"Canopus shining down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guid. ing through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with no speech for any feeling, it might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on him from the great deep Eternity; revealing the inner Splen dour to him." "Grand Lamaism," Popery itself, interpret after their fashion the sentiment of the divine; therefore Popery itself is to be respected. While a pious life remains capable of being led by it, . . . let it last as long as it can."2 What matters if people call it idolatry? “Idol is Eidolon, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a symbol of God. . . . Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? . . . The most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things, and worships thereby. . . . All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:—we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only more idolatrous."3 The only detestable idolatry is that from which the sentiment has departed; which consists only in ceremonies learned by rote, in mechanical repetition of prayers, in decent profession of formulas not understood. The deep veneration of a monk of the twelfth century, prostrated before the relics of St. Edmund, was worth more than the conventional piety and cold philosophical religion of a Protestant of to-day. Whatever the worship, it is the sentiment which gives it its whole value. And this sentiment is that of morality: ... "The one end, essence, and use of all religion past, present, and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining. . . All religion was here to remind us, better or worse, of what we already know better or worse, of the quite infinite difference there is between a Good man and a Bad; to bid us love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the other, strive infinitely to be the one, and not to be the other. All religion issues in due Practical Hero-worship.' "4 "All true Work is religion; and whatsoever religion is not Work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where 't will; with me it shall have no harbour." 5 1 Lectures on Heroes, i.; The Hero as Divinity. 2 Ibid. iv.; The Hero as Priest. A Past and Present, bk. iii ch. xv. Morrison Again. 3 Ibid. Though it has "no harbour" with Carlyle, it has elsewhere. We touch here the English and narrow feature of this German and broad conception. There are many religions which are not moral; there are more still which are not practical. Carlyle would reduce the heart of man to the English sentiment of duty, and his imagination to the English sentiment of respect. The half of human poetry escapes his grasp. For if a part of ourselves raises us to abnegation and virtue, another part leads us to enjoyment and pleasure. Man is pagan as well as Christian; nature has two faces: several races, India, Greece, Italy, have only comprehended the second, and have had for religions merely the adoration of overflowing force and the ecstasy of grand imagination; or otherwise the admiration of harmonious form, with the culture of pleasure, beauty, and happiness. V. His criticism of literary works is of the same character and violence, and has the same scope and the same limits, the same principle and the same conclusions, as his criticism of religious works. Carlyle has introduced the great ideas of Hegel and Goethe, and has confined them under the narrow discipline of Puritan sentiment.' He considers the poet, the writer, the artist, as an interpreter of "the Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance;" as a revealer of the infinite, as representing his century, his nation, his age: we recognize here all the German formulas. They signify that the artist detects and expresses better than any one, the salient and durable features of the world which surrounds him, so that we might draw from his work a theory of man and of nature, together with a picture of his race and of his time. This discovery has renewed criticism. Carlyle owes to it his finest views, his lessons on Shakespeare and Dante, his studies on Goethe, Dr. Johnson, Burns, and Rousseau. Thus, by a natural enthusiasm he becomes the herald of German literature; he makes himself the apostle of Goethe; he has praised him with a neophyte's fervor, to the extent of lacking on this subject skill and perspicacity; he calls him a Hero, presents his life as an example to all the men of our century; he will not see his paganism, manifest as it is, and so repellent to a Puritan. Through the same causes, he has 1 Lectures on Heroes; Miscellanies, passim. made of Jean-Paul Richter, an affected clown, and an extravagant humorist, "a giant," a sort of prophet; he has heaped eulogy on Novalis and the mystic dreamers; he has set the democrat Burns above Byron; he has exalted Dr. Johnson, that honest pedant, the most grotesque of literary behemoths. His principle is, that in a work of the mind, form is little, the basis alone is important. As soon as a man has a profound sentiment, a strong conviction, his book is beautiful. A writing, be it what it will, only manifests the soul: if the soul is serious, if it is intimately and habitually shaken by the grave thoughts which ought to preoccupy a soul; if it loves what is good, is devoted, endeavors with its whole effort, without any mental reservation of interest or self-love, to publish the truth which strikes it, it has reached its goal. We have nothing to do with the talent; we need not to be pleased by beautiful forms; our sole object is to find ourselves face to face with the sublime; the whole destiny of man is to perceive heroism; poetry and art have no other employment or merit. We see how far and with what excess Carlyle possesses the Germanic sentiment, why he loves the mystics, humorists, prophets, illiterate