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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Or overrated thy designs.”

The last of the four orisons is written in a singularly calm and

healthful spirit, and contains this petition:—
“My Father: I now come to thee with a desire to thank
thee for the continuance of our love, the one for the other.
I feel that without thy love in me I should be alone here in
the flesh. I cannot express my gratitude for what thou hast
been and continuest to be to me. But thou knowest what
my feelings are. When nought on earth seemeth pleasant
to me, thou dost make thyself known to me, and teach that
which is needful for me, and dost cheer my travels on. I
know that thou hast not created me and placed me here
on earth, amidst its toils and troubles and the follies of
those around me, and told me to be like thyself when I see
so little of thee here to profit by; thou hast not done this,
and then left me here to myself, a poor, weak man,
scarcely able to earn my bread. No; thou art my Father
and I will love thee, for thou didst first love me, and lovest
me still. We will ever be parent and child. Wilt thou give
me strength to persevere in this great work of redemption.
Wilt thou show me the true means of accomplishing it.... I
thank thee for the knowledge that I have attained of thee
by thy sons who have been before me, and especially for
him who brought me so perfect a type of thy goodness
and love to men.... I know that thou wilt deal with me as I
deserve. I place myself therefore in thy hand, knowing that
thou wilt keep me from harm so long as I consent to live
under thy protecting care.”

Let these few scattered leaves, which a chance (as men say, but
which to us shall be holy) brought under our eye nearly at the same
moment, stand as an example of innumerable similar expressions
which no mortal witness has reported, and be a sign of the times.
Might they be suggestion to many a heart of yet higher secret
experiences which are ineffable! But we must not tie up the rosary
on which we have strung these few white beads, without adding a
pearl of great price from that book of prayer, the “Confessions of
Saint Augustine.”
“And being admonished to reflect upon myself, I entered
into the very inward parts of my soul, by thy conduct; and I
was able to do it, because now thou wert become my
helper. I entered and discerned with the eye of my soul
(such as it was), even beyond my soul and mind itself, the
Light unchangeable. Not this vulgar light which all flesh
may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind,
as though the brightness of this should be manifold
greater and with its greatness take up all space. Not such
was this light, but other, yea, far other from all these.
Neither was it so above my understanding as oil swims
above water, or as the heaven is above the earth. But it is
above me, because it made me; and I am under it,
because I was made by it. He that knows truth or verity,
knows what that light is, and he that knows it, knows
eternity, and it is known by charity. O eternal Verity! and
true Charity! and dear Eternity! thou art my God, to thee
do I sigh day and night. Thee when I first knew, thou
liftedst me up that I might see, there was what I might see,
and that I was not yet such as to see. And thou didst beat
back my weak sight upon myself, shooting out beams
upon me after a vehement manner; and I even trembled
between love and horror, and I found myself to be far off,
and even in the very region of dissimilitude from thee.”

IV.

AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS. [8]

