Chapter XIV: Canto THE THIRD (3)

"To describe this siege of the Bastile (thought to be one of
the most important in history) perhaps transcends the talent of
mortals. Could one but, after infinite leading, 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 Fore-courts, _Cour avancé, 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 pigmies 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 coloured clothes:
half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Françaises in the Place de
Grève. Frantic patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them,
still hot, (or seemingly so,) to the Hôtel de Ville:--Paris,
you perceive, is to be burnt!--Paris wholly has got to the acme
of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness.

"Let conflagration rage of whatsoever is combustible!
Guard-rooms 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.

"Blood flows; the aliment of new madness. The wounded are
carried into the houses of the Rue Cerisuie; 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 Hôtel de Ville.
These wave their town-flag in the 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 Françaises have come; real
cannon, real cannoniers. Usher Maillard is busy; half-pay Elie,
half-pay Hulin rage in the midst of thousands.

"How the great Bastile 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 towards 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....

"For four long hours now has the world-bedlam roared: call it
the world-chimera, 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 towards 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 outspread 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
Bastile is fallen! '_Victoire! La Bastile est prise!_'"--Vol.
i. p. 233.

Such descriptions, we need hardly say, are not the sport of fancy, nor constructed by the agglomeration of eloquent phrases; they are formed by collecting together (and this constitutes their value) facts and intimations scattered through a number of authorities. It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that there is no imagination, or little artistic talent, displayed in collecting the materials for such a description. There may be genius in _reading well_ quite as certainly as in _writing well_; nor is it any common or inferior ability that detects at a glance, amongst a multitude of facts, the one which has real significance, and which gives its character to the scene to be reviewed. If any one wishes to convince himself how much a man of genius may _see_ in the page which can hardly obtain the attention of an ordinary reader, the last work of Mr Carlyle, _Past and Present_, will afford him an opportunity of making the experiment. He has but to turn, after reading in that work the account of Abbot Samson, to the Chronicle of _Jocelin_, from which it has been all faithfully extracted, and he will be surprised that our author could find so much life and truth in the antiquarian record. Or the experiment would be still more perfect if he should read the chronicle first, and then turn to the extracted account in _Past and Present_.

It is time, indeed, that we ourselves turned to this work, the perusal of which has led us to these remarks upon Mr Carlyle. We were desirous, however, of forming something like a general estimate of his merits and demerits before we entered upon any account of his last production. What space we have remaining shall be devoted to this work.

_Past and Present_, if it does not enhance, ought not, we think, to diminish from the reputation of its author; but as a _mannerism_ becomes increasingly disagreeable by repetition, we suspect that, without having less merit, this work will have less popularity than its predecessors. The style is the same "motley wear," and has the same jerking movement--seems at times a thing of shreds and patches hung on wires--and is so full of brief allusions to his own previous writings, that to a reader unacquainted with these it would be scarce intelligible. With all this it has the same vigour, and produces the same vivid impression that always attends upon his writings. Here, as elsewhere, he pursues his author-craft with a right noble and independent spirit, striking manifestly for truth, and for no other cause; and here also, as elsewhere, he leaves his side unguarded, open to unavoidable attack, so that the most blundering critic cannot fail to hit right, and the most friendly cannot spare.

The _past_ is represented by a certain Abbot Samson, and his abbey of St Edmunds, whose life and conversation are drawn from the chronicle already alluded to, and which has been lately published by the Camden Society.[68] Our author will look, he tells us, face to face on this remote period, "in hope of perhaps illustrating our own poor century thereby." Very good. To get a station in the past, and therefrom view the present, is no ill-devised scheme. But Abbot Samson and his monks form a very limited, almost a domestic picture, which supplies but few points of contrast or similitude with our "own poor century," which, at all events, is very rich in point of view. When, therefore, he proceeds to discuss the world-wide topics of our own times, we soon lose all memory of the Abbot and his monastery, who seems indeed to have as little connexion with the difficulties of our position, as the statues of Gog and Magog in Guildhall with the decision of some election contest which is made to take place in their venerable presence. On one point only can any palpable contrast be exhibited, namely, between the religious spirit of his times and our own.

