God's
Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it: this was
great, and all else was little to him.
Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it: this was
great, and all else was little to him.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v06 - Cal to Chr
- Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor
Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the
Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of
his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial
libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged
upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's,
was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who
does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be
cowardly, egoistic,- sentimentality, or little better. I know not
in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tender-
ness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of Æolian
harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart; - and then that
## p. 3259 (#233) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3259
stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards his
Beatrice; their meeting together in the 'Paradiso'; his gazing in
her pure transfigured eyes, hers that had been purified by death.
so long, separated from him so far:-one likens it to the song
of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps
the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
For the intense Dante is intense in all things; he has got
into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on
occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of
intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the
beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his
love; - as indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his
love? "A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici sui, Hateful to God and to
the enemies of God:" lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reproba-
tion and aversion; "Non ragionam di lor, We will not speak of
them, look only and pass. " Or think of this: "They have not
the hope to die, Non han speranza di morte. » One day, it had
risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he,
wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die;
"that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die. " Such words
are in this man. For rigor, earnestness, and depth, he is not to
be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must
go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets
there.
I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly pre-
ferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the 'Divina Com-
media. ' Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general
Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The
'Purgatorio' and 'Paradiso,'- especially the former, one would
almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing,
that Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification"; an emblem of the
noblest conception of that age. If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is
and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man
purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful
how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that "trem-
bling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morn-
ing, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an
altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in
company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of
dæmons and reprobates is underfoot; a soft breathing of peni-
tence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself.
## p. 3260 (#234) ###########################################
3260
THOMAS CARLYLE
"Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to
him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, my daughter Gio-
vanna; I think her mother loves me no more! " They toil pain-
fully up by that winding steep, "bent-down like corbels of a
building," some of them,-crushed together so "for the sin of
pride"; yet nevertheless in years, in ages and æons, they shall
have reached the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by Mercy
shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has
prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of
praise rises when one soul has perfected repentance and got its
sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment
of a true, noble thought.
But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one
another, are indispensable to one another. The 'Paradiso,' a kind
of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the 'Inferno ';
the 'Inferno' without it were untrue. All thrce make-up the true
Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages;
a thing forever memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to
all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul with such
depth of veracity as in this of Dante's; a man sent to sing it, to
keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity
he passes out of the every-day reality, into the Invisible one;
and in the second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the
World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things palpable,
indubitable! To Dante they were so; the real world, as it is
called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher
Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as preternatural as
the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a
spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible
Fact; he believes it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that.
Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now as always.
Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an
emblematic representation of his Belief about this Universe:-
some Critic in a future age, like some Scandinavian ones the
other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may
find this, too, all an "Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory! It is
a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity.
It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how
the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar
elements of this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two
differ not by preferability of one to the other, but by incom-
―――――――
## p. 3261 (#235) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3261
patibility, absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent and
high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna
and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence,
with everlasting Pity,-all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle.
Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I
urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose; how
unconscious of any embleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these
things were not fashioned as emblems: was there in our Modern
European Mind, any thought at all of their being emblems?
Were they not indubitable awful facts, the whole heart of man
taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere confirm-
ing them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe
an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may
be, who considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an
Allegory, will commit one sore mistake! - Paganism we recog-
nize as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling
of man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still not
without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Pagan-
ism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed
chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combina-
tions, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism
emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man.
One was for the sensuous nature; a rude helpless utterance of
the first Thought of men,- the chief recognized Virtue, Courage,
Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature,
but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one
respect only!
And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in
a very strange way, found a voice. The Divina Commedia' is
of Dante's writing; yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian cen-
turies, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The crafts-
man there, the smith with that metal of his, with these tools,
with these cunning methods,-how little of all he does is prop-
erly his work! All past inventive men work there with him;-
as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman
of the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in
everlasting music.
—
## p. 3262 (#236) ###########################################
3262
THOMAS CARLYLE
CROMWELL
From Heroes and Hero-Worship'
DOOR Cromwell,-great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet;
Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling
to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sin-
cerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphe-
misms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic
Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion,
visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and
yet such a clear determinate man's-energy working in the heart
of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight
and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria,
unformed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria,
what was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and
tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of sympathy he
had with things,-the quantity of insight he would yet get into
the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things:
this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery
always does, came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that
kind of man.
Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element
of mournful black enveloping him,-wide as the world. It is
the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul
seeing, and struggling to see.
On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed
confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-
clear; but the material with which he was to clothe it in utter-
ance was not there. He had lived silent; a great unnamed sea
of Thought round him all his days; and in his way of life little
call to attempt naming or uttering that. With his sharp power
of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have
learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough; - he
did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is
precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set
him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and logicizing; it is see-
ing and ascertaining. Virtue, Vir-tus, manhood, herohood, is not
fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Ger-
mans well name it, Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing, or Dough-tiness).
Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis of the matter Crom-
well had in him.
## p. 3263 (#237) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3263
One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in
Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how
he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free out-
pouring utterances of what is in the heart: method is not re-
quired in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required.
Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his
great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark inex-
tricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and he used to assemble,
and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till some definite reso-
lution rose among them, some "door of hope," as they would
name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent
prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to
make His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of
Christ, as they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian
Brothers, who had drawn the sword against a great black de-
vouring world not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,—they
cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to for-
sake the Cause that was His. The light which now rose upon
them, how could a human soul, by any means at all, get better
light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely the
best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more?
To them it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the
waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to
guide them on their desolate perilous way. Was it not such?
Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method
than intrinsically by that same,-devout prostration of the earn-
est struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light;
be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticu-
late one? There is no other method. "Hypocrisy"? One begins
to be weary of all that. They who call it so, have no right to
speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one
can call a purpose. They went about balancing expediencies,
plausibilities; gathering votes, advices; they never were alone
with the truth of a thing at all. - Cromwell's prayers were likely
to be "eloquent," and much more than that. His was the heart
of a man who could pray.
-
But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly
so ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all
speakers aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament;
one who, from the first, had weight. With that rude passionate
voice of his, he was always understood to mean something, and
## p. 3264 (#238) ###########################################
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THOMAS CARLYLE
men wished to know what. He disregarded eloquence, nay de-
spised and disliked it; spoke always without premeditation of the
words he was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to
have been singularly candid; and to have given the Printer pre-
cisely what they found on their own note-paper. And withal,
what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative
ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the world, that
to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! How came
he not to study his words a little, before flinging them out to
the public? If the words were true words, they could be left to
shift for themselves.
But with regard to Cromwell's "lying," we will make one re-
mark.
This, I suppose, or something like this, to have been the
nature of it. All parties found themselves deceived in him;
each party understood him to be meaning this, heard him even
say so, and behold he turns-out to have been meaning that!