In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an orchard

where boys were grafting apple-trees, and found the Farmer in his
corn-field. He was holding the plough, and his son driving the oxen.
This man always impresses me with respect, he is so manly, so
sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all appearances,—
excellent and reverable in his old weather-worn cap and blue frock
bedaubed with the soil of the field; so honest withal, that he always
needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I still remember
with some shame that in some dealing we had together a long time
ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest in the affair, and
I had been looking to my interest, and nobody had looked to his part.
As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst of his own acres, I
could not help feeling for him the highest respect. Here is the Cæsar,
the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer, after how many
and many a hard-fought summer’s day and winter’s day; not like
Napoleon, hero of sixty battles only, but of six thousand, and out of
every one he has come victor; and here he stands, with Atlantic
strength and cheer, invincible still. These slight and useless city
limbs of ours will come to shame before this strong soldier, for his
have done his own work and ours too. What good this man has or
has had, he has earned. No rich father or father-in-law left him any
inheritance of land or money. He borrowed the money with which he
bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them a good
education, and improved his land in every way year by year, and this
without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a man every
inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robin Hood ballad,—
“Much, the miller’s son,
There was no inch of his body
But it was worth a groom.”
Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow. Toil
has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness and
hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual taste, of
much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent spirit
which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any shape. I
walked up and down the field, as he ploughed his furrow, and we
talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the
season and its new labors. He had been reading the Report of the
Agricultural Survey of the Commonwealth, and had found good
things in it; but it was easy to see that he felt toward the author much
as soldiers do towards the historiographer who follows the camp,
more good-nature than reverence for the gownsman.
The First Report, he said, is better than the last, as I observe the
first sermon of a minister is often his best, for every man has one
thing which he specially wishes to say, and that comes out at first.
But who is this book written for? Not for farmers; no pains are taken
to send it to them; it was by accident that this volume came into my
hands for a few days. And it is not for them. They could not afford to
follow such advice as is given here; they have sterner teachers; their
own business teaches them better. No; this was written for the
literary men. But in that case, the state should not be taxed to pay for
it. Let us see. The account of the maple sugar,—that is very good
and entertaining, and, I suppose, true. The story of the farmer’s
daughter, whom education had spoiled for everything useful on a
farm,—that is good too, and we have much that is like it in Thomas’s
Almanack. But why this recommendation of stone houses? They are
not so cheap, not so dry, and not so fit for us. Our roads are always
changing their direction, and after a man has built at great cost a
stone house, a new road is opened, and he finds himself a mile or
two from the highway. Then our people are not stationary, like those
of old countries, but always alert to better themselves, and will
remove from town to town as a new market opens or a better farm is
to be had, and do not wish to spend too much on their buildings.
The Commissioner advises the farmers to sell their cattle and their
hay in the fall, and buy again in the spring. But we farmers always
know what our interest dictates, and do accordingly. We have no
choice in this matter; our way is but too plain. Down below, where
manure is cheap and hay dear, they will sell their oxen in November;
but for me to sell my cattle and my produce in the fall, would be to
sell my farm, for I should have no manure to renew a crop in the
spring. And thus Necessity farms it; necessity finds out when to go to
Brighton, and when to feed in the stall, better than Mr. Colman can
tell us.
But especially observe what is said throughout these Reports of
the model farms and model farmers. One would think that Mr. D. and
Major S. were the pillars of the Commonwealth. The good
Commissioner takes off his hat when he approaches them, distrusts
the value of “his feeble praise,” and repeats his compliments as often
as their names are introduced. And yet, in my opinion, Mr. D., with all
his knowledge and present skill, would starve in two years on any
one of fifty poor farms in this neighborhood, on each of which now a
farmer manages to get a good living. Mr. D. inherited a farm, and
spends on it every year from other resources; otherwise his farm had
ruined him long since;—and as for the Major, he never got rich by his
skill in making land produce, but in making men produce. The truth
is, a farm will not make an honest man rich in money. I do not know
of a single instance in which a man has honestly got rich by farming
alone. It cannot be done. The way in which men who have farms
grow rich, is either by other resources, or by trade, or by getting their
labor for nothing, or by other methods of which I could tell you many
sad anecdotes. What does the Agricultural Surveyor know of all this?
What can he know? He is the victim of the “Reports” that are sent
him, of particular farms. He cannot go behind the estimates to know
how the contracts were made, and how the sales were effected. The
true men of skill, the poor farmers, who, by the sweat of their face,
without an inheritance and without offence to their conscience have
reared a family of valuable citizens and matrons to the state,
reduced a stubborn soil to a good farm,—although their buildings are
many of them shabby, are the only right subjects of this Report; yet
these make no figure in it. These should be holden up to imitation,
and their methods detailed; yet their houses are very uninviting and
inconspicuous to State Commissioners. So with these premiums to
farms, and premiums at cattle-shows. The class that I describe must
pay the premium which is awarded to the rich. Yet the premium
obviously ought to be given for the good management of a poor
farm.
In this strain the Farmer proceeded, adding many special
criticisms. He had a good opinion of the Surveyor, and acquitted him
of any blame in the matter, but was incorrigible in his skepticism
concerning the benefits conferred by legislatures on the agriculture
of Massachusetts. I believe that my friend is a little stiff and
inconvertible in his own opinions, and that there is another side to be
heard; but so much wisdom seemed to lie under all his statement
that it deserved a record.

