[Footnote 69: "The Popish religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these years, and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with at present. 'Elle a trois cents ans dans le ventre,' counts M. Jouffroy; 'c'est pourquoi je la respecte!' The old Pope of Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him through the streets to bless the people on Corpus-Christi day, complains of rheumatism; whereupon his cardinals consult—construct him, after some study, a stuffed, cloaked figure, of iron and wood, with wool or baked hair, and place it in a kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure; to this stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread hands: the rump, with its cloaks, kneels; the Pope looks, and holds his hands spread; and so the two in concert bless the Roman population on Corpus-Christi day, as well as they can.

"I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-iron back, with the flesh head and hands, and endeavoured to calculate his horoscope. I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself in the human retina, for these several thousand years. Nay, since Chaos first shivered, and 'sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of nature and art working together? Here is a supreme priest who believes God to be—what, in the name of God, does he believe God to be?—and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax candles, organ blasts, Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps, artistically spread out, to save the ignorant from worse....

"There is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the scenic theory of worship, a frankness which I rather honour. Not half and half, but with undivided heart, does he set about worshipping by stage machinery; as if there were now, and could again be, in nature no other. He will ask you, What other? Under this my Gregorian chant, and beautiful wax-light phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an abyss of black doubts, scepticism, nay, sans-culottic Jacobinism, an orcus that has no bottom. Think of that. 'Groby Pool is thatched with pancakes,' as Jeannie Deans's innkeeper defined it to be! The bottomless of scepticism, atheism, Jacobinism, behold it is thatched over, hidden from your despair, by stage-properties judiciously arranged. This stuffed rump of mine saves not me only from rheumatism, but you also from what other isms!"—P. 187.]

The whole parallel which he runs between past and present is false—whimsically false. At one time we hear it uttered as an impeachment against our age, that every thing is done by committees and companies, shares and joint effort, and that no one man, or hero, can any longer move the world as in the blessed days of Peter the Hermit. Were we disposed to treat Mr Carlye as members of Parliament, by the help of their Hansard, controvert each other, we should have no difficulty in finding amongst his works some passage—whether eloquent or not, or how far intelligible, would be just a mere chance—in which he would tell us that this capacity for joint effort, this habit of co-operation, was the greatest boast our times could make, and gave the fairest promise for the future. In Ireland, by the way, one man can still effect something, and work after the fashion, if not with so pure a fanaticism, as Peter the Hermit. The spectacle does not appear very edifying. Pray—the question just occurs to us—pray has Mr O'Connell got an eye? Would Mr Carlyle acknowledge that this man has swallowed all formulas? Having been bred a lawyer, we are afraid, or, in common Christian speech, we hope, that he has not.

But we are not about to proceed through a volume such as this in a carping spirit, though food enough for such a spirit may be found; there is too much genuine merit, too much genuine humour, in the work. What, indeed, is the use of selecting from an author who will indulge in all manner of vagaries, whether of thought or expression, passages to prove that he can be whimsical and absurd, can deal abundantly in obscurities and contradictions, and can withal write the most motley, confused English of any man living? Better take, with thanks, from so irregular a genius, what seems to us good, or affords us gratification, and leave the rest alone.

We will not enter into the account of Abbot Samson; it is a little historical sketch, perfect in its kind, in which no part is redundant, and which, being gathered itself from very scanty sources, will not bear further mutilation. We turn, therefore, from the Past, although, in a literary point of view, a very attractive portion of the work, and will draw our extracts (they cannot now be numerous) from his lucubrations upon the Present.

Perhaps the most characteristic passage in the volume is that where, in the manner of a philosopher who suddenly finds himself awake in this "half-realized" world, he scans the institution of an army—looks out upon the soldier.

"Who can despair of Government that passes a soldier's guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets! That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them; this, a priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things? Yet look—behold it; in the stolidest of do-nothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done. See it there, with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an indisputable, palpable fact. Out of grey antiquity, amid all finance-difficulties, scaccarium-tallies, ship-monies, coat-and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of chance and time, there, down to the present blessed hour, it is.

"Often, in these painfully decadent, and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black, sleek, fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards—it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest fighting institution is still so young! Fresh complexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the standard, this fighting man has verily been got up, and can fight. While so much has not yet got into being, while so much has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty semblance, a clothes'-suit, and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's blanket—here still is a reality!

