No More Learning

History is really the biography of the heroes.
All so-called philosophies of history, attempts to discover general
laws and to dispense with the agency of great men, are tainted with
materialism. They would substitute "blind laws" for the living spirit
which really guides the development of the race. But if you ask how
your hero is to be known, the only answer can be, Know him at
your peril.
Carlyle's most elaborate books, the 'Cromwell' and the 'Fred-
erick,' are designed to give an explicit answer to the "right" and
"might" problem. Carlyle in both cases seems to be toiling amidst
the dust-heaps of some ancient ruin, painfully disinterring the shat-
tered and defaced fragments of a noble statue and reconstructing it
to be hereafter placed in a worthy Valhalla. Cromwell, according
to the vulgar legend, was a mere hypocrite, and Frederick a mere
cynical conqueror. The success of both - that is his intended moral-
was in proportion to the clearness with which they recognized the
eternal laws of the universe. Cromwell probably is the more satis-
factory hero, as more really sympathetic to his admirer. But each
requires an interpreter. Cromwell's gifts did not lie in the direction
of lucid utterance; and Frederick, if he could have read, would cer-
tainly have scorned, the doctrine of his eulogist. Carlyle, that is, has


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THOMAS CARLYLE
3241
to dig out in the actions of great men a true significance, certainly
not obvious to the actors themselves. Their recognition of the
eternal laws was in one case embodied in obsolete formulæ, and in
the other, it might seem, altogether unconscious.
The hero's recog-
nition of divine purposes does not imply then that his own vision is
purged from error, or that his aim is distinctly realized.
He may,
like Mahomet or the Abbot Sampson, be full of superstition. His
"veracity" does not mean that his beliefs are true; only that they
are sincere and such a version of the truth as is possible in his
dialect. This is connected with Carlyle's constant insistence upon
the superiority of silence to speech. The divine light shines through.
many distracting media; it enlightens many who do not consciously
perceive it. It may be recognized because it gives life; because the
work to which it prompts is lasting. But even the hero who tries to
utter himself is sure to interpolate much that is ephemeral, con-
fused, and imperfect; and speech in general represents the mere per-
plexed gabble of men who take words for thought, and raise a
hopeless clamor which drowns the still small voice of true inspira-
tion. If men are mostly fools, their talk is mostly folly; forming a
wild incoherent Babel in which it is hard to pick out the few scat-
tered words of real meaning. Carlyle has been ridiculed for preach-
ing silence in so many words; but then Carlyle was speaking the
truth; and of that, he fully admits, we can never have too much.
The hero may be a prophet, or a man of letters. He is bound to
speak seriously, though not to be literally silent; and his words must
be judged not by the momentary pleasure, but by their ultimate
influence on life.
Carlyle's message to his fellows, which I have tried imperfectly
to summarize, may be condemned on grounds of taste and of moral-
ity. Translated into logical formulæ it becomes inconsistent, and
it embodies some narrow prejudices in exaggerated terms. Yet I
think that it has been useful even by the shock it has given to com-
monplace optimism. It has been far more useful because in his
own dialect, Carlyle — as I think - expresses some vital truths with
surpassing force. Whatever our creeds, religious or political, he may
stimulate our respect for veracity, in the form of respect for honest
work or contempt for hypocritical conventions; our loyalty to all
great leaders, in the worlds both of thought and action; and our
belief that to achieve any real progress, something is required infi-
nitely deeper than any mere change in the superficial arrangements of
society. These lessons are expressed, too, as the merely literary
critic must admit, by a series of historical pictures, so vivid and so
unique in character that for many readers they are in the full sense
fascinating. They are revelations of new aspects of the world, never,
I


