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A PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE; from a Medallion by T. Woolner; mounted so as to bind with the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine .

London:—Bell and Daldy, 186, Fleet Street.

Perhaps it is well to advertise at once, that the following pages are written by one who “believes” in Carlyle. This is for the benefit of the reader, who is invited thereby to skip or to read. (I would rather you read if you please!) For the sake of the writer, let it be added, that he has heard of the old saying, “Amicus Plato, amicior veritas,” and thinks it one worthy to be followed.

This being said, it will be understood that I do not in this Essay propose to act schoolmaster to Carlyle, look over his exercises, admonish him, run my pen through his blunders, and administer the ferule; no! that would be folly, and worse; nor, on the other hand, need I drug my intellect, but rather keep it wide awake as possible, and approaching reverently this great mind, (it will be found dwelling in no dark cavern, but in a temple of light!) look well into it, and mark what it



is, and what it has done. In fact, I have already done this as well as I can, and now hasten to give my results to any friendly reader, who can believe that so wonderful a genie, or any part of him worth looking at, can be got into a little casket like this of a Magazine article, or into two such—they are little to be sure, but they gave the fisherman some trouble to haul up from out the vasty pool—and I hope that we may both discover the truth; may together understand what is the true character of Carlyle’s mind, as manifested in his seventeen or eighteen volumes of original writing; and may, in some imperfect manner, measure the nature and worth of the services he has done to our generation.

I intend, on this occasion, to introduce the reader to Carlyle—is it their first meeting, or not their first?—by some words of his, which once did the like office for another young Englishman. The incident to be spoken of is a trivial one, important chiefly to one person only; yet let it not be scorned; for, great or little, it is a true event in human history, helping to make up the sum total of good and evil now in the world; and besides, it is useful for our present purpose. A year or two ago, then, early one morning, at Cambridge, the young Englishman, an undergraduate, “all in his gown so blue,” strolled into a friend’s rooms at College; found him gone out; but on the table lay a book, Heroes and Hero Worship! He opened it and read as follows: “It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s Religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign, and in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the out-works of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe, (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others,) the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is, in all cases, the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. This is his religion.” (p. 3.)

These few sentences made a deep impression on our friend; they set him reading Carlyle in deep earnest, and have kept him doing so;—and now not content with reading, he must needs be writing too! But, forgetting him and his destinies, let us, you and I, reader, ponder these words, for they furnish a fit starting point for our present enterprise. They are true words,



and profoundly true; at once a help and a warning for our judgment of all human work and character, but especially a clue to discover what we desire to learn respecting him who wrote these very words out of his own heart. The drawback is, that we are hereby compelled to enter into subjects, which, though constrained to think of secretly, much and often, one would willingly have avoided talking or writing about at all, especially in the slight thing called Periodical Literature, whose office (so says an exigeant public that knows how to hiss and to clap, to give and withhold hard cash,) is to talk lively, tell pleasant stories, pirouette gaily over the surface of things in general, and, in one word, amuse. However, in no other way could our purpose be satisfactorily even attempted; and, though to publish views about the Universe be not wise, yet the views set forth shall not be so much mine as Carlyle’s.

The question, then, must be put and answered, What is Carlyle’s Religion? what is his chief belief respecting the Universe? Know then, reader, the true answer to be this, That there is an Eternal living God, who owns and rules the world. Strange that this belief should be predicated as characteristic of Carlyle! for it would seem to be the necessary faith of all reasonable men, and so in truth partially it is and must be; yet, in no other writer of this generation, who has dealt with things called Secular, that is, with the breadth and entireness and everyday and all-day of human life, and not the Sunday section of it only, is this thought, I think, so sure, so abiding, so paramount. But perhaps, (perhaps?—no doubt) some think it strange to be said of Carlyle at all. For the old sacred names he uses rarely, and talks much of nature, the gods, the destinies, the eternities and immensities, and other heathen or fanciful things. Nevertheless, any reader who cares to know, soon finds out all such phrases, even in the latter works, where they become rather offensively frequent, to be mere mannerisms of the writer, and discovers the true faith they invariably signify. For neither Carlyle, nor any man, is to be interpreted by his words only, like an act of Parliament; words being at the best a feeble and imperfect exponent of thought. The essence of all words and acts is their spirit, which can be fully discerned only by one who has some sympathy for the speaker or doer, most of all when the speaker is one so fond of symbolism and ambuscading humour, so careless of the vulgar intelligence, as Carlyle. In his works, the animating spirit (especially if you take him by sentences) is often veiled in fantastic clouds, but it is always there and always one; and now and then it gleams forth a ray of pure light, recognisable by all as solemn, beautiful, true, and for some illuminating a whole world of thought from east even to west.

It is often said that Carlyle believes in a great overruling Power, but not in a Personal Deity. But this notion of the poor public arises, partly because he avoids all discussion of religion as stated in formal propositions, regarding it as a living truth, which can be discovered, not by logic, but only by spiritual insight; he therefore never tries to prove the existence of Deity, but always takes it for granted, as the foundation of all thought, and of the thinking power; and partly it arises, because he adopts phraseology different from the common, sometimes out of mere waywardness or the force of habit, but more often from the impulse of genius, to choose its own form of expression; and the deep conviction, that truths, even the greatest, dressed in their old uniforms are for the most part disregarded as every-day presences, not worth thinking about, or only at appointed times, church levees and the like, when they strut and bustle about officially. Yet, for all this, he is sometimes the simplest of the simple



in phrase, uttering the greatest truths, just like his friend Mahomet, “There is but one God,—God is great!” It would be well for our scribes and pharisees to know that.

But to go a little deeper into this question of words. It appears, on reflection, that, as man, to express worthily the nature or operation of things below him, has to invest them for the while with qualities only belonging to himself, so he must also express his notions of that which is above him, which is infinite and properly unspeakable, in symbols of the highest human attributes; he therefore calls God a Person, because spiritual personality is the chief attribute of human nature, a something we know not what, but infinite, unchanging, indefeasible, eternal. He cannot mean to define the form of God, (forgive the thought!) because He is a Spirit, and no man hath seen Him at any time, and form is always changeable, mortal, even the most stable heaven continually changing its aspect, and the human form, the highest we know, dissolving into dust. He must mean only this, that God is a Being, Whose nature is spiritual, comprehending and transcending the spirit of men; Who is the eternal Father. One must symbolise after all; every word in this sentence is a human symbolism. We are tied down to the earth and cannot escape.

• So free we seem, so fettered fast we are;
• I feel, He laid the fetter: let it lie!

Such we may most positively assert, is the meaning and devout conviction of Carlyle, to be observed, I have said, everywhere penetrating and guiding his thought. For his own exposition of such Divinity I would recommend the Essays on German Literature, Diderot, and Voltaire, in the Miscellanies. As for the charge of Pantheism, which unthinking persons, who love to condemn rather than to open their eyes and learn, often bring against Carlyle, little need be said; for the notion of Pantheism, so far as it means anything more than the omnipresence of divine power, is utterly repugnant to Carlyle’s Theory of the Universe, which is one of Order, Subordination, above all of Unity. Indeed, I never can understand what is meant by the word Pantheism; unless it be the notion that every thing and every man is perfect divinity, and that every creature is to have his own will done in the world; a theory which is sufficiently contradicted by every one’s experience, and explicitly and emphatically denied by ordinary Christian teaching and Carlyle. If the reader has not already discovered this, let him try and accept it for a fact, at least for the present; and know that Carlyle means what he says when he declares he does not believe in an absentee God sitting outside the world and seeing it go, and that in a Sovereign Ruler ever with us he does believe; it will, I think, explain all his other doctrines, some of which are too often utterly misunderstood.

