Chapter XI: Part 11

By what signs, then, other than the ultimate test of success, can we discern the just from the unjust? That, of course, is the vital point which must decide upon the character of Carlyle's morality; and it is one which, in my opinion, he cannot be said to have answered distinctly. He gives, indeed, a test satisfactory to himself, and he enforces and applies it with superabundant energy and variety of phrase. That is right, one may say briefly, which will 'work.' The sham is hollow, and must be crushed in the tug and wrestle of the warring world. The reality survives and gathers strength. Veracity in equivalent phrase is the condition of vitality. Truth endures; the lie perishes. But in applying this or his vast vocabulary of similar phrases, we come to a difficulty. 'The largest veracity ever _done_ in Parliament' was, he says, Sir Robert Peel's abolition of the Corn Laws. But how can you _do_ a veracity? What is a lie?—a question, as he observes, worth asking by the 'practical English mind;' and to which he accordingly proceeds to give an answer. He insists, that is, very eloquently and vehemently, upon the inevitable results of all lying, and of all legislative and other action which proceeds upon the assumption of a falsity or an error which passes itself off for a truth. In all which I, for one, admit that there is not only truth, but truth nobly expressed and applied to the confutation of some most pestilent errors; and yet, as one must also admit, there is still an ambiguity. May it not, in fact, cover that exaltation of mere success which is so often objected to him? Some tyrannical institution—slavery, for example—lives and flourishes through long ages. Is it thereby justified? Is it not a fact, and if fact and truth are the same things, is it not a truth sanctioned by the eternal veracities and so forth, and therefore entitled to our respect? This is one more form of that fundamental problem which really perplexes Carlyle's moral teaching, and which he has at least the merit of bringing into prominence, though not of answering. In fact, we may recognise in it an ancient philosophical controversy not yet set at rest; for, since the beginning of ethical theorising, thinkers of various schools have tried in one way or other to deduce virtue from truth, and to identify all vice with error. But the reference is enough to show the difference of Carlyle's method. He might respect the metaphysician who held a doctrine so far analogous to his own; but the metaphysical method appeared to him as a mere formal logic-chopping where the essence of the teaching escaped amidst barren demonstrations of verbal identities.

The real answer is here again a new version of the old Puritan answer. The Puritan fell back upon the will of God revealed through the Bible, whose authority was manifest by the inner light. If the wicked were allowed to triumph for a time, there was no danger of being misled by their success, for they were condemned in advance by the plain fact of their renunciation of the inspired guide. For Carlyle, the 'hero' takes the place of, or rather is put side by side with, the older organs of inspiration. Every hero conveys in fact a new revelation to mankind; he conveys a divine message, not, it is true, with infallible precision, or without an admixture of human error, but still the very kernel and essence of his teaching. He may come as prophet, king, poet, or philosopher, and you may reject or accept his message at your peril. You may recognise it, as the Puritan recognised the authority of his Bible, by the spontaneous witness of your higher nature, and you will recognise it so long as you have not given yourself up to believe a lie. And if you demand some external proofs you must be referred, not to some particular signs and wonders, but to what you may, if you please, call the 'success' of the message; the fact, that is, that the hero has contributed some permanent element to the thoughts and lives of mankind, that he has revealed some enduring truth, created some permanent symbol of our highest feelings, or wrought some organic change in the very structure of society. There is a danger undoubtedly of confounding some temporary crystal palace or dazzling edifice of mere glass with an edifice founded on the rock and solid as the pyramids. The hero may be confounded with the sham, as unfortunately shams and realities are most frequently confounded in this world. But they differ for all that, and the true man recognises the difference, as the religious man knows the hypocrite from the saint. The test is indifferently the truth or the soundness of the work; they must coincide; but the test can only be applied by one who really loves the truth.

It is easy to point out the dangers of this position. It rests, after all, you may say upon the individual conviction, and lends itself too easily to that kind of dogmatism in which Carlyle indulged so freely, and which consists in asserting that any doctrine or system which he dislikes is an incarnate lie, and pronouncing that it is therefore doomed to failure. And, on the other hand, it may be equally perverted in the opposite direction by claiming a sacred character for every 'lie' not yet exploded. Carlyle, beyond all question, was a man of intense prejudices, and the claim to inspiration, even to the inspiration of our teachers, very easily passes into a deification of our own prejudices. No one was more liable to that error; but it is better worth our while to look at some other aspect of his teaching.