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THOMAS CARLYLE
when once observed, to be forgotten. And finally, I may add that
Carlyle's autobiographical writings-in which we must include the
delightful Life of Sterling'-show the same qualities in a shape
which, if sometimes saddening, is profoundly interesting. No man
was more reticent in his life, though he has been made to deliver
a posthumous confession of extraordinary fullness. We hear all the
groans once kept within the walls of Cheyne Row. After making
all allowance for the fits of temper, the harshness of judgment, and
the willful exaggeration, we see at last a man who under extraordi-
nary difficulties was unflinchingly faithful to what he took to be his
vocation, and struggled through a long life, full of anxieties and
vexations, to turn his genius to the best account.
Leche Stephen
LABOR
From Past and Present>
FOR
OR there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in
Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high
calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and
earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.
Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with
Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one
more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regula-
tions, which are truth.
The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it.
"Know thyself": long enough has that poor "self" of thine tor-
mented thee; thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe! Think
it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknow-
able individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it
like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.
It has been written, "An endless significance lies in Work;"
a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared
away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal
the man himself first ceases to be jungle and foul unwholesome
desert thereby. Consider how even in the meanest sorts of
Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real
harmony the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire,
Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-
dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every


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THOMAS CARLYLE
3243
man: but he bends himself with free valor against his task, and
all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their
The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labor in
him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up,
and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!
caves.
In
Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A
formless Chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever
rounder; ranges itself by mere force of gravity into strata, spheri-
cal courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted World.
What would become of the Earth did she cease to revolve?
the poor old Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities,
irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are inces-
santly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the Potter's
wheel,- one of the venerablest objects; old as the Prophet Ezekiel
and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves
up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And
fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced
to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading
and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human
soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and
spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like
the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead
nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive
coloring, what gilding and enameling she will, he is but a botch.
Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-
cornered, amorphous botch,-a mere enameled vessel of dishonor!
Let the idle think of this.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other
blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and
will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by
noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like
an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;-draining off
the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest
grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruit-
ful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the
meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small!
Labor is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his
God-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into
him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all
nobleness,-to all knowledge, "self-knowledge" and much else, so
as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that
soon


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THOMAS CARLYLE
will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature her-
self accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no
other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is
yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in
schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices,
till we try it and fix it. "Doubt, of whatever kind, can be
ended by Action alone. "
see
And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance,
Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do
better next time? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the
dim brute Powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such
wrestle, there, and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually
learn. Set down a brave Sir Christopher in the middle of black
ruined Stone-heaps, of foolish unarchitectural Bishops, red-tape
Officials, idle Nell-Gwynn Defenders of the Faith; and
whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral out of all that, yea
or no! Rough, rude, contradictory, are all things and persons,
from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen up to the idle
Nell-Gwynn Defenders, to blustering red-tape Officials, foolish
unarchitectural Bishops. All these things and persons are there
not for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's; they are there for
their own sake mainly! Christopher will have to conquer and
constrain all these, if he be able. All these are against him.
Equitable Nature herself, who carries her mathematics and
architectonics not on the face of her, but deep in the hidden
heart of her, Nature herself is but partially for him; will be
wholly against him, if he constrain her not! His very money,
where is it to come from? The pious munificence of England.
lies far-scattered, distant, unable to speak and say, "I am here";
- must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious munificence,
and all help, is so silent, invisible like the gods; impediments,
contradictions manifold, are so loud and near! O brave Sir
Christopher, trust thou in those, notwithstanding, and front all
these; understand all these; by valiant patience, noble effort,
insight, by man's strength, vanquish and compel all these,- and
on the whole, strike down victoriously the last topstone of that
Paul's Edifice; thy monument for certain centuries, the stamp
"Great Man" impressed very legibly on Portland-stone there!
Yes, all manner of help, and pious response from Men of
Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to
―――――
—