For, filled with this belief, Carlyle has looked forth upon the world, the wide wide world, and he finds it sacred, divine, full of infinite wonder, mysterious beauty and terror. The least thing that exists, is it not His work, His? the greatest of all, man and his doings, what are not they? Things for ever unspeakable, of which one dare scarcely think without bended knee. The body of man is a temple, wherein the holy of holies dwells; “a person is ever sacred to us,” “we touch heaven when we touch the body of man;” so he loves to quote from his favourite Novalis. And a still holier mystery is the soul of man, it is a ray of God himself. Again, the history of men is but a record of divine deeds; not the history of the Jews only is so, but the history of England, and all history, even the year 1856 being counted in Heaven’s calendar. And so also every stroke of genuine human work is to him worthy of deep reverence; even work of the commonest, sorriest kind; that of the housemaid,



who, this morning, on her knees, scrubbed clean our neighbour’s doorstep or our own; and so on, up to the ministry of a true High Priest, or the faithful life-work of a righteous King. To him all this is sacred; may it be to us too! Again, Carlyle perpetually strives to bring to our remembrance this vital truth, that all things are under the dominion of divine law, and not least, the thoughts and doings of men. Man is no landlord here below, but a tenant only, one of the old sort, a frank or free tenant, bound to be his “Lord’s man, of life and limb and earthly worship,”—nay, and of heavenly worship. He is not here to do his own will, but Another’s will, which more or less he must therefore do, and, if he leaves it undone, it will be surely done for him, that is, against him. There is nothing Carlyle asserts more often or more earnestly than “This is the Law, and the eternal laws must be obeyed!” “My friend,” writes he, in the shrill sardonic manner of his Latter-day Pamphlets, “do you think, had the united Posterity of Adam voted, and since the Creation done nothing but vote, that three and three were seven,—would this have altered the laws of arithmetic; or put to the blush the solitary Cocker, who continued to assert privately that three and three were six? I consider, not. And is arithmetic, think you, a thing more fixed by the Eternal, than the laws of justice are, and what the right is of man towards man? The builder of this world was Wisdom and Divine Foresight, not Folly and Chaotic Accident. Eternal Law is silently present, everywhere and everywhen.” (Parliaments, p. 26.)

“Well, we all know that,” answers one of the children of this world, “why tell us of it? of course it’s true.” True indeed it is; but unfortunately that is no reason why it should be believed. And the sin of this time is, that in a degree rarely precedented, men in high places and men in low have in the matter of truth and justice forgotten that there is a law, or only half believe it. Else, why would a writer, not unpopular, (Testis mearum centimanus Gyges Sententiarum!) preface a passage, one of the most impressive and faithful in his works, with such a sentence as this: “That honesty is the best policy, is a maxim which we firmly believe to be generally correct,” ( “generally correct!” Good God! are there any exceptions then?) “even with respect to the temporal interest of individuals; but with respect to societies, the rule is subject to still fewer exceptions;” (there are exceptions, then, it seems?) “and that, for this reason, that the life of societies is longer than the life of individuals.” ( Macaulay’s Essay on Clive.) Or why, in another essay ( Essay on Von Ranke), does the same not unpopular author, hint that transubstantiation is a lie, yet tell us that it has a fair chance of immortality in this earth, (which is certainly God’ s kingdom, or only probably so?) and that the Papacy, though an admitted imposture, “may exist in undiminished vigour, when some traveller from New Zealand, shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s?” A sorry faith is this, the faith only of a Mr. Mistrust; who, we hope will nevertheless, reach Heaven at last, and there, if not before, find his “exceptions” to be Divine judgments out at secret compound interest, most surely paid in this world in authentic coin of one kind or another. Let us, however, be just to him, and judge him, as Carlyle would have us judge every man, by his merits, not by his defects. Very grateful would we be to him for all his bright, laborious services: even in this unlucky sentence of his just quoted, the fancy is clear and startling, and bids us smile good-humouredly, an invitation which we will not be churlish enough to refuse; and the confession that the outer fashion of even dear old England’s



truth and glory must pass away, is a thought of pathos and humility that shall check our spiritual pride. Faith is the proper comeliness and joy of man; the bright colours which he should carry ever flying in his path; the trusty rudder which should guide his course: and Macaulay’s faith, we must say, is but a little one. But Macaulay is not the only tail-less fox amongst us. Alas! we are a company of poor, snub-tailed creatures! As spiritual beings, which verily we are, the plague-spot of Unbelief is upon us all; like the small-pox, searing our native beauty, grievously affecting our eyesight.

Nevertheless, our reader, I hope, does so far agree with Carlyle, and accept his faith in the enduring kingship of God quite unreservedly. Already then, as a sentinel keeping watch on the confines of Belief, he has received the first of Carlyle’s messengers into the camp, and has reverently presented arms to him, as one indubitably authorized to take supreme command. But now, peering into the gloom, he descries two strangers of more questionable aspect approaching; marching proudly along, hand in hand, just as if they had a good title to come! Briskly, for a fine young soldier is our reader, briskly he rings out his challenge, “Ho! Who goes there?” “ A Friend! A Friend!” “Advance friends, and give the countersign!” “ Might is Right, and Hero-Worship!” “Hicoccolorum! that was not the watch-word my corporal gave me,” thinks the honest man; so down goes his musket to the charge. These must surely be mere emissaries from the enemy, the prince of darkness and idolatry! The strangers submit to be questioned; the musket is discharged into the air; the corporal comes bustling up, and is, at first, for shooting them out of hand; but the sentinel, struck by the earnest, manly looks of both, pleads for them, and reference is finally made to the new commander; when lo! one of them at least forthwith turns out to be as he said, a friend, ay, and a very old and true friend, the inseparable ally of the Commander, come almost direct from the Generalissimo himself, and henceforth to be a great accession to the camp.

And now, dropping metaphor, let us in sober language examine into the doctrine: “Might is Right;” which has been the subject of so much accusation against Carlyle; deification of mere force; blind idolatry of success, &c. &c. Not that these accusations appear much in print, because people are afraid to match their “tailor’s bodkin” against his “Ithuriel spear,” at least in public; but in conversation, one hears again and again these perverse objections.

