No More Learning

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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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. 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.
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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.


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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


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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


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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
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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.


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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


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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.
-
-


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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


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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.