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THOMAS CARLYLE
3245
light, till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is
at first "Impossible. " In very truth, for every noble work the
possibilities will lie diffused through Immensity; inarticulate,
undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon, thou shalt spread
out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether under the
wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous moisture, or none.
Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's
fleece, spread out in silent appeal to Heaven; and from the kind
Immensities, what from the poor unkind Localities and town and
country Parishes there never could, blessed dew-moisture to
suffice thee shall have fallen!
Work is of a religious nature:- work is of a brave nature;
which it is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is as
the swimmer's: a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he
front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise
defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it
loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. "It is
so," says Goethe, "with all things that man undertakes in this
world. "
Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,- Columbus, my hero,
royalest Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment, this of
thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee mutinous discour-
aged souls, behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee the equal,
unpenetrated veil of Night. Brother, these wild water-mountains,
bounding from their deep basin (ten miles deep, I am told), are
not entirely there on thy behalf! Meseems they have other work
than floating thee forward:-and the huge Winds, that sweep
from Ursa-Major to the Tropics and Equators, dancing their
giant-waltz through the kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity, they
little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small
shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle-skiff of thine! Thou art
not among articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art
among immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling, wide
as the world here. Secret, far off, invisible to all hearts but
thine, there lies a help in them: see how thou wilt get at that.
Patiently thou wilt wait till the mad Southwester spend itself,
saving thyself by dexterous science of defense, the while: val-
iantly, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favor-
ing East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt
sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encour-
age: thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness,
care


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THOMAS CARLYLE
weakness of others and thyself; - how much wilt thou swallow
down! There shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than
this Sea, which is but ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable;
known to God only. Thou shalt be a great man. Yes, my
World-Soldier, thou of the World Marine-service,- thou wilt have
to be greater than this tumultuous unmeasured World here round
thee is; thou, in thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms shalt
embrace it, harness it down; and make it bear thee on, — to
new Americas, or whither God wills!
THE WORLD IN CLOTHES
From Sartor Resartus'
"A$
(
>
S MONTESQUIEU wrote a 'Spirit of Laws,'" observes our
Professor, "so could I write a 'Spirit of Clothes'; thus,
with an Esprit des Lois,' properly an 'Esprit de Cou-
tumes,' we should have an 'Esprit de Costumes. For neither
in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Acci-
dent, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of
the mind. In all his Modes, and habilatory endeavors, an Archi-
tectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the Cloth are
the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice,
of a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in
folded mantles, based on light sandals; tower-up in high head-
gear, from amid peaks, spangles, and bell-girdles; swell-out in
starched ruffs, buckram stuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or
girth himself into separate sections, and front the world an
Agglomeration of four limbs,- will depend on the nature of such
Architectural Idea: whether Grecian, Gothic, Later-Gothic, or
altogether Modern, and Parisian or Anglo-Dandiacal. Again,
what meaning lies in Color! From the soberest drab to the
high-flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies unfold themselves in
choice of color: if the cut betoken Intellect and Talent, so does
the Color betoken Temper and Heart. In all which, among
nations as among individuals, there is an incessant, indubitable,
though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect: every
snip of the Scissors has been regulated and prescribed by ever-
active Influences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a superior
order are neither invisible nor illegible.


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THOMAS CARLYLE
3247
"For such superior Intelligences a Cause-and-Effect Philosophy
of Clothes, as of Laws, were probably a comfortable winter-
evening entertainment: nevertheless, for inferior Intelligences,
like men, such Philosophies have always seemed to me unin-
structive enough. Nay, what is your Montesquieu himself but a
clever infant spelling Letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic
Book, the lexicon of which lies in Eternity, in Heaven? - Let
any Cause-and-Effect Philosopher explain, not why I wear such
and such a Garment, obey such and such a Law; but even why
I am here, to wear and obey anything! -Much therefore, if not
the whole, of that same 'Spirit of Clothes' I shall suppress as
hypothetical, ineffectual, and even impertinent: naked Facts, and
Deductions drawn therefrom in quite another than that omnis-
cient style, are my humbler and proper province. "
Acting on which prudent restriction, Teufelsdröckh has never-
theless contrived to take-in a well-nigh boundless extent of field;
at least, the boundaries too often lie quite beyond our horizon.
Selection being indispensable, we shall here glance over his First
Part only in the most cursory manner. This First Part is, no
doubt, distinguished by omnivorous learning, and utmost patience
and fairness: at the same time, in its results and delineations, it
is much more likely to interest the Compilers of some Library
of General, Entertaining, Useful, or even Useless Knowledge
than the miscellaneous readers of these pages. Was it this Part
of the Book which Heuschrecke had in view, when he recom-
mended us to that joint-stock vehicle of publication, "at present
the glory of British Literature"? If so, the Library Editors are
welcome to dig in it for their own behoof.
To the First Chapter, which turns on Paradise and Fig-leaves,
and leads us into interminable disquisitions of a mythological,
metaphorical, cabalistico-sartorial, and quite antediluvian cast, we
shall content ourselves with giving an unconcerned approval.
Still less have we to do with "Lilis, Adam's first wife, whom,
according to the Talmudists, he had before Eve, and who bore
him, in that wedlock, the whole progeny of aërial, aquatic, and
terrestrial Devils, "- very needlessly, we think. On this portion
of the Work, with its profound glances into the Adam-Kadmon,
or Primeval Element, here strangely brought into relation with
the Nif and Muspel (Darkness and Light) of the antique North,
it may be enough to say, that its correctness of deduction and
depth of Talmudic and Rabbinical lore have filled perhaps not