To explain first of all the terms used: Might is taken by Carlyle to mean any force of whatsoever kind, resident in things or men, certainly including the highest kind of force; and Right he uses in its true and, proper sense, a something ordained ( rectum), not an independent privilege by any means, for Carlyle denies any such at all to exist, but either a duty, or its reciprocal, a due, prescribed;—which may often be far from a pleasure to either party, as for instance, killing and being killed. And by the phrase, might is right, must not be understood, Might makes Right (though Carlyle may possibly sometimes use this loose form of expression —I don’t recollect any instance), as if Might had any creative power of its own underived, and this Universe were only a complicated machine; but rather that Might and Right are interchangeable terms, because everlastingly, and in every case, co-existent. Indeed, to speak plainly at once the very heart of the matter, this proposition of Carlyle’s, Might is Right, is founded in his belief that God is the maker of all, that He makes and gives nothing in vain, but to every gift of power assigns an exactly corresponding duty or right. The formula may appear strange to us, because the truth is stated in its naked



result; it is uncredited because we do not reflect upon it, or because we do not practically believe what it enunciates. For that old line of Homer:

• “ εί μάλα καρτερός έσσι, θεός που σοί τό γ’ εδωκευ .”

• “If exceeding strong thou art, surely ’twas God that gave thee that,”

is really undeniably true, and so are these sacred words, not unfamiliar to us all: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” Carlyle’s formula, rightly interpreted, is the very same thing in other words. The doctrine then is true, and as being truth, must be more and more recognised and really believed, until it finally become universal. Yet it is not to be expected, that these terms of Carlyle’s, though they are philosophically accurate, and though their pithy compact form and quick echo are most proverb-like, will be popularly accepted. For the word Might to the vulgar, signifies mere animal force, and has no spiritual meaning, especially in these days, when a strong arm is not so important as it once was, and has, in consequence, lost somewhat of its reverence in the eyes of men; and moreover, pitiful fallacies are abroad, embodied in such expressions as “amiable weakness,” “good-nature,” and the like. So that this truth, it is likely, will be more often approached from the other side, that of Right, a word which, notwithstanding the many perversions and degraded narrowing of its meaning, still exercises a hallowed spell upon the ear. However, there is some practical worth in the form Carlyle uses, which the reader, at least, will do well to consider. It is just this: that a man’s notions of his rights, the infinite number of pleasant things he is entitled to, is vast and generally quite irreducible to practice; but, on the other hand, every one knows that his mights are limited, and must conform themselves to the order of things about him. Or the reader may learn this from Carlyle’s own mouth: “The rights of man are little worth ascertaining in comparison to the mights of man; to what portion of his rights he has any chance of being able to make good! The accurate final rights of man lie in the far deeps of the ideal, where the Ideal weds itself to the Possible, as the philosophers say. The ascertainable temporary rights of man vary not a little, according to place and time. They are known to depend much on what a man’s conviction of them are. The Highland wife, with her husband at the foot of the gallows, patted him on the shoulder, (if there be historical truth in Joseph Miller,) and said, amid her tears,‘Go up, Donald, my man; the Laird bids ye.’ ”— Chartism, p. 46.

The story is not quite convincing, is it? nor is the prelude to it either quite satisfying; especially if we are, as more or less we all are, in the predicament of poor Donald; and so some further explanation may be required; for once more, the words seem strange to us, very strange. That “Right is Might” is a proposition gloriously true, all men admit in theory, certainly all who are earnestly engaged in what they know to be a worthy work. But can Wrong be Might? For if not, then, since there is no tertium quid to right and wrong, Might is and must be Right. Now Carlyle asserts and insists that wrong never can be might, but as the devil, its master, with all his cunning could make nothing, not even a rope, and strictly speaking is a very incapable, a mere destroyer, so wrong can do nothing either, but only undo, mar, or hinder a good thing; can never really succeed, but only seem to succeed, must certainly in due time, still more certainly in eternity, come to its proper issue, zero. Let us take the most adverse case conceivable. Courvoisier murders his master, Lord William; he does his work, as he thinks, most effectually, with the might of deadly midnight cunning,



the might of his right hand, the might of sharp steel; and we will say, (no impossible case) is not hanged in consequence, but lives and dies to all appearance very comfortably. Was might right here? . . . Nay, before verdict, it is well to use a little of your large discourse, looking before and after. That red hand is connected with the whole man, the man with all men; that deed with the whole future history of the world. The world is alive, and did not stop spinning on that fatal night, nor did the heavenly laws cease their fulfilment. Reflect a moment, and you will see; in truth, it was not the strength of the man, but the absence of strength, that caused that seeming deed; a little more true strength and the revengeful passion, the cruel hand would have been stayed; the deed moreover, he thought he did, was not a doing, but merely an undoing of something, the removal of Lord William from a life mortal and immortal, to an immortal one only; while the real final result is good, entirely good; the dross is all purged away, even the contagion which belongs to every evil thing, and the good remains for ever.

For what is the final result? One cannot, except imperfectly, understand, far less measure it; partly, however, it is a declaration of what human forethought and the human right hand may do with nobler purpose; but chiefly, it is that which was caused by the efficacy of some other and greater might than what appeared; namely, in the wretched man himself, unspeakable remorse, or still more painful, barrenness of soul; and in all other men, horror of his wickedness. In fine, an assertion of justice and of right! Thus, even in this most untoward instance, we see Might is Right, and that this is a truth indissolubly connected with no less truths than these: that man is a SPIRIT; that time is lost in eternity; that the good and true alone exist; that the Universe is a living unity, and its Ruler is the Just God.

Forgive, kind reader, my choosing such an unpleasant example; and as a sweet afterthought, read these words of Carlyle: “The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not They, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them, with which they fought unprevailing; they (the ethereal God-given force that dwelt in them, and was their self) have now shuffled off that heavy environment, and are free and pure; their life-long battle, go how it might, is all ended, with many wounds or with fewer; they have been recalled from it, and the once harsh-jarring battle-field has become a silent awe-inspiring Golgotha and Gottesacker (Field of God!)” Miscell, iii. 12.

But to return, though we have scarcely wandered. Far more manifestly is the saying true, and therefore to more minds an irresistible and joyful belief, when the apparent as well as the real might is doing work for the cause of Right. The sturdy arm of the labourer wielding plough or hammer, the stroke of the noble warrior, the sentence of the just judge, the convincing thought of the gifted thinker, the strong will of the wise ruler—these are Right, and sooner rather than later all men know them to be so. Many shrink from confessing the universal truth, because they feel the world is a world of contradiction, but happily in many and in most cases, their practical reason teaches them truly. Good people! they were not intended to be philosophers, and to have theories, or at least to be conscious of them, but to live a wise and true life from hour to hour.