"The man in horse-hair wig advances, promising that he will get me 'justice;' he takes me into Chancery law-courts, into decades, half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon; and does get me—disappointment, almost desperation; and one refuge—that of dismissing him and his 'justice' altogether out of my head. For I have work to do; I cannot spend my decades in mere arguing with other men about the exact wages of my work: I will work cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten years' gangrene or Chancery lawsuit in my heart. He of the horse-hair wig is a sort of failure; no substance, but a fond imagination of the mind. He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes forward professing that he will save my soul. O ye eternities, of him in this place be absolute silence! But he of the red coat, I say, is a success and no failure! He will veritably, if he gets orders, draw out a long sword and kill me. No mistake there. He is a fact, and not a shadow. Alive in this year Forty-three, able and willing to do his work. In dim old centuries, with William Rufus, William of Ipres, or far earlier, he began; and has come down safe so far. Catapult has given place to cannon, pike has given place to musket, iron mail-shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre ropematch to percussion-cap; equipments, circumstances, have all changed and again changed; but the human battle-engine, in the inside of any or of each of these, ready still to do battle, stands there, six feet in standard size.

"Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection—this of successfully killing one another? Truly you have learned it well, and carried the business to a high perfection. It is incalculable what, by arranging, commanding, and regimenting, you can make of men. These thousand straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat, and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity; few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish valets—an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came; by tap of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling them; and he and you have made them this! Most potent, effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining, and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who look on these two sentries at the Horse Guards!"—P. 349.

Passages there are in the work which a political agitator might be glad enough to seize on; but, upon the whole, it is very little that Radicalism or Chartism obtain from Mr Carlyle. No political party would choose him for its champion, or find in him a serviceable ally. Observe how he demolishes the hope of those who expect, by new systems of election, to secure some incomparably pure and wise body of legislators—some aristocracy of talent!

"We must have more wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the wisest, we must have an aristocracy of talent! cry many. True, most true; but how to get it? The following extract from our young friend of the Houndsditch Indicator is worth perusing—'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry every where, articulate or inarticulate, for an aristocracy of talent, a governing class, namely, what did govern, not merely which took the wages of governing, and could not with all our industry be kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and playing the very deuce, with us—it may not be altogether useless to remind some of the greener-headed sort what a dreadfully difficult affair the getting of such an aristocracy is! Do you expect, my friends, that your indispensable aristocracy of talent is to be enlisted straightway, by some sort of recruitment aforethought, out of the general population; arranged in supreme regimental order; and set to rule over us? That it will be got sifted, like wheat out of chaff, from the twenty-seven million British subjects; that any ballot-box, reform-bill, or other political machine, with force of public opinion ever so active on it, is likely to perform said process of sifting? Would to heaven that we had a sieve; that we could so much as fancy any kind of sieve, wind-fanners, or ne plus ultra of machinery, devisable by man that would do it!

"'Done, nevertheless, sure enough, it must be; it shall, and will be. We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction; every hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure, done. The doing of it is not doubtful; only the method or the costs! Nay, I will even mention to you an infallible sifting-process, whereby he that has ability will be sifted out to rule amongst us, and that same blessed aristocracy of talent be verily, in an approximate degree, vouchsafed us by-and-by; an infallible sifting-process; to which, however, no soul can help his neighbour, but each must, with devout prayer to heaven, help himself. It is, O friends! that all of us, that many of us, should acquire the true eye for talent, which is dreadfully wanting at present.

"'For example, you, Bobus Higgins, sausage-maker on the great scale, who are raising such a clamour for this aristocracy of talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours, chiefly in very fact pay reverence to? Is it to talent, intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus? The manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever reverence him; did you so much as know that he was a manly man at all, till his coat grew better? Talent! I understand you to be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity, or other success of talent; but the talent itself is a thing you never saw with eyes. Nay, what is it in yourself that you are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in surveying, meditatively, in thoughtful moments? Speak now, is it the bare Bobus, stript of his very name and shirt, and turned loose upon society, that you admire and thank heaven for; or Bobus, with his cash-accounts, and larders dropping fatness, with his respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony chaise, admirable in some measure to certain of the flunkey species? Your own degree of worth and talent, is it of infinite value to you; or only of finite—measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of praise or pudding, it has brought you to? Bobus, you are in a vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages; and will never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-talent has already got itself voted for!'—We here cut short the Indicator; all readers perceiving whither he now tends."—P. 39.

In the chapter, also, on Democracy, we have notions expressed upon liberty which would make little impression—would be very distasteful to any audience assembled for the usual excitement of political oratory.