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3248
THOMAS CARLYLE
the worst Hebraist in Britain with something like astonish-
ment.
But quitting this twilight region, Teufelsdröckh hastens from
the Tower of Babel, to follow the dispersion of Mankind over the
whole habitable and habilable globe. Walking by the light of
Oriental, Pelasgic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient
and Modern researches of every conceivable kind, he strives to
give us in compressed shape (as the Nürnbergers give an Orbis
Pictus) an Orbis Vestitus; or view of the costumes of all man-
kind, in all countries, in all times. It is here that to the Anti-
quarian, to the Historian, we
the Historian, we can triumphantly say: Fall to!
Here is learning: an irregular Treasury, if you will; but inex-
haustible as the Hoard of King Nibelung, which twelve wagons
in twelve days, at the rate of three journeys a day, could not
carry off.
Sheepskin cloaks and wampum belts; phylacteries,
stoles, albs; chlamydes, togas, Chinese silks, Afghan shawls,
trunk-hose, leather breeches, Celtic philibegs (though breeches,
as the name Gallia Braccata indicates, are the more ancient),
Hussar cloaks, Vandyke tippets, ruffs, fardingales, are brought
vividly before us, even the Kilmarnock nightcap is not for-
gotten. For most part, too, we must admit that the Learning,
heterogeneous as it is, and tumbled-down quite pell-mell, is true,
concentrated and purified Learning, the drossy parts smelted out
and thrown aside.
us.
Philosophical reflections intervene, and sometimes touching
pictures of human life. Of this sort the following has surprised
The first purpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was
not warmth or decency, but ornament. "Miserable indeed,"
says he, "was the condition of the Aboriginal Savage, glaring
fiercely from under his fleece of hair, which with the beard
reached down to his loins, and hung round him like a matted
cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural fell. He
loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild-fruits;
or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in morasses,
lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements, with-
out arms, save the ball of heavy Flint, to which, that his sole
possession and defense might not be lost, he had attached a long
cord of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling it
with deadly unerring skill. Nevertheless, the pains of Hunger
and Revenge once satisfied, his next care was not Comfort but
Decoration (Putz). Warmth he found in the toils of the chase;


