Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 08

by Unknown

(1807-1892)

milia Smith Flygare-Carlén was born at Strömstad, Sweden, August 8th, 1807. She was the daughter of Rutger Smith, a merchant of that place, and here her childhood was passed, varied by frequent sea trips with her father, and excursions to different parts of the coast. It was probably these early maritime experiences that laid the foundation of her accurate knowledge of the character and habits of the Swedish fisherfolk. In 1827 she was married to Dr. Flygare, a physician of Kronbergslän, but after his death in 1833 she returned to her native place. As a child her talent for imaginative literature was known among her friends, but nothing of any permanent value was developed until after her thirtieth year, when her first novel, 'Waldemar Klein,' was published anonymously (1838). After this first successful literary attempt, she went to Stockholm upon the advice of her father (1839), and shortly after she was married to a lawyer of that city, Johan Gabriel Carlén, a Swedish poet and author. Her novels appeared in quick succession; she at once became popular, and her books were widely read. Her productivity was remarkable. The period of her highest accomplishment was from 1838 to 1852, when a great affliction in the loss of her son suspended her activities for several years. It was not until 1858 that she again resumed her writing.

Emilia Carlén

She was honored by the gold medal of the Swedish Academy (1862), and the success of her books was followed by abundant pecuniary reward as well as distinction. Her house in Stockholm was the centre of the literary life of the capital until the death of her husband in 1875, when she completely retired from the world. She established the "Rutger Smith Fund" for poor fishermen and their widows, made an endowment for students to the University of Upsala in memory of her son, and also founded in memory of her husband a fund for the assistance of teachers. She died at Stockholm, February 5th, 1892.

As a novelist she shares national honors with her countrywoman, Fredrika Bremer. Her range in fiction was not confined to a single field, but embraced all classes and conditions of Swedish life. Her stories are full of action and rich in incident, and her delineation of character is natural and shows her real experience of human nature. She is most happy in depicting the humble fisherfolk and peasants. The stirring incidents of the adventurous life of the smugglers were congenial themes, and her graphic descriptions give typical pictures of the rough coast life among sailors, fishers, and revenue officers.

Among her best and most characteristic works are: 'Gustav Lindorm' (1835); 'Rosen på Tistelön' (The Rose of Tistelön), 1842; 'Jungfrutornet' (The Maiden's Tower), 1848; 'Enslingen på Johannisskäret' (The Hermit of the Johannis Rock), 1846. Her autobiography, written in her later years, is sprightly and interesting. Her collected works number more than thirty volumes, the greater part of which have been translated into German, French, and English.

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THE PURSUIT OF THE SMUGGLERS

From 'The Merchant House among the Islands'

He [Olagus] thundered his command to his companions:— "Row, row as fast as you can to the open sea!" And as though it had invisible wings, the boat turned and shot forward.

"Halt! halt!" cried the lieutenant, whose blood was now up. "In the name of his Majesty and of the Crown, down with the sails."

Loud laughter from the smugglers' boat sounded across the water.

This scornful laughter was answered from the yacht by the firing of the second cannon, which was fully loaded. The ball fell into the water close to the windward of the boat.

The answer was renewed laughter from the smugglers' boat; whose crew, urged by the twofold desire to save their cargo and to make fools of the Custom-house officers, continued to increase the distance between themselves and the yacht. In spite of the more skillful guidance, the two oars of the latter could not overtake the four men. But the lieutenant's full strong voice could still be heard:—

"Stop, or I will shoot you to the bottom!"

But he did not shoot, for the smugglers' boat was already out of the reach of shot.

At this moment it would have been impossible to detect the least trace of the amiable, good-natured Gudmar Guldbrandsson, the favorite of all the ladies, with his light yellow curls and his slightly arched forehead, and the beautiful dark blue eyes, which when not enlivened by the power of some passion, sometimes revealed that half-dreamy expression that women so often admire.

Majke ought to have seen her commander now, as he stood for a moment on the deck, leaning on his gun, his glass in his hand.

"Row, boys, row with all your might! I will not allow—" The remainder of the sentence was lost in inarticulate tones.

Once more he raised the glass to his eyes.

The chase lasted some time, without any increase of the intervening distance, or any hope of its diminution. It was a grave, a terrible chase.

Meantime new and strange intentions had occurred to the commander of the smugglers' boat. From what dark source could he have received the inspiration that dictated the command?

"Knock out the bung of the top brandy-barrel, and let us drink; that will refresh our courage and rejoice our hearts. Be merry and drink as long as you like."

And now ensued a wild bacchanalia. The men drank out of large mugs, they drank out of cans, and the result was not wanting, while the boat was nearing the entrance to the sea.

"Now, my men," began Olagus in powerful penetrating tones, as he stroked his reddish beard, "shall we allow one of those government fools to force us to go a different way from the one we ourselves wish to go?"

"Olagus," Tuve ventured to interpose,—for Tuve still possessed full consciousness, as he had only made a pretense of drinking,—"dear Olagus, let us be content if we can place the goods in safety. I think I perceive that you mean something else—something dangerous."

"Coward! You ought to sit at home and help your father weave nets. If you are afraid, creep under the tarpaulin; there are others here who do not get the cramp when they are to follow the Mörkö Bears."

"For my part," thought Börje, as he bent over his oar, "I should like to keep away from this hunt. But who dare speak a word? I feel as though I were already in the fortress, the ship and crew in the service of the Crown."

Perhaps Ragnar thought so too; but the great man was so much feared that when he commanded no contradiction was ever heard.

It was almost the first time that Tuve had made an objection, and his brother's scornful rebuke had roused his blood also; but still he controlled himself.

What was resolved on meantime will be seen from what follows.

"Why, what is that?" exclaimed the lieutenant of the yacht. "The oars are drawn in! He is turning,—on my life, he is turning!"

"He knew that we should catch him up," said Sven, delighted once more to be able to indulge in his usual humor. "Fists and sinews like mine are worth as much as four of them; and if we take Pelle into account, they might easily recognize that the best thing they can do is to surrender at once."

"Silence, you conceited idiot!" commanded the lieutenant; "this is no matter of parley. He is making straight for us. The wind is falling; it is becoming calm."

"What does the lieutenant think, Pelle?" asked Sven, in a loud whisper. "Can Olagus have weapons on board and want to attack us?"

"It almost looks like it," answered Pelle shortly.

Meantime the two boats approached one another with alarming speed.

"Whatever happens," said the lieutenant, with icy calm,— "and the game looks suspicious, you know, my friends,—would that the coast-guardsman may not look behind him! The flag of the Crown may wave over living or dead men; that is no matter so long as it does not wave over one who has not done his duty."

"Yes," answered Pelle.

Sven spread out his arms in a significant gesture.

"They may be excited by drink,—their copper-colored faces show that; but here stands a man who will not forget that his name is Sven Dillhufvud. There, I have spoken! But, dear sir, do take care of yourself. They have torn up the boards, and are fetching up stones and pieces of iron."

"Yes, I see. If they attack us, take care of the oars. Do not lay-to on the long side; but row past, and then turn. If they throw, watch their movements carefully; in that way you can escape the danger."

The boats, which were only a few fathoms apart, glided gently towards one another.

The lieutenant's command was punctually executed by his people.

"Olagus Esbjörnsson," exclaimed the commander of the Custom-house yacht, "I charge you once more in the King's name to surrender!"

"O dear, yes," exclaimed the worthy descendant of the Vikings. "I have come back just with that intention. Perhaps I also wanted to fulfill an old vow. Do you remember what I vowed that night by the Oternnest?"

At the same moment a whole shower of pieces of iron whistled through the air, and fell rattling on to the yacht; but the sharp piece of iron thrown by Olagus's own hands was aimed at the lieutenant himself. He however darted aside so quickly that he was not wounded, although it flew so close past him that it tore off his straw hat and dashed it into the sea.

"Olagus, and you others," sounded his voice, in all its youthful power, "consider what you do; consider the price of an attack on a royal boat and crew! The responsibility may cost you dear. I charge you to cease at once."

"What! Are you frightened, you Crown slaves?" roared Olagus, whose sparkling eyes and flushed face, so different from his usual calm in peaceful circumstances, lent increased wildness to his form and gestures. "Come, will this warm you?" And at the same moment another piece of iron flew past, aimed with such certainty that it would have cut off the thread of the lieutenant's life if he had not taken shelter behind the mast. The iron was firmly fixed in the mast.

The yacht was now bombarded on all sides. Here hung a torn sail, there an end of rope; and the side planks had already received a good deal of injury, so that the yacht was threatened with a leak. But now was heard for the last time the young commander's warning:—

"Stop, Olagus, and tell your people to put aside their wretched arms; for, on my life, this gun is loaded with a ball, and the first of you who throws another piece shall be shot down like a stag."

"Do it if you dare! But there, see, miserable Custom-house dog, how the Mörkö Bears respect your threats!"

The third piece of iron was just about to be thrown; but at the same moment the lieutenant took aim.

The shot was fired.

During the long chase and the attack which followed it, the sun had been approaching the horizon, and now might be seen one of those beautiful sunsets which so often delight the eye on this blue-green sea. They are the counterpart of the autumn apparitions during the dark fogs, when the ships wander about seeking their way among the cliffs, then glimmering whitely, and now shining red.

Worthy the inspiration of poet and painter, this warm, divinely peaceful, and lovely scene of nature offered a new, bitter contrast to the terrible picture which human passion and the claims of duty had conjured with lightning speed into these two spots in the sea—the smugglers' boat and the Custom-house yacht.

The shot was fired, and the mighty giant of Mörkö, Olagus Esbjörnsson, sank back into the tarpaulin.

"The accursed devil has shot right into my heart!"

Pale as death, Tuve sprang forward, and wanted to stay the blood.

"Leave it alone," panted Olagus. "It is no use. Give my love to father and Britje; she was a good wife. You must be a father to—my boy. The business may cease."

The subduing touch of death had already extinguished the wild light which the fire of hatred had kindled in these eyes. And the last glance that sought his brother's gaze was gentle.

Suddenly he was once more fired by the remembrance of the earthly life which was fast retreating from him.

"Quickly away with the cargo! No one must know that Olagus Esbjörnsson fell from a shot out of the Custom-house yacht. I—I—fell upon them."

They were his last words.

Tuve's head fell, sobbing, on the man whom he had so completely honored as his superior.

Tuve was now the first in Mörkö, and as though a stronger spirit had come over him, he began to feel his duty. He rose, and gave orders to turn toward the sea, but the crew stood motionless with terror.

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THOMAS CARLYLE

(1795-1881)

BY LESLIE STEPHEN

he hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Carlyle—(December 4th, 1795)—was lately commemorated. The house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which he had occupied from 1834 till his death (February 4th, 1881), was handed over to trustees to be preserved as a public memorial. No house in the British islands has more remarkable associations. Thither Carlyle had come in his thirty-eighth year, still hardly recognized by the general public, though already regarded by a small circle as a man of extraordinary powers. There he went through the concluding years of the long struggle which ended by a hard-won and scarcely enjoyed victory. There he had been visited by almost all the most conspicuous men of letters of his time: by Jeffrey, Southey, and J. S. Mill; by Tennyson and Browning, the greatest poets, and by Thackeray and Dickens, the greatest novelists of his generation; by the dearest friends of his youth, Irving and Emerson and John Sterling, and by his last followers, Froude and Ruskin. There too had lived until 1866 the woman who had shared his struggles, whom he loved and admired without stint, and whom he was yet destined to remember with many bitter pangs of remorse. Their story, laid bare with singular fullness, has invested the scene of their joys and sorrows, their alienation and reconciliations, with extraordinary interest. Every one who has read the "Reminiscences" and the later mass of biographical matter must be glad to see the "sound-proof" room, and the garden haunted by the "demon-fowls" and the other dumb witnesses of a long tragi-comedy. No one was so keenly sensitive as Carlyle to the interest of the little gleams of light which reveal our ancestors not only stirred by the great passions, but absorbed like ourselves by the trivialities of the day. A similar interest will long attach to the scene of his own trials.

Carlyle's life was a struggle and a warfare. Each of his books was wrenched from him, like the tale of the 'Ancient Mariner,' by a spiritual agony. The early books excited the wrath of his contemporaries, when they were not ridiculed as the grotesque outpourings of an eccentric humorist. His teaching was intended to oppose what most people take to be the general tendency of thought, and yet many who share that tendency gladly acknowledge that they owe to Carlyle a more powerful intellectual stimulus than they can attribute even to their accepted teachers. I shall try briefly to indicate the general nature of his message to mankind, without attempting to consider the soundness or otherwise of particular views.

Carlyle describes what kind of person people went to see in Cheyne Row. "The very sound of my voice," he says, "has got something savage-prophetic: I am as a John the Baptist girt about with a leather girdle, whose food is locusts and wild honey." Respectable literary society at "aesthetic tea-parties" regarded him as the Scribes and Pharisees regarded the Hebrew prophet. He came among them to tear the mask from their hypocritical cant. Carlyle was not externally a Diogenes. Though the son of peasants, he had the appearance and manner of a thorough gentleman in spite of all his irritable outbreaks. But he was not the less penetrated to the core with the idiosyncrasies of his class. The father, a Davie Deans of real life, had impressed the son profoundly. Carlyle had begun life on the same terms as innumerable young Scots. Strict frugality had enabled him to get a college training and reach the threshold of the ministry. His mother could look forward to the exquisite pleasure of seeing "her own bairn wag his head in a pulpit!" But at this point Carlyle's individuality first asserted itself. He could not step into any of the ordinary grooves. His college teachers appeared to him to offer "sawdust" instead of manna from heaven. The sacred formulæ of their ancestral creed had lost their savor. Words once expressive of the strongest faith were either used to utter the bigotry of narrow pedants, or were adopted only to be explained away into insipid commonplace. Carlyle shared the intellectual movement of his time too much to profess any reverence for what he called the "Hebrew old-clothes." Philosophers and critics had torn them to rags. His quarrel however was with the accidental embodiment, not with the spirit of the old creeds. The old morality was ingrained in his very nature; nor was he shocked, like some of his fellows, by the sternness of the Calvinistic views of the universe and life. The whole problem was with him precisely to save this living spirit. The skeptics, he thought, were, in the German phrase, "emptying out the baby with the bath." They were at war with the spirit as well as with the letter; trying to construct a Godless universe; to substitute a dead mechanism for the living organism; and therefore to kill down at the root every noble aspiration which could stimulate the conscience, or strengthen a man to bear the spectacle of the wrongs and sufferings of mankind.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

The crisis of this struggle happened in 1821. After giving up the ministry, Carlyle had tried "schoolmastering" and found himself to be least fitted of mankind for a function which demands patience with stupidity. He had just glanced at the legal profession only to be disgusted with its chicaneries. Hack authorship was his only chance. The dyspeptic disorder which tormented him through life was tormenting him. "A rat was gnawing at the pit of his stomach." Then he was embittered by the general distress of his own class. Men out of work were threatening riots and the yeomanry being called out to suppress them. Carlyle was asked by a friend why he too did not come out with a musket. "Hm! yes," he replied, "but I haven't quite settled on which side." It was while thus distracted, that after three weeks of sleeplessness he experienced what he called his "conversion." The universe had seemed to him "void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility; it was one huge and immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death!" And then he suddenly resolved to resist. Why go on trembling like a coward?—"As I so thought, there rushed a stream of fire over my whole soul, and I shook base fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit; almost a god: ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed; not fear or whining sorrow was in it, but indignation and grim, fell-eyed defiance." These are the phrases of his imaginary hero in 'Sartor Resartus.' In the 'Reminiscences' he repeats the statement in his own person. He had won "an immense victory"; he had escaped from the "foul mud gods" and soared into the "eternal blue of ether" where he had "for the spiritual part ever since lived." He could look down upon his fellow creatures still "weltering in that fatal element," "pitying the religious part of them and indignant against the frivolous"; enjoying an inward and supreme happiness which still remained to him, though often "eclipsed" in later years.