V.

EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS. [9]

It was a brighter day than we have often known in our literary

calendar, when within a twelvemonth a single London advertisement
announced a new volume of poems by Wordsworth, poems by
Tennyson, and a play by Henry Taylor. Wordsworth’s nature or
character has had all the time it needed in order to make its mark
and supply the want of talent. We have learned how to read him. We
have ceased to expect that which he cannot give. He has the merit
of just moral perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How
would Milton curl his lip at such slipshod newspaper style. Many of
his poems, as for example the Rylstone Doe, might be all
improvised. Nothing of Milton, nothing of Marvell, of Herbert, of
Dryden, could be. These are such verses as in a just state of culture
should be vers de société, such as every gentleman could write but
none would think of printing, or of claiming the poet’s laurel on their
merit. The Pindar, the Shakspeare, the Dante, whilst they have the
just and open soul, have also the eye to see the dimmest star that
glimmers in the Milky Way, the serratures of every leaf, the test-
objects of the microscope, and then the tongue to utter the same
things in words that engrave them on all the ears of mankind. The
poet demands all gifts, and not one or two only.
The poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer the
sky than all surrounding objects, down to the earth, and into the dark
wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse with
pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses. His
words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to
be seen and smelled and handled. His fable must be a good story,
and its meaning must hold as pure truth. In the debates on the
Copyright Bill, in the English Parliament, Mr. Sergeant Wakley, the
coroner, quoted Wordsworth’s poetry in derision, and asked the
roaring House of Commons what that meant, and whether a man
should have public reward for writing such stuff. Homer, Horace,
Milton and Chaucer would defy the coroner. Whilst they have
wisdom to the wise, he would see that to the external they have
external meaning. Coleridge excellently said of poetry, that poetry
must first be good sense; as a palace might well be magnificent, but
first it must be a house.
Wordsworth is open to ridicule of this kind. And yet Wordsworth,
though satisfied if he can suggest to a sympathetic mind his own
mood, and though setting a private and exaggerated value on his
compositions; though confounding his accidental with the universal
consciousness, and taking the public to task for not admiring his
poetry,—is really a master of the English language, and his poems
evince a power of diction that is no more rivalled by his
contemporaries than is his poetic insight. But the capital merit of
Wordsworth is that he has done more for the sanity of this
generation than any other writer. Early in life, at a crisis it is said in
his private affairs, he made his election between assuming and
defending some legal rights, with the chances of wealth and a
position in the world,—and the inward promptings of his heavenly
genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a poet, and sat
down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain fare to obey the
heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his will, manifested itself
in every line to be real. We have poets who write the poetry of
society, of the patrician and conventional Europe, as Scott and
Moore, and others who, like Byron or Bulwer, write the poetry of vice
and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself into his place, made no
reserves or stipulations; man and writer were not to be divided. He
sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the margin of Windermere, and
took their lustrous mornings and their sublime midnights for his
theme, and not Marlow, nor Massinger, not Horace, nor Milton, nor
Dante. He once for all forsook the styles and standards and modes
of thinking of London and Paris, and the books read there, and the
aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and Windermere, and the dim
spirits which these haunts harbored. There was not the least attempt
to reconcile these with the spirit of fashion and selfishness, nor to
show, with great deference to the superior judgment of dukes and
earls, that although London was the home for men of great parts, yet
Westmoreland had these consolations for such as fate had
condemned to the country life,—but with a complete satisfaction he
pitied and rebuked their false lives, and celebrated his own with the
religion of a true priest. Hence the antagonism which was
immediately felt between his poetry and the spirit of the age, that
here not only criticism but conscience and will were parties; the spirit
of literature and the modes of living and the conventional theories of
the conduct of life were called in question on wholly new grounds,—
not from Platonism, not from Christianity, but from the lessons which
the country muse taught a stout pedestrian climbing a mountain and
following a river from its parent rill down to the sea. The Cannings
and Jeffreys of the capital, the Court Journals and Literary Gazettes
were not well pleased, and voted the poet a bore. But that which
rose in him so high as to the lips, rose in many others as high as to
the heart. What he said, they were prepared to hear and confirm.
The influence was in the air, and was wafted up and down into lone
