A political intrigue abroad will be unmasked in March. An invention, or discovery, will be effected in France which will fill the hundred mouths of reA conversion will astonish the world. There will be an extraordinary

nown.

trial.

New fashions will come in with April. There will be parliamentary scandals. Death of a great artist. More singularities on the part of spirit-rappers. Several eccentricities in America. Disastrous inundations. Calamities at sea. A very remarkable progress will be made in the art of aerostatics.

Some prodigious fortunes will be made in May, the suddenness of which will dazzle many. New magnificences at Paris, and unanticipated festivities. Debates and war out of France. A surprising ruin. Discomfiture of certain political reveries. There will be further aggrandisements of French unity, and corresponding grief in Switzerland.

In June, a suit will absorb the attention of the public, to the exclusion of all other matters. There will be further political conversions in France. A parallel will be instituted between the two legitimacies. Scandals at the Bourse. Disasters in Prussia and in England.

Some remarkable results from lightning will take place in July. Ruin of a great house. Commotions in Italy. An entirely new spectacle will present itself. There will be miracles that no one can contest. Injuries will be done to an honourable celebrity. There will be a splendid harvest, and an unexampled abundance of fruit.

August will bring with it the disillusionising of a favourite of fortune. There will be extraordinary fêtes, but over which suicides will cast a gloom. A wedding will be much talked about. A person in a very high situation will fall into disgrace.

In September there will be a new manifestation of genius, or the apparition of a genius-we are not sure which. Curious troubles will arise in the United States. A leg will be broken in consequence of certain tragic events. There will be fighting in the distance. Treachery will receive a condign punishment. A mysterious personage will be the universal topic of conversation.

An unheard-of accident will happen in August in hunting or shooting. A great reputation will burst like a bubble. There will be a theft of surprising audacity; also, an important discovery will be made for the general well-being. Further progress will be made in the art of navigation in November. There will be troubles in India and China. New results will be obtained in electrical science. An important restitution will be made.

False

There will be a prodigious affluence of strangers in Paris in December. The weather will undergo great changes. There will be a notable pen war. news, hurtful to commerce, will be propagated. Remarkable progress will be made in the art of healing, and some great discoveries in hygienic science will come to prolong life.

471

THOMAS CARLYLE.

Be not alarmed, reader, at the title of this article. We are not going to increase that great herd of writers who have regarded the wind-bag pricker from every point of view, and have added inches to their stature, because they had the opportunity of playing the part of the fly on the wheel. The "sea-green incorruptible" will hardly be alluded to in this paper. We do not intend to bow down and worship at the shrine of the Carlylean heroes. We have no desire to point out fresh phantasms. In fact, we purpose to leave ourselves out of the question altogether, and draw the character of Thomas Carlyle from two recently published works. The first of these is by Moritz Hartmann, sometime a distinguished member of the Frankfort parliament, who was in England in 1856, and had an introduction to Carlyle, then residing at Chelsea. Of course he could not refrain from making literary capital of his visit, but had the modesty to wait four years, till he published his new work, "Bilder und Büsten."

After a somewhat lengthy description of Chelsea, as the refuge of sundry political exiles, among whom we may mention Antonio Perez, the victim of Philip of Spain, and Jean Cavalier, the general of the Camisards, and lastly Mirabeau, whose historian Carlyle became, we come to a description of the great man's penates, as they were when he dwelt at No. 5, Cheyne-row. His house, we are glad to find, was quiet and comfortable, and the author lived there on the money his literary successes had gained him, "as in a harbour, a bay set in with flowers and shady trees, where he never experienced the storms of life." Still, our author is careful to add that he often appears like a weather-bronzed sailor, who can talk about nothing save reefs, and whirlwinds, and treacherous storms, which ruin the entire world and the voyage of life. Either in the comfortable parlour, with his hands folded on his knees, or behind the house in a small pleasant garden, with a short clay pipe in his mouth, and gloomy furrows on his forehead, Thomas Carlyle, the despiser of mankind and the world, would sit, either pouring forth unending speeches, or frowningly silent. How is it that he became what he now is? Or is he a living, but involuntary proof, that a man despises the world the more, the less he knows of it? The explanation Mr. Hartmann gives of the paradox is certainly curious, so we will let him speak for himself.

