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through them the faculties which he has not. He is not genuinely philosophical; the mediocrity of his earlier chapters on the ancient history of England proves this sufficiently; but his force of reasoning, his habits of classification and order, bestow unity upon his History. He is not a genuine artist; when he draws a picture, he is always thinking of proving something; he inserts dissertations in the most interesting and affecting places; he has neither charm, lightness, vivacity, nor finesse, but a marvellous memory, vast knowledge, an ardent, political passion, a great legal talent for expounding and pleading every cause, a precise knowledge of precise and petty facts which rivet the attention, charm, diversify, animate, and warm a narrative. He is not simply a popularizer; he is too ardent, too eager to prove, to conquer belief, to beat down his foes, to have only the limpid talent of a man who explains and expounds, with no other end than to explain and expound, which spreads light throughout, and never spreads heat; but he is so well provided with details and reasons, so anxious to convince, so rich in his expositions, that he cannot fail to be popular. By this breadth of knowledge, this power of reasoning and passion, he has produced one of the finest books of the age, whilst manifesting the genius of his nation. This solidity, this energy, this deep political passion, these moral prepossessions, these oratorical habits, this limited philosophical power, this somewhat uniform style, without flexibility or sweetness, this eternal gravity, this geometrical progress to a settled end, announce in him the English mind. But if he is English to the French, he is not so to his nation. The animation, interest, clearness, unity of his narrative, astonish them. They think him brilliant, rapid, bold; it is, they say, a French mind. Doubtless he is so, in many respects: if he understands Racine badly, he admires Pascal and Bossuet; his friends say that he used daily to read Mme. de Sévigné. Nay more, by the structure of his mind, by his eloquence and rhetoric, he is Latin; so that the inner structure of his talent places him amongst the classics; it is only by his lively appreciation of special, complex, and sensible facts, by his energy and fierceness, by the rather heavy richness of his imagination, by the depth of his coloring, that he belongs to his race. Like Addison and Burke, he resembles a strange graft, fed and transformed by

the sap of the national stock. At all events, this judgment is the strongest mark of the difference between the two nations. To reach the English intellect, a Frenchman must make two voyages. When he has crossed the first interval, which is wide, he comes upon Macaulay. Let him re-embark; he must accomplish a second passage, just as long, to arrive at Carlyle for instance-a mind fundamentally Germanic, on the genuine English soil.

CHAPTER FOURTH

PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY-CARLYLE

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WHEN we ask Englishmen, especially those under forty, who amongst them are the great thinkers, they first mention Carlyle; but at the same time they advise us not to read him, warning us that we will not understand him at all. Then, of course, we hasten to get the twenty volumes of Carlyle-criticism, history, pamphlets, fantasies, philosophy; we read them with very strange emotions, contradicting every morning our opinion of the night before. We discover at last that we are in presence of a strange animal, a relic of a lost family, a sort of mastodon, who has strayed in a world not made for him. We rejoice in this zoölogical good luck, and dissect him with minute curiosity, telling ourselves that we shall probably never find another like him.

PART I.-STYLE AND MIND

Section I. Carlyle's Obscurity and Crudeness

We are at first put out. All is new here-ideas, style, tone, the shape of the phrases, and the very vocabulary. He takes everything in a contrary meaning, does violence to everything, to expressions as well as to things. With him paradoxes are set down for principles; common-sense takes the form of absurdity. We are, as it were, carried into an unknown world, whose inhabitants walk head downwards, feet in the air, dressed in motley, as great lords and maniacs, with contortions, jerks, and cries; we are grievously stunned by these extravagant and discordant sounds; we want to stop our ears, we have a headache, we are obliged to decipher a new language. We see upon the table volumes which ought to be as clear as possible "The History of the French Revolution," for instance; and