and into populous places, resisting the popular taste, modifying
opinions which it did not change, and soon came to be felt in poetry,
in criticism, in plans of life, and at last in legislation. In this country it
very early found a stronghold, and its effect may be traced on all the
poetry both of England and America.
But, notwithstanding all Wordsworth’s grand merits, it was a great
pleasure to know that Alfred Tennyson’s two volumes were coming
out in the same ship; it was a great pleasure to receive them. The
elegance, the wit and subtlety of this writer, his rich fancy, his power
of language, his metrical skill, his independence of any living
masters, his peculiar topics, his taste for the costly and gorgeous,
discriminate the musky poet of gardens and conservatories, of parks
and palaces. Perhaps we felt the popular objection that he wants
rude truth; he is too fine. In these boudoirs of damask and alabaster,
one is farther off from stern nature and human life than in “Lalla
Rookh” and “The Loves of the Angels.” Amid swinging censers and
perfumed lamps, amidst velvet and glory we long for rain and frost.
Otto-of-roses is good, but wild air is better. A critical friend of ours
affirms that the vice which bereaved modern painters of their power,
is the ambition to begin where their fathers ended; to equal the
masters in their exquisite finish, instead of their religious purpose.
The painters are not willing to paint ill enough; they will not paint for
their times, agitated by the spirit which agitates their country; so
should their picture picture us and draw all men after them; but they
copy the technics of their predecessors, and paint for their
predecessors’ public. It seems as if the same vice had worked in
poetry. Tennyson’s compositions are not so much poems as studies
in poetry, or sketches after the styles of sundry old masters. He is
not the husband, who builds the homestead after his own necessity,
from foundation-stone to chimney-top and turret, but a tasteful
bachelor who collects quaint staircases and groined ceilings. We
have no right to such superfineness. We must not make our bread of
pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then legitimate when
they are the excess of substantial and necessary expenditure. The
best songs in English poetry are by that heavy, hard, pedantic poet,
Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare occasions gay.
Tennyson is always fine; but Jonson’s beauty is more grateful than
Tennyson’s. It is a natural manly grace of a robust workman. Ben’s
flowers are not in pots at a city florist’s, arranged on a flower-stand,
but he is a countryman at a harvest-home, attending his ox-cart from
the fields, loaded with potatoes and apples, with grapes and plums,
with nuts and berries, and stuck with boughs of hemlock and
sweetbriar, with ferns and pond lilies which the children have
gathered. But let us not quarrel with our benefactors. Perhaps
Tennyson is too quaint and elegant. What then? It is long since we
have had as good a lyrist; it will be long before we have his superior.
“Godiva” is a noble poem that will tell the legend a thousand years.
The poem of all the poetry of the present age for which we predict
the longest term, is “Abou ben Adhem,” of Leigh Hunt. Fortune will
still have her part in every victory, and it is strange that one of the
best poems should be written by a man who has hardly written any
other. And “Godiva” is a parable which belongs to the same gospel.
“Locksley Hall” and “The Two Voices” are meditative poems, which
were slowly written to be slowly read. “The Talking Oak,” though a
little hurt by its wit and ingenuity, is beautiful, and the most poetic of
the volume. “Ulysses” belongs to a high class of poetry, destined to
be the highest, and to be more cultivated in the next generation.
“Œnone” was a sketch of the same kind. One of the best specimens
we have of the class is Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” of which no
special merit it can possess equals the total merit of having selected
such a subject in such a spirit.
Next to the poetry, the novels, which come to us in every ship from
England, have an importance increased by the immense extension
of their circulation through the new cheap press, which sends them
to so many willing thousands. We have heard it alleged with some
evidence that the prominence given to intellectual power in Bulwer’s
romances has proved a main stimulus to mental culture in thousands
of young men in England and America. The effect on manners
cannot be less sensible, and we can easily believe that the behavior
of the ball-room and of the hotel has not failed to draw some addition
of dignity and grace from the fair ideals with which the imagination of
a novelist has filled the heads of the most imitative class.
We are not very well versed in these books, yet we have read Mr.
Bulwer enough to see that the story is rapid and interesting; he has
really seen London society, and does not draw ignorant caricatures.
He is not a genius, but his novels are marked with great energy and
with a courage of experiment which in each instance had its degree
of success. The story of Zanoni was one of those world-fables which
is so agreeable to the human imagination that it is found in some
form in the language of every country, and is always reappearing in
literature. Many of the details of this novel preserve a poetic truth.
We read Zanoni with pleasure, because magic is natural. It is implied
in all superior culture that a complete man would need no auxiliaries
