowed of the Night.

With Barbaroux's Note of Introduction, and slight stock of luggage, we

see Charlotte on Tuesday the 9th of July seated in the Caen Diligence,

with a place for Paris. None takes farewell of her, wishes her

Good-journey: her Father will find a line left, signifying that she is

gone to England, that he must pardon her, and forget her. The drowsy

Diligence lumbers along; amid drowsy talk of Politics, and praise of

the Mountain; in which she mingles not: all night, all day, and again

all night. On Thursday, not long before noon, we are at the bridge of

Neuilly; here is Paris with her thousand black domes, the goal and

purpose of thy journey! Arrived at the Inn de la Providence in the Rue

des Vieux Augustins, Charlotte demands a room; hastens to bed; sleeps

all afternoon and night, till the morrow morning.

On the morrow morning, she delivers her Note to Duperret. It relates

to certain Family Papers which are in the Minister of the Interior's

hands; which a Nun at Caen, an old Convent friend of Charlotte's, has

need of; which Duperret shall assist her in getting: this then was

Charlotte's errand to Paris? She has finished this, in the course of

Friday:--yet says nothing of returning. She has seen and silently

investigated several things. The Convention, in bodily reality, she

has seen; what the Mountain is like. The living physiognomy of Marat

she could not see; he is sick at present, and confined to home.

About eight on the Saturday morning, she purchases a large

sheath-knife in the Palais Royal; then straightway, in the Place des

Victoires, takes a hackney-coach: "To the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine,

No. 44." It is the residence of the Citoyen Marat!--The Citoyen Marat

is ill, and cannot be seen; which seems to disappoint her much. Her

business is with Marat, then? Hapless beautiful Charlotte; hapless

squalid Marat! From Caen in the utmost West, from Neuchatel in the

utmost East, they two are drawing nigh each other; they two have, very

strangely, business together.--Charlotte, returning to her Inn,

dispatches a short Note to Marat; signifying that she is from Caen,

the seat of rebellion; that she desires earnestly to see him, and

"will put it in his power to do France a great service." No answer.

Charlotte writes another Note, still more pressing; sets out with it

by coach, about seven in the evening, herself. Tired day-laborers have

again finished their Week; huge Paris is circling and simmering,

manifold according to its vague wont; this one fair Figure has

decision in it; drives straight,--toward a purpose.

It is yellow July evening, we say, the 13th of the month; eve of the

Bastille day,--when "M. Marat," four years ago, in the crowd of the

Pont Neuf, shrewdly required of that Besenval Hussar-party, which had

such friendly dispositions, "to dismount, and give up their arms,

then"; and became notable among Patriot men. Four years: what a road

he has traveled:--and sits now, about half-past seven of the clock,

stewing in slipper-bath; sore afflicted; ill of Revolution Fever,--of

what other malady this History had rather not name. Excessively sick

and worn, poor man: with precisely eleven-pence-half-penny of

ready-money, in paper; with slipper-bath; strong three-footed stool

for writing on, the while; and a squalid--Washer-woman, one may call

her: that is his civic establishment in Medical-School Street; thither

and not elsewhither has his road led him. Not to the reign of

Brotherhood and Perfect Felicity: yet surely on the way toward

that?--Hark, a rap again! A musical woman's voice, refusing to be

rejected: it is the Citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat,

recognizing from within, cries, Admit her. Charlotte Corday is

admitted.

Citoyen Marat, I am from Caen the seat of rebellion, and wished to

speak with you.--Be seated, _mon enfant_. Now what are the Traitors

doing at Caen? What Deputies are at Caen?--Charlotte names some

Deputies. "Their heads shall fall within a fortnight," croaks the

eager People's-friend, clutching his tablets to write: Barbaroux,

Petion, writes he with bare shrunk arm, turning aside in the bath:

Petion, and Louvet, and--Charlotte has drawn her knife from the

sheath; plunges it with one sure stroke, into the writer's heart.

"_A moi, chere amie_ (Help, dear)!" no more could the Death-choked say

or shriek. The helpful Washer-woman running in--there is no Friend of

the People, or Friend of the Washer-woman, left; but his life with a

groan gushes out, indignant, to the shades below!

And so Marat, People's-friend, is ended; the lone Stylites has got

hurled down suddenly from his pillar--_whitherward_ He that made him

knows. Patriot Paris may sound triple and tenfold, in dole and wail;

re-echoed by patriot France; and the Convention, "Chabot pale with

terror, declaring that they are to be all assassinated," may decree

him Pantheon Honors, Public Funeral, Mirabeau's dust making way for

him; and Jacobin Societies, in lamentable oratory, summing up his

character, parallel him to One, whom they think it honor to call "the

good Sans-culotte,"--whom we name not here; also a Chapel may be made,

for the urn that holds his Heart, in the Place du Carrousel; and

new-born children be named Marat; and Lago-di-Como Hawkers bake

mountains of stucco into unbeautiful Busts; and David paint his

Picture, or Death-Scene; and such other Apotheosis take place as the

human genius, in these circumstances, can devise: but Marat returns no

more to the light of this Sun. One sole circumstance we have read with

clear sympathy, in the old Moniteur Newspaper: how Marat's Brother

comes from Neuchatel to ask of the Convention, "that the deceased

Jean-Paul Marat's musket be given to him." For Marat too had a brother

and natural affections; and was wrapped once in swaddling-clothes, and

slept safe in a cradle like the rest of us. Ye children of men!--A

sister of his, they say, lives still to this day in Paris.

As for Charlotte Corday, her work is accomplished; the recompense of

it is near and sure. The _chere amie_, and the neighbors of the house,

flying at her, she "overturns some movables," intrenches herself till

the gendarmes arrive; then quietly surrenders; goes quietly to the

Abbaye Prison: she alone quiet, all Paris sounding, in wonder, in rage

or admiration, round her. Duperret is put in arrest, on account of

her; his Papers sealed,--which may lead to consequences. Fauchet, in

like manner; though Fauchet had not so much as heard of her.

Charlotte, confronted with these two Deputies, praises the grave

firmness of Duperret, censures the dejection of Fauchet.

On Wednesday morning the thronged Palais de Justice and Revolutionary

Tribunal can see her face; beautiful and calm: she dates it "fourth

day of the Preparation of Peace." A strange murmur ran through the

Hall, at sight of her; you could not say of what character. Tinville

has his indictments and tape-papers: the cutler of the Palais Royal

will testify that he sold her the sheath-knife; "All these details are

needless," interrupted Charlotte; "it is I that killed Marat." By

whose instigation?--"By no one's." "What tempted you, then?" "His

crimes. I killed one man," added she, raising her voice extremely

(_extremement_), as they went on with their questions, "I killed one

man to save a hundred thousand; a villain to save innocents; a savage

wild-beast to give repose to my country. I was a Republican before the

Revolution; I never wanted energy." There is therefore nothing to be

said. The public gazes astonished: the hasty limners sketch her

features, Charlotte not disapproving: the men of law proceed with

their formalities. The doom is Death as a murderess. To her Advocate

she gives thanks; in gentle phrase, in high-flown classical spirit. To

the Priest they send her she gives thanks; but needs not any shriving,

any ghostly or other aid from him.