Our great “Might is Right” is beleaguered by many Lilliputian enemies, but they are filled most with pious rage, when he takes the form of Intellectual Power; for there is not a Lilliputian but knows that Carlyle never



means that brute force is to reign over us supreme; whereas many, being well aware how the thing called “Cleverness” is worshipped amongst us in modern times, and perhaps doing a little in that sort themselves, think he too bows his knee to this Baal. They could not make a greater mistake, the Lilliputians. No writer so incessantly as Carlyle, smites, sears with hot iron, and does all manner of execution upon this shallow, pretentious quality, which he calls the Vulpine Intellect, or Quackery, or on the respect commonly paid to it, which he calls Quack-worship. They are both in his opinion counterfeits, and therefore utterly condemnable; but the counterfeits of what? The one, of the most precious gift given to man, true Intellect, Talent, or by whatever name we name our thinking faculty; the other of man’s most important duty, Reverence, obedience to the truly wise. By Intellect, where he uses the term, Carlyle means “the understanding heart,” which penetrates the “open secret,” which through the external forms of things discerns their essence, and so knows the inner laws which govern them, and the laws which must govern men in dealing with them; or (hardest and highest of all) which sees the true God-ordained relations of man to man, and the methods which must be employed on each occasion to realize them. This faculty, he asserts, and oh how earnestly, how perpetually! must be reverenced above all things, must be unweariedly sought for, and when found, joyfully recognised, and with all speed promoted to rule over the affairs of men. Carlyle, therefore, does not divorce intellect from goodness; he indissolubly weds them, or rather declares them indissolubly wedded by a Higher than he. “Truly, a thinking man,” he writes, “is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through the Nether Empire.”— Sartor, p. 132. (Or read the chapter in Chartism, called “Rights and Mights.”) The phrase “Intellect,” I know, sounds not celestial, but earth-born, and Carlyle himself would admit how inadequate it or any other word is to express the thing signified; indeed he is not bigoted to it at all, but rings the change upon such phrases as the Able, the Wise, the Gifted, the Seeing man, the Hero, always, pray observe, where possible, treating of men, not of qualities. After all said in the last hundred years, including all by the great Coleridge, the qualities spoken of, as Intellectual or Moral, Reason, Understanding, Conscience, heart and head, are by no means integral factors of man’s being; on the contrary, man’s being is a prime number, and such terms as these, though intelligible enough, express distinctions between things never altogether distinct, and are used chiefly by metaphysicians or by men living in an age whose spirit is metaphysical. Thus in the Bible knowledge is constantly used to signify the wisdom of holiness; and Plato, after all his investigations, comes to the conclusion that virtue is an έπιστήμη or faculty of knowing. For the ultimate question to be asked is this, What is it that perceives the manifold laws of God? To which we answer, The whole man; not a part of him can be spared. His senses five, his brave heart, or his logical faculty, his spiritual vision, or that mystery of mysteries we call the will,—we want them all, for the greatest or the least work, to make it true and complete. The man is One.

Oh to go back for one instant from Carlyle to the world! The world condemns Carlyle for his “Might is Right,” and calls him idolator; but what sort of reading does the world like, distributing solid rewards accordingly? Macaulay, Times’ leaders, Opposition speeches, and other mighty clever things more or less unconscionable; things in great measure, as it appears to me, manifesting that seeming Might



which is without Right. Is this a fact, reader? or is it not? Truly a sincere, wise, and consistent world, that thinks it knows black from white,—and does not!

“Might is Right” we may now say with Carlyle, is universally true; true in nature and in man, and even in God, though Might and Right here merge in the Author of both; is not His name the All-mighty, the All-just One? It is true in Nature, as exhibited, not only in its loveliest and most enduring forms, as the sustained glory of the heavens, and the grand fixity of the earth, but no less in things transient, terrible, hateful, and even disgusting; in the breath of the summer wind, and the flush of the sunset cloud; in the destroying down-rush of the lightning, and the overwhelming of the merciless sea; in the pestilential river-fog, the deadly serpent’s fang, the voracity of the rat, and the foul busyness of vermin; in the forces both of life and death; in all these the thoughtful mind will acknowledge a Divine appointment, a sacredness, goodness, and even blessedness; far more shall it acknowledge the ordained might and right of man to rule over all these, to make them his servants, or to war with them either defensively or in aggression even to extermination. But the most difficult and noble requirement is to see that the law holds good in all the manifold complexity of man’s dealing with man; to see with unerring eye and know with undoubting heart, that, looking backward over history, where-ever a good result has been achieved, so much virtue, so much Divine strength was possessed by those who did that thing, and wherever there was a true strength, there also, whether now visible or not, there followed an everlasting fruit; that looking forward, what we can do, that we ought and shall do; and so far exactly and no further, as the work we undertake is true and just, will it succeed, so far as it is false and sinful will it utterly fail. The main difficulty lies in the application; in discerning what results are real, what only apparent; what is verily might, and what weakness; what is right, and what is wrong. Truly this is a difficult task! It is because Carlyle, especially in his maturer works, has with the utmost daring chosen the most difficult cases to decide; cases in which terrible violence in the war between good and evil has been or is to be done; has chosen out for judgment the deeds of the middle ages, the life of an Oliver Cromwell, with his doings at Tredah, in the Long Parliament, and elsewhere; the phenomena of conquerors, of revolutionists in thought and politics; the practice of slavery, of government, of penal law; and has in these given a verdict contrary to the popular opinion, that he is so loudly condemned. Just so a Turner, while he worked in browns and greys and well-known things, found favour with all men; but when he chose for himself sunsets and rainbows and all the glorious host of heaven, his critics blinded with excess of light called him mad. Like Turner, Carlyle loves to face the sun.

It is not to be supposed that in these high matters Carlyle has quite convinced the world, though really it seems to me in much he is convincing it. If what he says be true, he must be! Here and there victory has already declared itself for him. As an example of the way in which he can now and then extinguish an ugly phantom, and set the public (true-hearted after all!) laughing and rejoicing over the discovery of its own error, like any young prince in faery tale at the transformation of some loathly hag into a lovely princess, all ready and willing to be loved, I can give no happier instance than his reading of Boswell’s



true character ( Miscell. iii). “Corsica Boswell” had many faults, it is true, and Carlyle allows them all, describing them with picturesque accuracy and force by no means inferior to Macaulay’s; but Bozzy had one virtue, a great and in his days an extremely rare one, a deep reverence for living wisdom; he felt Johnson to be a wise man, and so loved and honoured him exceedingly. For which, as Carlyle teaches us, we also should love and honour Bozzy himself, instead of sneering at him; and know besides, that he wrote a good book just because he had this virtue in him, and for no other reason; his vices, every one of them, being all against both him and us. If the reader disagrees with this, if he too will not laugh and rejoice, I can only say I am sorry for him. He is unworthy of the lovely lady; the hag then be his portion, for wed he must! In the language of modern episcopal anathema, I pray for him.

There is no reason why Carlyle or we should flinch from the full consequences of this doctrine, “Might is Right,” but on the contrary, every reason why we should pursue them to the utmost verge of thought. Indeed we cannot help it if we would. The result then is, that the necessary condition of all just judgment of the past, and of all effectual work for the present and future, is to know that this world is, as it was made, essentially very good. (Read on, please!) I know this is a hard doctrine to be compassed and received, as indeed all men acknowledge the presence of evil in God’s world to be a mystery. Yet again, it must be said it is true. Dare any one find fault with the Maker of the world? No one; not even the friend of Goethe’s youth, the one-eyed disloyal philosopher, ^* if he would seriously reflect upon it. The world is very good. All that we behold and experience is full of blessings; even our sins and sufferings and sorrows we feel to be His judgments, our deserved trials, containing within them gifts for higher spiritual attainments than we have yet reached. This has been the faith of all good men since the beginning of time, and is the faith of every man in his holiest, happiest mood. Without it, what hope were there in the world? Yet a hope we have, though a hidden hope; “behind the veil, behind the veil.”