[Footnote 68: Chronica JOCELINI DE BRAKELONDA, de rebus gestis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi: nunc primum typis mandata, curante JOHANNE GOGE ROKEWOOD. (Camden Society, London, 1840.)]

Now, here, as on every topic where a comparison is attempted, what must strike every one is, the manifest partiality Mr Carlyle shows to the past, and the unfair preference he gives it over the present. Nothing but respect and indulgence when he revisits the monastery of St Edmunds; nothing but censure and suspicion when he enters, say, for instance, the precincts of Exeter Hall. Well do we know, that if Mr Carlyle could meet such a monk alive, as he here treats with so much deference, encounter him face to face, talk to him, and hear him talk; he and the monk would be intolerable to each other. Fortunately for him, the monks are dead and buried whom he lauds so much when contrasted with our modern pietists. Could these tenants of the stately monastery preach to him about their purgatory and their prayers--lecture him, as assuredly they would, with that same earnest, uncomfortable, too anxious exhortation, which all saints must address to sinners--he would close his ears hermetically--he would fly for it--he would escape with as desperate haste as from the saddest whine that ever issued from some lath-and-plaster conventicle.

Mr Carlyle censures our poor century for its lack of faith; yet the kind of faith it possesses, which has grown up in it, which is _here_ at this present, he has no respect for, treats with no manner of tenderness. What _other_ would he have? He deals out to it no measure of philosophical justice. He accepts the faith of every age but his own. He will accept, as the best thing possible, the trustful and hopeful spirit of dark and superstitious periods; but if the more enlightened piety of his own age be at variance even with the most subtle and difficult tenets of his own philosophy, he will make no compromise with it, he casts it away for contemptuous infidelity to trample on as it pleases. When visiting the past, how indulgent, kind, and considerate he is! When Abbot Samson (as the greatest event of his life) resolves to see and to touch the remains of St Edmund, and "taking the head between his hands, speaks groaning," and prays to the "Glorious Martyr that it may not be turned to his perdition that he, miserable and sinful, has dared to touch his sacred person," and thereupon proceeds to touch the eyes and the nose, and the breast and the toes, which last he religiously counts; our complacent author sees here, "a noble awe surrounding the memory of the dead saint, symbol, and promoter of many other right noble things." And when he has occasion to call to mind the preaching of Peter the Hermit, who threw the fanaticism of the west on the fanaticism of the east, and in order that there should be no disparity between them in the sanguinary conflict, assimilated the faith of Christ to that of Mahommed, and taught that the baptized believer who fell by the Saracen would die in the arms of angels, and at the very gates of heaven; here, too, he bestows a hearty respect on the enthusiastic missionary, and all his fellow crusaders: it seems that he also would willingly have gone with such an army of the faithful. But when he turns from the past to the present, all this charity and indulgence are at an end. He finds in his own mechanico-philosophical age a faith in accordance with its prevailing modes of thought--faith lying at the foundation of whatever else of doctrinal theology it possesses--a faith diffused over all society, and taught not only in churches and chapels to pious auditories, but in every lecture-room, and by scientific as well as theological instructors--a faith in God, as creator of the universe, as the demonstrated author, architect, originator, of this wondrous world; and lo! this same philosopher who looked with encouraging complacency on Abbot Samson bending in adoration over the exhumed remains of a fellow mortal, and who listens without a protest to the cries of sanguinary enthusiasm, rising from a throng of embattled Christians, steps disdainfully aside from this faith of a peaceful and scientific age; he has some subtle, metaphysical speculations that will not countenance it; he demands that a faith in God should he put on some other foundation, which foundation, unhappily, his countrymen, as yet unskilled in transcendental metaphysics; cannot apprehend; he withdraws his sympathy from the so trite and sober-minded belief of an industrious, experimental, ratiocinating generation, and cares not if they have a God at all, if they can only make his existence evident to themselves from some commonplace notion of design and prearrangement visible in the world. Accordingly, we have passages like the following, which it is not our fault if the reader finds to be not very intelligible, or written in, what our author occasionally perpetrates, a sad jargon.