For we may surely accept without hesitation one application of the doctrine, which is of the first importance with Carlyle, and which he has taught so incessantly and impressively, that to him more than to any other man may be attributed the general recognition of its truth. The success of any system of thought—the permanent influence, that is, of any great man or of any great institution—must be due to the truth which it contained, or to its real value to mankind. This doctrine has become so much of a commonplace, and harmonises so fully with all modern historical methods, that we are apt to overlook the service done by Carlyle in its explicit assertion and rigorous application to facts. When he was delivering his lectures upon hero-worship, intelligent people were still in the attitude of mind represented, for example, by Gibbon's famous explanation of the success of Christianity, as due, amongst other things, to the zeal of the early believers, as if the zeal required no explanation; when, on the other side, it was thought proper to explain Mahometanism, not by the admixture of genuine truth which it contained, but as a simple imposture. Carlyle still speaks like a man advancing a disputed theory when he urges in this latter case that to explain the power of Mahomet's sword, you must explain the force which wielded the sword; and that the ingenious hypothesis of a downright cheat will by no means serve the turn. This doctrine is now generally accepted, unless by a few clever people who still cherish the wire-pulling heresy which makes history a puppet-show manipulated by ingenious scoundrels, instead of a vast co-operation of organic forces. Carlyle, however, has done more than any writer to make such barren and degrading explanations impossible for all serious thinkers. His 'Cromwell' has at least exploded once for all the simple-minded 'hypocrisy' theory, as the essay upon Johnson destroyed the ingenious doctrine that a man could write a good book simply because he was a fool. Whether his portraits are accurate or not, they are at least set before us as conceivable and consistent human beings. The prosaic historian and biographer takes the average verdict of commonplace observers: if he is a partisan, he is content with the contemporary caricatures of the party to which he belongs; if he wishes to be impartial, he strikes a rough average between opposite errors; and if he wishes to be dazzling, he calmly combines incompatible judgments. Macaulay's works, with all their merits, are a perfect gallery of such portraits—rhetorically excellent, but hopelessly flimsy in substance: of angelic Whigs and fiendish Tories, and of strange monsters like his Bacon and his Boswell, made by quietly heaping together meanness and wisdom, sense and folly, and inviting you to accept a string of paradoxes as a sober statement of fact. The truly imaginative writer has to go deeper than this. He begins where the rhetorician ends. A great work, as he instinctively sees, implies a great force. A man can only leave his mark upon history so far as he is animated, and therefore worthy to be animated, by a great idea. The secret of his nature is to be discovered by a sympathetic imagination acting by a kind of poetical induction. Gathering together all his recorded acts and utterances, the masses of recorded facts, preserved, often in hopeless confusion and misrepresentation, by his contemporaries, you must brood over them till at last you gain a clear vision of the underlying unity of character which manifests itself in these various ways. Then, at last, you may recognise the true hero, and discover unsuspected unity of purpose and strength of conviction, where the hasty judgments passed by contemporaries and those who set them upon isolated fragments of his career, make a bewildering chaos of inconsistency. The process is admirably illustrated in the study of Cromwell, and the result has the merit of being at least a possible, if not a correct, theory of a great man.

This, again, is connected with another aspect of Carlyle's teaching—as valuable, though perhaps its value is not even now as generally recognised. For the tendency of his mind is always to substitute what is sometimes called the dynamical for the merely mechanical view of history. It is a necessity for his imagination to penetrate as much to the centre instead of remaining at the circumference; to unveil the actual forces which govern the working of the superficial phenomena, instead of losing himself in the external phenomena themselves. The true condition for understanding history is to gain a clear perception of the genuine beliefs, the wants and passions which actually sway men's souls, instead of working simply at the complicated wheels and pulleys of the political machinery, or accepting the masses of idle verbiage which conceal our true thoughts from ourselves and from each other. An implicit faith in the potency of the machinery, and an equal neglect of the real driving force, was, in his view, the original sin of political theory. The constitution-mongers of the Delolme or Siéyès type, the men who fancied that government (as one of them said) was like 'a dance where everything depended on the disposition of the figures,' and nothing, therefore, on the nature of the dancers, have pretty well passed away. Carlyle saw the same vital fallacies in such nostrums as the ballot or the scheme so enthusiastically advocated by Hare and Mill. 'If of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation, how in the name of wonder will you get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of those ten men? Never by any conceivable ballot-box, nor by all the machinery in Bromwicham or out of it, will you attain such a result.' Whether Carlyle was right or wrong in the particular application I do not presume to say. Such a change as the ballot may perhaps imply more than a mere change of machinery. But I certainly cannot doubt that he is right in the essence of his contention: that a perception of the difference between the merely mechanical details and the vital forces of a society is essential to any sound political theorising; and that half our pet schemes of reform fail just from this cause, that they expect to change the essence by modifying the surface, and are therefore equivalent to plans for obtaining mechanical results without expending energy.