To understand this crisis is to understand his whole attitude. The change was not of the purely logical kind. Carlyle was not converted by any philosophical system. Coleridge, not long before, had found in Kant and Schelling an answer to similar perplexities. Carlyle, though he respected the German metaphysicians, could never find their dogmas satisfactory to his shrewd Scottish sense. His great helper, he tells us, in the strait, was not Kant but Goethe. The contrast between that serene prophet of culture and the rugged Scottish Puritan is so marked that one may be tempted to explain the influence partly by personal accident. Carlyle grew up at a time when the British public was just awaking to the existence of Germany; and not only promoted the awakening but was recognized by the great Goethe himself. He may well have been inclined in later years to exaggerate a debt due to so welcome a recognition. And yet it is intelligible that in Goethe, Carlyle saw what he most required. A man of the highest genius and a full representative of the most advanced thought could yet recognize what was elevating in the past as clearly as what was the true line of progress for us to pursue; and while casting aside the dead trappings as decidedly as Carlyle, could reach serene heights above the petty controversies where men wrangled over extinct issues. Goethe had solved the problem which vexed Carlyle's soul, and set an inspiring example of the true spirit and its great reward.

Carlyle, however, was not qualified by temperament or mental characteristics to follow Goethe's steps. If not primarily a reasoner, and too impatient perhaps for slow logical processes, he was also not a poet. Some of the greatest English teachers of his period embodied their conceptions of the world in poetry. Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron, in particular, were more effective representatives of the chief spiritual influences of the day than the few speculative writers. Carlyle thought for a time that he could utter himself in verse, or at least in prose fiction. He tried, only to feel his incompetence. As Froude observes, he had little ear for metrical composition. There were other and perhaps greater obstacles. A poet must be capable of detachment from the actual world in which he lives, however profound his interest in its great problems. He must be able to dwell with "seraph contemplation" and stand aside from the actual contest. To Carlyle such an attitude was partly impossible, partly contemptible. He had imbibed the Puritan aversion to æsthetic enjoyments. He had been brought up in circles where it was thought wrong for a child to read the 'Arabian Nights,' and where Milton could only obtain a doubtful admission as a versifier of the Scriptural narrative. Carlyle retained the prejudice. He always looked askance at poetry which had no immediate bearing upon conduct, and regarded "æsthetic" as equivalent to frivolous. "May the devil fly away with the fine arts" is a sentiment which he quotes with cordial sympathy. This view was congenial to his inborn characteristics.

One striking peculiarity was his extraordinary "receptivity" of all outward impressions. The strange irritability which he set down to the "hag Dyspepsia" made him resemble a patient in whom disease has produced a morbidly excessive sensibility. Little annoyances were magnified into tragic dimensions. The noises in a next-door house affected him as an earthquake might affect others. His memory was as retentive as his impressions were strong. Froude testifies that his account of a little trip to Paris, written forty years later without reference to memoranda, is verified down to the minutest details by contemporary letters. Scenes instantaneously photographed on his memory never faded. No one had a keener eye for country. When he visited Germany he brought back pictures of the scenes of Frederick's battles, which enabled him to reproduce them with such startling veracity that after reading you seem to remember the reality, not the book. In history he seeks to place before us a series of visions as distinct as actual eyesight: to show us Cromwell watching the descent of the Scottish army at Dunbar, or the human whirlpool raging round the walls of the Bastille. We—the commonplace spectators—should not, it is true, even at present see what was visible to Carlyle, any more than we see a landscape as Turner saw it. We may wish that we could. At any rate, we have the conviction of absolute truthfulness to the impression made on a powerful idiosyncrasy. We perceive, as by the help of a Rembrandt, vast chaotic breadths of gloomy confusion, with central figures thrown out by a light of extraordinary brilliancy. Carlyle, indeed, always has it in mind that what we call reality is but a film on the surface of mysterious depths. We are such stuff, to repeat his favorite quotation, as dreams are made of. Past history is a series of dreams; the magic of memory may restore them for an instant to our present consciousness. But the most vivid picture of whatever is not irrecoverably lost always brings, too, the pathetic sense that we are after all but ephemeral appearances in the midst of the eternities and infinities. Overwhelmed by this sense of the unsubstantiality even of the most real objects, Carlyle clutches, as it were with the energy of despair, every fading image; and tries to invest it with something of its old brightness. Carlyle was so desirous to gain this distinctness of vision that he could not be happy in personal descriptions till, if possible, he had examined the portrait of his hero and satisfied himself that he could reproduce the actual bodily appearance. The face, he holds, shows the soul. And then his shrewd Scottish sagacity never deserts him. If the hero sometimes becomes, like most heroes, a little too free from human infirmities, the actors in his dramas never become mere walking gentlemen. In Dryasdust he gives us lay figures, bedizened at times with shallow paradoxes; but Carlyle always deals in genuine human nature. His judgment may not be impartial, but at least it is not nugatory. He sees the man from within and makes him a credible individual, not a mere bit of machinery worked by colorless formulæ. With this eye for character goes the keen sense of grim humor which keeps him in touch with reality. Little incidents bring out the absurd side of even the heroic. The most exciting scenes of his 'French Revolution' are heightened by the vision of the shivering usher who "accords the grand entries" when the ferocious mob is rushing into the palace—not "finding it convenient," as Carlyle observes, "to refuse them"; and of the gentleman who continues for an hour to "demand the arrestment of knaves and dastards"—a most comprehensive of all known petitions. Carlyle's "mannerism" is one result of this strain to be graphic. It has been attributed to readings of Jean Paul, and by Carlyle himself, partly to Irving and partly to the early talk in his father's home. It appears at any rate as soon as Carlyle gets confidence enough in himself to trust to his own modes of impression; and if it may fairly be called a mannerism, was not an affectation. It was struck out in the attempt to give most effective utterance to his genuine thought, and may be compared, as Burke said of Johnson's conversation, to the "contortions of the Sibyl."

It is time, however, to try to say what was the prophetic message thus delivered. Carlyle, I have said, had no logical system of philosophy, and was too much of a "realist" (in one sense) to find poetry congenial. He has to preach by pictures of the past; by giving us history, though history transfused with poetry; an account of the external fact which shall reveal the real animating principle, quietly omitted by statisticians and constitutional historians. The doctrine so delivered appears to be vague. What, the ordinary believer may ask, would be left of a religion if its historical statements should turn out to be mere figments and its framework of dogmas to be nonsense? He would naturally reply, Nothing. Carlyle replies, Everything. The spirit may survive, though its whole visible embodiment should be dissolved into fiction and fallacy. But to define this spirit is obviously impossible. It represents a tone of thought, a mode of contemplating life and the world, not any distinct set of definite propositions. Carlyle was called a "mystic," and even, as he says, was made into a "mystic school." We may accept the phrase, so far as mysticism means the substitution of a "logic of the heart" for a "logic of the head"—an appeal to sentiment rather than to any definite reasoning process. The "mystic" naturally recognizes the inner light as shining through many different and even apparently contradictory forms. But most mystics retain, in a new sense perhaps, the ancient formulæ. Carlyle rejected them so markedly that he shocked many believers, otherwise sympathetic. His early friend Irving, who tried to restore life to the old forms, and many who accepted Coleridge as their spiritual guide, were scandalized by his utterances. He thought, conversely, that they were still masquerading in "Hebrew old-clothes," or were even like the apes who went on chattering by the banks of the Dead Sea, till they ceased to be human. He regards the "Oxford movement" with simple contempt. His dictum that Newman had "no more brain than a moderate-sized rabbit" must have been followed, as no one will doubt who heard him talk, by one of those gigantic explosions of laughter which were signals of humorous exaggeration. But it meant in all seriousness that he held Newman to be reviving superstitions unworthy of the smallest allowance of brain.