"For out of this that we call Atheism, come so many other
_isms_ and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its
heels!--A SOUL is not, like wind, (_spiritus_ or breath,)
contained within a capsule; the ALMIGHTY MAKER is not like a
clockmaker that once, in old immemorial ages, having _made_ his
horologe of a universe, sits ever since and sees it go! Not at
all. Hence comes Atheism; come, as we say, many other _isms_;
and as the sum of all comes _vatetism_, the _reverse_ of
heroism--sad root of all woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man
ever saw the above said wind element inclosed within its
capsule, and finds it at bottom more deniable than conceivable;
so too, he finds, in spite of Bridgewater bequests, your
clockmaker Almighty an entirely questionable affair, a deniable
affair; and accordingly denies it, and along with it so much
else."--(P. 199.)

Do we ask Mr Carlyle to falsify his own transendental philosophy for the sake of his weaker brethren? By no means. Let him proceed on the "high _à priori_ road," if he finds it--as not many do--practicable. Let men, at all times, when they write as philosophers, speak out simply what they hold to be truth. It is his _partiality_ only that we here take notice of, and the different measure that he deals out to the past and the present. Out of compliment to a bygone century he can sink philosophy, and common sense too; when it might be something more than a compliment to the existing age to appear in harmony with its creed, he will not bate a jot from the subtlest of his metaphysical convictions.

Mr Carlyle not being _en rapport_ with the religious spirit of his age, finds therein no religious spirit whatever; on the other hand, he has a great deal of religion of his own, not very clear to any but himself; and thus, between these two, we have pages, very many, of such raving as the following:--

"It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have
forgotten God;'--in the most modern dialect, and very truth of
the matter, we have taken up the fact of the universe as it _is
not_. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal substance
of things, and opened them only to the shows and shams of
things. We quietly believe this universe to be intrinsically a
great unintelligible PERHAPS; extrinsically, clear enough, it
is a great, most extensive cattle-fold and workhouse, with most
extensive kitchen-ranges, dining-tables--whereat he is wise who
can find a place! All the truth of this universe is uncertain;
only the profit and the loss of it, the pudding and praise of
it, are and remain very visible to the practical man.

"There is no longer any God for us! God's laws are become a
greatest-happiness principle, a parliamentary expediency; the
heavens overarch us only as an astronomical timekeeper: a butt
for Herschel telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot
sentimentalities at:--in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has
lost the _soul_ out of him; and now, after the due period,
begins to find the want of it! This is verily the
plague-spot--centre of the universal social gangrene,
threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that
will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and
top-root, with its world-wide upas boughs and accursed poison
exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and
agony. You touch the focal centre of all our disease, of our
frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this.
There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul,
and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing Kings, in
passing Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester
Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine
leprosy, alleviated for an hour, re-appears in new force and
desperateness next hour.

"For actually this is _not_ the real fact of the world; the
world is not made so, but otherwise! Truly, any society setting
out from this no-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two.
The _un_veracities, escorted each unveracity of them by its
corresponding misery and penalty; the phantasms and fatuities,
and ten-years' corn-law debatings, that shall walk the earth at
noonday, must needs be numerous! The universe being
intrinsically a perhaps, being too probably an 'infinite
humbug,' why should any minor humbug astonish us? It is all
according to the order of nature; and phantasms riding with
huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our
existence, astonish nobody. Enchanted St Ives' workhouses and
Joe Manton aristocracies; giant-working mammonism near
strangled in the partridge nets of giant-looking Idle
Dilettantism--this, in all its branches, in its thousand
thousand modes and figures, is a sight familiar to us."--P.
185.

What is to be said of writing such as this! For ourselves, we hurry on with a sort of incredulity, scarce believing that it is set down there for our steady perusal; we tread lightly over these "Phantasms" and "Unveracities," and "Double-barrelled Dilettantism," (another favourite phrase of his--pity it is not more euphonious--but none of his coinage _rings_ well,) we step on, we say, briskly, in the confident hope of soon meeting something--if only a stroke of humour--which shall be worth pausing for. Accordingly in the very page where our extract stopped, in the very next paragraph, comes a description of a certain pope most delectable to read. As it is but fair that our readers should enjoy the same compensation as ourselves, we insert it in a note.[69]