He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsically, is
not all this the inevitable fortune, not of a false man in such
times, but simply of a superior man? Such a man must have
reticences in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve
for daws to peck at, his journey will not extend far! There is
no use for any man's taking-up his abode in a house built of
glass. A man always is to be himself the judge how much of
his mind he will show to other men; even to those he would
have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries
made: your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on that
matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as
dark as he was!
This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the
wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a case.
Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small
subaltern parties; uttered to them a part of his mind. Each
little party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, one and
all, to find him not of their party, but of his own party! Was
it his blame? At all seasons of his history he must have felt,
among such people, how if he explained to them the deeper in-
sight he had, they must either have shuddered aghast at it, or
believing it, their own little compact hypothesis must have gone
wholly to wreck. They could not have worked in his province
any more; nay perhaps they could not have now worked in their
own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man
## p. 3265 (#239) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3265
among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be
seen everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some convic-
tion which to you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we
call an error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty.
always or often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, doing
loud work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionality,
conventionality to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that
beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might have my
hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only my little.
finger. "
And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how
much more in all departments of practice! He that cannot
withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable
thing whatever. And we call it "dissimulation," all this? What
would you think of calling the general of an army a dissembler
because he did not tell every corporal and private soldier who
pleased to put the question, what his thoughts were about every-
thing? - Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a
manner we must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex
of such questioning "corporals" rolled confusedly round him
through his whole course; whom he did answer. It must have
been as a great true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not
one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that
ever wound himself through such a coil of things will you say
so much?
But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which per-
vert to the very basis our judgments formed about such men as
Cromwell; about their "ambition," "falsity," and suchlike. The
first is what I might call substituting the goal of their career for
the course and starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian of a
Cromwell fancies that he had determined on being Protector of
England, at the time when he was plowing the marsh lands of
Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped-out: a program of
the whole drama; which he then step by step dramatically un-
folded with all manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he
went on, the hollow scheming Trozpts, or Play-actor, that he
was! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such
cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How
much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead
of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of appre-
hensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell
VI-205
## p. 3266 (#240) ###########################################
3266
THOMAS CARLYLE
had not his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which
he needed then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to
enact dramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it so; but
to him it was in no measure so. What absurdities would fall
away of themselves, were this one undeniable fact kept honestly
in view by History! Historians indeed will tell you that they
do keep it in view; - but look whether such is practically the
fact! Vulgar History, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it alto-
gether; even the best kinds of History only remember it now
and then. To remember it duly with rigorous perfection, as in
the fact it stood, requires indeed a rare faculty; rare, nay impos-
sible. A very Shakespeare for faculty; or more than Shake-
speare; who could enact a brother man's biography, see with
the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things
he saw; in short, know his course and him, as few "Historians"
are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perver-
sions which distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if
we honestly so much as try to represent them so; in sequence,
as they were; not in the lump, as they are thrown down before
us.
But a second error which I think the generality commit
refers to this same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the am-
bition of Great Men; we mistake what the nature of it is. Great
Men are not ambitious in that sense; he is a small poor man
that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives in misery be-
cause he does not shine above other men; who goes about pro-
ducing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims;
struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for
God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over
the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest
sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid
prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for
a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He
cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder
at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the
emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is noth-
ing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find some-
thing in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so
much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in
him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this
way.
## p. 3267 (#241) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3267
Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by
noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him.
He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would make him
other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and
Life from the down-hill slope was all seen to be limited, not infi-
nite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,- he had
been content to plow the ground, and read his Bible. He in
his old days could not support it any longer, without selling him-
self to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to White-
hall, and have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him,
"Decide this, decide that," which in utmost sorrow of heart no
man can perfectly decide! What could gilt carriages do for this.
man? From of old was there not in his life a weight of meaning,
a terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His existence there
as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment,
and Eternity: these already lay as the background of whatsoever
he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as in a sea of name-
less Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could name.
God's
Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it: this was
great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man ambi-
tious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above,
seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep
your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks,
your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone,
leave me alone; there is too much of life in me already! " Old
Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was
not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with
printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed
at home. The world-wide soul, wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its
sorrows; what could paradings and ribbons in the hat, do
for it?
«<
-
Ah yes, I will say again: The great silent men! Looking
round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little mean-
ing, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great
Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and
there, each in his own department; silently thinking; silently
working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They
are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of
these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots; which
had all turned into leaves and boughs;-which must soon wither
and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we
## p. 3268 (#242) ###########################################
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THOMAS CARLYLE
can show, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence:
higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It
alone is great; all else is small. I hope we English will long
maintain our grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot
do without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all
the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,- become a most
green forest without roots! Solomon says, There is a time to
speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of some great silent
Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson says he
was, by want of money and nothing other, one might ask, "Why
do not you too get up and speak; promulgate your system, found
your sect? »
Truly," he will answer, "I am continent of my
thought hitherto; happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in
me, no compulsion strong enough to speak it. My 'system' is
not for promulgation first of all; it is for serving myself to live
by. That is the great purpose of it to me. And then the
'honor'? Alas, yes; - but as Cato said of the statue: So many
statues in that Forum of yours, may it not be better if they ask,
Where is Cato's statue ? "
But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me
say that there are two kinds of ambition: one wholly blamable,
the other laudable and inevitable. Nature has provided that the
great silent Samuel shall not be silent too long. The selfish
wish to shine over others, let it be accounted altogether poor and
miserable. "Seekest thou great things, seek them not:" this is
most true. And yet, I say, there is an irrepressible tendency in
every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which
Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what Nature
has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay, it is a duty,
and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of
life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To
unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for.
It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our exist-
Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to
speak by this necessity it feels. We will say therefore: To decide.
about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to
take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the
fitness for the man of the place withal: that is the question.
Perhaps the place was his, perhaps he had a natural right, and
even obligation to seek the place! Mirabeau's ambition to be
Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, if he were "the only
ence.
-
-
## p. 3269 (#243) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3269
man in France that could have done any good there"? Hope-
fuler perhaps had he not so clearly felt how much good he could
do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even
felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because
they had flung him out and he was now quit of it, well might
Gibbon mourn over him. - Nature, I say, has provided amply
that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal; too amply,
rather!
Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old.
Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up existence, that it was pos-
sible for him to do priceless divine work for his country and the
whole world. That the perfect Heavenly Law might be made
Law on this Earth; that the prayer he prayed daily, "Thy king-
dom come," was at length to be fulfilled! If you had convinced
his judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable; that he
the mournful silent Samuel was called to take a part in it!
Would not the whole soul of the man have flamed-up into a
divine clearness, into noble utterance and determination to act;
casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting all
affliction and contradiction small, the whole dark element of
his existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and light-
ning? It were a true ambition this! And think now how it
actually was with Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings of
God's Church, true zealous Preachers of the truth flung into
dungeons, whipt, set on pillories, their ears cropt-off, God's
Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy: all this had
lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon it in
silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; trusting well that
a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come, that such a course
was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And now behold
the dawn of it; after twelve years' silent waiting, all England
stirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right
will get a voice for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has
come again into the Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth
being a member of? Cromwell threw down his plow, and
hastened thither.
-
―
He spoke there, rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen
truth, where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he
fought and strove, like a strong true giant of a man, through
cannon-tumult and all else,-on and on, till the Cause triumphed,
its once so formidable enemies all swept from before it, and the
## p. 3270 (#244) ###########################################
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THOMAS CARLYLE
dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and certainty.
That he stood there as the strongest soul of England, the undis-
puted Hero of all England, what of this? It was possible that
the Law of Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the
world! The Theocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might
dream of as a "devout imagination," this practical man, expe-
rienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to
consider as capable of being realized. Those that were highest
in Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the
land: in some considerable degree, it might be so and should be
SO. Was it not true, God's truth? And if true, was it not then
the very thing to do? The strongest practical intellect in
England dared to answer, Yes! This I call a noble true pur-
pose; is it not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could enter
into the heart of Statesman or man? For a Knox to take it up
was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great sound sense.
and experience of what our world was, History, I think, shows
it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating
point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in the
Bible" was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it
were made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right
supremely victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed
and prayed for, as the highest good to England and all lands,
an attainable fact!
Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, with its knowingness,
its alertness and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to
me a rather sorry business. We have had but one such States-
man in England; one man, that I can get sight of, who ever
had in the heart of him any such purpose at all. One man, in
the course of fifteen hundred years; and this was his welcome.
He had adherents by the hundred or the ten; opponents by the
million. Had England rallied all round him, - why, then, Eng-
land might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine know-
ingness
sits yet at its hopeless problem, "Given a world of
Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action; "-how
cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and
some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but
also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and
this problem is becoming to all men a palpably hopeless one.
## p. 3271 (#245) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3271
THE PROCESSION
From The French Revolution'
WE
E DWELL no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude, for
now, behold, the Commons Deputies are at hand!
Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white
cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one
guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as
all bodies of men, must have, be their work what it may; there
is
there who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest
of all to do it; that man, as future, not-yet-elected king walks
there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it
With the hure, as himself calls it, or black boar's-head, fit
to be "shaken" as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy
beetle-brows and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face there look
natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,-and burn-
ing fire of genius, like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through
murkiest confusions? It is Gabriel Honoré Riquetti de Mira-
beau, the world-compeller; man-ruling Deputy of Aix! According
to the Baroness de Staël, he steps proudly along, though looked
at askance here, and shakes his black chevelure, or lion's mane,
as if prophetic of great deeds.
be?
Yes, Reader, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch, as
Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acqui-
sitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than
any other man; — and intrinsically such a mass of manhood too.
Mark him well.
The National Assembly were all different with-
that one; nay, he might say, with the old Despot:-"The
National Assembly? I am that. "
Of
a southern climate, of wild southern blood: for the
Riquettis,
or Arrighettis, had to fly from Florence and the
Guelfs, long centuries ago, and settled in Provence, where from
generation to generation they have ever approved themselves a
peculiar kindred, irascible, indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like
steel they wore; of an intensity and activity that sometimes
One ancient Ri-
the
verged towards madness, yet did not reach it.
quetti, in mad fulfillment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains
together, and the chain, with its "iron star of five rays," is still
to be seen. May not a modern Riquetti unchain so much, and
set it drifting—which also shall be seen?
## p. 3272 (#246) ###########################################
3272
THOMAS CARLYLE
Destiny has work for that swart, burly-headed Mirabeau; Des-
tiny has watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not
his Grandfather, stout Col-d'Argent (Silver-Stock, so they named
him), shattered and slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one
fell day, lie sunk together on the Bridge at Casano, while Prince
Eugene's cavalry galloped and regalloped over him-only the
flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle over that loved head;
and Vendôme, dropping his spy-glass, moaned out, "Mirabeau
is dead, then! " Nevertheless he was not dead; he awoke to
breath and miraculous surgery - for Gabriel was yet to be.
With his silver stock he kept his scarred head erect, through
long years, and wedded, and produced tough Marquis Victor, the
friend of men. Whereby at last in the appointed year, 1749, this
long-expected, rough-hewn Gabriel Honoré did likewise see the
light; roughest lion's-whelp ever littered of that rough breed.
How the old lion (for our old Marquis, too, was lion-like, most
unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wondering on
his offspring, and determined to train him as no lion had yet
been! It is in vain, O Marquis! This cub, though thou slay
him and flay him, will not learn to draw in dog-cart of Political
Economy, and be a friend of men; he will not be Thou, but must
and will be Himself, another than Thou. Divorce law-suits,
" whole family save one in prison, and threescore lettres-de-
cachet" for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.
Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in
the Isle of Rhé, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the
Castle of If, and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has
been in the Fortress of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly
clothing to his back, in the Dungeon of Vincennes;-all by lettre-
de-cachet, from his lion father. He has been in Pontarlier Jails
(self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording estuaries of the
sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men. He has
pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get back his wife), the public
gathering on roofs, to see, since they could not hear: "The
clatter-teeth (claque-dents)! ” snarls singular old Mirabeau; dis-
cerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but two
clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum
species.
But as for Gabriel Honoré, in these strange wayfarings, what
has he not seen and tried! From drill-sergeants to prime min-
isters, to foreign and domestic booksellers, all manner of men he
## p. 3273 (#247) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3273
has seen.
All manner of men he has gained; for at bottom it
is a social loving heart, that wild unconquerable one more
especially all manner of women. From the Archer's Daughter
at Saintes to that fair young Sophie, Madame Monnier, whom he
could not but "steal" and be beheaded for- in effigy! For
indeed, hardly since the Arabian Prophet lay dead, to Ali's
admiration, was there seen such a Love-hero, with the strength
of thirty men. In War again, he has helped to conquer Corsica;
fought duels, irregular brawls; horsewhipped calumnious barons.
In Literature, he has written on 'Despotism,' on 'Lettres-de-
Cachet'; Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities, Profanities;
Books on the Prussian Monarchy,' on 'Cagliostro,' on 'Calonne,'
on The Water-Companies of Paris':- each book comparable, we
will say, to a bituminous alarum-fire, huge, smoky, sudden! The
fire-pan, the kindling, the bitumen, were his own; but the lum-
ber, of rags, old wood, and nameless combustible rubbish (for all
is fuel to him), was gathered from hucksters and ass-panniers
of every description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters
enough have been heard to exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is
mine!
―――
Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent
for borrowing.
The idea, the faculty of another man, he can
make his; the man himself he can make his. "All reflex and
echo (tout de reflet et de réverbère)! " snarls old Mirabeau, who
can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his so-
ciality, his aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of
qualities for him. In that forty years' "struggle against despot-
ism, »
he has gained the glorious faculty of self-help, and yet not
the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped.
union: this man can live self-sufficing—yet lives also in
the life of other men; can make men love him, work with him;
a born king of men!
lost
Rare
But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he
has made away with (hume, swallowed, snuffed-up) all Formu
<<
las";
much.
fiercely
a fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean
This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of
instincts and insights.