writers, and men of action, spontaneous poets, all who violate regular beauty through ignorance, brutality, folly, or deliberately. He goes so far as to excuse the rhetoric of Dr. Johnson, because Johnson was loyal and sincere; he does not distinguish in him the literary man from the practical; he avoids seeing the classic declaimer, a strange compound of Scaliger, Boileau, and La Harpe, majestically decked out in the Ciceronian gown, in order to see only a man of faith and conviction. Such a habit prevents a man seeing one half of things. Carlyle speaks with scornful indifference' of modern dilettantism, seems to despise painters, admits no sensible beauty. Wholly on the side of the authors, he neglects the artists; for the source of art is the sentiment of form; and the greatest artists, the Italians, the Greeks, did not know, like their priests and poets, any beauty beyond that of voluptuousness and force. Thence also it comes that he has no taste for French literature. The exact order, the fine proportions, the perpetual regard for the agreeable and proper, the harmonious structure of clear and consecutive ideas, the delicate picture of society, the perfection of style,—nothing which moves us has attraction for him. His Life of Sterling. In mode of comprehending life is too far removed from ours. vain he tries to understand Voltaire, all he can do is to slander him: "We find no heroism of character in him, from first to last; nay, there is not, that we know of, one great thought in all his six-and-thirty quartos. . . . He sees but a little way into Nature; the mighty All, in its beauty and infi nite mysterious grandeur, humbling the small me into nothingness, has never even for moments been revealed to him; only this and that other atom of it, and the differences and discrepancies of these two, has he looked into and noted down. His theory of the world, his picture of man and man's life is little; for a poet and philosopher, even pitiful. The Divine idea, that which lies at the bottom of appearances,' was never more invisible to any man. He reads history not with the eyes of a devout seer, or even of a critic, but through a pair of mere anticatholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama enacted on the theatre of Infinitude, with suns for lamps and Eternity as a background, . . . but a poor wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopédie and the Sorbonne. . . . God's Universe is a larger patrimony of St. Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt out the Pope. The still higher praise of having had a right or noble aim cannot be conceded him without many limitations, and may, plausibly enough, be altogether denied. . . . The force necessary for him was nowise a great and noble one; but small, in some respects a mean one, to be nimbly and seasonably put into use. The Ephesian temple, which it had employed many wise heads and strong arms for a lifetime to build, could be unbuilt by one madman, in a single hour."1 These are big words; we will not employ the like. I will simply say, that if a man were to judge Carlyle, as a Frenchman, as he judges Voltaire as an Englishman, he would draw a different picture of Carlyle from that which I am trying here to draw. VI. This trade of calumny was in vogue fifty years ago, in fifty more it will probably have altogether ceased. The French are beginning to comprehend the gravity of the Puritans; perhaps the English will end by comprehending the gaiety of Voltaire : the first are laboring to appreciate Shakespeare; the second wil doubtless attempt to appreciate Racine. Goethe, the master of all modern minds, knew well how to appreciate both. The critic must add to his natural and national soul five or six artifi Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 4 vols. ii. Voltaire. cial and acquired souls, and his flexible sympathy must introduce him to extinct or foreign sentiments. The best fruit of criticism is to detach ourselves from ourselves, to constrain us to make allowance for the surroundings in which we live, to teach us to distinguish objects themselves through the transient appearances, with which our character and our age never fail to clothe them. Each person regards them through glasses of diverse focus and hue, and no one can reach the truth save by taking into account the form and tint which his glasses give to the objects which he sees. Hitherto we have been wrangling and pummeling one another, this man declaring that things are green, another that they are yellow; others, again, that they are red; each accusing his neighbor of seeing wrong, and being disingenuous. Now, at last, we are learning moral optics; we are finding that the color is not in the objects, but in ourselves; we pardon our neighbors for seeing differently from us; we recognize that they may see red what to us appears blue, green what to us appears yellow; we can even define the kind of glasses which produces yellow, and the kind which produces green, divine their effects from their nature, predict to people the tint under which the object we are about to present to them will appear, construct beforehand the system of every mind, and perhaps one day free ourselves from every system. "As a poet," said Goethe, "I am a polytheist; as a naturalist, a pantheist; as a moral man, a deist; and in order to express my mind, I need all these forms." In fact, all these glasses are serviceable, for they all show us some new aspect of things. The important point is to have not one, but several, to employ each at the suitable moment, not to mind the particular color of these glasses, but to know that behind these million moving poetical tints, optics only prove transformations governed by a law. § 4.-CONCEPTION OF HISTORY. I. "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodi |