But heard are the voices, The world's, and the age's. Here eyes do regard you Ye brave, to reward you. Is not that a piece of psalmody? It seems to me like a piece of marching music to the great brave Teutonic kindred as they march through the waste of time-that section of eternity they were appointed for. Oben die Sterne und unten die Gräber, &c. Let us all sing it and march on cheerful of heart. We bid you to hope.'2 say the voices, do they not? So This poem of Goethe's was on Carlyle's lips to the last days of his life. When very near the end he quoted the last lines of it to me when speaking of what might lie beyond. We bid you to hope.' Carlyle gives the original in writing to Sterling. I take Carlyle's own translation from 'Past and Present.' 2 The literal translation of the last line, 'Wir heissen euch hoffen,' CHAPTER IV. A.D. 1837. ET. 42. Character of Carlyle's writings-The 'French Revolution' as a work of art—Political neutrality-Effect of the book on Carlyle's position-Proposed lectures-Public speaking-Delivery of the first course-Success, moral and financial-End of money difficulties— Letter to Sterling-Exhaustion-Retreat to Scotland. 1 HAVE been thus particular in describing the conditions under which the History of the French Revolution' was composed, because this book gave Carlyle at a single step his unique position as an English man of letters, and because it is in many respects the most perfect of all his writings. In his other works the sense of form is defective. He throws out brilliant detached pictures, and large masses of thought, each in itself inimitably clear. There is everywhere a unity of purpose, with powerful final effects. But events are not left to tell their own story. He appears continually in his own person, instructing, commenting, informing the reader at every step of his own opinion. His method of composition is so original that it cannot be tried by common rules. The want of art is even useful for the purposes which he has generally in view: but it interferes with the simplicity of a genuine historical narrative. The French Revolution' is not open to this objection. It stands alone in artistic regularity and completeness. It is a prose poem with a distinct beginning, a middle, an end. It opens with the crash of a corrupt system, and a dream of liberty which was to bring with it a reign of peace and happiness and universal love. It pursues its way through the failure of visionary hopes into regicide and terror, and the regeneration of mankind by the guillotine. It has been called an epic. It is rather an Eschylean drama composed of facts literally true, in which the Furies are seen once more walking on this prosaic earth and shaking their serpent hair. The form is quite peculiar, unlike that of any history ever written before, or probably to be written again. No one can imitate Carlyle who does not sincerely feel as Carlyle felt. But it is complete in itself. The story takes shape as it grows, a definite organic creation, with no dead or needless matter anywhere disfiguring or adhering to it, as if the metal had been smelted in a furnace seven times heated, till every particle of dross had been burnt away. As in all living things, there is the central idea, the animating principle round which the matter gathers and developes into shape. Carlyle was writing what he believed would be his last word to his countrymen. He was not looking forward to fame or fortune, or to making a position for himself in the world. He belonged to no political party, and was engaged in the defence of no theory or interest. For many years he had been studying painfully the mystery of human life, wholly and solely that he might arrive at some kind of truth about it and understand his own duty. He had no belief in the virtue of special Constitutions.' 96 6 He was neither Tory, nor Whig, nor Radical, nor Socialist, nor any other ist.' He had stripped himself of Formulas as a Nessus shirt,' and flung them fiercely away from him, finding Formulas' in these days to be mostly lies agreed to be believed.' In the record of God's law, as he had been able to read it, he had found no commendation of symbols of faith,' of church organisation, or methods of government. He wrote, as he said to Sterling, in the character of a man' only; and of a man without earthly objects, without earthly prospects, who had been sternly handled by fate and circumstances, and was left alone with the elements, as Prometheus on the rock of Caucasus. Struggling thus in pain and sorrow, he desired to tell the modern world that, destitute as it and its affairs appeared to be of Divine guidance, God or justice was still in the middle of it, sternly inexorable as ever; that modern nations were as entirely governed by God's law as the Israelites had been in Palestine-laws self-acting and inflicting their own penalties, if man neglected or defied them. And these laws were substantially the same as those on the Tables delivered in thunder on Mount Sinai. You shall reverence your Almighty Maker. You shall speak truth. You shall do justice to your fellow-man. If you set truth aside for conventional and convenient lies; if you prefer your own pleasure, your own will, your own ambition, to purity and manliness and justice, and submission to your Maker's commands, then are whirlwinds still provided in the constitution of things which will blow you to atoms. Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, were the whips which were provided for the Israelites. Germans and Huns swept away the Roman sensualists. Modern society, though out of fear of barbarian conquerors, breeds in its own heart the instruments of its punishment. The hungry and injured millions will rise up and bring to justice their guilty rulers, themselves little better than those whom they throw down, themselves powerless to rebuild out of the ruins any abiding city; but powerful to destroy, powerful to dash in pieces the corrupt institutions which have been the shelter and the instrument of oppression. And Carlyle believed this-believed it singly and simply as Isaiah believed it, not as a mode of speech to be used in pulpits by eloquent preachers, but as actual literal fact, as a real account of the true living relations between man and his Maker. The established forms, creeds, liturgies, articles of faith, were but as the shell round the kernel. The shell in these days of ours had rotted away, and men supposed that, because the shell was gone, the entire conception had been but a dream. It was no dream. The kernel could not rot. It was the vital force by which human existence in this planet was controlled, and would be controlled to the end. In this conviction he wrote his spectral History of the French Revolution.' Spectral, for the actors in it appear without their earthly clothes: men and women in their natural characters, but as in some vast phantasmagoria, with the supernatural shining through them, working in fancy their own wills or their own imagination; in reality, the mere instruments of a superior power, infernal or divine, whose awful presence is felt while it is unseen. To give form to his conception, Carlyle possessed |