A man, nevertheless, who will glare
on any object, and see through it, and conquer it: for he
has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men.
A man not
with logic-spectacles, but with an eye! Unhappily without Deca-
logue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without
## p. 3274 (#248) ###########################################
3274
THOMAS CARLYLE
a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there; a Reality, not
an artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having struggled "forty
years against despotism," and "made away with all formulas,"
shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the
same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to
cast off despotism, to make away with her old formulas,- having
found them naught, worn out, far from the reality? She will
make away with such formulas; and even go bare, if need be,
till she have found new ones.
-
Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singu
lar Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-
locks under the slouch hat, he steps along there. A fiery,
fuliginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but
would fill all France with smoke! And now it has got air; it
will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too,
and fill all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that
smoldering, with foul fire-damp and vapor enough; then victory
over that, and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high;
and for twenty-three resplendent months, pours out, in flame
and molten fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and Won-
der-sign of an amazed Europe;- and then lies hollow, cold for-
ever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honoré, the greatest
of them all in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation,
there is none like and none second to thee.
But now, if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six
Hundred may be the meanest? Shall we say that anxious,
slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his
eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face,
snuffing dimly the uncertain future time; complexion of a
multiplex atrabiliar color, the final shade of which may be the
pale sea-green. That greenish-colored (verdâtre) individual is
an Advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre. The
son of an Advocate; his father founded Mason-lodges under
Charles Edward, the English Prince or Pretender. Maximilien,
the first-born, was thriftily educated; he had brisk Camille
Desmoulins for schoolmate in the College of Louis le Grand, at
Paris. But he begged our famed Necklace-Cardinal, Rohan, the
patron, to let him depart thence, and resign in favor of a
younger brother. The strict-minded Max departed, home
paternal Arras; and even had a Law-case there, and pleaded, not
unsuccessfully, "in favor of the first Franklin thunder-rod. ”
to
## p. 3275 (#249) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3275
With a strict, painful mind, an understanding small but clear
and ready, he grew in favor with official persons, who could
foresee in him an excellent man of business, happily quite free
from genius. The Bishop, therefore, taking counsel, appoints
him Judge of his diocese, and he faithfully does justice to the
people: till behold, one day, a culprit comes whose crime mer-
its hanging, and the strict-minded Max must abdicate, for his
conscience will not permit the dooming of any son of Adam to
die. A strict-minded, strait-laced man! A man unfit for Revolu-
tions? whose small soul, transparent wholesome-looking as small-
ale, could by no chance ferment into virulent alegar, — the
mother of ever-new alegar; - till all France were grown acetous
virulent? We shall see.
-
Between which two extremes of grandest and meanest, so
many grand and mean roll on, towards their several destinies, in
that
Procession! There is Cazalès, the learned young soldier,
who shall become the eloquent orator of Royalism, and earn the
shadow of a name. Experienced Mounier, experienced Malouet,
whose Presidential Parlementary experience the stream of things
shall soon leave stranded. A Pétion has left his gown and briefs
at Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading; has not forgotten
his violin, being fond of music. His hair is grizzled, though he
is still young; convictions, beliefs placid-unalterable, are in that
man; not hindmost of them, belief in himself. A Protestant-
clerical Rabaut-St. -Étienne, a slender young eloquent and ve-
hement Barnave, will help to regenerate France. There are so
of them young.
Till thirty the Spartans did not suffer
to marry: but how many men here under thirty; com-
ing to produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a
many
a man
world
of such! The old to heal up rents, the young to remove
rubbish:- which latter is it not, indeed, the task here?
with
Dim, formless from this distance, yet authentically there, thou
noticest the Deputies from Nantes? To us mere clothes-screens,
Slouch-hat and cloak, but bearing in their pocket a Cahier
of doléances with this singular clause, and more such, in it:-
"That the master wigmakers of Nantes be not troubled with
new
――――――
guild-brethren, the actually existing number of ninety-two
being more than sufficient! " The Rennes people have elected
farmer Gérard, "a man of natural sense and rectitude without
any learning. " He walks there with solid step; unique, "in his
rustic farmer-clothes;" which he will wear always, careless of
## p. 3276 (#250) ###########################################
3276
THOMAS CARLYLE
short-cloaks and costumes. The name Gérard, or "Père Gérard,
Father Gérard," as they please to call him, will fly far, borne
about in endless banter, in Royalist satires, in Republican Didactic
Almanacks. As for the man Gérard, being asked once what he
did, after trial of it, candidly think of this Parlementary work,-
"I think," answered he, "that there are a good many scoundrels
among us. "
So walks Father Gérard, solid in his thick shoes,
whithersoever bound.
And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one
other time? If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see
him with the eye of prophecy; for indeed the Parisian Deputies
are all a little late. Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner:
doomed by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that
ever kept obscure mortal from his resting-place, the bosom of
oblivion! Guillotin can improve the ventilation of the Hall; in
all cases of medical police and hygiène be a present aid: but
greater far, he can produce his 'Report on the Penal Code,' and
reveal therein a cunningly devised Beheading Machine, which
shall become famous and world-famous. This is the product of
Guillotin's endeavors, gained not without meditation and reading;
which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine
derivative name, as if it were his daughter: La Guillotine!
"With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais
sauter la tête) in a twinkling, and you have no pain; " — whereat
they all laugh. Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years
he, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing
but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander,
as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and
Lethe; his name like to outlive Cæsar's.
See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honored Historian of Astron-
omy Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beauti-
ful Philosophizing, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thin-
ness, ends in foul thick confusion of Presidency, Mayorship,
diplomatic officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlast-
ing Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly Gal-
axy to the Drapeau Rouge: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that
last hell-day, thou must "tremble," though only with cold-
"de froid. " Speculation is not practice: to be weak is not
so miserable, but to be weaker than our task. Woe the day
when they mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on that wild
Hippogriff of a Democracy, which, spurning the firm earth, nay,
## p. 3277 (#251) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3277
lashing at the very stars, no yet known Astolpho could have.
ridden!
In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of
Letters; 374 Lawyers, and at least one Clergyman, the Abbé
Sieyes. Him also Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him,
the light, thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the
pride of Logic; passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-
conceit. If indeed that can be called a passion, which in its
independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into
transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind of godlike indif-
ference, and look down on passion! He is the man, and wisdom
Ishall die with him. This is the Sieyès who shall be System-
builder, Constitution-builder General, and build Constitutions (as
many as wanted) sky-high,-which shall all unfortunately fall
before he get the scaffolding away. "La Politique," said he to
Dumont, "polity is a science I think I have completed (achevée). »
What things, O Sieyès, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou
to see! But were it not curious to know how Sieyès, now in
these days (for he is said to be still alive) looks out on all that
Constitution masonry, through the rheumy soberness of extreme
age? Might we hope, still with the old irrefragable transcend-
entalism?
Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the
Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of
his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial
libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged
upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's,
was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who
does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be
cowardly, egoistic,- sentimentality, or little better. I know not
in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tender-
ness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of Æolian
harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart; - and then that
## p. 3259 (#233) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3259
stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards his
Beatrice; their meeting together in the 'Paradiso'; his gazing in
her pure transfigured eyes, hers that had been purified by death.
so long, separated from him so far:-one likens it to the song
of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps
the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
For the intense Dante is intense in all things; he has got
into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on
occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of
intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the
beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his
love; - as indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his
love? "A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici sui, Hateful to God and to
the enemies of God:" lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reproba-
tion and aversion; "Non ragionam di lor, We will not speak of
them, look only and pass. " Or think of this: "They have not
the hope to die, Non han speranza di morte. » One day, it had
risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he,
wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die;
"that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die. " Such words
are in this man. For rigor, earnestness, and depth, he is not to
be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must
go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets
there.
I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly pre-
ferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the 'Divina Com-
media. ' Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general
Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The
'Purgatorio' and 'Paradiso,'- especially the former, one would
almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing,
that Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification"; an emblem of the
noblest conception of that age. If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is
and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man
purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful
how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that "trem-
bling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morn-
ing, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an
altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in
company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of
dæmons and reprobates is underfoot; a soft breathing of peni-
tence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself.
## p. 3260 (#234) ###########################################
3260
THOMAS CARLYLE
"Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to
him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, my daughter Gio-
vanna; I think her mother loves me no more! " They toil pain-
fully up by that winding steep, "bent-down like corbels of a
building," some of them,-crushed together so "for the sin of
pride"; yet nevertheless in years, in ages and æons, they shall
have reached the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by Mercy
shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has
prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of
praise rises when one soul has perfected repentance and got its
sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment
of a true, noble thought.
But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one
another, are indispensable to one another. The 'Paradiso,' a kind
of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the 'Inferno ';
the 'Inferno' without it were untrue. All thrce make-up the true
Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages;
a thing forever memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to
all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul with such
depth of veracity as in this of Dante's; a man sent to sing it, to
keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity
he passes out of the every-day reality, into the Invisible one;
and in the second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the
World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things palpable,
indubitable! To Dante they were so; the real world, as it is
called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher
Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as preternatural as
the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a
spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible
Fact; he believes it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that.
Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now as always.
Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an
emblematic representation of his Belief about this Universe:-
some Critic in a future age, like some Scandinavian ones the
other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may
find this, too, all an "Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory! It is
a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity.
It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how
the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar
elements of this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two
differ not by preferability of one to the other, but by incom-
―――――――
## p. 3261 (#235) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3261
patibility, absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent and
high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna
and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence,
with everlasting Pity,-all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle.
Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I
urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose; how
unconscious of any embleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these
things were not fashioned as emblems: was there in our Modern
European Mind, any thought at all of their being emblems?
Were they not indubitable awful facts, the whole heart of man
taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere confirm-
ing them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe
an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may
be, who considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an
Allegory, will commit one sore mistake! - Paganism we recog-
nize as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling
of man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still not
without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Pagan-
ism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed
chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combina-
tions, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism
emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man.
One was for the sensuous nature; a rude helpless utterance of
the first Thought of men,- the chief recognized Virtue, Courage,
Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature,
but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one
respect only!
And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in
a very strange way, found a voice. The Divina Commedia' is
of Dante's writing; yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian cen-
turies, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The crafts-
man there, the smith with that metal of his, with these tools,
with these cunning methods,-how little of all he does is prop-
erly his work! All past inventive men work there with him;-
as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman
of the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in
everlasting music.
—
## p. 3262 (#236) ###########################################
3262
THOMAS CARLYLE
CROMWELL
From Heroes and Hero-Worship'
DOOR Cromwell,-great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet;
Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling
to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sin-
cerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphe-
misms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic
Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion,
visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and
yet such a clear determinate man's-energy working in the heart
of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight
and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria,
unformed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria,
what was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and
tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of sympathy he
had with things,-the quantity of insight he would yet get into
the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things:
this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery
always does, came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that
kind of man.
Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element
of mournful black enveloping him,-wide as the world. It is
the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul
seeing, and struggling to see.
On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed
confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-
clear; but the material with which he was to clothe it in utter-
ance was not there. He had lived silent; a great unnamed sea
of Thought round him all his days; and in his way of life little
call to attempt naming or uttering that. With his sharp power
of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have
learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough; - he
did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is
precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set
him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and logicizing; it is see-
ing and ascertaining. Virtue, Vir-tus, manhood, herohood, is not
fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Ger-
mans well name it, Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing, or Dough-tiness).
Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis of the matter Crom-
well had in him.
## p. 3263 (#237) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3263
One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in
Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how
he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free out-
pouring utterances of what is in the heart: method is not re-
quired in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required.
Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his
great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark inex-
tricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and he used to assemble,
and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till some definite reso-
lution rose among them, some "door of hope," as they would
name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent
prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to
make His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of
Christ, as they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian
Brothers, who had drawn the sword against a great black de-
vouring world not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,—they
cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to for-
sake the Cause that was His. The light which now rose upon
them, how could a human soul, by any means at all, get better
light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely the
best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more?
To them it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the
waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to
guide them on their desolate perilous way. Was it not such?
Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method
than intrinsically by that same,-devout prostration of the earn-
est struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light;
be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticu-
late one? There is no other method. "Hypocrisy"? One begins
to be weary of all that. They who call it so, have no right to
speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one
can call a purpose. They went about balancing expediencies,
plausibilities; gathering votes, advices; they never were alone
with the truth of a thing at all. - Cromwell's prayers were likely
to be "eloquent," and much more than that. His was the heart
of a man who could pray.
-
But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly
so ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all
speakers aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament;
one who, from the first, had weight. With that rude passionate
voice of his, he was always understood to mean something, and
## p. 3264 (#238) ###########################################
3264
THOMAS CARLYLE
men wished to know what. He disregarded eloquence, nay de-
spised and disliked it; spoke always without premeditation of the
words he was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to
have been singularly candid; and to have given the Printer pre-
cisely what they found on their own note-paper. And withal,
what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative
ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the world, that
to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! How came
he not to study his words a little, before flinging them out to
the public? If the words were true words, they could be left to
shift for themselves.
But with regard to Cromwell's "lying," we will make one re-
mark.
This, I suppose, or something like this, to have been the
nature of it. All parties found themselves deceived in him;
each party understood him to be meaning this, heard him even
say so, and behold he turns-out to have been meaning that!
He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsically, is
not all this the inevitable fortune, not of a false man in such
times, but simply of a superior man? Such a man must have
reticences in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve
for daws to peck at, his journey will not extend far! There is
no use for any man's taking-up his abode in a house built of
glass. A man always is to be himself the judge how much of
his mind he will show to other men; even to those he would
have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries
made: your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on that
matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as
dark as he was!