Carlyle quotes thus, with loving approbation, from the fair Jewess Rahel, the spiritual queen of Germany: “So long as we do not take even the injustice which is done us, and which forces even the burning tears from us; so long as we do not take even this for just and right, we are in the thickest darkness, without dawn.” ( Misc. iv. 188.) And thus he writes himself in a Latter-day pamphlet: “The free man is he who is loyal to the laws of this universe; who in his heart sees and knows, across all contradictions, that injustice cannot befall him here; that except by sloth and cowardly falsity, it is not possible here.” ( Parliaments, p. 44.)

Is this thought, then, quite unfamiliar to the reader? Does it not remind him of words he heard long ago in his childhood? “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” Well for him if he has taken them to heart! If he has not, let him do so at once. So advises him a wise man, who has seen many years, and thought much,—Thomas Carlyle.

Let it not, however, be judged from all this that Carlyle is a mere Fatalist, perhaps no man is less so. As he believes in Necessity, so likewise he believes in Free Will. This of course involves a flat logical contradiction; but what of that, when the thing itself is a contradiction, a mystery (above logic therefore), cannot be even so



much as stated without contradiction? —as two succeeding verses of an Apostle might show us. Yet it can be translated into a certainty, which shall be satisfying. How? By Action based upon acceptance of both terms. Carlyle does accept both terms; and while affirming that Good is evermore with us, he affirms likewise that Evil is with us for the present, and must be incessantly warred against. Is it not enough to remind the reader that Carlyle is known chiefly as a denouncer, that he is for hanging our supreme scoundrel, and scoundrels generally, and urges us to do it with all speed? So far from denying evil, he greatly enlarges the common scope of the word. He really thinks a lie to be accursed, were it ever so little a one; stockjobbing he abominates; the stockjobber he would not raise on a column high, but “sink him in a coal-shaft rather:” submitting to be ruled by little men he calls a national crime; money-worship is with him mammon-worship; contentedness with hearsay belief, passive treason; cloth-subserviency, service to Belial; and idleness he holds to be flat rebellion against the Most High. The difference between him and common men is, that he looks upon evil as sin against the Just God, and not against the comfort of men. Service to Him he passionately recommends, and urges with voice of command, entreaty, expostulation, denunciation, with laughter and with tears, the duty of purpose, of choice, of earnest, earnest work. “Know thy work and do it.” “Work in well-doing, like a star unhasting yet unresting.” “Work while it is called day, for the night cometh:” are his favourite maxims. And in one place he thus writes: “With the ring of necessity we are all begirt; happy he for whom a heavenly sun brightens it into a ring of duty, and plays round it with beautiful prismatic diffractions!” ( Sartor, p. 107.) Indeed, one of his chief aims, as I shall hereafter show, is to recall us, chiefly such as you and me, reader, from the painful barren process of questioning, and talking, and sentimentalising about all things, which only breeds incessant grumbling (disloyalty, sin! the Englishman’s privilege?) to the fruitful, joyful process of work; one condition only being prescribed, that men first learn the stern laws under which they have to work. So Carlyle is not a Fatalist! No, Mr. Quarterly Reviewer, no! I for one, am ready to kiss the book upon it! not a thumb only, as is the wont of some reviewers.

Inseparably connected with all the foregoing is the faith that a good thing never dies. ^* In one form or another, and always in many forms, it lives and bears fruit for evermore. The words of One that walked in Galilee eighteen hundred years ago, what have they not done for mankind, what are they not doing and to do? Or again, take this example, which for being modern is not the less true. Carlyle, perhaps twenty years ago, thinks his brave thought in his quiet London home, and utters it in print. I, unknown to him, read it, and write this article in our young Magazine; another, most likely unknown to either, reads what is here written, and it may be a spark of thought, faithfully transmitted from the bright parent flame, lights up the heart of that reader, as he sits in his comfortable arm-chair. The breath of God is not in vain! That thought, if it be true, has might and right, and that eternally; it is now fairly in the world, incorporated into human life; qualifies, even if we know it not, henceforward every thought and action of the reader’s life and mine, and from thence colours the whole history of the world. More wondrous still, it would have ultimately come to its goal by another route, if never uttered at all, so only that it had been thought. Strange and beautiful mystery! Even so a single flower



produces often a thousand seeds, which the winds of heaven (not at random either) carry hither and thither, far and wide, unknown to the flower and to all men, but the wide earth receives them—and who shall tell the end thereof? Or take a stone, big or little, but the larger the better, and pitch it into yonder lake or pond, or puddle. First comes the splash, then the silent ever-widening circles, and then final—rest? No! the rotation of the vast world itself is altered thereby; so the mathematicians say, and I believe them.

Good, truth, fact, do never die. A precious thought to whoso thinks of either past or present! Still more to him who looks, as we all must now and then look, into the dim future, near or far away. For with no doubtful prophecy it tells us of the continuous progress and ultimate perfecting of man; that the result is only a matter of time (though what is Time? Never mind, it is either Time or nothing). The words, “Thy kingdom come,” rise on our lips, and those other words, that “for the elects’ sake those days,” the days of trial and battle, “shall be shortened;” and to the inmost soul of every man is revealed the blessed truth, that by his faithful lifelong efforts some small portion of that kingdom may be realized, and the days shall be shortened. Ah, it is Carlyle that helps us to feel this! And further, he teaches us that feeling unfollowed by doing is worth but little, and talking without doing is worse than worthless.

Most readily shall it be admitted by me that all that I have said, or even all that Carlyle has said, does not prove these things; and in fact, that they cannot be proven at all; also, that speculation such as we have been pursuing does not very much help us, chiefly because of this, that a man cannot be always contemplating his relation to the whole universe, but has to act and judge every day of his life, at a moment’s notice, with only hard present fact staring him in the face. However, as the need is practical and perpetual, so a remedy is provided accordingly; not one of argument or speculation, but this, a righteous life, which is open to all men; so only can a man’s judgment of himself and his brother-men be made true; so only an enduring blessed belief be built up in his heart, and his work be both descried and done. This too is Carlyle’s doctrine, one that he asserts, and keeps unceasingly asserting. “Most true is it,” he writes in the Sartor, (p. 211), “that Doubt of any sort cannot be removed, except by Action. On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness and uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn ripen into day, lay this other precept to heart, which to me was of invaluable service, ‘Do the duty which lies nearest to thee, that which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer!’ ”

Perhaps it may be a satisfaction to the reader if, by a reference or two, I show how some of these Carlylean thoughts, which have taken me so long to set forth, are connected with the thoughts of other inspired men; for the wise we find of all time are tolerably agreed in the main; nay, so far as they think truly they exactly coincide, or beautifully harmonize. I suggest, then, to the sympathizing reader, the old Greek word for the world, Kosmos, or Order, the perpetual doctrine of the Old Testament respecting Divine law, Divine judgments, and God-given might ruling and to rule society; the doctrine of the New Testament (which chiefly treats of the inner man) speaking of that which is to rule in our hearts, and to bring every thought into captivity; (mark the word!) then the mediæval trial by combat, founded on deep faith, but faith



without patience; then Milton’s Ode to Time; and for modern writers, much of our wise, devout Maurice; much of Kingsley, who, under Maurice, as general of a division, is like Ney, “le plus brave des braves;” much of Ruskin, who has taught us the lesson that Art too is no field for arbitrary taste, but a glorious empire, subject to Divine law; then for poets (the chief teachers of our time), Wordsworth and his Ode to Duty; our beloved Tennyson, who has travailed for himself and us not a little in these world problems, take especially his In Memoriam, Two Voices, Love and Duty, and the Golden Year; and, lastly, these fine lines of Browning:—

• “ Each deed thou hast done
• Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e’en as the sun,
• Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface,
• Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace
• The results of his past summer prime— so each ray of thy will,
• Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill
• The whole people, the countless, with ardour, till they too give forth
• A like cheer to their sons, who in turn fill the south and the north
• With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in the past.”