to his personal presence. The eye and the word are certainly far
subtler and stronger weapons than either money or knives. Whoever
looked on the hero would consent to his will, being certified that his
aims were universal, not selfish; and he would be obeyed as
naturally as the rain and the sunshine are. For this reason, children
delight in fairy tales. Nature is described in them as the servant of
man, which they feel ought to be true. But Zanoni pains us and the
author loses our respect, because he speedily betrays that he does
not see the true limitations of the charm; because the power with
which his hero is armed is a toy, inasmuch as the power does not
flow from its legitimate fountains in the mind, is a power for London;
a divine power converted into a burglar’s false key or a
highwayman’s pistol to rob and kill with.
But Mr. Bulwer’s recent stories have given us who do not read
novels, occasion to think of this department of literature, supposed to
be the natural fruit and expression of the age. We conceive that the
obvious division of modern romance is into two kinds: first, the
novels of costume or of circumstance, which is the old style, and
vastly the most numerous. In this class, the hero, without any
particular character, is in a very particular circumstance; he is greatly
in want of a fortune or of a wife, and usually of both, and the
business of the piece is to provide him suitably. This is the problem
to be solved in thousands of English romances, including the Porter
novels and the more splendid examples of the Edgeworth and Scott
romances.
It is curious how sleepy and foolish we are, that these tales will so
take us. Again and again we have been caught in that old foolish
trap. Had one noble thought opening the chambers of the intellect,
one sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, the
reader had been made a participator of their triumph; he too had
been an invited and eternal guest; but this reward granted them is
property, all-excluding property, a little cake baked for them to eat
and for none other, nay, a preference and cosseting which is rude
and insulting to all but the minion.
Except in the stories of Edgeworth and Scott, whose talent knew
how to give to the book a thousand adventitious graces, the novels
of costume are all one, and there is but one standard English novel,
like the one orthodox sermon, which with slight variation is repeated
every Sunday from so many pulpits.
But the other novel, of which “Wilhelm Meister” is the best
specimen, the novel of character, treats the reader with more
respect; the development of character being the problem, the reader
is made a partaker of the whole prosperity. Everything good in such
a story remains with the reader when the book is closed. A noble
book was “Wilhelm Meister.” It gave the hint of a cultivated society
which we found nowhere else. It was founded on power to do what
was necessary, each person finding it an indispensable qualification
of membership that he could do something useful, as in mechanics
or agriculture or other indispensable art; then a probity, a justice was
to be its element, symbolized by the insisting that each property
should be cleared of privilege, and should pay its full tax to the state.
Then a perception of beauty was the equally indispensable element
of the association, by which each was dignified and all were
dignified; then each was to obey his genius to the length of
abandonment. They watched each candidate vigilantly, without his
knowing that he was observed, and when he had given proof that he
was a faithful man, then all doors, all houses, all relations were open
to him; high behavior fraternized with high behavior, without question
of heraldry, and the only power recognized is the force of character.
The novels of Fashion, of D’Israeli, Mrs. Gore, Mr. Ward, belong to
the class of novels of costume, because the aim is purely external
success. Of the tales of fashionable life, by far the most agreeable
and the most efficient was Vivian Grey. Young men were and still are
the readers and victims. Byron ruled for a time, but Vivian, with no
tithe of Byron’s genius, rules longer. One can distinguish the Vivians
in all companies. They would quiz their father and mother and lover
and friend. They discuss sun and planets, liberty and fate, love and
death, over the soup. They never sleep, go nowhere, stay nowhere,
eat nothing, and know nobody, but are up to anything, though it were
the genesis of nature, or the last cataclysm,—Festus-like, Faust-like,
Jove-like, and could write an Iliad any rainy morning, if fame were
not such a bore. Men, women, though the greatest and fairest, are
stupid things; but a rifle, and a mild pleasant gunpowder, a spaniel,
and a cheroot, are themes for Olympus. I fear it was in part the
influence of such pictures on living society which made the style of
manners of which we have so many pictures, as, for example, in the
following account of the English fashionist. “His highest triumph is to
appear with the most wooden manners, as little polished as will
suffice to avoid castigation, nay, to contrive even his civilities so that
they may appear as near as may be to affronts; instead of a noble
high-bred ease, to have the courage to offend against every restraint
of decorum, to invert the relation in which our sex stand to women,
so that they appear the attacking, and he the passive or defensive
party.”
We must here check our gossip in mid volley and adjourn the rest
of our critical chapter to a more convenient season.