[Footnote 69: "The Popish religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these years, and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with at present. '_Elle a trois cents ans dans le ventre_,' counts M. Jouffroy; '_c'est pourquoi je la respecte!_' The old Pope of Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him through the streets to bless the people on _Corpus-Christi_ day, complains of rheumatism; whereupon his cardinals consult--construct him, after some study, a stuffed, cloaked figure, of iron and wood, with wool or baked hair, and place it in a kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure; to this stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread hands: the rump, with its cloaks, kneels; the Pope looks, and holds his hands spread; and so the two in concert bless the Roman population on _Corpus-Christi_ day, as well as they can.

"I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-iron back, with the flesh head and hands, and endeavoured to calculate his horoscope. I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself in the human retina, for these several thousand years. Nay, since Chaos first shivered, and 'sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of nature and art working together? Here is a supreme priest who believes God to be--what, in the name of God, _does_ he believe God to be?--and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax candles, organ blasts, Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps, artistically spread out, to save the ignorant from worse....

"There is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the scenic theory of worship, a frankness which I rather honour. Not half and half, but with undivided heart, does _he_ set about worshipping by stage machinery; as if there were now, and could again be, in nature no other. He will ask you, What other? Under this my Gregorian chant, and beautiful wax-light phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an abyss of black doubts, scepticism, nay, sans-culottic Jacobinism, an orcus that has no bottom. Think of that. 'Groby Pool _is_ thatched with pancakes,' as Jeannie Deans's innkeeper defined it to be! The bottomless of scepticism, atheism, Jacobinism, behold it is thatched over, hidden from your despair, by stage-properties judiciously arranged. This stuffed rump of mine saves not me only from rheumatism, but you also from what other _isms_!"--P. 187.]

The whole parallel which he runs between past and present is false--whimsically false. At one time we hear it uttered as an impeachment against our age, that every thing is done by committees and companies, shares and joint effort, and that no one man, or hero, can any longer move the world as in the blessed days of Peter the Hermit. Were we disposed to treat Mr Carlye as members of Parliament, by the help of their _Hansard_, controvert each other, we should have no difficulty in finding amongst his works some passage--whether eloquent or not, or how far intelligible, would be just a mere chance--in which he would tell us that this capacity for joint effort, this habit of co-operation, was the greatest boast our times could make, and gave the fairest promise for the future. In Ireland, by the way, _one man_ can still effect something, and work after the fashion, if not with so pure a fanaticism, as Peter the Hermit. The spectacle does not appear very edifying. Pray--the question just occurs to us--pray has Mr O'Connell got an _eye_? Would Mr Carlyle acknowledge that this man has _swallowed all formulas_? Having been bred a lawyer, we are afraid, or, in common Christian speech, we hope, that he has not.

But we are not about to proceed through a volume such as this in a carping spirit, though food enough for such a spirit may be found; there is too much genuine merit, too much genuine humour, in the work. What, indeed, is the use of selecting from an author who _will_ indulge in all manner of vagaries, whether of thought or expression, passages to prove that he can be whimsical and absurd, can deal abundantly in obscurities and contradictions, and can withal write the most motley, confused English of any man living? Better take, with thanks, from so irregular a genius, what seems to us good, or affords us gratification, and leave the rest alone.

We will not enter into the account of Abbot Samson; it is a little historical sketch, perfect in its kind, in which no part is redundant, and which, being gathered itself from very scanty sources, will not bear further mutilation. We turn, therefore, from the _Past_, although, in a literary point of view, a very attractive portion of the work, and will draw our extracts (they cannot now be numerous) from his lucubrations upon the _Present_.

Perhaps the most characteristic passage in the volume is that where, in the manner of a philosopher who suddenly finds himself awake in this "half-realized" world, he scans the institution of an _army_--looks out upon the _soldier_.

"Who can despair of Government that passes a soldier's
guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets! That a
body of men could be got together to kill other men when you
bade them; this, _à priori_, does it not seem one of the
impossiblest things? Yet look--behold it; in the stolidest of
do-nothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done. See
it there, with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking
sentry at guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an
indisputable, palpable fact. Out of grey antiquity, amid all
finance-difficulties, _scaccarium_-tallies, ship-monies,
coat-and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of chance and time,
there, down to the present blessed hour, it is.