And with all these, take two grand specimens of Might is Right, from Carlyle himself. The first is from the French Revolution, in the chapter called the “General Overturn.” “Still bread comes not. The harvest is reaped and garnered, yet still we have no bread. Urged by despair and hope, what can drudgery do, but rise, as predicted, and produce the general overturn? Fancy, then, some five full-grown millions of such gaunt figures, with their haggard faces ( figures hâves), in woollen jupes, with copper-studded leather girths, and high sabots, starting up to ask, as in forest-roarings, their washed upper classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question—How have ye treated us? how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames over the nightly summer-sky. This is the feeding and leading we have had of you; EMPTINESS—of pocket, of stomach, of head, and of heart. Behold there is nothing in us, nothing but what nature gives her wild children of the desert: ferocity and appetite, strength grounded on hunger. Did ye mark, among your Rights of Man, that man was not to die of starvation while there was bread reaped by him? It is among the Mights of Man.”

The other is from Past and Present, the glorious chapter called Plugson of Undershot: it is on war, and introduced only by way of illustration. “Fighting, as I often say to myself, fighting with steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than working, take it how you will; yet even of fighting, in religious Abbot Samson’s days, see what a feudalism there had grown; ‘a glorious chivalry,’ much besung down to the present day. Was not that one of the impossiblest things? Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth and hell-fire eyes, hacking one another’s flesh, converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did a chivalry come out of that, how anything that was not hideous, scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth considering by and by. I remark for the present, two things: first, that the fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a fighting without cause, but more or less with cause. Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier, his life ‘a battle and a march’ under the right general. It is for ever indispensable for a man to fight: now with necessity, with barrenness, scarcity,



with puddles, bogs, tangled forests, unkempt cotton; now also with the hallucinations of his poor fellow-men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor fellow-man; make him claim over me rights which are not his. All fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of strengths, each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words, the justest,—of mights, which do in the long run, and for ever will in this just universe, in the long run, mean rights. In conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies off into dust; this process ended, appears the imperishable, the true and exact. And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful operations, a noble devout-hearted chevalier will comfort himself, and an ignoble godless bucanier and Choctaw Indian: victory is the aim of each. But deep in the heart of the noble man it lies for ever legible, that as an Invisible Just God made him, so will and must God’s justice, and this only, were it never so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and enterprises, and battles whatsoever. What an influence! ever present—like a soul in the rudest Caliban of a body; like a ray of heaven, an illuminative creative Fiat-Lux, in the wastest terrestrial chaos! Blessed Divine influence, traceable even in the horror of battle-fields and garments rolled in blood; how it ennobles even the battle-field; and in place of a Choctaw massacre, makes it a field of honour! A battle-field too is great: considered well, it is a kind of quintessence of labour; labour distilled into its utmost concentration; the significance of years of it compressed into an hour. Here too thou shalt be strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst prevail. Here too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul; thou shalt dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life; in rage thou shalt remember mercy, justice; thou shalt be a knight and not a Choctaw, if thou wouldst prevail! It is the rule of all battles, against hallucinating fellow-men, against unkempt cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be, which a man in this world has to fight. Howel Davies dyes the West Indian seas with blood, piles his decks with plunder, approves himself the expertest seaman, the daringest sea-fighter; but he gains no lasting victory,—lasting victory is not possible for him; not, had he fleets larger than the combined British navy all united with him in bucaniering: he, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel; he strikes down his man, yes, but his man, or his man’s representative, has no notion to lie struck down; neither, though slain ten times, will he keep so lying; nor has the universe any notion to keep him so lying! On the contrary, the universe and he have, at all moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out at last to St. Helena, the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men; but what profits it? He has one enemy never to be struck down, nay two enemies: mankind and the Maker of men. On the great scale, or on the small, in fighting of men, or fighting of difficulties, I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies; it is not the bucanier, it is the hero only that can gain victory, that can do more than seem to succeed. These things will deserve meditating, for they apply to all battle and soldiership, all struggle and effort whatsoever in this fight of life. It is a poor gospel, cash-gospel, or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear tone, uncontradictable, carry conviction to all hearts, for ever keep men in mind



of these things. Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a great degree, forgotten them.”

Reader, if you are a brave man, as I doubt not, methinks these words must somewhat stir you. Perhaps ecstatic thoughts swell in your heart, and you know not whether to bow the head and worship, or to shout aloud in joy and triumph: both are good, but there is a method better still,—Up and prove the truth, by deed and deeds!

All this while, we have left a friend of ours, vainly uttering, “Hero-worship, hero-worship,” in the charge of the corporal of the watch. (Who shall stand for this corporal? The editor of a religious journal, an ex-Constitutionalist Minister; a great man of Exeter, or St. Martin’s, or St. George’s Hall, or alas! saddest of all, a respectable father of a family, who is somewhat stupid? there are many candidates.) Well, the brave fellow is much suspected, being taken by the corporal and others for a stray fanatic from the distant land of the dark ages; however, he is humble and patient, for he knows his loyalty, yet a little downcast too, for he too would fain be believed. Let us hear what he has to say for himself, or as that may not be, what I can say for him.

Strictly speaking, Hero-worship is only the highest example of Might is Right. Carlyle knows and feels deeply that there is a Lawgiver and a Law for the world; above all, for that which is infinitely the noblest of the created, Man. Mankind cannot be a mere aggregate of men; splintered up into fragments and units, by some blind force at random, and driven pell-mell hither and thither by passion, chance, circumstance; but for every man and for every society of men, at every moment of time, and in every possible conjuncture of circumstance, there must be a thing ordained to be done, a right to be fulfilled, and a might whereby this is to be accomplished. In short, he believes that every man comes into the world under orders , a covenanted servant, and continues such until he dies. So far as the appointed order is obeyed, all will be well with him; so far as it is not obeyed, neglected or mistaken, punishment of him and his must be the inevitable consequence. As I have said before, this truth is much forgotten now-a-days; every man of the smallest reflection must have observed, that most things are treated as questions of opinion only, to be determined by “voting, counting of heads upon the matter;” and there is a general tendency to let things take their course, “for experience will teach every man, and bring all right in the end.” In a sense this is true, but before that end come, what will befall? Sin and sorrow countless on us and on our children! It is therefore, thinks Carlyle, of the utmost necessity that we learn the true order which we have to follow. Deep meditation on the nature of man, his wondrous gifts and faculties; deep meditation on the nature of society; the voices of the great past, the sad present, lead him infallibly to this conclusion, that man must be governed by his brother-man. Governed, not in this or that thing only, but as far as may be, in every operation of his own being, in every possible relation to others; governed in his life. The direction of his outward action is one of the foremost needs, but by no means only or chief; the rule and guidance of his soul and intellect are no less necessary; and all must continuously be brought nearer to perfection. Accordingly, in the judgment of Carlyle, to every man born into the world attaches one or both of these two duties, ruling or obeying his fellow-man, visible there before him. Much, very much of these duties he performs unconsciously, for the mights, like the ministries of day and night, work often silently; but at all times men have to be thinking and trying