VI.

PAST AND PRESENT. [10]

Here is Carlyle’s new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his
poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its
first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton, we
have had nothing to compare with it. It grapples honestly with the
facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master’s
mind, and, with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best
counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the
dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has
conversed much on these topics with such wise men of all ranks and
parties as are drawn to a scholar’s house, until such daily and nightly
meditation has grown into a great connection, if not a system of
thoughts; and the topic of English politics becomes the best vehicle
for the expression of his recent thinking, recommended to him by the
desire to give some timely counsels, and to strip the worst mischiefs
of their plausibility. It is a brave and just book, and not a semblance.
“No new truth,” say the critics on all sides. Is it so? Truth is very old,
but the merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their
right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount,
whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into
their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other.
The book makes great approaches to true contemporary history, a
very rare success, and firmly holds up to daylight the absurdities still
tolerated in the English and European system. It is such an appeal to
the conscience and honor of England as cannot be forgotten, or be
feigned to be forgotten. It has the merit which belongs to every
honest book, that it was self-examining before it was eloquent, and
so hits all other men, and, as the country people say of good
preaching, “comes bounce down into every pew.” Every reader shall
carry away something. The scholar shall read and write, the farmer
and mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget the book
when they resume their labor.
Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers a believer
in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the
times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good bills, but
the vice in false and superficial aims of the people, and the remedy
in honesty and insight. Like every work of genius, its great value is in
telling such simple truths. As we recall the topics, we are struck with
the force given to the plain truths; the picture of the English nation all
sitting enchanted, the poor, enchanted so that they cannot work, the
rich, enchanted so that they cannot enjoy, and are rich in vain; the
exposure of the progress of fraud into all arts and social activities;
the proposition that the laborer must have a greater share in his
earnings; that the principle of permanence shall be admitted into all
contracts of mutual service; that the state shall provide at least
schoolmaster’s education for all the citizens; the exhortation to the
workman that he shall respect the work and not the wages; to the
scholar that he shall be there for light; to the idle, that no man shall
sit idle; the picture of Abbot Samson, the true governor, who “is not
there to expect reason and nobleness of others, he is there to give
them of his own reason and nobleness;” and the assumption
throughout the book, that a new chivalry and nobility, namely the
dynasty of labor, is replacing the old nobilities. These things strike us
with a force which reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early
Greek masters, and of no modern book. Truly in these things is great
reward. It is not by sitting still at a grand distance and calling the
human race larvæ, that men are to be helped, nor by helping the
depraved after their own foolish fashion, but by doing unweariedly
the particular work we were born to do. Let no man think himself
absolved because he does a generous action and befriends the
poor, but let him see whether he so holds his property that a benefit
goes from it to all. A man’s diet should be what is simplest and
readiest to be had, because it is so private a good. His house should
be better, because that is for the use of hundreds, perhaps of
thousands, and is the property of the traveller. But his speech is a
perpetual and public instrument; let that always side with the race
and yield neither a lie nor a sneer. His manners,—let them be
hospitable and civilizing, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have
taught anything better in canvas or stone; and his acts should be
representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in
his having, and poor in his want.
It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the
contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all men
for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of the
problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe fruits. The
task is superhuman; and the poet knows well that a little time will do
more than the most puissant genius. Time stills the loud noise of
opinions, sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges
without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of the
present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is
unattainable. Each man can very well know his own part of duty, if he
will; but to bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature, surmounts
the powers of art. The most elaborate history of to-day will have the
oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The historian of to-day
is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend into the turbid present
without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence that necessity of isolation
which genius has always felt. He must stand on his glass tripod, if he
would keep his electricity.
But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the
sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher
than literary inspiration may succor him. It is a costly proof of
character, that the most renowned scholar of England should take
his reputation in his hand and should descend into the ring; and he
has added to his love whatever honor his opinions may forfeit. To
atone for this departure from the vows of the scholar and his eternal
duties to this secular charity, we have at least this gain, that here is a
message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose but
hear. Though they die, they must listen. It is plain that whether by
hope or by fear, or were it only by delight in this panorama of brilliant
images, all the great classes of English society must read, even
those whose existence it proscribes. Poor Queen Victoria,—poor Sir
Robert Peel, poor Primate and Bishops,—poor Dukes and Lords!
There is no help in place or pride or in looking another way; a grain
of wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm, which
no curtains or shutters will keep out. Here is a book which will be
read, no thanks to anybody but itself. What pains, what hopes, what
vows, shall come of the reading! Here is a book as full of treason as
an egg is full of meat, and every lordship and worship and high form
and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a foot-ball into the
air, and kept in the air, with merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet
not a word is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official
zeal; and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this flaming
sword of Cherubim waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon,
and shows to the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst
of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all
sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane
conservatism, and impressing the reader with the conviction that the
satirist himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent in
English land and institutions, and a genuine respect for the basis of
truth in those whom he exposes.
We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of