"Often, in these painfully decadent, and painfully nascent
times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and
'impossibilities;' meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his
snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque
lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed
buckskins, on their coal-black, sleek, fiery quadrupeds, riding
sentry at the Horse-Guards--it strikes one with a kind of
mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and
wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest
fighting institution is still so young! Fresh complexioned,
firm-limbed, six feet by the standard, this fighting man has
verily been got up, and can fight. While so much has not yet
got into being, while so much has gone gradually out of it, and
become an empty semblance, a clothes'-suit, and highest
king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are
getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost
offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's blanket--here
still is a reality!

"The man in horse-hair wig advances, promising that he will get
me 'justice;' he takes me into Chancery law-courts, into
decades, half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon; and
_does get_ me--disappointment, almost desperation; and one
refuge--that of dismissing him and his 'justice' altogether out
of my head. For I have work to do; I cannot spend my decades in
mere arguing with other men about the exact wages of my work: I
will work cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten
years' gangrene or Chancery lawsuit in my heart. He of the
horse-hair wig is a sort of failure; no substance, but a fond
imagination of the mind. He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes
forward professing that he will save my soul. O ye eternities,
of him in this place be absolute silence! But he of the red
coat, I say, is a success and no failure! He will veritably, if
he gets orders, draw out a long sword and kill me. No mistake
there. He is a fact, and not a shadow. Alive in this year
Forty-three, able and willing to do _his_ work. In dim old
centuries, with William Rufus, William of Ipres, or far
earlier, he began; and has come down safe so far. Catapult has
given place to cannon, pike has given place to musket, iron
mail-shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre ropematch to
percussion-cap; equipments, circumstances, have all changed and
again changed; but the human battle-engine, in the inside of
any or of each of these, ready still to do battle, stands
there, six feet in standard size.

"Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was
this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the
one thing important to learn well, and bring to
perfection--this of successfully killing one another? Truly you
have learned it well, and carried the business to a high
perfection. It is incalculable what, by arranging, commanding,
and regimenting, you can make of men. These thousand
straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who
march, wheel, advance, retreat, and are, for your behoof, a
magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect
condition of potential activity; few months ago, till the
persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged
losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish
valets--an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the
treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came; by tap of drum
enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling
them; and he and you have made them this! Most potent,
effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm
combining, and commanding among men. Let no man despair of
Governments who look on these two sentries at the Horse
Guards!"--P. 349.

Passages there are in the work which a political agitator might be glad enough to seize on; but, upon the whole, it is very little that Radicalism or Chartism obtain from Mr Carlyle. No political party would choose him for its champion, or find in him a serviceable ally. Observe how he demolishes the hope of those who expect, by new systems of election, to secure some incomparably pure and wise body of legislators--some aristocracy of talent!

"We must have more wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by
the wisest, we must have an aristocracy of talent! cry many.
True, most true; but how to get it? The following extract from
our young friend of the _Houndsditch Indicator_ is worth
perusing--'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry every
where, articulate or inarticulate, for an aristocracy of
talent, a governing class, namely, what did govern, not merely
which took the wages of governing, and could not with all our
industry be kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and playing
the very deuce, with us--it may not be altogether useless to
remind some of the greener-headed sort what a dreadfully
difficult affair the getting of such an aristocracy is! Do you
expect, my friends, that your indispensable aristocracy of
talent is to be enlisted straightway, by some sort of
recruitment aforethought, out of the general population;
arranged in supreme regimental order; and set to rule over us?
That it will be got sifted, like wheat out of chaff, from the
twenty-seven million British subjects; that any ballot-box,
reform-bill, or other political machine, with force of public
opinion ever so active on it, is likely to perform said process
of sifting? Would to heaven that we had a sieve; that we could
so much as fancy any kind of sieve, wind-fanners, or _ne plus
ultra_ of machinery, devisable by man that would do it!