This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the
wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a case.
Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small
subaltern parties; uttered to them a part of his mind. Each
little party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, one and
all, to find him not of their party, but of his own party! Was
it his blame? At all seasons of his history he must have felt,
among such people, how if he explained to them the deeper in-
sight he had, they must either have shuddered aghast at it, or
believing it, their own little compact hypothesis must have gone
wholly to wreck. They could not have worked in his province
any more; nay perhaps they could not have now worked in their
own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man
## p. 3265 (#239) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3265
among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be
seen everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some convic-
tion which to you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we
call an error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty.
always or often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, doing
loud work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionality,
conventionality to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that
beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might have my
hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only my little.
finger. "
And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how
much more in all departments of practice! He that cannot
withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable
thing whatever. And we call it "dissimulation," all this? What
would you think of calling the general of an army a dissembler
because he did not tell every corporal and private soldier who
pleased to put the question, what his thoughts were about every-
thing? - Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a
manner we must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex
of such questioning "corporals" rolled confusedly round him
through his whole course; whom he did answer. It must have
been as a great true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not
one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that
ever wound himself through such a coil of things will you say
so much?
But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which per-
vert to the very basis our judgments formed about such men as
Cromwell; about their "ambition," "falsity," and suchlike. The
first is what I might call substituting the goal of their career for
the course and starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian of a
Cromwell fancies that he had determined on being Protector of
England, at the time when he was plowing the marsh lands of
Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped-out: a program of
the whole drama; which he then step by step dramatically un-
folded with all manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he
went on, the hollow scheming Trozpts, or Play-actor, that he
was! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such
cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How
much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead
of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of appre-
hensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell
VI-205
## p. 3266 (#240) ###########################################
3266
THOMAS CARLYLE
had not his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which
he needed then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to
enact dramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it so; but
to him it was in no measure so. What absurdities would fall
away of themselves, were this one undeniable fact kept honestly
in view by History! Historians indeed will tell you that they
do keep it in view; - but look whether such is practically the
fact! Vulgar History, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it alto-
gether; even the best kinds of History only remember it now
and then. To remember it duly with rigorous perfection, as in
the fact it stood, requires indeed a rare faculty; rare, nay impos-
sible. A very Shakespeare for faculty; or more than Shake-
speare; who could enact a brother man's biography, see with
the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things
he saw; in short, know his course and him, as few "Historians"
are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perver-
sions which distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if
we honestly so much as try to represent them so; in sequence,
as they were; not in the lump, as they are thrown down before
us.
But a second error which I think the generality commit
refers to this same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the am-
bition of Great Men; we mistake what the nature of it is. Great
Men are not ambitious in that sense; he is a small poor man
that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives in misery be-
cause he does not shine above other men; who goes about pro-
ducing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims;
struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for
God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over
the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest
sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid
prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for
a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He
cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder
at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the
emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is noth-
ing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find some-
thing in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so
much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in
him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this
way.
## p. 3267 (#241) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3267
Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by
noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him.
He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would make him
other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and
Life from the down-hill slope was all seen to be limited, not infi-
nite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,- he had
been content to plow the ground, and read his Bible. He in
his old days could not support it any longer, without selling him-
self to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to White-
hall, and have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him,
"Decide this, decide that," which in utmost sorrow of heart no
man can perfectly decide! What could gilt carriages do for this.
man? From of old was there not in his life a weight of meaning,
a terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His existence there
as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment,
and Eternity: these already lay as the background of whatsoever
he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as in a sea of name-
less Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could name.
God's
Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it: this was
great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man ambi-
tious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above,
seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep
your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks,
your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone,
leave me alone; there is too much of life in me already! " Old
Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was
not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with
printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed
at home. The world-wide soul, wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its
sorrows; what could paradings and ribbons in the hat, do
for it?
«<
-
Ah yes, I will say again: The great silent men! Looking
round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little mean-
ing, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great
Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and
there, each in his own department; silently thinking; silently
working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They
are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of
these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots; which
had all turned into leaves and boughs;-which must soon wither
and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we
## p. 3268 (#242) ###########################################
3268
THOMAS CARLYLE
can show, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence:
higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It
alone is great; all else is small. I hope we English will long
maintain our grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot
do without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all
the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,- become a most
green forest without roots! Solomon says, There is a time to
speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of some great silent
Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson says he
was, by want of money and nothing other, one might ask, "Why
do not you too get up and speak; promulgate your system, found
your sect? »
Truly," he will answer, "I am continent of my
thought hitherto; happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in
me, no compulsion strong enough to speak it. My 'system' is
not for promulgation first of all; it is for serving myself to live
by. That is the great purpose of it to me. And then the
'honor'? Alas, yes; - but as Cato said of the statue: So many
statues in that Forum of yours, may it not be better if they ask,
Where is Cato's statue ? "
But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me
say that there are two kinds of ambition: one wholly blamable,
the other laudable and inevitable. Nature has provided that the
great silent Samuel shall not be silent too long. The selfish
wish to shine over others, let it be accounted altogether poor and
miserable. "Seekest thou great things, seek them not:" this is
most true. And yet, I say, there is an irrepressible tendency in
every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which
Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what Nature
has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay, it is a duty,
and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of
life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To
unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for.
It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our exist-
Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to
speak by this necessity it feels. We will say therefore: To decide.
about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to
take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the
fitness for the man of the place withal: that is the question.
Perhaps the place was his, perhaps he had a natural right, and
even obligation to seek the place! Mirabeau's ambition to be
Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, if he were "the only
ence.
-
-
## p. 3269 (#243) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3269
man in France that could have done any good there"? Hope-
fuler perhaps had he not so clearly felt how much good he could
do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even
felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because
they had flung him out and he was now quit of it, well might
Gibbon mourn over him. - Nature, I say, has provided amply
that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal; too amply,
rather!
Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old.
Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up existence, that it was pos-
sible for him to do priceless divine work for his country and the
whole world. That the perfect Heavenly Law might be made
Law on this Earth; that the prayer he prayed daily, "Thy king-
dom come," was at length to be fulfilled! If you had convinced
his judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable; that he
the mournful silent Samuel was called to take a part in it!
Would not the whole soul of the man have flamed-up into a
divine clearness, into noble utterance and determination to act;
casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting all
affliction and contradiction small, the whole dark element of
his existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and light-
ning? It were a true ambition this! And think now how it
actually was with Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings of
God's Church, true zealous Preachers of the truth flung into
dungeons, whipt, set on pillories, their ears cropt-off, God's
Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy: all this had
lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon it in
silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; trusting well that
a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come, that such a course
was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And now behold
the dawn of it; after twelve years' silent waiting, all England
stirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right
will get a voice for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has
come again into the Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth
being a member of? Cromwell threw down his plow, and
hastened thither.