this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent
displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special criticism in the wrong.
And we may easily fail in expressing the general objection which we
feel. It appears to us as a certain disproportion in the picture, caused
by the obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In this work, as in his
former labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant. His humors are
expressed with so much force of constitution that his fancies are
more attractive and more credible than the sanity of duller men. But
the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies whilst it stimulates. It is
felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the picture. It is
not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in lurid storm-lights.
Every object attitudinizes, to the very mountains and stars almost,
under the refraction of this wonderful humorist; and instead of the
common earth and sky, we have a Martin’s Creation or Judgment
Day. A crisis has always arrived which requires a deus ex machinâ.
One can hardly credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the
world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to
us,—as of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to
begin again and try to do a little business. It was perhaps
inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and imagination
on English politics, that a certain local emphasis and love of effect,
such as is the vice of preaching, should appear,—producing on the
reader a feeling of forlornness by the excess of value attributed to
circumstances. But the splendor of wit cannot outdazzle the calm
daylight, which always shows every individual man in balance with
his age, and able to work out his own salvation from all the follies of
that, and no such glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each
age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young
people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself; and if you
should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with pride or with
regret, (according as he was practical or poetic), that he had none.
But after a short time, down go its follies and weakness and the
memory of them; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation assumes
the poetic form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our sight
clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and color. The revelation
of Reason is this of the unchangeableness of the fact of humanity
under all its subjective aspects; that to the cowering it always
cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only
venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial; as
the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot reach to
their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?
And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing
dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over-coloring
of the picture; and we at this distance are not so far removed from
any of the specific evils, and are deeply participant in too many, not
to share the gloom and thank the love and courage of the counsellor.
This book is full of humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as
in all Mr. Carlyle’s works, than the attitude of the writer. He has the
dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and
never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of
scholars, he sustains their office in the highest credit and honor. If
the good heaven have any good word to impart to this unworthy
generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its occasion.
One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of criticism, that
he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let who will be the
dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye off from that gracious Infinite
which embosoms us.
As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main
one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit,
what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his expedient for
expressing those unproven opinions which he entertains but will not
endorse, by summoning one of his men of straw from the cell,—and
the respectable Sauerteig, or Teufelsdröckh, or Dryasdust, or
Picturesque Traveller, says what is put into his mouth, and
disappears. That morbid temperament has given his rhetoric a
somewhat bloated character; a luxury to many imaginative and
learned persons, like a showery south-wind with its sun-bursts and
rapid chasing of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its
offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish
some concession were possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it
must not be forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of
tunes with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,—in all this
glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet ever
and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the crowd,
quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone the
very word, and then with new glee return to his game. He is like a
lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which
is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is
meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it
is due.
One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in
literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient,
and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke
sometimes reaches to that exuberant fulness, though deficient in
depth. Carlyle, in his strange, half-mad way, has entered the Field of
the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigor and wealth of resource which
has no rival in the tourney-play of these times;—the indubitable
champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern
system, with its infinity of details, into style. We have been civilizing
very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New England
and India, New Holland and Oregon,—and it has not appeared in
literature; there has been no analogous expansion and
recomposition in books. Carlyle’s style is the first emergence of all
this wealth and labor with which the world has gone with child so
long. London and Europe, tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with trade-
nobility, and East and West Indies for dependencies; and America,
with the Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been
conquered in literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How
like an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the
continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a symbol
which was never a symbol before. This is the first experiment, and
something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned to so great an
achievement. It will be done again and again, sharper, simpler; but
fortunate is he who did it first, though never so giant-like and
fabulous. This grandiose character pervades his wit and his
imagination. We have never had anything in literature so like
earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He “shakes with his mountain
mirth.” It is like the laughter of the Genii in the horizon. These jokes
shake down Parliament-house and Windsor Castle, Temple and
Tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other
particular of magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is
altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the limits of
metre. Yet he is full of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his
periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and grand returns of his sense
and music. Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him
fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and
is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as
threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills,
the horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.
 VII.