Carlyle is the son of a Scotch farmer, who exerted himself to the utmost to give his children a careful education. Thomas would be nothing but an author, and at an early age wrote liberal and popular articles in the Edinburgh Review. He had seen nothing of the world, when, as a clover and promising young man, he was drawn into the circle of Scotland's educated and sensible aristocracy. The splendid mode of life, so free from care, pleased him, the Olympian jollity imposed on him, and, ere he was aware of it, he became an aristocrat. It appeared to him as if the world only belonged to a party of the select. Disposed to eccentricities, and perhaps recognising that the select he had before him were not the right chosen vessels, he proceeded a step further, and no longer recognised select castes, but select individuals" heroes," to whom the

VOL. XLVIII.

2 I

world and universal history belonged by right. He developed this worship of personality into a system, and proceeded to London, where he delivered his lectures on Hero-worship, which he soon published. Through the originality of its contents and style, it laid the foundation of his celebrity, and may be regarded as the starting-point of Carlyle's literary activity. All his later works (carefully remember that Mr. Hartmann speaks) are nothing but further and eccentric developments, and, as he believes, striking proofs of the idea, which he explained in his Heroworship.

His system, however, as it may be traced in his writings, and as he explains it to every one he deems worthy of such explanation, is: men are beasts, and the devil governs the world. To lame these beasts, and prevent them devouring each other, God sends from time to time great men. The latter, however, in Carlyle's view, are pre-eminently those who oppress humanity, scourge it till the blood flows, and cause it all the sufferings it deserves in consequence of its brutality-that is to say, tyrants and despots. All the horrors which dishonour man-cruelty, villany, treason, ingratitude-he calls specially human, as specially characteristic of man as in the French revolution. 66 Behold, it is human. Here, too, is human nature once more human." He pardons everything, however, in his heroes, his great men, those who have come to ill-treat mankind, according to their deserts, or transitorily to improve them by education and civilisation; they are privileged to do everything. They have swallowed all formulas; that is, they go their own road; they stand above everything traditional, the morality, and aesthetics; they are permitted to do everything they think proper, and what they think proper is divine inspiration. He writes all his books to deify such formula swallowers. He writes the French Revolution, only to place the three formula swallowers, Mirabeau, Danton, and Napoleon, in a poetic light, and by this opportunity to jibe at humanity because it dares to strive for liberty, while it falls a prey to the formula swallowers. He makes Cromwell his hero, not because he made a mockery of parliamentary institutions, and showed what individuality and personal tyranny can effect, but because he swallowed at one gulp both the formulas of royalty and of liberty. And lastly comes the turn of Frederick the Great, merely because by the might of his will he turned the world topsy-turvy, and bore down all the barriers that stopped his progress. Just as this reverence of the individual, this authority of personality, produced the above-mentioned books, so the series of his Latter-day Pamphlets was the result of his general contempt of humanity. In these he only holds up the ridiculous side of all popular institutions, of all liberal tendencies, of all popular exertions, and in them he shows that all called in later times great, only emanated from the "braver sense" of men, and that all the striving for freedom and human dignity, all popular contests and struggles, only lead to the end of the world, to the latter days.

Our author then says, pertinently enough, that such a system is madness! He allows it is so, and attempts to explain it, however, in the following way. When great geniuses go astray, the error borders on insanity, especially in Englishmen. (This, by the way, is only another reading of our "great learning to great madness oft allied.") England is distinguished from all other countries by the fact that it has produced and

educated its own enemies, and those powerful and talented enemies: not traitors, but haters, deep contemners, either of the entire state or of sundry conditions and institutions, moral, religious, or political. And as the English are islanders, and most of them are only acquainted with England, and as, moreover, in spite of all their hatred or contempt of their fatherland, regard it as the first country in the world, it is easy for them to extend their hatred and contempt to the whole of humanity. This extension affords a species of consolation to their ever-living national spirit. Hobbes hated English liberty, and formed a philosophic system, according to which the most absolute despotism was the sole form of government worthy of, and suited for, humanity. Hobbes had witnessed the great struggles which preceded the conquest of English liberty, and he started back from the horrors of civil war and revolution, which could not be carried out with bonbons and eau sucrée. Carlyle treads unconsciously in Hobbes's footsteps, and as he has a weaker mind than that philosopher, far weaker movements, the eternal unrest of Parliamentarianism, the thundering speeches, the electoral intrigues, have had the same effect npon him, the student of the study, as the great revolution had upon Hobbes. But an English study student is a far more abstract creation than his German brother. As Englishman—that is, as islander and study student-he is doubly isolated; he sits on a small isolated stool, which stands on a larger one; he is cut off from all communication with the general spirit of the world, all the electricity is collected in his head, and produces there the strangest, most ghostly, and most unsociable ideas.