"'Done, nevertheless, sure enough, it must be; it shall, and
will be. We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction;
every hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure,
done. The doing of it is not doubtful; only the method or the
costs! Nay, I will even mention to you an infallible
sifting-process, whereby he that has ability will be sifted out
to rule amongst us, and that same blessed aristocracy of talent
be verily, in an approximate degree, vouchsafed us by-and-by;
an infallible sifting-process; to which, however, no soul can
help his neighbour, but each must, with devout prayer to
heaven, help himself. It is, O friends! that all of us, that
many of us, should acquire the true _eye_ for talent, which is
dreadfully wanting at present.

"'For example, you, Bobus Higgins, sausage-maker on the great
scale, who are raising such a clamour for this aristocracy of
talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours,
chiefly in very fact pay reverence to? Is it to talent,
intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus? The
manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever
reverence him; did you so much as know that he was a manly man
at all, till his coat grew better? Talent! I understand you to
be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash,
celebrity, or other success of talent; but the talent itself is
a thing you never saw with eyes. Nay, what is it in yourself
that you are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in
surveying, meditatively, in thoughtful moments? Speak now, is
it the bare Bobus, stript of his very name and shirt, and
turned loose upon society, that you admire and thank heaven
for; or Bobus, with his cash-accounts, and larders dropping
fatness, with his respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony
chaise, admirable in some measure to certain of the flunkey
species? Your own degree of worth and talent, is it of
_infinite_ value to you; or only of finite--measurable by the
degree of currency, and conquest of praise or pudding, it has
brought you to? Bobus, you are in a vicious circle, rounder
than one of your own sausages; and will never vote for or
promote any talent, except what talent or sham-talent has
already _got_ itself voted for!'--We here cut short the
_Indicator_; all readers perceiving whither he now tends."--P.
39.

In the chapter, also, on Democracy, we have notions expressed upon _liberty_ which would make little impression--would be very distasteful to any audience assembled for the usual excitement of political oratory.

"Liberty! the true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted
in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right
path, and to walk thereon--to learn or to be taught what work
he actually was able for, and then, by permission, persuasion,
and even compulsion, to set about doing the same! That is his
true blessedness, honour, 'liberty,' and maximum of
well-being,--if liberty be not that, I for one have small care
about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over
precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise, and
keep him, were it in strait waist-coat, away from the
precipices! Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man, is
but a less palpable madman; his true liberty were that a wiser
man, that any and every wiser man, could, by brass collars, or
in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he is
going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter.
O! if thou really art my _senior_--seigneur, my
_elder_--Presbyter or priest,--if thou art in very deed my
_wiser_, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to
'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what
is good and right, I conjure thee, in the name of God, force me
to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips, and
handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have
been called by all the newspapers a 'free man,' will avail me
little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that
the newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it
pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not
death but life! Liberty requires new definitions."--P. 285.

"But truly, as I had to remark in the meanwhile, the 'liberty
of not being oppressed by your fellow-man,' is an
indispensable, yet one of the most insignificant fractional
parts of human liberty. No man oppresses thee--can bid thee
fetch or carry, come or go, without reason shown. True; from
all men thou art emancipated, but from thyself and from the
devil! No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee come or go; but
thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetites for
money--Windsor Georges and such like! No man oppresses thee, O
free and independent Franchiser! but does not this stupid
porter-pot oppress thee? no son of Adam can bid thee come and
go; but this absurd pot of heavy-wet, this can and does! Thou
art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal
appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor; and thou protest of
thy 'liberty,' thou entire blockhead!"--P. 292.

We should hardly think of entering with Mr Carlyle into a controversy upon the corn-laws, or on schemes of emigration, or any disputed point of political economy. He brings to bear upon these certain primitive _moral_ views and feelings which are but very remotely applicable in the resolution of these knotty problems. We should almost as soon think of inviting the veritable Diogenes himself, should he roll up in his tub to our door, to a discussion upon our commercial system. Our Diogenes Teufelsdrockh looks upon these matters in a quite peculiar manner; observe, for example, the glance he takes at our present mercantile difficulties, which, doubtless, is not without its own value, nor undeserving of all consideration.