To have asserted these principles so emphatically is one of Carlyle's greatest merits; and if he obtained emphasis at the cost of exaggeration, overstatement, grotesque straining of language and imagery, and much substantial error as to facts, I can only say that the service remains, and is inestimable. But there is a less pleasing qualification to be made. The objection to the ballot as a purely mechanical arrangement is combined, as we have just seen, with the objection founded upon the prevalence of fools. That stinging phrase, 'mostly fools,' has stuck in our throats. The prophet who tells us that we are wicked may be popular—perhaps, because our consciences are on his side; but the prophet who calls us fools is likely to provoke our wrath. I, at least, never met a man who relished that imputation, even if he admitted it to contain a grain of truth. But, palatable or not, it is clearly fundamental with Carlyle. The world is formed of 'dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led;' the great men are the 'guides of the dull host, who follow them as by an irrevocable decree.' They are the heroes to whom alone are granted real powers of vision and command; realities amongst shams, and knowers amongst vague feelers after knowledge. We need not ask how this theory was reached; whether it is the spontaneous sentiment of a proud and melancholy character, or really a fair estimate of the facts; or, again, a deduction from the 'hero' doctrine. With that doctrine, at any rate, it naturally coincides. To exalt the stature of your hero, you must depress his fellows. If Gulliver is to be a giant, he must go to Lilliput. There is, however, a gap in the argument which is characteristically neglected by Carlyle. He would never have fairly accepted the doctrine—whose was it?—that, though a man may be wiser than anybody there is something wiser than he—namely, everybody. The omission is critical, and has many consequences. For one may fully admit Carlyle's estimate: one may hold the difference between a Shakespeare and an average contributor to the poet's corner of a newspaper, or between a born leader of men, a Cromwell and a Chatham, and the enormous majority of his followers, as something hardly expressible in words: one may admit that the history of thought or society reveals the more clearly, the more closely it is studied, the height to which the chosen few tower above the average; one may even diminish the percentage of the wise from a tenth to a hundredth or a thousandth: and yet one may hold to the superior wisdom of the mass. No ballot-box, it is true, will make the folly of the nine equal to the wisdom of the one. Or it can tend that way only if the foolish majority have some sense of the need of superior guidance. But the ignorance and folly of mankind, their incapacity for forming any trustworthy judgment on any given point, may also be consistent with a capacity for groping after truth, and they have the advantage of trying experiments on a large scale. The fact that a creed commends itself to the instincts of many men in many ages is a better proof—Carlyle himself being the judge—that it contains some truth than the isolated judgment of the most clearsighted philosopher. The fact that an institution actually makes men happy and calls forth their loyalty is a more forcible argument in its favour than the opinion of the most experienced statesman. And, therefore, the fact that any society is chiefly made up of fools is quite consistent with the belief that it is collectively the organ through which truth gradually manifests itself and wins a wider recognition. _Securus judicat orbis_ may be a true maxim if we interpret it to mean that the world decides—not as the experimenter but as the experiment. Carlyle systematically overlooks this blind semi-conscious process of co-operation upon which the 'hero' is really as dependent as the dull flock which he leads. History, as he is fond of saying, is the essence of innumerable biographies. To find the essence of the biographies, again, he goes to the essential biographies; that is, to the biographies of the men who give the impulse, not of those who passively submit to the impulse. This apotheosis of the individual is dictated by his imaginative idiosyncrasy, as much as by his theory of history. He must have the picturesque concrete fact; the living hero to be the incarnation of the idea; and, accordingly, history in his page is like a gigantic panorama in which the painter sacrifices everything to obtain the strongest contrasts, and makes his lights stand out against vast breadths of unspeakable gloom. The hero is thus made to sum up the whole effectual force, and all that is done by the Greeks is attributed to the arm of Achilles. Some awkward results follow. Frederick is a hero who has obvious moral defects, and readers are startled by Carlyle's worship of such an idol. Yet it follows from the assumptions. For Frederick, in Carlyle's theory, means the development of the German nation. That the growth of the German influence in Europe was a phenomenon which naturally and rightfully excited Carlyle's strongest enthusiasm requires no demonstration. If the credit of that, as of every other great achievement, must be given to some solitary hero, Frederick doubtless has the best claim to the honour. We may no doubt say that Frederick, in spite of this, was selfish and cynical, and may confine our praises to allowing his possession of perspicacity enough to see the capabilities of his position. A great man may do an involuntary service to mankind, because his genius inclines him to range himself on the side of the strongest forces, and therefore of what we vaguely call progress. But the hero-worshipper naturally regards him as not merely an instrument, but the conscious and efficient cause of the progress itself.

Hence, too, the apparent immorality which some people discern in Carlyle's denunciations of 'red tape' formulas, and the ordinary conventions of society. Undoubtedly, such fetters must snap like packthread when opposed to the deeper forces which govern the growth of nations. No set of engagements on paper will keep a nation on its legs if it is rotten at the core, or maintain a balance of power between forces which are daily growing unequal. It is idle to suppose that any contract could bind, or otherwise can preserve, the vitality of effete institutions. And hence arise a good many puzzling questions for political casuistry. It is hard to say at what precise point it becomes necessary to snap the bonds, and when the necessity of change makes revolution, with all its mischiefs, preferable to stagnation. The hero-worshipper who regards his idol as the supreme moving force, has to make him also the infallible judge in such matter. He stands above—not the ultimate rules of morality, but—the whole system of regulations and compromises by which men must govern themselves in normal times—and decides when they must be suspended in the name of the higher law. The only appeal from his decision is the appeal to facts. If the apparent hero be really self-seeking and vulgarly ambitious, he and his empire will be crushed like Napoleon's. If, on the whole, his decision be right, as inspired from above, he will lay the foundations of a new order on an unshakable basis. And, therefore, Carlyle is naturally attracted to the revolutionary periods, when the underlying forces come to the surface; when the foundations of the great deep are broken up, all conventions summarily swept aside, and the direct as well as the ultimate attention is to the great principles of its social life. Therefore he sympathises with Mirabeau, who had 'swallowed all formulas,' and still more with Cromwell, whose purpose, in his view, was to make the laws of England a direct application of the laws of God. Puritan and Jacobin are equally impatient for the instantaneous advent of the millennium, and so far attract equally the man who shares their hatred of compromise and temporising with the world.