Yet Carlyle's untiring denunciation of "shams" and "unrealities" of this, as of other varieties, does not mean unqualified antipathy. He feels that the attempt to link the living spirit to the dead externals is a fatal enterprise. That may be now a stifling incumbrance, which was once the only possible symbol of a living belief. Accordingly, though Carlyle's insistence upon the value of absolute intellectual truthfulness is directed against this mode of thought, his attack upon the opposite error is more passionate and characteristic. The 'Sartor Resartus,' his first complete book (1833-4), announced and tried to explain his "conversion." To many readers it still seems his best work, as it certainly contains some of his noblest passages. It was unpopular in England, and (an Englishman must say it with regret) seems to have been first appreciated in America. It gave indeed many sharp blows at English society: it expresses his contempt for the upper literary strata, who like Jeffrey complained of him for being so "desperately in earnest"; and for the authors, who were not "prophets," but mere caterers to ephemeral amusement. But the satire, I cannot but think, is not quite happy. The humor of the "Clothes Philosophy" is a little strained; to me, I confess, rather tiresome: and the impressive passages just those where he forgets it.

His real power became obvious beyond all cavil on the publication of the 'French Revolution' (1837). Not for a hundred years, he declared, had the public received any book that "came more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man." That expresses, as I think, the truth. The book is not to be "read for information." The facts would now require much restatement; and moreover, the narrative is too apt to overleap prosaic but necessary facts in order to fasten upon the picturesque passages. But considered as what it is, a "prose epic," a moving panorama, drawn with astonishing force and perception of the tremendous tragi-comedy involved, it is unequaled in English literature. The doctrine inculcated is significant. Carlyle's sympathies were in one sense with the Revolution. He felt, he says, that the Radicals were "guild-brothers," while the Whigs were mere "amateurs." He was even more thoroughly convinced than the Radicals that a thoroughgoing demolition of the old order was essential. The Revolution was but the first volcanic outburst of the great forces still active below the surface. Europe, he says ('Chartism'), lay "hag-ridden" and "quack-ridden." The quack is the most hideous of hags; he is a "falsehood incarnate." To blow him and his to the four winds was the first necessity. The French Revolution was "the inevitable stern end of much: the fearful but also wonderful, indispensable, and sternly beneficent beginning of much." So far, Carlyle was far more in agreement with Paine than with Burke. But what was to follow when the ground was cleared? When you have cut off your king's head and confiscated the estates of the nobility and the church, you have only begun. A new period is to be born with death-throes and birth-throes, and there are, he guesses ('French Revolution,' Book iv., chapter 4), some two centuries of fighting before "Democracy go through its dire, most baleful stage of 'Quackocracy.'" The radicals represent this coming "Quackocracy." What was their root error? Briefly (I try to expound, not to enlarge), that they were materialists. Their aim was low. They desired simply a multiplication of physical comforts, or as he puts it, a boundless supply of "pigs-wash." Their means too were futile. Society, on their showing, was a selfish herd hungering for an equal distribution of pigs-wash. They put unlimited faith in the mere mechanism of constitution-mongering; in ballot-boxes and manipulation of votes and contrivances by which a number of mean and selfish passions might be somehow so directed as to balance each other. It is not by any such devices that society can really be regenerated. You must raise men's souls, not alter their conventions. They must not simply abolish kings, but learn to recognize the true king, the man who has the really divine right of superior strength and wisdom, not the sham divine right of obsolete tradition. You require not paper rules, but a new spirit which spontaneously recognizes the voice of God. The true secret of life must be to him, as to every "mystic," that we should follow the dictates of the inner light which speaks in different dialects to all of us.

But this implies a difficulty. Carlyle, spite of his emergence into "blue ether," was constitutionally gloomy. He was more alive than any man since Swift to the dark side of human nature. The dullness of mankind weighed upon him like a nightmare. "Mostly fools" is his pithy verdict upon the race at large. Nothing then could be more idle than the dream of the revolutionists that the voice of the people could be itself the voice of God. From millions of fools you can by no constitutional machinery extract anything but folly. Where then is the escape? The millions, he says (essay on Johnson), "roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led"; they seem "all sightless and slavish," with little but "animal instincts." The hope is that, here and there, are scattered the men of power and of insight, the heaven-sent leaders; and it is upon loyalty to them and capacity for recognizing and obeying them that the future of the race really depends. This was the moral of the lectures on 'Hero-Worship' (1840). Odin, Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Cromwell, and Napoleon, are types of the great men who now and then visit the earth as prophets or rulers. They are the brilliant centres of light in the midst of the surrounding darkness; and in loyal recognition of their claims lies our security for all external progress. By what signs, do you ask, can they be recognized? There can be no sign. You can see the light if you have eyes; but no other faculty can supply the want of eyesight. And hence arise some remarkable points both of difference from and coincidence with popular beliefs.

In the 'Chartism,' 'Past and Present,' and 'Latter-Day Pamphlets' (1839, 1843, and 1850), Carlyle applied his theories to the problems of the day. They had the disadvantage which generally attaches to the writings of an outsider in politics. They were, said the average reader, "unpractical." Carlyle could not recommend any definite measures; an objection easy to bring against a man who urges rather a change of spirit than of particular measures. Yet it is noticeable that he recommends much that has since become popular. Much of his language might be used by modern Socialists. In 'Past and Present,' for example (Book iii., Chapter 8), he gives the principle of "land nationalization." The great capitalist is to be turned into a "captain of industry," and government is to undertake to organize labor, to protect health, and to enforce education. Carlyle so far sympathizes with the Socialist, not only as agreeing that the great end of government is the raising of the poor, but as denouncing the laissez-faire doctrine. The old-fashioned English Radical had regarded all government as a necessary evil, to be minimized as much as possible. When it had armed the policemen, it had fulfilled its whole duty. But this, according to Carlyle, was to leave the "dull multitude" to drift into chaos. Government should rest upon the loyalty of the lower to the higher. Order is essential; and good order means the spontaneous obedience to the heaven-sent hero. He, when found, must supply the guiding and stimulating force. The Socialist, like Carlyle, desires a strong government, but not the government of the "hero." Government of which the moving force comes from above instead of below will be, he thinks, a government of mere force. And here occurs the awkward problem to which Carlyle is constantly referring. He was generally accused of identifying "right" with "might." Against this interpretation he always protested. Right and Might, he says often, are in the long run identical. That which is right and that alone is ultimately lasting. Your rights are the expression of the divine will; and for that reason, whatever endures must be right. Work lasts so far as it is based upon eternal foundations. The might, therefore, is in the long run the expression of the right. The Napoleonic empire, according to a favorite illustration, could not last because it was founded upon injustice. The two tests then must coincide: what is good proves itself by lasting, and what lasts, lasts because good; but the test of endurance cannot, it is clear, be applied when it is wanted. Hence arises an ambiguity which often gives to Carlyle the air of a man worshiping mere success; when, if we take his own interpretation, he takes the success to be the consequence, not the cause, of the rightness. The hero is the man who sees the fact and disregards the conventional fiction; but for the moment he looks very like the man who disregards principles and attends to his own interest.

Here again Carlyle approximates to a doctrine to which he was most averse, the theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. The Darwinian answers in this way Carlyle's problem, how it is to come to pass that the stupidity of the masses comes to blunder into a better order? Here and there, as in his accounts of the way in which the intensely stupid British public managed to blunder into the establishment of a great empire, Carlyle seems to fall in with the Darwinian view. That view shocked him because he thought it mechanical. To him the essence of history was to be found not in the blind striving of the dull, but in the lives of great men. They represent the incarnate wisdom which must guide all wholesome aspiration. History is really the biography of the heroes. All so-called philosophies of history, attempts to discover general laws and to dispense with the agency of great men, are tainted with materialism. They would substitute "blind laws" for the living spirit which really guides the development of the race. But if you ask how your hero is to be known, the only answer can be, Know him at your peril.