"The continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our
machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for
themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!'
Sad news, indeed, but irremediable--by no means the saddest
news. The saddest news is, that we should find our national
existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling
manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other
people--a most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself
on; a stand which, with all the corn-law abrogations
conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

"My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came
honestly down from it, and said--'This is our minimum of cotton
prices; we care not, for the present, to make cotton any
cheaper. Do you, if it seems so blessed to you, make cotton
cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fug, your hearts with
copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general
gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a nation which
fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to
the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to _under_sell
them; we will be content to _equal_sell them: to be happy
selling equally with them. I do not see the use of underselling
them; cotton cloth is already twopence a yard or lower, and yet
bare backs were never more numerous amongst us. Let inventive
men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how
cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how
cotton, at its present cheapness, could be somewhat juster
divided amongst us! Let inventive men consider whether the
secret of this universe, and of man's life there, does after
all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is
one God--just, supreme, almighty: but is Mammon the name of
him?

"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with
our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?--cry
many.--Ay, what? Many things can be done with them, a hundred
things, a thousand things--had we once got a soul and begun to
try. This one thing of doing for them by 'underselling all
people,' and filling our own bursten pockets by the road; and
turning over all care for any 'population,' or human or divine
consideration, except cash only, to the winds, with a
'Laissez-faire' and the rest of it; this is evidently not the
thing. 'Farthing cheaper per yard;' no great nation can stand
on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher and
higher: balancing itself on its great toe! Can England not
subsist without being _above_ all people in working? England
never deliberately proposed such a thing. If England work
better than all people, it shall be well. England, like an
honest worker, will work as well as she can; and hope the gods
may allow her to live on that basis. _Laissez-faire_ and much
else being once dead, how many 'impossibles' will become
possible! They are 'impossible' as cotton-cloth at twopence an
ell was--till men set about making it. The inventive genius of
great England will not for ever sit patient with mere wheels
and pinions, bobbins, straps, and billy-rollers whirring in the
head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a beaver's,
or a spinner's, or a spider's genius: it is a _man's_ genius, I
hope, with a God over him!"--P. 246.

And hear our Diogenes on the often repeated cry of _over-production_:--

"But what will reflective readers say of a governing class,
such as ours, addressing its workers with an indictment of
'over-production!' Over-production: runs it not so? 'Ye
miscellaneous ignoble, manufacturing individuals, ye have
produced too much. We accuse you of making above two hundred
thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers
too, which you have made of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch
plaid, of jane, nankeen, and woollen broadcloth, are they not
manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human
foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with--Nay, what say we
of hats and shoes? You produce gold watches, jewelleries,
silver forks and épergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed
sofas--Heavens, the Commercial Bazar and multitudinous Howel
and James cannot contain you! You have produced, produced;--he
that seeks your indictment, let him look around. Millions of
shirts and empty pairs of breeches hang there in judgment
against you. We accuse you of over-producing; you are
criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes,
and commodities in a frightful over-abundance. And now there is
a glut, and your operatives cannot be fed.'

"Never, surely, against an earnest working mammonism was there
brought by game-preserving aristocratic dilettantism, a
stranger accusation since this world began. My Lords and
Gentlemen--why it was _you_ that were appointed, by the fact
and by the theory of your position on the earth, to make and
administer laws. That is to say, in a world such as ours, to
guard against 'gluts,' against honest operatives who had done
their work remaining unfed! I say, you were appointed to
preside over the distribution and appointment of the wages of
work done; and to see well that there went no labourer without
his hire, were it of money coins, were it of hemp
gallows-ropes: that formation was yours, and from immemorial
time has been yours, and as yet no other's. These poor
shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by the virtual
unwritten law of their position they should have remembered;
but by any written recognized law of their position, what have
they forgotten? They were set to make shirts. The community,
with all its voices commanded them, saying, 'make shirts;'--and
there the shirts are! Too many shirts? Well, that is a novelty,
in this intemperate earth, with its nine hundred millions of
bare backs! But the community commanded you, saying, 'See that
the shirts are well apportioned, that our human laws be emblems
of God's law;' and where is the apportionment? Two millions
shirt-less, or ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in work-house
Bastiles, five millions more (according to some) in Ugoline
hunger-cellars; and for remedy, you say--what say you? 'Raise
our rents!' I have not in my time heard any stranger speech,
not even on the shores of the Dead Sea. You continue addressing
these poor shirt-spinners and over-producers in really a _too_
triumphant manner.