Here we come to the final problem. Cromwell's Parliament, he says, failed in their attempt to realise their 'noble, and surely necessary, attempt.' Nay, they 'could not but fail;' they had 'the sluggishness, the slavish half-and-halfness, the greediness, the cowardice, and general fatuity and falsity of some ten million men against it—alas! the whole world and what we call the Devil and all his angels against it!' This is the true revolutionary doctrine. The fact that a reform would only succeed fully if men were angels is with the ordinary Conservative a reason for not reforming at all; and with your genuine fanatic a reason not for declining the impracticable, but for denouncing the facts. We have, however, to ask how it fits in with any such theory of progress as was possible for Carlyle. For some such theory must be held by anyone who makes the victory of truth and justice over shams and falsehoods a corner-stone of his system. It has been asked, in fact, whether there is not a gross inconsistency here. If Cromwell's success proved him to be a hero, did not the Restoration upset the proof? The answer, frequently and emphatically given by Carlyle, as in the lecture on the hero as king, is an obvious one. Cromwell represents an intermediate stage between Luther and the French Revolution. Luther told the Pope that he was a 'chimera;' and the French gave the same piece of information to other 'chimeras.' The whole process is a revolt against certain gigantic shams, and the success very inadequately measured by any special incident in the struggle. The French Revolution, with all its horrors, was a 'return to truth,' though, as it were, to a truth 'clad in hellfire:' and its advent should be hailed as 'shipwrecked mariners might hail the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless seas and waves.' And throughout this vast revolutionary process, our hope rests upon the 'certainty of heroes being sent us;' and that certainty 'shines like a polestar, through murk dustclouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.'

It is well that we have a 'certainty' of the coming hero; for the essay seems to show the weakness of all excessive reliance upon individuals. Cromwell's life, as he tells us emphatically, was the life of the Commonwealth, and Cromwell's life was at the mercy of a 'stray bullet.' Where then is a certainty of progress in a world thus dependent upon solitary heroes, in a wilderness of fools, liable to be snuffed out at a moment's notice? So far as certainty means a scientific conviction resting on the observation of facts, we, of course, cannot have it. It is a certainty which follows from our belief in the overruling power which will send heroes when there is work for heroes to do. And Carlyle can at times, especially in his earlier writings, declare his faith in such a progress with full conviction. 'The English Whig,' says Herr Teufelsdröckh, 'has, in the second generation, become an English Radical, who, in the third, it is to be hoped, will become an English rebuilder. Find mankind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower; the phœnix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling earth with her music; or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral swansong immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer.' And the phrase, as I think, gives the theory which in fact is more or less explicitly contained in all Carlyle's writings.

It is plain, however, that progress, so understood, is a progress consistent with long periods of the reverse of progress. It implies an alternation of periods of reconstruction and vital energy with others of decay and degeneration. And in this I do not know that Carlyle differs from other philosophers. Few people are sanguine enough to hold that every generation improves upon the preceding. But the modern believer in progress undoubtedly believes that this actual generation is better than the last, and that the next will be better still; and is very apt to impute bad motives to anyone who differs from him. Here, of course, he must come into flat opposition to Carlyle. For Carlyle, to put it briefly, regarded the present state of things as analogous to that of the Lower Empire; a time of dissolution of old bonds and of a general ferment which was destroying the very tissues of society. So far he agrees, of course, with many Conservatives; but he differs from them in regarding the process as necessary, and even ultimately beneficial. The disease is one which must run its course; the best hope is that it may run it quickly; the attempt to suppress the symptoms and to regain health by making time run backwards is simply chimerical. Thus he was in the painful position of one who sees a destructive process going on of which he recognises the necessity whilst all the immediate results are bad.