"Liberty! the true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, and to walk thereon—to learn or to be taught what work he actually was able for, and then, by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing the same! That is his true blessedness, honour, 'liberty,' and maximum of well-being,—if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise, and keep him, were it in strait waist-coat, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man, is but a less palpable madman; his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he is going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O! if thou really art my senior—seigneur, my elder—Presbyter or priest,—if thou art in very deed my wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee, in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips, and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called by all the newspapers a 'free man,' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not death but life! Liberty requires new definitions."—P. 285.

"But truly, as I had to remark in the meanwhile, the 'liberty of not being oppressed by your fellow-man,' is an indispensable, yet one of the most insignificant fractional parts of human liberty. No man oppresses thee—can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without reason shown. True; from all men thou art emancipated, but from thyself and from the devil! No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee come or go; but thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetites for money—Windsor Georges and such like! No man oppresses thee, O free and independent Franchiser! but does not this stupid porter-pot oppress thee? no son of Adam can bid thee come and go; but this absurd pot of heavy-wet, this can and does! Thou art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor; and thou protest of thy 'liberty,' thou entire blockhead!"—P. 292.

We should hardly think of entering with Mr Carlyle into a controversy upon the corn-laws, or on schemes of emigration, or any disputed point of political economy. He brings to bear upon these certain primitive moral views and feelings which are but very remotely applicable in the resolution of these knotty problems. We should almost as soon think of inviting the veritable Diogenes himself, should he roll up in his tub to our door, to a discussion upon our commercial system. Our Diogenes Teufelsdrockh looks upon these matters in a quite peculiar manner; observe, for example, the glance he takes at our present mercantile difficulties, which, doubtless, is not without its own value, nor undeserving of all consideration.

"The continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!' Sad news, indeed, but irremediable—by no means the saddest news. The saddest news is, that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people—a most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on; a stand which, with all the corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

"My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly down from it, and said—'This is our minimum of cotton prices; we care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seems so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fug, your hearts with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell them; we will be content to equalsell them: to be happy selling equally with them. I do not see the use of underselling them; cotton cloth is already twopence a yard or lower, and yet bare backs were never more numerous amongst us. Let inventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how cotton, at its present cheapness, could be somewhat juster divided amongst us! Let inventive men consider whether the secret of this universe, and of man's life there, does after all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is one God—just, supreme, almighty: but is Mammon the name of him?

"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?—cry many.—Ay, what? Many things can be done with them, a hundred things, a thousand things—had we once got a soul and begun to try. This one thing of doing for them by 'underselling all people,' and filling our own bursten pockets by the road; and turning over all care for any 'population,' or human or divine consideration, except cash only, to the winds, with a 'Laissez-faire' and the rest of it; this is evidently not the thing. 'Farthing cheaper per yard;' no great nation can stand on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher and higher: balancing itself on its great toe! Can England not subsist without being above all people in working? England never deliberately proposed such a thing. If England work better than all people, it shall be well. England, like an honest worker, will work as well as she can; and hope the gods may allow her to live on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else being once dead, how many 'impossibles' will become possible! They are 'impossible' as cotton-cloth at twopence an ell was—till men set about making it. The inventive genius of great England will not for ever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps, and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a beaver's, or a spinner's, or a spider's genius: it is a man's genius, I hope, with a God over him!"—P. 246.

And hear our Diogenes on the often repeated cry of over-production:—

"But what will reflective readers say of a governing class, such as ours, addressing its workers with an indictment of 'over-production!' Over-production: runs it not so? 'Ye miscellaneous ignoble, manufacturing individuals, ye have produced too much. We accuse you of making above two hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers too, which you have made of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch plaid, of jane, nankeen, and woollen broadcloth, are they not manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with—Nay, what say we of hats and shoes? You produce gold watches, jewelleries, silver forks and epergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed sofas—Heavens, the Commercial Bazar and multitudinous Howel and James cannot contain you! You have produced, produced;—he that seeks your indictment, let him look around. Millions of shirts and empty pairs of breeches hang there in judgment against you. We accuse you of over-producing; you are criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes, and commodities in a frightful over-abundance. And now there is a glut, and your operatives cannot be fed.'