A LETTER. [11]

As we are very liable, in common with the letter-writing world, to

fall behindhand in our correspondence; and a little more liable
because in consequence of our editorial function we receive more
epistles than our individual share, we have thought that we might
clear our account by writing a quarterly catholic letter to all and
several who have honored us, in verse or prose, with their
confidence, and expressed a curiosity to know our opinion. We shall
be compelled to dispose very rapidly of quite miscellaneous topics.
And first, in regard to the writer who has given us his speculations
on Rail-roads and Air-roads, our correspondent shall have his own
way. To the railway, we must say,—like the courageous lord mayor at
his first hunting, when told the hare was coming,—“Let it come, in
Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.” Very unlooked-for political and
social effects of the iron road are fast appearing. It will require an
expansion of the police of the old world. When a railroad train shoots
through Europe every day from Brussels to Vienna, from Vienna to
Constantinople, it cannot stop every twenty or thirty miles at a
German custom-house, for examination of property and passports.
But when our correspondent proceeds to flying-machines, we have
no longer the smallest taper-light of credible information and
experience left, and must speak on a priori grounds.
Shortly then, we think the population is not yet quite fit for them,
and therefore there will be none. Our friend suggests so many
inconveniences from piracy out of the high air to orchards and lone
houses, and also to other high fliers; and the total inadequacy of the
present system of defence, that we have not the heart to break the
sleep of the good public by the repetition of these details. When
children come into the library, we put the inkstand and the watch on
the high shelf until they be a little older; and Nature has set the sun
and moon in plain sight and use, but laid them on the high shelf