To the ardent believer in progress such a state of mind is, of course, repulsive. It implies misanthropy, cynicism, and disbelief in mankind. Nor can anybody deny that Carlyle's gloomy and dyspeptic constitution palpably biassed his view of his contemporaries as well as of their theories. The 'mostly fools' expresses a deeply-rooted feeling, and we might add 'mostly bores,' and to a great extent humbugs. And this, of course, implies a very low estimate of the powers of unheroic mankind, and therefore of their rights. If most men are fools, their right to do as they please is a right to knock their heads against stone walls. Carlyle perhaps overlooked the fact that even that process may be useful training for fools. But even here he asserted a doctrine wrongly applied rather than false in principle. It shocks one to find an open advocacy of slavery for black Quashee. But we must admit, and admit for the reasons given by Carlyle, that even slavery may be better than sheer anarchy and barbarism; that, historically speaking, the system of slavery represents a necessary stage in civilisation; and therefore that the simple abolition of slavery—a recognition of unconditional 'right' without reference to the possession of the instincts necessary for higher kinds of society—might be disguised cruelty. The error was in the hasty assumption that his Quashee was, in fact, in this degraded state; and the haste to accept this disheartening belief was but too characteristic. That liberty might mean barbarism was true; that it actually did mean it in certain given cases was a rash assumption too much in harmony with his ordinary aversion to the theorists of his time.

This applies to all Carlyle's preachings about contemporary politics; the weakest of his writings are those in which his rash dogmatism, coloured by his gloomy temperament, was employed upon unfamiliar topics. But the pith and essence of them all is the intense conviction that the one critical point for modern statesmen is the creation of a healthy substratum to the social structure. That the lives of the great masses are squalid, miserable, and vicious, and must be elevated by the spread of honesty, justice, and the unflinching extirpation of corrupt elements, the substitution of rigorous rulers for idle professors of official pedantry, busy about everything but the essential—that is the sum and substance of the teaching. That he attributes too much to the legislative power, and has too little belief in the capacities of the average man, may be true enough. But this one thing must be said in conclusion. The bitterness, the gloom, even the apparent brutality, is a proof of the strength of his sympathies. He is savage with the physician because he is appalled at the virulence of the disease and the inadequacy of the remedy. He may shriek 'quack' too hastily, and be too ready to give over the patient as desperate. And yet I am frequently struck by a contrast. I meet a good friend who holds up his hands at Carlyle's ferocity. We talk, and I find that he holds that in politics we are all going to sheer destruction or 'shooting Niagara'; that the miserable Radicals are sapping all public spirit; that faith is being undermined by malcontents and atheists; that the merchant has become a gambler, and the tradesman a common cheat; that the 'British workman' is a phrase which may be used with the certainty of provoking a sneer; and, briefly, that there is not a class in the country which is not on the highroad to decay, or an institution beyond the reach of corruption. And yet my friend sits quietly down and enjoys his dinner as heartily as if he were expecting the millennium. What shall I say? That he does not believe what he says, or that his digestive apparatus was in most enviable order? I know not; but certainly Carlyle was not capable of this. He took things too terribly in earnest. When workmen scamped the alterations in his house, or the railway puffed its smoke into his face, he saw visible symbols of modern degeneracy, and thought painfully of the old honest wholesome life in Annandale—of steady God-fearing farmers and self-respecting workmen. All that swept away by progress and 'prosperity beyond example'! That was his reflection; perhaps it was very weak, as certainly it was very unpleasant to worry himself about what he could not help, and sprang, let us say, all from a defective digestion. And yet, though I cannot think without pity of the man of genius who felt so keenly and thought so gloomily of the evils around us, I feel infinitely more respect for his frame of mind than for that of the man who, sharing, verbally at least, this opinion, can let it calmly lie in his mind without the least danger to his personal comfort.

_THE STATE TRIALS_

It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on the whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not generally share that impression; and, on the contrary, have said a great many fine things about the charm of conversing with the choice minds of all ages, with the _innuendo_, to use the legal phrase, that they themselves modestly demand some place amongst the aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort upon our teachers. Are you not, we observe, exceedingly given to humbug? The youthful student takes the poet's ecstasies and agonies in solemn earnest. We who have grown a little wiser cannot forget with what complacency the poet has often devised a new agony; how he has set it to a pretty tune; how he has treasured up his sorrows and despairs to make his literary stock in trade, has taken them to market, and squabbled with publishers and writhed under petty critics, and purred and bridled under judicious flattery; and we begin to resent his demand upon our sympathies. Are not poetry and art a terrible waste of energy in a world where so much energy is already being dissipated? The great musician, according to the well-worn anecdote, hears the people crying for bread in the street, and the wave of emotion passing through his mind comes out in the shape, not of active benevolence, but of some new and exquisite jangle of sounds. It is all very well. The musician, it is probable enough, could have done nothing better. But there are times when we feel that we would rather have the actual sounds, the downright utterance of an agonised human being, than the far-away echo of passion set up in the artistic brain. We prefer the roar of the tempest to the squeaking of the Æolian harp. We tire of the skilfully prepared sentiment, the pretty fancies, the unreal imaginations, and long for the harsh, crude, substantial fact, the actual utterance of men struggling in the dire grasp of unmitigated realities. We want to see Nature itself, not to look at the distorted images presented in the magical mirror of a Shakespeare. The purpose of playing is, as that excellent authority is constantly made to repeat, to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. But, upon that hypothesis, why should we not see the age itself instead of being bothered by impossible kings and queens and ghosts mixed up in supernatural catastrophes? If this theory of art be sound, is not the most realistic historian the only artist? Nay, since every historian is more or less a sophisticator, should we not go back to the materials from which histories are made?