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THOMAS CARLYLE
3249
or amid dried leaves, in his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or
natural grotto: but for Decoration he must have Clothes. Nay,
among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to
Clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decora-
tion, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civil-
ized countries.
"Reader, the heaven-inspired melodious Singer; loftiest Se-
rene Highness; nay, thy own amber-locked, snow-and-rose-bloom
Maiden, worthy to glide sylph-like almost on air, whom thou
lovest, worshipest as a divine Presence, which, indeed, symboli-
cally taken, she is, has descended, like thyself, from that same
hair-mantled, flint-hurling Aboriginal Anthropophagus! Out of
the eater cometh forth meat; out of the strong cometh forth
sweetness. What changes are wrought, not by Time, yet in
Time! For not Mankind only, but all that Mankind does or
beholds, is in continual growth, regenesis and self-perfecting
vitality. Cast forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living,
ever-working Universe: it is a seed-grain that cannot die; unno-
ticed to-day (says one), it will be found flourishing as a Banyan-
grove (perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-forest! ) after a thousand
years.
-
"He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of
Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most
Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world:
he had invented the Art of Printing. The first ground handful
of Nitre, Sulphur, and Charcoal drove Monk Schwartz's pestle
through the ceiling: what will the last do? Achieve the final
undisputed prostration of Force under Thought, of Animal cour-
age under Spiritual. A simple invention it was in the old-world
Grazier,― sick of lugging his slow Ox about the country till he
got it bartered for corn or oil,-to take a piece of Leather, and
thereon scratch or stamp the mere Figure of an Ox (or Pecus);
put it in his pocket, and call it Pecunia, Money. Yet hereby did
Barter grow Sale, the Leather Money is now Golden and Paper,
and all miracles have been out-miracled: for there are Roth-
schilds and English National Debts; and whoso has sixpence is
sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands
cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount
guard over him,-to the length of sixpence. - Clothes too, which
began in foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not be-
come! Increased Security and pleasurable Heat soon followed:
VI-201


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3250
THOMAS CARLYLE
but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (Scham, Modesty), as
yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mys-
teriously under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the
Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinction, social
polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to
make Clothes-screens of us.
"But, on the whole," continues our eloquent Professor, "Man
is a Tool-using Animal (Handthierendes Thier). Weak in him-
self, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the
flattest-soled, of some half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to
straddle out his legs, lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest
of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer
of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless
he can use Tools, can devise Tools: with these the granite
mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing
iron, as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway,
winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find
him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he
is all. "
Here may we not, for a moment, interrupt the stream of
Oratory with a remark, that this Definition of the Tool-using
Animal appears to us, of all that Animal-sort, considerably the
precisest and best? Man is called a Laughing Animal: but do
not the apes also laugh, or attempt to do it: and is the manliest
man the greatest and oftenest laugher? Teufelsdröckh himself,
as we said, laughed only once. Still less do we make of that
other French Definition of the Cooking Animal: which, indeed,
for rigorous scientific purposes, is as good as useless. Can a
Tartar be said to cook, when he only readies his steak by riding
on it? Again, what Cookery does the Greenlander use, beyond
stowing-up his whale-blubber, as a marmot, in the like case,
might do?
Or how would Monsieur Ude prosper among those
Orinoco Indians who, according to Humboldt, lodge in crow-
nests, on the branches of trees; and, for half the year, have no
victuals but pipe-clay, the whole country being under water?
But on the other hand, show us the human being, of any period.
or climate, without his Tools: those very Caledonians, as we
saw, had their Flint-ball, and Thong to it, such as no brute has
or can have.
"Man is a Tool-using Animal," concludes Teufelsdröckh in
his abrupt way; "of which truth Clothes are but one example:


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THOMAS CARLYLE
3251
and surely if we consider the interval between the first wooden
Dibble fashioned by man, and those Liverpool Steam-carriages,
or the British House of Commons, we shall note what progress
he has made. He digs up certain black stones from the bosom
of the earth, and says to them, Transport me and this luggage
at the rate of five-and-thirty miles an hour; and they do it: he
collects, apparently by lot, six hundred and fifty-eight miscella-
neous individuals, and says to them, Make this nation toil for us,
bleed for us, hunger and sorrow and sin for us; and they do it. "
-
M
ANY Volumes have been written by way of commentary on
Dante and his Book; yet, on the whole, with no great
result. His Biography is, as it were, irrevocably lost for
us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man, not much
note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of that has
vanished, in the long space that now intervenes.
It is five cen-
turies since he ceased writing and living here. After all com-
mentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The
Book; and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to
Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think
genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a
To me it is a most touching face;
perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there,
painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it;
the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also
deathless; significant of the whole history of Dante! I think it
is the mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality; an
altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as founda-
tion of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child;
but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abne-
gation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain. A soft, ethereal soul,
looking-out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from impris-
onment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a
silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain
of the thing that is eating out his heart,-as if it were withal a
mean, insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture
and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in
protest, and lifelong, unsurrendering battle, against the world.
―――――――
DANTE
From Heroes and Hero-Worship'