what they may do to fulfil this work of government; and continually, in ever-varying form the problem arises, demanding quick solution, “Who are to be Governors? How shall they be chosen? What shall they do?” Carlyle says, Might is Right, and the might of truth, wisdom, valour, is ever the mightiest; and your Governors shall be true, wise, brave men, in a word, heroes. And they shall be worshipped! Flat burglary! cries some Dogberry or other, meaning, I suppose, blasphemy. In truth, it must be admitted that Carlyle is fond of a paradox, if only by way of a whoo-hoop to startle away weak-minded people come to stare,—startle them away, or else convince them by storm; but if the noun worship be taken in its native sense of worth-ship, and the tribute due to worth-ship, and the verb be construed accordingly, there is little harm in the word. Carlyle, however, has a further meaning, for he always insists that human worth is sacred, a true divine emanation, which commands infinite, yes, infinite awe and reverence from those who can recognise it; which awe and reverence are to take shape, not in feeling only, but in dutiful, loving obedience. This is for those who can see and acknowledge human worth, who cannot but be good men; but for those who will not acknowledge it, they too shall worship, they shall be forced to worship! or at least to submit; compulsion, chastisement, even death shall be theirs, if they do not. The rod for the back of fools, for those who will not be wise! To inflict such unsparingly is the duty of the wise Governor, and to suffer such is the due of those who will not obey him; strictly, the appointed right of either party. This is further enforced by the thought that man is made in the image of God, and must realize his method of governing, so far as he can; a method of ever-watchful supervision, peremptory order, yet with large trustfulness; favour and blessedness to those who obey, terrible punishment to those who do not.

This applies most palpably to mere political government; but, mutatis mutandis, to all government whatsoever. As will be seen in our next chapter, Carlyle has a much larger scope for government than the reader (if he has not read Carlyle) is probably aware of.

Still, man is man; that is to say, imperfect, prone to abuse his powers, wilfully suffering what is baser in him to elude for a while the mastery of the divine. The cry is: We can’t get a just governor! See what a man of mischief is your despot! We can’t afford to trust him! We can’t trust anybody to rule over us. Let us ’bout ship and try the other tack, and see if we can prosper with no government, or as little as may be. Carlyle says, that this is what we have done in England, or been trying to do, for now almost two centuries; that it has proved a worse failure than ever; that it is now high time we should call all hands on deck, and ’bout ship once more; that we must strenuously endeavour to choose wise governors and trust them, or—.

Here, then, we have at length fairly arrived at a definite and practical doctrine of Carlyle’s, palpably at difference with the modern mind. For certainly these notions of government are not popular, which any one with insight into the time will confess, and as the reader may verify by asking himself, whether the following words do not faithfully describe a feeling very common amongst Englishmen: “What is the universally arrogated Virtue, almost the sole remaining Catholic Virtue of these days? For some half century it has been the thing you name, ‘Independence:’ suspicion of servility, of reverence for superiors, the very dog-leech is anxious to disavow.” And now, let him read on: “Fools!” cries Teufelsdröck (Carlyle), “were your Superiors worthy to govern, and you to obey,



reverence for them were your only possible freedom. Independence in all kinds is rebellion; if unjust rebellion, why parade it and everywhere prescribe it?” And does the reader think this fanciful? then let him consider another word of Teufelsdröck’s: “Know that there is in man a quite indestructible Reverence for whatsoever holds of Heaven, or even plausibly counterfeits such holding. Show the dullest clodpole, show the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself is actually here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and worship.”— Sartor. p. 273.

In olden time Service was not thought a disgrace. Read Sir John Froissart’s preface to his history, and you will see; or read those grand old oaths of Homage and Fealty as recorded for us in Lyttelton. Neither is it, if of the right kind, anything but honourable and delightful, were it ever so humble, for it is the fulfilment of order, which is the Divine law. There is perhaps, or certainly, no one who has not at some moment of his life felt the pride and joy of obeying one whom he really loved and honoured; a father, maybe, or a teacher, or master. And, considering how few lords there are, how little any man can have his own will, this would be a miserable world if it were otherwise. Yet in the teeth of this, modern theory, and even modern practice, so far as hunger, manifold desires, silent right instincts, and noble traditions do not compel us otherwise, asserts that Service is ignoble. This may be observed in the forms of dress and speech and outward ceremony which image so much of our inner thoughts. Footmen and coachmen of my acquaintance, though Thackeray and John Leech speak only too truly of their vanity for plush, are secretly ashamed of their service, and love to go out holiday-making to Greenwich in strict incognito; the Undergraduate dons his beaver whenever he may, or throws his gown over his arm, not for reasons of convenience only; Officers have ceased to be proud of Her Majesty’s uniform, and, parade done, cast it aside for the gentlemanly black frock-coat, which tells no tale of its owner, or, better still, for the shooting-coat, which says, “See, my master is a free man!” Yet a uniform, a fitting and distinctive badge of duty, is a pleasant, even a solemn sight to the simple-hearted, and ought to be to all, were it only the drayman’s red cap or the butcher’s blouse; still more if it is the scarlet robe of the judge, and the royal chain of honour round his neck. Again, in words and social ceremonies, think of our boastful “Free and Independent Electors,” and compare it with “my loving subjects” or “our Liege Lord” of earlier English history. Or think of our newly-coined phrase “Governor” for father, remembering that sons once Sirred their fathers, and would not sit down in their presence without permission asked and given; and that old ladies still alive, had in their girlhood to drop a curtsey when they entered the parlour, just as all men have still to salute Her Majesty’s quarter-deck. Or again, consider the term ‘Dons’ for college superiors, contrasting it with the requirements of our ancient statutes: or the opprobrious term “Parson” for a man once and even still for habit’s sake called ‘Reverend,’ while his Bishop was called ‘Right Reverend Father in God,’—‘Right Reverend Father in God!’—The difference is striking enough.

The fact, then, of this modern dislike and contempt for authority is obvious, and the immediate justification that suggests itself is that it is hard to trust to others interests so precious to us as life, property, liberty, belief. Yet the office, the necessity of trust in the world is great. Paley writes thus in his Moral Philosophy: “It is not considered how every hour of our lives we trust to and depend upon



others, and how impossible it is to stir a step, or, what is worse, to sit still a moment, without such trust and dependence. I am now writing at my ease, not doubting (or rather, never distrusting, and therefore never thinking about it,) that the butcher will send in the joint of meat which I ordered; that his servant will bring it; that my cook will dress it; that my footman will serve it up, and that I shall find it upon my table at one o’clock.” Truly Dinner is an important interest to an Arch-deacon, and to all men: yet here we find it committed to the care of alien hands, the hands of mere fallible, sinful mortals. That cook and footman and butcher of Paley’s we may be sure were men and women, and no more; and Paley was a fortunate householder, if at least once or twice in his life they did not deceive him: even if they never did, it was because he was wise enough to take some pains in choosing and managing them. True they were his servants, but in a sense they were governors too; one was queen of the kitchen; another king of the pantry. And we soon find this principle of wise choice and ample measure of trust is the only method by which any satisfactory work can be obtained, and the higher the work, the more necessity for wiser choice and also ampler trust. The Romans knew this, and if Hannibal was at the gates, would make one man Dictator, with powers of life and death in his hand. In military matters (human enterprises still) the same always holds good, and without it what would become of your armies and you? A wise Englishman also and a civilian knew this, one who lived not long ago,—Dr. Arnold. He insisted that he should have entire control of his school, and his demand was granted. The result has been a grand effective piece of work, for Rugby and for England.