I feel some touch of sympathy for those simple-minded readers who avowedly prefer the police reports to any other kind of literature. There at least they come into contact with solid facts; shocking, it may be, to well-regulated minds, but possessing all the charm of their brutal reality; not worked into the carefully doctored theories and rose-coloured pictures set forth by the judicious author, whose real aim is to pose as an amiable and interesting being. It is true that there are certain objections to such studies. They generally imply a wrong state of mind in the student. He too often reads, it is to be feared, with that pleasure in loathsome details which seems to spring from a survival of the old cruel instincts capable of finding pleasure in the sight of torture and bloodshed. Certainly one would not, even in a passing phrase, suggest that the indulgence of such a temper can be anything but loathsome. But it is not necessary to assume this evil propensity in all cases; or what must be our judgment of the many excellent members of society who studied day by day the reports of the Tichborne case, for example, and felt that there was a real blank in their lives when the newspapers had to fill their columns with nothing better than discussions of international relations and social reforms? You might perhaps laugh at such a man if he asserted that he was conscientiously studying human nature. But you might give him credit if he replied that he was reading a novel which atoned for any defects of construction by the incomparable interest of reality. And the reply would be more plausible in defence of another kind of reading. When literature palls upon me I sometimes turn for relief to the great collection of State Trials. They are nothing, you may say, but the police reports of the past. But it makes all the difference that they are of the past. I may be ashamed of myself when I read some hideous revelation of modern crime, not to stimulate my ardour as a patriot and a reformer, but to add a zest to my comfortable chair in the club window or at the bar of my favourite public-house. But I can read without such a pang of remorse about Charles I. and the regicides. I can do nothing for them. I cannot turn the tide of battle at Naseby, or rush into the streets with the enthusiastic Venner. They make no appeal to me for help, and I have not to harden my heart by resisting, but only feel a sympathy which cannot be wasted because it could not be turned to account. I may indulge in it, for it strengthens the bond between me and my ancestors. My sense of relationship is stimulated and strengthened as I gaze at the forms sinking slowly beyond my grasp down into the abyss of the past, and try in imagination to raise them once more to the surface. I do all that I can for them in simply acknowledging that they form a part of the great process in which I am for the instant on the knife-edge of actual existence, and unreal only in the sense in which the last motion of my pen is unreal now. 'I was once,' says one of the earliest performers, 'a looker-on of the pageant as others be here now, but now, woe is me! I am a player in that doleful tragedy.' This 'now' is become our 'once,' and we may leave it to the harmless enthusiasts who play at metaphysics to explain or to darken the meaning of the familiar phrase. Whatever time may be—a point, I believe, not quite settled—there is always a singular fascination in any study which makes us vividly conscious of its ceaseless lapse, and gives us the sense of rolling back the ever-closing scroll. Historians, especially of the graphic variety, try to do that service for us; but we can only get the full enjoyment by studying at first-hand direct contemporary reports of actual words and deeds.

The charm of the State Trials is in the singular fulness and apparent authenticity of many of the reports of _vivâ voce_ examinations. There are not more links between us for example, and Sir Nicholas Throgmorton—whose words I have just quoted—than between us and the last witness at a contemporary trial. The very words are given fresh from the speaker's mouth. The volumes, of course, contain vast masses of the dismal materials which can be quarried only by the patience of a Dryasdust. If we open them at random we may come upon reading which is anything but exhilarating. There are pages upon pages of constitutional eloquence in the Sacheverell case about the blessed revolution, and the social compact, and the theory of passive resistance, which are as hopelessly unreadable as the last parliamentary debate in the 'Times.' If we chance upon the great case of Shipmoney, and the arguments for and against the immortal Hampden, we have to dig through strata of legal antiquarianism solid enough to daunt the most intrepid explorer. And, as trials expand in later times, and the efforts of the British Barrister to establish certain important rules of evidence become fully reported, we, as innocent laymen, feel bound to withdraw from the sacred place. Indeed, one is forced to ask in passing whether any English lawyer, with one exception, ever made a speech in court which it was possible for any one not a lawyer to read in cold blood. Speeches, of course, have been made beyond number of admirable efficacy for the persuasion of judges and juries; but so far as the State Trials inform us, one can only suppose that lawyers regarded eloquence as a deadly sin, perhaps because jurymen had a kind of dumb instinct which led them to associate eloquence with humbug. The one exception is Erskine, whose speeches are true works of art, and perfect models of lucid exposition. The strangely inarticulate utterance of his brethren reconciles us in a literary sense to the rule—outrageous in a moral and political point of view—which for centuries forbade the assistance of counsel in the most serious cases. In the older trials, therefore, we assist at a series of tragedies which may shock our sense of justice, but in their rough-and-ready fashion go at once to the point and show us all the passions of human beings fighting in deadly earnest over the issues of life and death. The unities of time and place are strictly observed. In the good old days the jury, when once empanelled, had to go on to the end. There was no dilatory adjourning from day to day.[9] As wrestlers who have once taken hold must struggle till one touches earth, the prisoner had to finish his agony there and then. The case might go on by candlelight, and into the early hours of a second morning, till even the spectators, wedged together in the close court, with a pestilential atmosphere, loaded, if they had only known it, with the germs of gaol fever, were well-nigh exhausted; till the judge confessed himself too faint to sum up, and even to recollect the evidence; till the unfortunate prisoner, browbeaten by the judge and the opposite counsel, bewildered by the legal subtleties, often surprised by unexpected evidence, and unable to produce contradictory witnesses at the instant, overwhelmed with all the labour and impossibility of a task to which he was totally unaccustomed, could only stammer out a vague assertion of innocence. Here and there some sturdy prisoner—a Throgmorton or a Lilburne—thus brought to bay under every disadvantage, managed to fight his way through, and to persuade a jury to let him off even at their own peril. As time goes on, things get better, and the professions of fair-play have more reality; but it is also true that the performance becomes less exciting. In the degenerate eighteenth century it came to be settled that a minister might be turned out of office without losing his head; and it is perhaps only from an æsthetic point of view that the old practice was better, which provided historians with so many moving stories of judicial tyranny. But in that point of view we may certainly prefer the old system, for the tragedies generally have a worthy ending; and instead of those sudden interventions of a benevolent author, which are meant to save our feelings, at the end of a modern novel, we are generally thrilled by a scene on the scaffold, in which it is rare indeed for the actors to play their parts unworthily.