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Affection all converted into indignation: an implacable indigna-
tion; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye, too, it
looks out in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry-Why the
world was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks, this
"voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us "his mystic unfath-
omable song. "
The little that we know of Dante's life corresponds well
enough with this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Flor-
ence, in the upper class of society, in the year 1265. His educa-
tion was the best then going; much school-divinity, Aristotelian
logic, some Latin classics,- no inconsiderable insight into certain
provinces of things: and Dante, with his earnest intelligent
nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most all that was
learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding, and great
subtlety; this best fruit of education he had contrived to realize
from these scholastics.
He knows accurately and well what lies
close to him; but in such a time, without printed books or free
intercourse, he could not know well what was distant: the small
clear light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into
singular chiaroscuro striking on what is far off. This was
Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone through
the usual destinies: been twice out campaigning as a soldier for
the Florentine State; been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of
the Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a
certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age
and rank, and grown-up henceforth in partial sight of her, in
some distant intercourse with her. All readers know his grace-
ful affecting account of this; and then of their being parted; of
her being wedded to another, and of her death soon after. She
makes a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems to have made a
great figure in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she,
held apart from him, far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were
the only one he had ever with his whole strength of affection
loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but it seems not
happily, far from happily. I fancy the rigorous earnest man,
with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
happy.
We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right
with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podestà
or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among


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neighbors, and the world had wanted one of the most notable
words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had another
prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued
voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be
ten of them and more) had no 'Divina Commedia' to hear! We
will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for
this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and
crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choice of
his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really
happy, what was really miserable.
In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or
some other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that
Dante, whose party had seemed the stronger, was with his
friends cast unexpectedly forth into banishment; doomed thence-
forth to a life of woe and wandering. His property was all
confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling that it was
entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He
tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike
surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad only
had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in
the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught,
to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very
curious civic document. Another curious document, some con-
siderable number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the
Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal of
theirs, that he should return on condition of apologizing and
paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern pride:—“If I cannot
return without calling myself guilty, I will never return
(nunquam revertar). ”
For Dante there was now no home in this world. He
wandered from patron to patron, from place to place; proving,
in his own bitter words, "How hard is the path (Come è duro
calle). " The wretched are not cheerful company. Dante, poor
and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his moody.
humors, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of
him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day
for his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like
way. Della Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and
buffoons (nebulones ac histriones) making him heartily merry;
when turning to Dante, he said: "Is it not strange, now, that
this poor fool should make himself so entertaining; while you, a
-
—


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wise man, sit there day after day, and have nothing to amuse us
with at all? » Dante answered bitterly:-"No, not strange; your
Highness is to recollect the Proverb, 'Like to Like;" — given the
amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man, with his
proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not made
to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him
that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in
this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander,
wander; no living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries
there was no solace here.
The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself
on him; that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world,
with its Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal
shadow. Florence thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory
and Heaven thou shalt surely see! What is Florence, Can della
Scala, and the World and Life altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of
a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound! The
great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and
more in that awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded
on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or
bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:-but to Dante,
in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape;
he no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there
with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself
should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople
if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding
over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into
mystic unfathomable song "; and this his 'Divine Comedy,' the
most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.
It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as
we can see, a proud thought for him at times, that he, here in
exile, could do this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men,
could hinder him from doing it, or even much help him in doing
it. He knew too, partly, that it was great; the greatest a man
could do. "If thou follow thy star, Se tu segui tua stella," —so
could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still
say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a
glorious haven! " The labor of writing, we find, and indeed
could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he says,
"This Book, which has made me lean for many years. " Ah yes,
it was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,—not in sport, but