-
―
He spoke there, rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen
truth, where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he
fought and strove, like a strong true giant of a man, through
cannon-tumult and all else,-on and on, till the Cause triumphed,
its once so formidable enemies all swept from before it, and the
## p. 3270 (#244) ###########################################
3270
THOMAS CARLYLE
dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and certainty.
That he stood there as the strongest soul of England, the undis-
puted Hero of all England, what of this? It was possible that
the Law of Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the
world! The Theocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might
dream of as a "devout imagination," this practical man, expe-
rienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to
consider as capable of being realized. Those that were highest
in Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the
land: in some considerable degree, it might be so and should be
SO. Was it not true, God's truth? And if true, was it not then
the very thing to do? The strongest practical intellect in
England dared to answer, Yes! This I call a noble true pur-
pose; is it not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could enter
into the heart of Statesman or man? For a Knox to take it up
was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great sound sense.
and experience of what our world was, History, I think, shows
it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating
point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in the
Bible" was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it
were made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right
supremely victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed
and prayed for, as the highest good to England and all lands,
an attainable fact!
Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, with its knowingness,
its alertness and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to
me a rather sorry business. We have had but one such States-
man in England; one man, that I can get sight of, who ever
had in the heart of him any such purpose at all. One man, in
the course of fifteen hundred years; and this was his welcome.
He had adherents by the hundred or the ten; opponents by the
million. Had England rallied all round him, - why, then, Eng-
land might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine know-
ingness
sits yet at its hopeless problem, "Given a world of
Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action; "-how
cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and
some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but
also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and
this problem is becoming to all men a palpably hopeless one.
## p. 3271 (#245) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3271
THE PROCESSION
From The French Revolution'
WE
E DWELL no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude, for
now, behold, the Commons Deputies are at hand!
Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white
cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one
guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as
all bodies of men, must have, be their work what it may; there
is
there who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest
of all to do it; that man, as future, not-yet-elected king walks
there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it
With the hure, as himself calls it, or black boar's-head, fit
to be "shaken" as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy
beetle-brows and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face there look
natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,-and burn-
ing fire of genius, like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through
murkiest confusions? It is Gabriel Honoré Riquetti de Mira-
beau, the world-compeller; man-ruling Deputy of Aix! According
to the Baroness de Staël, he steps proudly along, though looked
at askance here, and shakes his black chevelure, or lion's mane,
as if prophetic of great deeds.
be?
Yes, Reader, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch, as
Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acqui-
sitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than
any other man; — and intrinsically such a mass of manhood too.
Mark him well.
The National Assembly were all different with-
that one; nay, he might say, with the old Despot:-"The
National Assembly? I am that. "
Of
a southern climate, of wild southern blood: for the
Riquettis,
or Arrighettis, had to fly from Florence and the
Guelfs, long centuries ago, and settled in Provence, where from
generation to generation they have ever approved themselves a
peculiar kindred, irascible, indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like
steel they wore; of an intensity and activity that sometimes
One ancient Ri-
the
verged towards madness, yet did not reach it.
quetti, in mad fulfillment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains
together, and the chain, with its "iron star of five rays," is still
to be seen. May not a modern Riquetti unchain so much, and
set it drifting—which also shall be seen?
## p. 3272 (#246) ###########################################
3272
THOMAS CARLYLE
Destiny has work for that swart, burly-headed Mirabeau; Des-
tiny has watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not
his Grandfather, stout Col-d'Argent (Silver-Stock, so they named
him), shattered and slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one
fell day, lie sunk together on the Bridge at Casano, while Prince
Eugene's cavalry galloped and regalloped over him-only the
flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle over that loved head;
and Vendôme, dropping his spy-glass, moaned out, "Mirabeau
is dead, then! " Nevertheless he was not dead; he awoke to
breath and miraculous surgery - for Gabriel was yet to be.
With his silver stock he kept his scarred head erect, through
long years, and wedded, and produced tough Marquis Victor, the
friend of men. Whereby at last in the appointed year, 1749, this
long-expected, rough-hewn Gabriel Honoré did likewise see the
light; roughest lion's-whelp ever littered of that rough breed.
How the old lion (for our old Marquis, too, was lion-like, most
unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wondering on
his offspring, and determined to train him as no lion had yet
been! It is in vain, O Marquis! This cub, though thou slay
him and flay him, will not learn to draw in dog-cart of Political
Economy, and be a friend of men; he will not be Thou, but must
and will be Himself, another than Thou. Divorce law-suits,
" whole family save one in prison, and threescore lettres-de-
cachet" for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.
Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in
the Isle of Rhé, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the
Castle of If, and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has
been in the Fortress of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly
clothing to his back, in the Dungeon of Vincennes;-all by lettre-
de-cachet, from his lion father. He has been in Pontarlier Jails
(self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording estuaries of the
sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men. He has
pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get back his wife), the public
gathering on roofs, to see, since they could not hear: "The
clatter-teeth (claque-dents)! ” snarls singular old Mirabeau; dis-
cerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but two
clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum
species.
But as for Gabriel Honoré, in these strange wayfarings, what
has he not seen and tried! From drill-sergeants to prime min-
isters, to foreign and domestic booksellers, all manner of men he
## p. 3273 (#247) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3273
has seen.
All manner of men he has gained; for at bottom it
is a social loving heart, that wild unconquerable one more
especially all manner of women. From the Archer's Daughter
at Saintes to that fair young Sophie, Madame Monnier, whom he
could not but "steal" and be beheaded for- in effigy! For
indeed, hardly since the Arabian Prophet lay dead, to Ali's
admiration, was there seen such a Love-hero, with the strength
of thirty men. In War again, he has helped to conquer Corsica;
fought duels, irregular brawls; horsewhipped calumnious barons.
In Literature, he has written on 'Despotism,' on 'Lettres-de-
Cachet'; Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities, Profanities;
Books on the Prussian Monarchy,' on 'Cagliostro,' on 'Calonne,'
on The Water-Companies of Paris':- each book comparable, we
will say, to a bituminous alarum-fire, huge, smoky, sudden! The
fire-pan, the kindling, the bitumen, were his own; but the lum-
ber, of rags, old wood, and nameless combustible rubbish (for all
is fuel to him), was gathered from hucksters and ass-panniers
of every description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters
enough have been heard to exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is
mine!
―――
Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent
for borrowing.
The idea, the faculty of another man, he can
make his; the man himself he can make his. "All reflex and
echo (tout de reflet et de réverbère)! " snarls old Mirabeau, who
can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his so-
ciality, his aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of
qualities for him. In that forty years' "struggle against despot-
ism, »
he has gained the glorious faculty of self-help, and yet not
the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped.
union: this man can live self-sufficing—yet lives also in
the life of other men; can make men love him, work with him;
a born king of men!
lost
Rare
But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he
has made away with (hume, swallowed, snuffed-up) all Formu
<<
las";
much.
fiercely
a fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean
This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of
instincts and insights.