"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse _us_ of
over-production? We take the heavens and the earth to witness,
that we have produced nothing at all. Not from us proceeds this
frightful overplus of shirts. In the wide domains of created
nature, circulates nothing of our producing. Certain
fox-brushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of fair
audacity at Melton Mowbray; these we have produced, and they
are openly nailed up there. He that accuses us of producing,
let him show himself, let him name what and when. We are
innocent of producing,--ye ungrateful, what mountains of things
have we not, on the contrary, had to consume, and make away
with! Mountains of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever
edible or wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if
we had the talent of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of
divine faculty to eat? Ye ungrateful!--and did you not grow
under the shadow of our wings? Are not your filthy mills built
on these fields of ours; on this soil of England, which belongs
to--whom think you? And we shall not offer you our own wheat at
the price that pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A
precious notion! What would become of you, if we chose at any
time to decide on growing no wheat more?"

An amusing--caustic--exaggeration, more like a portion of a clever satire on man and society, than a sincere discussion of political evils and remedies; and not intended, we trust, for Mr Carlyle's own sake, to express his real belief in the true causes of the evils of society. If we could suppose that this piece of extravagant and one-sided invective were meant to be seriously taken, as embodying Mr Carlyle's social and political creed, we should scarcely find words strong enough to reprobate its false and mischievous tendency.

We have already said, that we regard the chief _value_ of Mr Carlyle's writings to consist in the _tone of mind_ which the individual reader acquires from their perusal;--manly, energetic, enduring, with high resolves and self-forgetting effort; and we here again, at the close of our paper, revert to this remark: _Past and Present_, has not, and could not have, the same wild power which _Sartor Resartus_ possessed, in our opinion, over the feelings of the reader; but it contains passages which look the same way, and breathe the same spirit. We will quote one or two of these, and then conclude our notice. Their effect will not be injured, we may observe, by our brief manner of quotation. Speaking of "the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for his _happiness_," he says:--

"Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to
the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times.
'Happiness, our being's end and aim,' is at bottom, if we will
count well, not yet two centuries old in the world. The only
happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much
about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not, 'I can't
eat!' but, 'I can't work!' that was the burden of all wise
complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of
a man--that he cannot work--that he cannot get his destiny as a
man fulfilled."

* * * * *

"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."

* * * * *

"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 glass-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. Labour is life!"

* * * * *

"Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain
not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there,
in God's eternity--surviving there--they alone
surviving--sacred band of the Immortals. Even in the weak human
memory they survive so long as saints, as heroes, as gods; they
alone surviving--peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes
of time! To thee, Heaven, though severe, is _not_ unkind.
Heaven is kind, as a noble mother--as that Spartan mother,
saying, as she gave her son his shield, 'with it, my son, or
upon it!'

"And, who art thou that braggest of thy life of idleness;
complacently showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous
cushions; appliances for the folding of the hands to more
sleep? Looking up, looking down, around, behind, or before,
discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any _idle_
hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. 'In the
heavens, in the earth, in the waters under the earth, is none
like unto thee.' Thou art an original figure in this creation,
a denizen in Mayfair alone. One monster there is in the world:
the idle man. What is his 'religion?' That nature is a
phantasm, where cunning, beggary, or thievery, may sometimes
find good victual."

* * * * *

"The 'wages' of every noble work do yet lie in heaven, or else
nowhere. Nay, at bottom dost thou need any reward? Was it thy
aim and life-purpose, to be filled with good things for thy
heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call
'happy' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for
thee, deliberately, no?

"The brave man has to give his life away. Give it, I advise
thee--thou dost not expect to _sell_ thy life in an adequate
manner? What price, for example, would content thee?... Thou
wilt never sell thy life, or any part of thy life, in a
satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart--let the price
be nothing; thou hast then, in a certain sense, got all for
it!"

Well said! we again repeat, O Diogenes Teufelsdrockh!

* * * * *

_Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work_.

* * * * *