The most interesting period of the State Trials is perhaps the last half of the seventeenth century, when the art of reporting seems to have been sufficiently developed to give a minute verbal record—vivid as a photograph—of the actual scene, and before the interest was diluted by floods of legal rhetoric. Pepys himself does not restore the past more vividly than do some of those anonymous reporters. The records indeed of the trials give the fullest picture of a social period, which is too often treated from some limited point of view. The great political movements of the day leave their mark upon the trials; the last struggle of parties was fought out by judges and juries with whatever partiality in open court. We may start, if we please, with the 'memorable scene' in which Charles I. won his title to martyrdom; then comes the gloomy procession of regicides; and presently we have the martyrs to the Popish Plot, and they are followed by the Whig martyr, Russell, and by the miserable victims who got the worst of Sedgemoor fight. The Church of England has its share of interest in the exciting case of the Seven Bishops; and Nonconformists are represented by Baxter's sufferings under Jeffreys, and by luckless frequenters of prohibited conventicles; and beneath the more stirring events described in different histories, we have strange glimpses of the domestic histories which were being transacted at the time; there are murderers and forgers and housebreakers, who cared little for Whig or Tory. Superstition is represented by an occasional case of witchcraft. And we have some curious illustrations of the manners and customs of the fast young men of the period, the dissolute noblemen, the 'sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine,' who disturbed Milton's meditations, and got upon the stage to see Nell Gwynn and Mrs. Bracegirdle in the comedies of Dryden and Etherege. It is unfair to take the reports of a police court as fully representing the characteristics of a time; but there never was a time which left a fuller impression of its idiosyncrasies in such an unsavoury Record Office. Let us pick up a case or two pretty much at random.

It is pleasantest, perhaps, to avoid the more familiar and pompous scenes. It is rather in the byplay—in the little vignettes of real life which turn up amidst more serious events—that we may find the characteristic charm of the narrative. The trials, for example, of the regicides have an interest. They died for the most part (Hugh Peters seems to have been an exception) as became the survivors of the terrible Ironsides, glorying, till drums beat under the scaffold to silence them, in their fidelity to the 'good old cause,' and showing a stern front to the jubilant royalists. But one must admit that they show something, too, of the peculiarities which made the race tiresome to their contemporaries as they probably would be to us. They cannot submit without a wrangle—which they know to be futile—over some legal point, where simple submission to the inevitable would have been more dignified; and their dying prayers and orations are echoes of the long-winded sermons of the Blathergowls. They showed fully as much courage, but not so much taste, as the 'royal actor' on the same scene. But amidst the trials there occurs here and there a fragment of picturesque evidence. A waterman tells us how he was walking about Whitehall on the morning of the 'fatal blow.' 'Down came a file of musketeers.' They hurried the hangman into his boat, and said, 'Waterman, away with him; begone quickly.' 'So,' says the waterman, 'out I launched, and having got a little way in the water, says I, "Who the devil have I got in my boat?" Says my fellow, says he, "Why?" I directed my speech to him, saying, "Are you the hangman that cut off the King's head?" "No, as I am a sinner to God," saith he, "not I." He shook, every joint of him. I knew not what to do. I rowed away a little farther, and fell to a new examination of him. "Tell me true," says I, "are you the hangman that hath cut off the King's head? I cannot carry you," said I. "No," saith he;' and explains that his instruments had been used, but not himself; and though the waterman threatened to sink his boat, the supposed hangman stuck to his story, and was presumably landed in safety. The evidence seems to be rather ambiguous as concerns the prisoner, who was accused of being the actual executioner; but the vivacity with which Mr. Abraham Smith tells his story is admirable. Doubtless it had been his favourite anecdote to his fellows and his fares during the intervening years, and he felt, rightly as it has turned out, that this accidental contact with one of the great events of history would be his sole title to a kind of obscure immortality.