Carlyle's most elaborate books, the 'Cromwell' and the 'Frederick,' are designed to give an explicit answer to the "right" and "might" problem. Carlyle in both cases seems to be toiling amidst the dust-heaps of some ancient ruin, painfully disinterring the shattered and defaced fragments of a noble statue and reconstructing it to be hereafter placed in a worthy Valhalla. Cromwell, according to the vulgar legend, was a mere hypocrite, and Frederick a mere cynical conqueror. The success of both—that is his intended moral—was in proportion to the clearness with which they recognized the eternal laws of the universe. Cromwell probably is the more satisfactory hero, as more really sympathetic to his admirer. But each requires an interpreter. Cromwell's gifts did not lie in the direction of lucid utterance; and Frederick, if he could have read, would certainly have scorned, the doctrine of his eulogist. Carlyle, that is, has to dig out in the actions of great men a true significance, certainly not obvious to the actors themselves. Their recognition of the eternal laws was in one case embodied in obsolete formulæ, and in the other, it might seem, altogether unconscious. The hero's recognition of divine purposes does not imply then that his own vision is purged from error, or that his aim is distinctly realized. He may, like Mahomet or the Abbot Sampson, be full of superstition. His "veracity" does not mean that his beliefs are true; only that they are sincere and such a version of the truth as is possible in his dialect. This is connected with Carlyle's constant insistence upon the superiority of silence to speech. The divine light shines through many distracting media; it enlightens many who do not consciously perceive it. It may be recognized because it gives life; because the work to which it prompts is lasting. But even the hero who tries to utter himself is sure to interpolate much that is ephemeral, confused, and imperfect; and speech in general represents the mere perplexed gabble of men who take words for thought, and raise a hopeless clamor which drowns the still small voice of true inspiration. If men are mostly fools, their talk is mostly folly; forming a wild incoherent Babel in which it is hard to pick out the few scattered words of real meaning. Carlyle has been ridiculed for preaching silence in so many words; but then Carlyle was speaking the truth, and of that, he fully admits, we can never have too much. The hero may be a prophet, or a man of letters. He is bound to speak seriously, though not to be literally silent; and his words must be judged not by the momentary pleasure, but by their ultimate influence on life.

Carlyle's message to his fellows, which I have tried imperfectly to summarize, may be condemned on grounds of taste and of morality. Translated into logical formulæ it becomes inconsistent, and it embodies some narrow prejudices in exaggerated terms. Yet I think that it has been useful even by the shock it has given to commonplace optimism. It has been far more useful because in his own dialect, Carlyle—as I think—expresses some vital truths with surpassing force. Whatever our creeds, religious or political, he may stimulate our respect for veracity, in the form of respect for honest work or contempt for hypocritical conventions; our loyalty to all great leaders, in the worlds both of thought and action; and our belief that to achieve any real progress, something is required infinitely deeper than any mere change in the superficial arrangements of society. These lessons are expressed, too, as the merely literary critic must admit, by a series of historical pictures, so vivid and so unique in character that for many readers they are in the full sense fascinating. They are revelations of new aspects of the world, never, when once observed, to be forgotten. And finally, I may add that Carlyle's autobiographical writings—in which we must include the delightful 'Life of Sterling'—show the same qualities in a shape which, if sometimes saddening, is profoundly interesting. No man was more reticent in his life, though he has been made to deliver a posthumous confession of extraordinary fullness. We hear all the groans once kept within the walls of Cheyne Row. After making all allowance for the fits of temper, the harshness of judgment, and the willful exaggeration, we see at last a man who under extraordinary difficulties was unflinchingly faithful to what he took to be his vocation, and struggled through a long life, full of anxieties and vexations, to turn his genius to the best account.

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LABOR

From 'Past and Present'

For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.

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.

It has been written, "An endless significance lies in Work;" a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valor against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labor in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!

Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless Chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself by mere force of gravity into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted World. What would become of the Earth did she cease to revolve? In the poor old Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the Potter's wheel,—one of the venerablest objects; old as the Prophet Ezekiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive coloring, what gilding and enameling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch,—a mere enameled vessel of dishonor! Let the idle think of this.

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 grass-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! Labor is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, "self-knowledge" and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. "Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone."

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And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim brute Powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such wrestle, there, and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually learn. Set down a brave Sir Christopher in the middle of black ruined Stone-heaps, of foolish unarchitectural Bishops, red-tape Officials, idle Nell-Gwynn Defenders of the Faith; and see whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral out of all that, yea or no! Rough, rude, contradictory, are all things and persons, from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen up to the idle Nell-Gwynn Defenders, to blustering red-tape Officials, foolish unarchitectural Bishops. All these things and persons are there not for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's; they are there for their own sake mainly! Christopher will have to conquer and constrain all these,—if he be able. All these are against him. Equitable Nature herself, who carries her mathematics and architectonics not on the face of her, but deep in the hidden heart of her,—Nature herself is but partially for him; will be wholly against him, if he constrain her not! His very money, where is it to come from? The pious munificence of England lies far-scattered, distant, unable to speak and say, "I am here";—must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious munificence, and all help, is so silent, invisible like the gods; impediments, contradictions manifold, are so loud and near! O brave Sir Christopher, trust thou in those, notwithstanding, and front all these; understand all these; by valiant patience, noble effort, insight, by man's strength, vanquish and compel all these,—and on the whole, strike down victoriously the last topstone of that Paul's Edifice; thy monument for certain centuries, the stamp "Great Man" impressed very legibly on Portland-stone there!

Yes, all manner of help, and pious response from Men of Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first "Impossible." In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through Immensity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon, thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to Heaven; and from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind Localities and town and country Parishes there never could, blessed dew-moisture to suffice thee shall have fallen!

Work is of a religious nature;—work is of a brave nature; which it is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is as the swimmer's: a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. "It is so," says Goethe, "with all things that man undertakes in this world."

Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,—Columbus, my hero, royalest Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment, this of thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee mutinous discouraged souls, behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee the equal, unpenetrated veil of Night. Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from their deep basin (ten miles deep, I am told), are not entirely there on thy behalf! Meseems they have other work than floating thee forward:—and the huge Winds, that sweep from Ursa-Major to the Tropics and Equators, dancing their giant-waltz through the kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity, they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle-skiff of thine! Thou art not among articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art among immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling, wide as the world here. Secret, far off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there lies a help in them: see how thou wilt get at that. Patiently thou wilt wait till the mad Southwester spend itself, saving thyself by dexterous science of defense, the while: valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favoring East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage: thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness, weakness of others and thyself;—how much wilt thou swallow down! There shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea, which is but ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable; known to God only. Thou shalt be a great man. Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of the World Marine-service,—thou wilt have to be greater than this tumultuous unmeasured World here round thee is; thou, in thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms shalt embrace it, harness it down; and make it bear thee on,—to new Americas, or whither God wills!

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THE WORLD IN CLOTHES

From 'Sartor Resartus'

As Montesquieu wrote a 'Spirit of Laws,'" observes our Professor, "so could I write a 'Spirit of Clothes'; thus, with an 'Esprit des Lois,' properly an 'Esprit de Coutumes,' we should have an 'Esprit de Costumes.' For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. In all his Modes, and habilatory endeavors, an Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded mantles, based on light sandals; tower-up in high headgear, from amid peaks, spangles, and bell-girdles; swell-out in starched ruffs, buckram stuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or girth himself into separate sections, and front the world an Agglomeration of four limbs,—will depend on the nature of such Architectural Idea: whether Grecian, Gothic, Later-Gothic, or altogether Modern, and Parisian or Anglo-Dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in Color! From the soberest drab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies unfold themselves in choice of color: if the cut betoken Intellect and Talent, so does the Color betoken Temper and Heart. In all which, among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant, indubitable, though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect: every snip of the Scissors has been regulated and prescribed by ever-active Influences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a superior order are neither invisible nor illegible.