"Never, surely, against an earnest working mammonism was there brought by game-preserving aristocratic dilettantism, a stranger accusation since this world began. My Lords and Gentlemen—why it was you that were appointed, by the fact and by the theory of your position on the earth, to make and administer laws. That is to say, in a world such as ours, to guard against 'gluts,' against honest operatives who had done their work remaining unfed! I say, you were appointed to preside over the distribution and appointment of the wages of work done; and to see well that there went no labourer without his hire, were it of money coins, were it of hemp gallows-ropes: that formation was yours, and from immemorial time has been yours, and as yet no other's. These poor shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by the virtual unwritten law of their position they should have remembered; but by any written recognized law of their position, what have they forgotten? They were set to make shirts. The community, with all its voices commanded them, saying, 'make shirts;'—and there the shirts are! Too many shirts? Well, that is a novelty, in this intemperate earth, with its nine hundred millions of bare backs! But the community commanded you, saying, 'See that the shirts are well apportioned, that our human laws be emblems of God's law;' and where is the apportionment? Two millions shirt-less, or ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in work-house Bastiles, five millions more (according to some) in Ugoline hunger-cellars; and for remedy, you say—what say you? 'Raise our rents!' I have not in my time heard any stranger speech, not even on the shores of the Dead Sea. You continue addressing these poor shirt-spinners and over-producers in really a too triumphant manner.

"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of over-production? We take the heavens and the earth to witness, that we have produced nothing at all. Not from us proceeds this frightful overplus of shirts. In the wide domains of created nature, circulates nothing of our producing. Certain fox-brushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of fair audacity at Melton Mowbray; these we have produced, and they are openly nailed up there. He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself, let him name what and when. We are innocent of producing,—ye ungrateful, what mountains of things have we not, on the contrary, had to consume, and make away with! Mountains of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever edible or wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if we had the talent of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of divine faculty to eat? Ye ungrateful!—and did you not grow under the shadow of our wings? Are not your filthy mills built on these fields of ours; on this soil of England, which belongs to—whom think you? And we shall not offer you our own wheat at the price that pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A precious notion! What would become of you, if we chose at any time to decide on growing no wheat more?"

An amusing—caustic—exaggeration, more like a portion of a clever satire on man and society, than a sincere discussion of political evils and remedies; and not intended, we trust, for Mr Carlyle's own sake, to express his real belief in the true causes of the evils of society. If we could suppose that this piece of extravagant and one-sided invective were meant to be seriously taken, as embodying Mr Carlyle's social and political creed, we should scarcely find words strong enough to reprobate its false and mischievous tendency.

We have already said, that we regard the chief value of Mr Carlyle's writings to consist in the tone of mind which the individual reader acquires from their perusal;—manly, energetic, enduring, with high resolves and self-forgetting effort; and we here again, at the close of our paper, revert to this remark: Past and Present, has not, and could not have, the same wild power which Sartor Resartus possessed, in our opinion, over the feelings of the reader; but it contains passages which look the same way, and breathe the same spirit. We will quote one or two of these, and then conclude our notice. Their effect will not be injured, we may observe, by our brief manner of quotation. Speaking of "the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for his happiness," he says:—

"Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. 'Happiness, our being's end and aim,' is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world. The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not, 'I can't eat!' but, 'I can't work!' that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man—that he cannot work—that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled."

* * * * *

"The latest Gospel in this world, is, know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself;' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan."

* * * * *

"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river, there it runs and flows;—draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest glass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small. Labour is life!"

* * * * *

"Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there, in God's eternity—surviving there—they alone surviving—sacred band of the Immortals. Even in the weak human memory they survive so long as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surviving—peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes of time! To thee, Heaven, though severe, is not unkind. Heaven is kind, as a noble mother—as that Spartan mother, saying, as she gave her son his shield, 'with it, my son, or upon it!'

"And, who art thou that braggest of thy life of idleness; complacently showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous cushions; appliances for the folding of the hands to more sleep? Looking up, looking down, around, behind, or before, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any idle hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. 'In the heavens, in the earth, in the waters under the earth, is none like unto thee.' Thou art an original figure in this creation, a denizen in Mayfair alone. One monster there is in the world: the idle man. What is his 'religion?' That nature is a phantasm, where cunning, beggary, or thievery, may sometimes find good victual."

* * * * *

"The 'wages' of every noble work do yet lie in heaven, or else nowhere. Nay, at bottom dost thou need any reward? Was it thy aim and life-purpose, to be filled with good things for thy heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call 'happy' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for thee, deliberately, no?

"The brave man has to give his life away. Give it, I advise thee—thou dost not expect to sell thy life in an adequate manner? What price, for example, would content thee?... Thou wilt never sell thy life, or any part of thy life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart—let the price be nothing; thou hast then, in a certain sense, got all for it!"

Well said! we again repeat, O Diogenes Teufelsdrockh!

* * * * *

Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work.

* * * * *

THE END