Another hero of that time, unfortunately a principal instead of a mere spectator in the recorded tragedy, is so full of exuberant vitality that we can scarcely reconcile ourselves to the belief that the poor man was hanged two centuries ago. The gallant Colonel Turner had served in the royal army, and, if we may believe his dying words, was specially valued by his Majesty. The colonel, however, got into difficulties: he made acquaintance with a rich old merchant named Tryon, and tried to get a will forged in his favour by one of Tryon's clerks; failing in this, he decided upon speedier measures. He tied down poor old Tryon in his bed one night, and then carried off jewels to the value of 3,000_l._ An energetic alderman suspected the colonel, clutched him a day or two afterwards, and forced him to disgorge. When put upon his defence, he could only tell one of those familiar fictions common to pickpockets; how he had accidentally collared the thief, who had transferred the stolen goods to him, and how he was thus entitled to gratitude instead of punishment. It is not surprising that the jury declined to believe him; but we are almost surprised that any judge had the courage to sentence him. For Colonel Turner is a splendid scoundrel. There is something truly heroic in his magnificent self-complacency; the fine placid glow of conscious virtue diffused over his speeches. He is a link between Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Bobadil, and the audacious promoter of some modern financiering scheme. Had he lived in days when old merchants invest their savings in shares instead of diamonds, he would have been an invaluable director of a bubble company. There is a dash of the Pecksniff about him; but he has far too much pith and courage to be dashed like that miserable creature by a single exposure. Old Chuzzlewit would never have broken loose from his bonds. It is delightful to see, in days when most criminals prostrated themselves in abject humiliation, how this splendid colonel takes the Lord Chief Justice into his confidence, verbally buttonholes 'my dear lord' with a pleasant assumption that, though for form's sake some inquiry might be necessary, every reasonable man must see the humour of an accusation directed against so innocent a patriot. The whole thing is manifestly absurd. And then the colonel gracefully slides in little compliments to his own domestic virtues. Part of his story had to be that he had sent his wife (who was accused as an accomplice) on an embassy to recover the stolen goods. 'I sent my poor wife away,' he says, 'and, saving your lordship's presence, she did all bedirt herself—a thing she did not use to do, poor soul. She found this Nagshead, she sat down, being somewhat fat and weary, poor heart! I have had twenty-seven children by her, fifteen sons and twelve daughters.' 'Seven or eight times this fellow did round her.' 'Let me give that relation,' interrupts the wife. 'You cannot,' replies the colonel, 'it is as well. Prythee, sit down, dear Moll; sit thee down, good child, all will be well.' And so the colonel proceeds with amazing volubility, and we sympathise with this admirable father of twenty-seven children under so cruel a hardship. But—not to follow the trial—the colonel culminated under the most trying circumstances. His dying speech is superb. He is honourably confessing his sins, but his natural instinct asserts itself. He cannot but admit, in common honesty, that he is a model character, and speaks under his gallows as if he were the good apprentice just arrived at the mayoralty. He admits, indeed, that he occasionally gave way to swearing, though he 'hated and loathed' the sin when he observed it; but he was—it was the source of all his troubles—of a 'hasty nature.' But he was brought up in an honest family in the good old times, and laments the bad times that have since come in. He has been a devoted loyalist; he has lived civilly and honestly at the upper end of Cheapside as became a freeman of the Company of Drapers; he was never known to be 'disguised in drink;' a small cup of cider in the morning, and two little glasses of sack and one of claret at dinner, were enough for him; he was a constant churchgoer, and of such delicate propriety of behaviour that he never 'saw a man in church with his hat on but it troubled him very much' (a phrase which reminds us of Johnson's famous friend); 'there must be,' he is sure, when he thinks of all his virtues, 'a thousand sorrowful souls and weeping eyes' for him this day. The attendant clergy are a little scandalised at this peculiar kind of penitence; and he is good enough to declare that he 'disclaims any desert of his own'—a sentiment which we feel to be a graceful concession, but not to be too strictly interpreted. The hangman is obliged to put the rope round his neck. '_Dost thou mean to choke me, fellow?_' exclaims the indignant colonel. 'What a simple fellow is this! how long have you been executioner that you know not how to put the knot?' He then utters some pious ejaculations, and as he is assuming the fatal cap, sees a lady at a window; he kisses his hand to her, and says, 'Your servant, Mistress;' and so pulling down the cap, the brave colonel vanishes, as the reporter tells us, with a very undaunted carriage to his last breath.