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in grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has
been written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his
whole history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet
very old, at the age of fifty-six ;-broken-hearted rather, as is
said. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: Hic claudor
Dantes patriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines begged back his
body, in a century after; the Ravenna people would not give it.
"Here am I, Dante, laid, shut-out from my native shores. "
too.
I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it "a
mystic unfathomable Song"; and such is literally the character of
it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever
you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody
in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning
For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together
here as everywhere. Song: we said before, it was the Heroic of
Speech! All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically
Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that
whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of
Prose cramped into jingling lines,-to the great injury of the
grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What
we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any;
why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out
plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true pas-
sion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Cole-
ridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth, and
music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and
sing, that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic
of Speakers, whose speech is Song. Pretenders to this are
many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most part a
very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of
reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be
rhymed: it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle,
what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who can speak
their thought, not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious
time, among serious men, there is no vocation in them for sing-
ing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are charmed by
it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and
account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous,
altogether an insincere and offensive thing.
I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his 'Divine
Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very
-


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3256
THOMAS CARLYLE
sound of it there is a canto fermo; it proceeds as by a chant.
The language, his simple terza rima, doubtless helped him in
this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt. But I add,
that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and material of
the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion
and sincerity, makes it musical; - go deep enough, there is music
everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an archi-
tectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architect-
ural; which also partakes of the character of music. The three
kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look-out on one another
like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-
cathedral, piled-up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of
Souls! It is, at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sincerity,
here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out
of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep, and through
long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they
saw him on the streets, used to say, "Eccovi l'uom ch'è stato
all' Inferno" (See, there is the man that was in Hell). Ah yes,
he had been in Hell;-in Hell enough, in long severe sorrow
and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.
Commedias that come-out divine are not accomplished otherwise.
Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not
the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind; -
true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself:
that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through
suffering. "— But as I say, no work known to me is so elabo-
rated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in the
hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him "lean" for many
years. Not the general whole only; every compartment of it is
worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visu-
ality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its place, like a
marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the soul of
Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered forever
rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one:
but a task which is done.
Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that depends
on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does.
not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow,
and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and
position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in
all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He


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is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he is
world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into
the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Con-
sider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of
his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power of
vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing
more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of
Dite: red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim
immensity of gloom;-so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and
forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante.
There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not
briefer, more condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural
condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and
then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more
eloquent than words. It is strange with what a sharp decisive
grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter: cuts into the
matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, col-
lapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails sink, the mast being
suddenly broken. " Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the cotto
aspetto, "face baked," parched brown and lean; and the "fiery
snow » that falls on them there, a "fiery snow without wind,”
slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs;
square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with
its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut
at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata
rises; and how Cavalcante falls-at hearing of his Son, and the
past tense "fue"! The very movements in Dante have something
brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence
of his genius, this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian
nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt
movements, its silent "pale rages," speaks itself in these things.
For though this of painting is one of the outermost develop-
ments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty
of him; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man
whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth
something; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic of
him. In the first place, he could not have discerned the object
at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what we may
call, sympathized with it,-had sympathy in him to bestow on
objects. He must have been sincere about it too; sincere and
sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness.


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THOMAS CARLYLE
of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial
hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that
intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning
what an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may
have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be
done? The gifted man is he who sees the essential point, and
leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty too, the
man of business's faculty, that he discern the true likeness, not
the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in.
And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of
anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it
the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are trivial,
as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the
Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No
most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In
the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will
take away with him.
Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a
vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is
every way noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca
and her Lover, what qualities in that! A thing woven as out of
rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small flute-voice of
infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A touch
of womanhood in it too: della bella persona, che mi fu tolta; and
how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never
part from her! Saddest tragedy in these alti guai. And the
racking winds, in that aer bruno, whirl them away again, to wail
forever! - Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor
Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the
Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of
his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial
libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged
upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's,
was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who
does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be
cowardly, egoistic,- sentimentality, or little better. I know not
in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tender-
ness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of Æolian
harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart; - and then that


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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.


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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-
―――――――


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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.