At Chelsea, then, Mr. Hartmann tells us, he found exactly the man he had learned to know in his books. On entering the drawing or work room, you saw at once that you were in the house of the hero-worshipper. On all sides were recollections of the persons who are Carlyle's heroes or demigods. The most interesting of all to our author was, of course, Goethe, one of the number, whose "Wilhelm Meister" Carlyle translated at an early age. On the walls and over the mantelpieces hung pictures relating to the great poet: Goethe at various stages of life, the house of his birth, his dwelling at Weimar, his summer-house, Goethe at Pompeii, illustrations from Goethe's works, and in Carlyle's remarks repeated quotations from Goethe's prose and poetical works. His admiration for Goethe borders on religious worship, and in a discussion he can be most easily confuted by a passage from Goethe. When such is employed he bows his head, like a believer at a passage from the Gospels, or a patriarch. It is also whispered that his sensible and amiable wife, whenever he has any eccentric design in petto, holds him in check by a quotation from Goethe, and that she manages her household affairs generally by sentences from his saint.

At dinner, more especially at tea, Carlyle is extraordinarily eloquent: only after the meal, when he sits with a broad-brimmed hat on his head in the garden, with a short clay pipe in his mouth, puffing forth there dense clouds of smoke slowly or vehemently, according to the nature of his dreams and thoughts, he likes to be silent. His mode of speech, an impetuous and rustling mountain stream, leaping with mad bounds over stick and stem, easily resembles his style, which the English call German, the better read among them, Jean-Paulish. But Mr. Hartmann solemnly

protests against this comparison: Jean Paul binds countless sentences one in the other, which together form one long sentence, and in that sentence he alludes to a hundred different things. Carlyle, on the contrary, fastens together a quantity of small hacked sentences in unending succession. Between his sentences-indeed, between each portion of them are deep or broad abysses, which can only be passed by the aid of a lyrical leap or a salto mortale. Jean Paul is ever mild, and possesses that humour of which it is said that he smiles through his tears. Carlyle, too, is called a humorist, but his humour does not smile; he laughs contemptuously; he is a loud, wild laugher, although the tear cannot be overlooked which at times collects in his eye much against his will. If Carlyle's writings were to be punctuated properly and in accordance with the truth, only dashes, notes of interrogation and of admiration, should be found in them; full stop, colon, and semicolon must be entirely banished. His history of the French Revolution is eminently characteristic both of his mode of observation and of his style. Has he written the French Revolution? No, Mr. Hartmann sturdily protests. He has completed in prose a lyrically satirical and philosophical epic of the great historic period. How could Carlyle describe an event in its natural order, when at everything that plays the most subordinate parts in that event, with every little gamin who picks up a stone, a hundred philosophical and satirical, merry and mournful ideas, and, further, countless metaphors, images, comparisons, good and bad jokes, slip from his pen? He has enough to do even if he gives only a fragment of all this, and contents himself with making merely a slight reference to all that occurs to him. Every page, consequently, looks like a treasury, and, at the same time, as a lumber-room. The fact may raise its head here and there, but it must advance modestly and disappear again directly, for round about it dance, leap, sing, laugh, and pray, shreds of elegies, odes, hymns, philosophic reflections, allegories, and every possible thing that a poetically excited head can collect. At times, however, he grows calm; a solemn moment arrives, the cloud of countless little beauties and phantasms parts, to display grand epic pictures, which are worthy of the greatest poet and the greatest historian. Then you feel how the author revels in the great sight, and the reader shares in the joy of the man, who knows so few joys, and has embittered his life by his sad way of regarding it. Yet Mr. Hartmann says that it would be difficult to share his joy, did you not remember that tear to which we have already alluded, and did you not feel the intimate conviction that behind all this contempt a deep lamentation for that human dignity which Carlyle esteems as lost was concealed. How nearly allied are what are called misanthropy and philanthropy.

Such, as we said, were Mr. Hartmann's convictions ere he formed Carlyle's personal acquaintance, and hence he was enabled to listen calmly to his long speeches, in which the words God, devil, evil enemy, beast, bestial, and so on, frequently played a part, and enjoy his fanciful adornment, his original word-creation, images, and comparisons. Though speaking for hours without cessation, he ever finds the right word, becomes fervid, and then presently breaks out into Homeric laughter at his own expressions. During Mr. Hartmann's first visit to England, Carlyle was enthusiastic for the Emperor Nicholas and the Russian form of go