"For such superior Intelligences a Cause-and-Effect Philosophy of Clothes, as of Laws, were probably a comfortable winter-evening entertainment: nevertheless, for inferior Intelligences, like men, such Philosophies have always seemed to me uninstructive enough. Nay, what is your Montesquieu himself but a clever infant spelling Letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic Book, the lexicon of which lies in Eternity, in Heaven?—Let any Cause-and-Effect Philosopher explain, not why I wear such and such a Garment, obey such and such a Law; but even why I am here, to wear and obey anything!—Much therefore, if not the whole, of that same 'Spirit of Clothes' I shall suppress as hypothetical, ineffectual, and even impertinent: naked Facts, and Deductions drawn therefrom in quite another than that omniscient style, are my humbler and proper province."

Acting on which prudent restriction, Teufelsdröckh has nevertheless contrived to take-in a well nigh boundless extent of field; at least, the boundaries too often lie quite beyond our horizon. Selection being indispensable, we shall here glance over his First Part only in the most cursory manner. This First Part is, no doubt, distinguished by omnivorous learning, and utmost patience and fairness: at the same time, in its results and delineations, it is much more likely to interest the Compilers of some Library of General, Entertaining, Useful, or even Useless Knowledge than the miscellaneous readers of these pages. Was it this Part of the Book which Heuschrecke had in view, when he recommended us to that joint-stock vehicle of publication, "at present the glory of British Literature"? If so, the Library Editors are welcome to dig in it for their own behoof.

To the First Chapter, which turns on Paradise and Fig-leaves, and leads us into interminable disquisitions of a mythological, metaphorical, cabalistico sartorial, and quite antediluvian cast, we shall content ourselves with giving an unconcerned approval. Still less have we to do with "Lilis, Adam's first wife, whom, according to the Talmudists, he had before Eve, and who bore him, in that wedlock, the whole progeny of aërial, aquatic, and terrestrial Devils,"—very needlessly, we think. On this portion of the Work, with its profound glances into the Adam-Kadmon, or Primeval Element, here strangely brought into relation with the Nifl and Muspel (Darkness and Light) of the antique North, it may be enough to say, that its correctness of deduction and depth of Talmudic and Rabbinical lore have filled perhaps not the worst Hebraist in Britain with something like astonishment.

But quitting this twilight region, Teufelsdröckh hastens from the Tower of Babel, to follow the dispersion of Mankind over the whole habitable and habilable globe. Walking by the light of Oriental, Pelasgic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient and Modern researches of every conceivable kind, he strives to give us in compressed shape (as the Nürnbergers give an Orbis Pictus) an Orbis Vestitus; or view of the costumes of all mankind, in all countries, in all times. It is here that to the Antiquarian, to the Historian, we can triumphantly say: Fall to! Here is learning: an irregular Treasury, if you will; but inexhaustible as the Hoard of King Nibelung, which twelve wagons in twelve days, at the rate of three journeys a day, could not carry off. Sheepskin cloaks and wampum belts; phylacteries, stoles, albs; chlamydes, togas, Chinese silks, Afghan shawls, trunk-hose, leather breeches, Celtic philibegs (though breeches, as the name Gallia Braccata indicates, are the more ancient), Hussar cloaks, Vandyke tippets, ruffs, fardingales, are brought vividly before us,—even the Kilmarnock nightcap is not forgotten. For most part, too, we must admit that the Learning, heterogeneous as it is, and tumbled-down quite pell-mell, is true, concentrated and purified Learning, the drossy parts smelted out and thrown aside.

Philosophical reflections intervene, and sometimes touching pictures of human life. Of this sort the following has surprised us. The first purpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament. "Miserable indeed," says he, "was the condition of the Aboriginal Savage, glaring fiercely from under his fleece of hair, which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung round him like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild-fruits; or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in morasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements, without arms, save the ball of heavy Flint, to which, that his sole possession and defense might not be lost, he had attached a long cord of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling it with deadly unerring skill. Nevertheless, the pains of Hunger and Revenge once satisfied, his next care was not Comfort but Decoration (Putz). Warmth he found in the toils of the chase; or amid dried leaves, in his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto: but for Decoration he must have Clothes. Nay, among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to Clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decoration, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

"Reader, the heaven-inspired melodious Singer; loftiest Serene Highness; nay, thy own amber-locked, snow-and-rose-bloom Maiden, worthy to glide sylph-like almost on air, whom thou lovest, worshipest as a divine Presence, which, indeed, symbolically taken, she is,—has descended, like thyself, from that same hair-mantled, flint-hurling Aboriginal Anthropophagus! Out of the eater cometh forth meat; out of the strong cometh forth sweetness. What changes are wrought, not by Time, yet in Time! For not Mankind only, but all that Mankind does or beholds, is in continual growth, regenesis and self-perfecting vitality. Cast forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living, ever-working Universe: it is a seed-grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-day (says one), it will be found flourishing as a Banyan-grove (perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-forest!) after a thousand years.

"He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of Printing. The first ground handful of Nitre, Sulphur, and Charcoal drove Monk Schwartz's pestle through the ceiling: what will the last do? Achieve the final undisputed prostration of Force under Thought, of Animal courage under Spiritual. A simple invention it was in the old-world Grazier,—sick of lugging his slow Ox about the country till he got it bartered for corn or oil,—to take a piece of Leather, and thereon scratch or stamp the mere Figure of an Ox (or Pecus); put it in his pocket, and call it Pecunia, Money. Yet hereby did Barter grow Sale, the Leather Money is now Golden and Paper, and all miracles have been out-miracled: for there are Rothschilds and English National Debts; and whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,—to the length of sixpence.—Clothes too, which began in foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! Increased Security and pleasurable Heat soon followed: but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (Scham, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinction, social polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us.

"But, on the whole," continues our eloquent Professor, "Man is a Tool-using Animal (Handthierendes Thier). Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs, lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise Tools: with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron, as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all."

Here may we not, for a moment, interrupt the stream of Oratory with a remark, that this Definition of the Tool-using Animal appears to us, of all that Animal-sort, considerably the precisest and best? Man is called a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also laugh, or attempt to do it: and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher? Teufelsdröckh himself, as we said, laughed only once. Still less do we make of that other French Definition of the Cooking Animal: which, indeed, for rigorous scientific purposes, is as good as useless. Can a Tartar be said to cook, when he only readies his steak by riding on it? Again, what Cookery does the Greenlander use, beyond stowing-up his whale-blubber, as a marmot, in the like case, might do? Or how would Monsieur Ude prosper among those Orinoco Indians who, according to Humboldt, lodge in crow-nests, on the branches of trees; and, for half the year, have no victuals but pipe-clay, the whole country being under water? But on the other hand, show us the human being, of any period or climate, without his Tools: those very Caledonians, as we saw, had their Flint-ball, and Thong to it, such as no brute has or can have.

"Man is a Tool-using Animal," concludes Teufelsdröckh in his abrupt way; "of which truth Clothes are but one example: and surely if we consider the interval between the first wooden Dibble fashioned by man, and those Liverpool Steam-carriages, or the British House of Commons, we shall note what progress he has made. He digs up certain black stones from the bosom of the earth, and says to them, Transport me and this luggage at the rate of five-and-thirty miles an hour; and they do it: he collects, apparently by lot, six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous individuals, and says to them, Make this nation toil for us, bleed for us, hunger and sorrow and sin for us; and they do it."

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DANTE

From 'Heroes and Hero-Worship'

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it were, irrevocably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book;—and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless;—significant of the whole history of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain. A soft, ethereal soul, looking-out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart, as if it were withal a mean, insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and lifelong, unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye, too, it looks out in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry—Why the world was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks, this "voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us "his mystic unfathomable song."

The little that we know of Dante's life corresponds well enough with this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then going; much school-divinity, Aristotelian logic, some Latin classics,—no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things: and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding, and great subtlety; this best fruit of education he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. He knows accurately and well what lies close to him; but in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into singular chiaroscuro striking on what is far off. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone through the usual destinies: been twice out campaigning as a soldier for the Florentine State; been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and grown-up henceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy the rigorous earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podestà or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,—and the world had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no 'Divina Commedia' to hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious civic document. Another curious document, some considerable number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern pride:—"If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return (nunquam revertar)."