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there we read these headings to the chapters: "Realized Ideals - Viaticum-Astræa Redux- Petition in HieroglyphsWindbags-Mercury de Brézé-Broglie the War-God." We ask ourselves what connection there can be between these riddles and such simple events as we all know. We then perceive that Carlyle always speaks in riddles. "Logic-choppers" is the name he gives to the analysts of the eighteenth century; "Beaver science" is his word for the catalogues and classifications of our modern men of science; "Transcendental moonshine" signifies the philosophical and sentimental dreams imported from Germany. The religion of the "rotary calabash means external and mechanical religion. He cannot be contented with a simple expression; he employs figures at every step; he embodies all his ideas; he must touch forms. We see that he is besieged and haunted by brilliant or gloomy visions; every thought with him is a shock; a stream of misty passion comes bubbling into his overflowing brain, and the torrent of images breaks forth and rolls on amidst every kind of mud and magnificence. He cannot reason, he must paint. If he wants to explain the embarrassment of a young man obliged to choose a career amongst the lusts and doubts of the age, in which we live, he tells you of

"A world all rocking and plunging, like that old Roman one when the measure of its iniquities was full; the abysses, and subterranean and supernal deluges, plainly broken loose; in the wild dim-lighted chaos all stars of Heaven gone out. No star of Heaven visible, hardly now to any man; the pestiferous fogs and foul exhalations grown continual, have, except on the highest mountain-tops, blotted out all stars: will-o'-wisps, of various course and colour, take the place of stars. Over the wild surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun-though visibly it is but a Chinese Lantern made of paper mainly, with candle-end foully dying in the heart of it." 2

Imagine a volume, twenty volumes, made up of such pictures, united by exclamations and apostrophes; even history-that

1 Because the Kalmucks put written prayers into a calabash turned by the wind, which in their opinion produces a perpetual adoration. In the

same way are the prayer-mills of Thibet used.

2 The " Life of John Sterling," ch. v.; "A Profession."

of the French Revolution-is like a delirium. Carlyle is a Puritan seer, before whose eyes pass scaffolds, orgies, massacres, battles, and who, beset by furious or bloody phantoms, prophesies, encourages, or curses. If we do not throw down the book from anger or weariness, we will become dazed; our ideas leave us, nightmare seizes us, a medley of grinning and ferocious figures whirl about in our head; we hear the howls of insurrection, cries of war; we are sick; we are like those hearers of the Covenanters whom the preaching filled with disgust or enthusiasm, and who broke the head of their prophet, if they did not take him for their leader.

These violent outbursts will seem to us still more violent if we mark the breadth of the field which they traverse. From the sublime to the ignoble, from the pathetic to the grotesque, is but a step with Carlyle. At one and the same time he touches the two extremes. His adorations end in sarcasms. The Universe is for him an oracle and a temple, as well as a kitchen and a stable. He moves freely about, and is at his ease in mysticism, as well as in brutality. Speaking of the setting sun at the North Cape, he writes:

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Silence as of death; for Midnight, even in the Arctic latitudes, has its character: nothing but the granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, the peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar Ocean, over which in the utmost North the great Sun hangs low and lazy, as if he too were slumbering. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought of crimson and cloth-of-gold; yet does his light stream over the mirror of waters, like a tremulous fire-pillar, shooting downwards to the abyss, and hide itself under my feet. In such moments, Solitude also is invaluable; for who would speak, or be looked on, when behind him lies all Europe and Africa, fast asleep, except the watchmen; and before him the silent Immensity, and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our Sun is but a porch-lamp?" 3

Such splendors he sees whenever he is face to face with nature. No one has contemplated with a more powerful emotion the silent stars which roll eternally in the pale firmament and envelop our little world. No one has contemplated with more of religious awe the infinite obscurity in which our slender thought appears for an instant like a gleam, and by our side the gloomy abyss in which the hot frenzy of life is to be extinguished. His eyes are habitually fixed on this vast Darkness,

"Sartor Resartus," 1868, bk. ii. ch. viii.; Centre of Indifference.

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