Yet, for the most part, in all higher departments of human need and work, this principle is almost entirely disregarded, and even denied; in the State, the Church, the Professions, in Labour, and in Literature. The true reason must now be given; it is Carlyle’s. Men have long ceased to look earnestly for worth and true capacity; have in great part ceased to believe that good, wise, really able men exist and are to be found by searching for them; in a word, many have forgotten God, and deny Him. This is the way of the fool and the coward. “There’s lime in this sack, too,” says the old worldly poltroon; “there’s nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man . . . If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.” There have been too many such men and thinkers amongst us; but times are bettering; Carlyle himself is a living proof of that. The old faith in God and man must be revived once more, nay it is reviving. Blot out that faith, and the sun himself no longer shines for us in the heaven, and the earth is become a hell, full only of darkness and gnashing of teeth. But the sun is still in the heavens! And a voice cries, “Look up! Look up! Heart and Eye!”

Governors, then, are to be chosen and trusted; but by whom chosen and how? Carlyle again answers,“By wise men, and by the wisest methods they can devise.” Not by any machinery once discovered, and then set going for ever; but by men who can really discern and value worth, who know that men have both to act and to learn, and that the secret of Action is Order,



and of learning an open mind. These men shall choose your Rulers; and they shall establish a fit system, fit systems, and shall change them when the due time comes. Perhaps the reader thinks this Utopianism; he will be wiser if he thinks it counsel to labour after perfection, to rest satisfied with nothing less.

And Carlyle continues, That all that is great in the past has been done by great men commanding virtually or actually smaller men, and all that shall be great in the future must be done in like manner; that the character of the leaders chosen, and the method of choice adopted, do in the main exactly represent the character of those who follow them, whether men or nations. All these he asserts again and again as absolute truths, and applies them in a most rigorous, determined manner to the past and present of human action; to Literature, Belief, Politics, and Social Work of almost every kind. Of some of these truly surprising decisions I shall speak in the next chapter.

The reader, therefore, will do well to consider this doctrine, which Carlyle calls “Hero Worship;” it is his chief message to men.

Meanwhile, what does he think of it already? What does our Sentinel do? As he hesitates, in earnest voice I would whisper in his ear, “Present Arms!”. . . I think I hear the clanging of his firelock! And now let him carry and shoulder arms at his leisure, and tread, if he can, his beat in peace, until next May-day, when I hope Carlyle and he and I may meet again,—good friends all three.

Our age,” I read, “is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.” And truly it is as if some interval of time must always pass before we can take in all the magnitude of a man, or cycle, or event, just as interspace is needed by the eye before it can see proportion in visible objects, so that we never recognise in the slowly heaving sides of a great mountain, as we walk over it, what seemed in the distance so abrupt, terrible and majestic. And this severance of possession from enjoyment, and familiarity from comprehension, seems to me, in the breadth and depth of the losses it brings with it, one of the saddest curses that has followed on the Fall. We do, indeed, well to build the sepulchres of the fathers; yet I fear we should have slain some of them with scorn outright, and buried others in a far different kind of tomb had they lived now. Certainly, regarding how complacently we suffer the critic-fogs to come between us and God’s light, to our own eclipsing, strange fancies arise, sometimes, how the world’s pet names would fare if their owners were living now; if the men who ever said or did a noble thing, and having so done, were glad to die, and could do so with a certain majesty, were alive this day—all the dignity of utterance fretted into nervous speech, by reason of certain “long-necked geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise, Because their natures are little.” And, so far, the thought is entertaining, and may be followed to strange issues. But the fancy grows too horrible for definiteness, if we try to realize for a moment



how it had been with us, if He “Who at mid-watch ca, By the starlight naming a dubious name,” those ages long ago, had tarried till now to visit us. I protest that here the thought grows too terrible for completion. Yet we wrong ourselves daily in this self-immolation to the dead, in ever writing Mishnas to results and truths, that men of old arrived at because they looked forwards and not backwards. We are fit, I know, for better things than this; neither is nature so exhausted, that it has no need of us, for if this were so, we should never have been born. Let us take example from the sky. Is it this morning so very like the sky of yesterday, or any that we remember, so conservative of the old type that it cannot find a language for itself? It renews itself daily, and has not ceased to do so from the morning God spread it out for a covering to the earth. And in us also there are mines of measureless wealth, if we would rise up and work them; “for, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth,” and what has the past with all its glories and judgments, and grave counsels, to set beside the words “ a living man,” and to outweigh them?

Here stands one to the point at issue: no writer of Mishnas, nor binder of the sheaves of other men’s reaping; but one who has stood face to face with the mornings, and caught some new truth before the sun went down. Speaking, if ever man spoke, by the Spirit and approval of Heaven—truths pre-eminent and noble, most worthy to be believed by us: a good man confessedly, one deeply moved by things holy, unseen, eternal; counting everything on earth to be soluble only by reference to Heaven; seeing humanity bounded not in death but Godhead, temporality bounded, not in decay, but eternity; whose philosophy begins and ends with this, that “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” And withal, telling all this so grandly, that I question if the gift of language has more than once or twice reached such majesty and beauty. This also affording worthy credentials, if we accept it rightly. I find one saying of beautiful language, that it is “at once a commanding certificate, that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.” Why, there are passages so lovely, and utterly solemn in their quietness, and magnificent in the clash of words and roll of music, that should one ask another, the moment after the sound was gone, what he heard in them, he could answer only with Hamlet’s answer, “Words, words, words:” for they flame along the page till the very type grows beautiful with the names most honoured there, God and Truth, Faith and Christ, increasing like a chorus, with a “dominant’s persistence, till it must be answered to.” And all this with total abandonment to the truth spoken, no consciousness of having said the thing well, or desire of getting praise of men. You will not suffer this man, being such and much more than I can express, to go on his way, witnessed against by lying spirits, obscured for you, and darkened by critics, whose pitiful revenge would sacrifice truth, and conscience, and fair name, and anything, and everything, to wreak its little monthly vengeance; to be laughed at, even as St. Paul was once, for a madman; to go to his own place at the last, with a life embittered, and a death embalmed. True men and good, lovers of honesty and fair encounter, feel a righteous indignation at this, and cannot long endure it. And, although I am not so arrogant as to ask them to



believe me rather than adverse critics—not but that I believe firmly, for my own part, that true judgment in all things is to be attained soonest by the loving heart,—yet I have a certain confidence in appealing to them only to read and judg