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, "How hard is the path (Come è duro calle)." The wretched are not cheerful company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his moody humors, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (nebulones ac histriones) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he said:—"Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himself so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, and have nothing to amuse us with at all?" Dante answered bitterly:—"No, not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, 'Like to Like;'"—given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was no solace here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him; that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life altogether? Eternity: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:—but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic unfathomable song"; and this his 'Divine Comedy,' the most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a proud thought for him at times, that he, here in exile, could do this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great; the greatest a man could do. "If thou follow thy star, Se tu segui tua stella,"—so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven!" The labor of writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he says, "This Book, which has made me lean for many years." Ah yes, it was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,—not in sport, but in grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at the age of fifty-six;—broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after; the Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am I, Dante, laid, shut-out from my native shores."

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it "a mystic unfathomable Song"; and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song: we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any; why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth, and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,—whose speech is Song. Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed:—it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who can speak their thought, not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his 'Divine Comedy' that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a canto fermo; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple terza rima, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it musical;—go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look-out on one another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "Eccovi l' nom ch' è stato all' Inferno" (See, there is the man that was in Hell). Ah yes, he had been in Hell;—in Hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come-out divine are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;—true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through suffering."—But as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole only; every compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered forever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one: but a task which is done.

Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that depends on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of Dite: red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom;—so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunette Latini, with the cotto aspetto, "face baked", parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" that falls on them there, a "fiery snow without wind," slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls—at hearing of his Son, and the past tense "fue"! The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius, this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale rages", speaks itself in these things.

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what we may call, sympathized with it,—had sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been sincere about it too; sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who sees the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern the true likeness, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: della bella persona, che mi fu tolta; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these alti guai. And the racking winds, in that aer bruno, whirl them away again, to wail forever!—Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,—sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of Æolian harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;—and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the 'Paradiso'; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, hers that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so far:—one likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.

For the intense Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;—as indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his love? "A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici sui, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God:" lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; "Non ragionam di lor, We will not speak of them, look only and pass." Or think of this: "They have not the hope to die, Non han speranza di morte." One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die; "that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such words are in this man. For rigor, earnestness, and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the 'Divina Commedia.' Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The 'Purgatorio' and 'Paradiso,'—especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing, that Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification"; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of dæmons and reprobates is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, my daughter Giovanna; I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that winding steep, "bent-down like corbels of a building," some of them,—crushed together so "for the sin of pride"; yet nevertheless in years, in ages and æons, they shall have reached the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises when one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true, noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are indispensable to one another. The 'Paradiso,' a kind of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the 'Inferno'; the 'Inferno' without it were untrue. All three make-up the true Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante's; a man sent to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they were so; the real world, as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as preternatural as the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now as always.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic representation of his Belief about this Universe:—some Critic in a future age, like some Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this, too, all an "Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two differ not by preferability of one to the other, but by incompatibility, absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with everlasting Pity,—all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems: was there in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their being emblems? Were they not indubitable awful facts, the whole heart of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an Allegory, will commit one sore mistake!—Paganism we recognize as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature; a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,—the chief recognized Virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!

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And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very strange way, found a voice. The 'Divina Commedia' is of Dante's writing; yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning methods,—how little of all he does is properly his work! All past inventive men work there with him;—as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting music.

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CROMWELL

From 'Heroes and Hero-Worship'

Poor Cromwell,—great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a clear determinate man's energy working in the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of sympathy he had with things,—the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things: this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful black enveloping him,—wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul seeing, and struggling to see.

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but the material with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. He had lived silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round him all his days; and in his way of life little call to attempt naming or uttering that. With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough;—he did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and logicizing; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, Vir-tus, manhood, herohood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Germans well name it, Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing, or Dough-tiness), Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis of the matter Cromwell had in him.

One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free out-pouring utterances of what is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and he used to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till some definite resolution rose among them, some "door of hope," as they would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to make His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian Brothers, who had drawn the sword against a great black devouring world not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,—they cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the Cause that was His. The light which now rose upon them,—how could a human soul, by any means at all, get better light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more? To them it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide them on their desolate perilous way. Was it not such? Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that same,—devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one? There is no other method. "Hypocrisy"? One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went about balancing expediencies, plausibilities; gathering votes, advices; they never were alone with the truth of a thing at all.—Cromwell's prayers were likely to be "eloquent," and much more than that. His was the heart of a man who could pray.

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly so ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all speakers aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament; one who, from the first, had weight. With that rude passionate voice of his, he was always understood to mean something, and men wished to know what. He disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke always without premeditation of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to have been singularly candid; and to have given the Printer precisely what they found on their own note-paper. And withal, what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the world, that to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! How came he not to study his words a little, before flinging them out to the public? If the words were true words, they could be left to shift for themselves.

But with regard to Cromwell's "lying," we will make one remark. This, I suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of it. All parties found themselves deceived in him; each party understood him to be meaning this, heard him even say so, and behold he turns-out to have been meaning that! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable fortune, not of a false man in such times, but simply of a superior man? Such a man must have reticences in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his journey will not extend far! There is no use for any man's taking-up his abode in a house built of glass. A man always is to be himself the judge how much of his mind he will show to other men; even to those he would have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries made: your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on that matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!

This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a case.

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small subaltern parties; uttered to them a part of his mind. Each little party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to find him not of their party, but of his own party! Was it his blame? At all seasons of his history he must have felt, among such people, how if he explained to them the deeper insight he had, they must either have shuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compact hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not have worked in his province any more; nay perhaps they could not have now worked in their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionality, conventionality to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only my little finger."

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in all departments of practice! He that cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call it "dissimulation," all this? What would you think of calling the general of an army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal and private soldier who pleased to put the question, what his thoughts were about everything?—Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a manner we must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning "corporals" rolled confusedly round him through his whole course; whom he did answer. It must have been as a great true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that ever wound himself through such a coil of things will you say so much?

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert to the very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell; about their "ambition," "falsity," and suchlike. The first is what I might call substituting the goal of their career for the course and starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had determined on being Protector of England, at the time when he was plowing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped-out: a program of the whole drama; which he then step by step dramatically unfolded with all manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on,—the hollow scheming [Greek: Ypochritês], or Play-actor, that he was! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had not his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he needed then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it so; but to him it was in no measure so. What absurdities would fall away of themselves, were this one undeniable fact kept honestly in view by History! Historians indeed will tell you that they do keep it in view;—but look whether such is practically the fact! Vulgar History, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether; even the best kinds of History only remember it now and then. To remember it duly with rigorous perfection, as in the fact it stood, requires indeed a rare faculty; rare, nay impossible. A very Shakespeare for faculty; or more than Shakespeare; who could enact a brother man's biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things he saw; in short, know his course and him, as few "Historians" are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try to represent them so; in sequence, as they were; not in the lump, as they are thrown down before us.

But a second error which I think the generality commit refers to this same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great Men; we mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious in that sense; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way.

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would make him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the down-hill slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,—he had been content to plow the ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer, without selling himself to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him, "Decide this, decide that," which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly decide! What could gilt carriages do for this man? From of old was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His existence there as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment, and Eternity: these already lay as the background of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it: this was great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone; there is too much of life in me already!" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home. The world-wide soul, wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its sorrows;—what could paradings and ribbons in the hat, do for it?

Ah yes, I will say again: The great silent men! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his own department; silently thinking; silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;—which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.—I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot do without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,—become a most green forest without roots! Solomon says, There is a time to speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of some great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson says he was, by want of money and nothing other, one might ask, "Why do not you too get up and speak; promulgate your system, found your sect?" "Truly," he will answer, "I am continent of my thought hitherto; happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no compulsion strong enough to speak it. My 'system' is not for promulgation first of all; it is for serving myself to live by. That is the great purpose of it to me. And then the 'honor'? Alas, yes;—but as Cato said of the statue: So many statues in that Forum of yours, may it not be better if they ask, Where is Cato's statue?"