A man, nevertheless, who will glare
on any object, and see through it, and conquer it: for he
has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men.
A man not
with logic-spectacles, but with an eye! Unhappily without Deca-
logue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without
## p. 3274 (#248) ###########################################
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THOMAS CARLYLE
a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there; a Reality, not
an artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having struggled "forty
years against despotism," and "made away with all formulas,"
shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the
same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to
cast off despotism, to make away with her old formulas,- having
found them naught, worn out, far from the reality? She will
make away with such formulas; and even go bare, if need be,
till she have found new ones.
-
Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singu
lar Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-
locks under the slouch hat, he steps along there. A fiery,
fuliginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but
would fill all France with smoke! And now it has got air; it
will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too,
and fill all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that
smoldering, with foul fire-damp and vapor enough; then victory
over that, and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high;
and for twenty-three resplendent months, pours out, in flame
and molten fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and Won-
der-sign of an amazed Europe;- and then lies hollow, cold for-
ever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honoré, the greatest
of them all in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation,
there is none like and none second to thee.
But now, if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six
Hundred may be the meanest? Shall we say that anxious,
slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his
eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face,
snuffing dimly the uncertain future time; complexion of a
multiplex atrabiliar color, the final shade of which may be the
pale sea-green. That greenish-colored (verdâtre) individual is
an Advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre. The
son of an Advocate; his father founded Mason-lodges under
Charles Edward, the English Prince or Pretender. Maximilien,
the first-born, was thriftily educated; he had brisk Camille
Desmoulins for schoolmate in the College of Louis le Grand, at
Paris. But he begged our famed Necklace-Cardinal, Rohan, the
patron, to let him depart thence, and resign in favor of a
younger brother. The strict-minded Max departed, home
paternal Arras; and even had a Law-case there, and pleaded, not
unsuccessfully, "in favor of the first Franklin thunder-rod. ”
to
## p. 3275 (#249) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3275
With a strict, painful mind, an understanding small but clear
and ready, he grew in favor with official persons, who could
foresee in him an excellent man of business, happily quite free
from genius. The Bishop, therefore, taking counsel, appoints
him Judge of his diocese, and he faithfully does justice to the
people: till behold, one day, a culprit comes whose crime mer-
its hanging, and the strict-minded Max must abdicate, for his
conscience will not permit the dooming of any son of Adam to
die. A strict-minded, strait-laced man! A man unfit for Revolu-
tions? whose small soul, transparent wholesome-looking as small-
ale, could by no chance ferment into virulent alegar, — the
mother of ever-new alegar; - till all France were grown acetous
virulent? We shall see.
-
Between which two extremes of grandest and meanest, so
many grand and mean roll on, towards their several destinies, in
that
Procession! There is Cazalès, the learned young soldier,
who shall become the eloquent orator of Royalism, and earn the
shadow of a name. Experienced Mounier, experienced Malouet,
whose Presidential Parlementary experience the stream of things
shall soon leave stranded. A Pétion has left his gown and briefs
at Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading; has not forgotten
his violin, being fond of music. His hair is grizzled, though he
is still young; convictions, beliefs placid-unalterable, are in that
man; not hindmost of them, belief in himself. A Protestant-
clerical Rabaut-St. -Étienne, a slender young eloquent and ve-
hement Barnave, will help to regenerate France. There are so
of them young.
Till thirty the Spartans did not suffer
to marry: but how many men here under thirty; com-
ing to produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a
many
a man
world
of such! The old to heal up rents, the young to remove
rubbish:- which latter is it not, indeed, the task here?
with
Dim, formless from this distance, yet authentically there, thou
noticest the Deputies from Nantes? To us mere clothes-screens,
Slouch-hat and cloak, but bearing in their pocket a Cahier
of doléances with this singular clause, and more such, in it:-
"That the master wigmakers of Nantes be not troubled with
new
――――――
guild-brethren, the actually existing number of ninety-two
being more than sufficient! " The Rennes people have elected
farmer Gérard, "a man of natural sense and rectitude without
any learning. " He walks there with solid step; unique, "in his
rustic farmer-clothes;" which he will wear always, careless of
## p. 3276 (#250) ###########################################
3276
THOMAS CARLYLE
short-cloaks and costumes. The name Gérard, or "Père Gérard,
Father Gérard," as they please to call him, will fly far, borne
about in endless banter, in Royalist satires, in Republican Didactic
Almanacks. As for the man Gérard, being asked once what he
did, after trial of it, candidly think of this Parlementary work,-
"I think," answered he, "that there are a good many scoundrels
among us. "
So walks Father Gérard, solid in his thick shoes,
whithersoever bound.
And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one
other time? If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see
him with the eye of prophecy; for indeed the Parisian Deputies
are all a little late. Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner:
doomed by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that
ever kept obscure mortal from his resting-place, the bosom of
oblivion! Guillotin can improve the ventilation of the Hall; in
all cases of medical police and hygiène be a present aid: but
greater far, he can produce his 'Report on the Penal Code,' and
reveal therein a cunningly devised Beheading Machine, which
shall become famous and world-famous. This is the product of
Guillotin's endeavors, gained not without meditation and reading;
which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine
derivative name, as if it were his daughter: La Guillotine!
"With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais
sauter la tête) in a twinkling, and you have no pain; " — whereat
they all laugh. Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years
he, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing
but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander,
as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and
Lethe; his name like to outlive Cæsar's.
See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honored Historian of Astron-
omy Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beauti-
ful Philosophizing, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thin-
ness, ends in foul thick confusion of Presidency, Mayorship,
diplomatic officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlast-
ing Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly Gal-
axy to the Drapeau Rouge: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that
last hell-day, thou must "tremble," though only with cold-
"de froid. " Speculation is not practice: to be weak is not
so miserable, but to be weaker than our task. Woe the day
when they mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on that wild
Hippogriff of a Democracy, which, spurning the firm earth, nay,
## p. 3277 (#251) ###########################################
THOMAS CARLYLE
3277
lashing at the very stars, no yet known Astolpho could have.
ridden!
In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of
Letters; 374 Lawyers, and at least one Clergyman, the Abbé
Sieyes. Him also Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him,
the light, thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the
pride of Logic; passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-
conceit. If indeed that can be called a passion, which in its
independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into
transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind of godlike indif-
ference, and look down on passion! He is the man, and wisdom
Ishall die with him. This is the Sieyès who shall be System-
builder, Constitution-builder General, and build Constitutions (as
many as wanted) sky-high,-which shall all unfortunately fall
before he get the scaffolding away. "La Politique," said he to
Dumont, "polity is a science I think I have completed (achevée). »
What things, O Sieyès, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou
to see! But were it not curious to know how Sieyès, now in
these days (for he is said to be still alive) looks out on all that
Constitution masonry, through the rheumy soberness of extreme
age? Might we hope, still with the old irrefragable transcend-
entalism?