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me say that there are two kinds of ambition: one wholly blamable, the other laudable and inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silent Samuel shall not be silent too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be accounted altogether poor and miserable. "Seekest thou great things, seek them not:" this is most true. And yet, I say, there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what Nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay, it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to speak by this necessity it feels.—We will say therefore: To decide about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness for the man of the place withal: that is the question. Perhaps the place was his, perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation to seek the place! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, if he were "the only man in France that could have done any good there"? Hopefuler perhaps had he not so clearly felt how much good he could do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because they had flung him out and he was now quit of it, well might Gibbon mourn over him.—Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal; too amply, rather!

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up existence, that it was possible for him to do priceless divine work for his country and the whole world. That the perfect Heavenly Law might be made Law on this Earth; that the prayer he prayed daily, "Thy kingdom come," was at length to be fulfilled! If you had convinced his judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable; that he the mournful silent Samuel was called to take a part in it! Would not the whole soul of the man have flamed-up into a divine clearness, into noble utterance and determination to act; casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting all affliction and contradiction small,—the whole dark element of his existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning? It were a true ambition this! And think now how it actually was with Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, true zealous Preachers of the truth flung into dungeons, whipt, set on pillories, their ears cropt off, God's Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy: all this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon it in silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; trusting well that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come,—that such a course was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And now behold the dawn of it; after twelve years' silent waiting, all England stirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right will get a voice for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has come again into the Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth being a member of? Cromwell threw down his plow, and hastened thither.

He spoke there,—rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen truth, where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he fought and strove, like a strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult and all else,—on and on, till the Cause triumphed, its once so formidable enemies all swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and certainty. That he stood there as the strongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero of all England,—what of this? It was possible that the Law of Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the world! The Theocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might dream of as a "devout imagination," this practical man, experienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to consider as capable of being realized. Those that were highest in Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land: in some considerable degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not true, God's truth? And if true, was it not then the very thing to do? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to answer, Yes! This I call a noble true purpose; is it not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For a Knox to take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great sound sense and experience of what our world was,—History, I think, shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in the Bible" was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it were made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for, as the highest good to England and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, with its knowingness, its alertness and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to me a rather sorry business. We have had but one such Statesman in England; one man, that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose at all. One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years; and this was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten; opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round him,—why, then, England might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, "Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;"—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all men a palpably hopeless one.

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THE PROCESSION

From 'The French Revolution'

We dwell no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude, for now, behold, the Commons Deputies are at hand! Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have, be their work what it may; there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it; that man, as future, not-yet-elected king walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? With the hure, as himself calls it, or black boar's-head, fit to be "shaken" as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—and burning fire of genius, like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions? It is Gabriel Honoré Riquetti de Mirabeau, the world-compeller; man-ruling Deputy of Aix! According to the Baroness de Staël, he steps proudly along, though looked at askance here, and shakes his black chevelure, or lion's mane, as if prophetic of great deeds.

Yes, Reader, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch, as Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than any other man;—and intrinsically such a mass of manhood too. Mark him well. The National Assembly were all different without that one; nay, he might say, with the old Despot:—"The National Assembly? I am that."

Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood:—for the Riquettis, or Arrighettis, had to fly from Florence and the Guelfs, long centuries ago, and settled in Provence, where from generation to generation they have ever approved themselves a peculiar kindred, irascible, indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like the steel they wore; of an intensity and activity that sometimes verged towards madness, yet did not reach it. One ancient Riquetti, in mad fulfillment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains together, and the chain, with its "iron star of five rays," is still to be seen. May not a modern Riquetti unchain so much, and set it drifting—which also shall be seen?

Destiny has work for that swart, burly-headed Mirabeau; Destiny has watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not his Grandfather, stout Col-d'Argent (Silver-Stock, so they named him), shattered and slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one fell day, lie sunk together on the Bridge at Casano, while Prince Eugene's cavalry galloped and regalloped over him—only the flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle over that loved head; and Vendôme, dropping his spy-glass, moaned out, "Mirabeau is dead, then!" Nevertheless he was not dead; he awoke to breath and miraculous surgery—for Gabriel was yet to be. With his silver stock he kept his scarred head erect, through long years, and wedded, and produced tough Marquis Victor, the friend of men. Whereby at last in the appointed year, 1749, this long-expected, rough-hewn Gabriel Honoré did likewise see the light; roughest lion's-whelp ever littered of that rough breed. How the old lion (for our old Marquis, too, was lion-like, most unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wondering on his offspring, and determined to train him as no lion had yet been! It is in vain, O Marquis! This cub, though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn to draw in dog-cart of Political Economy, and be a friend of men; he will not be Thou, but must and will be Himself, another than Thou. Divorce law-suits, "whole family save one in prison, and threescore lettres-de-cachet" for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.

Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the Isle of Rhé, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the Castle of If, and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has been in the Fortress of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in the Dungeon of Vincennes;—all by lettre-de-cachet, from his lion father. He has been in Pontarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men. He has pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get back his wife), the public gathering on roofs, to see, since they could not hear: "The clatter-teeth (claque-dents)!" snarls singular old Mirabeau; discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species.

But as for Gabriel Honoré, in these strange wayfarings, what has he not seen and tried! From drill-sergeants to prime ministers, to foreign and domestic booksellers, all manner of men he has seen. All manner of men he has gained; for at bottom it is a social loving heart, that wild unconquerable one—more especially all manner of women. From the Archer's Daughter at Saintes to that fair young Sophie, Madame Monnier, whom he could not but "steal" and be beheaded for—in effigy! For indeed, hardly since the Arabian Prophet lay dead, to Ali's admiration, was there seen such a Love-hero, with the strength of thirty men. In War again, he has helped to conquer Corsica; fought duels, irregular brawls; horsewhipped calumnious barons. In Literature, he has written on 'Despotism,' on 'Lettres-de-Cachet'; Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities, Profanities; Books on the 'Prussian Monarchy,' on 'Cagliostro,' on 'Calonne,' on 'The Water-Companies of Paris':—each book comparable, we will say, to a bituminous alarum-fire, huge, smoky, sudden! The fire-pan, the kindling, the bitumen, were his own; but the lumber, of rags, old wood, and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel to him), was gathered from hucksters and ass-panniers of every description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have been heard to exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is mine!

Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man, he can make his; the man himself he can make his. "All reflex and echo (tout de reflet et de réverbère)!" snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of qualities for him. In that forty years' "struggle against despotism," he has gained the glorious faculty of self-help, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped. Rare union: this man can live self-sufficing—yet lives also in the life of other men; can make men love him, work with him; a born king of men!

But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has "made away with (humé, swallowed, snuffed-up) all Formulas"; a fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and insights. A man, nevertheless, who will glare fiercely on any object, and see through it, and conquer it: for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles, but with an eye! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there; a Reality, not an artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having struggled "forty years against despotism," and "made away with all formulas," shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism, to make away with her old formulas,—having found them naught, worn out, far from the reality? She will make away with such formulas;—and even go bare, if need be, till she have found new ones.

Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the slouch hat, he steps along there. A fiery, fuliginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke! And now it has got air; it will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too, and fill all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that smoldering, with foul fire-damp and vapor enough; then victory over that, and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high; and for twenty-three resplendent months, pours out, in flame and molten fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and Wonder-sign of an amazed Europe;—and then lies hollow, cold forever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honoré, the greatest of them all: in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation, there is none like and none second to thee.

But now, if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six Hundred may be the meanest? Shall we say that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future time; complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar color, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green. That greenish-colored (verdâtre) individual is an Advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre. The son of an Advocate; his father founded Mason-lodges under Charles Edward, the English Prince or Pretender. Maximilien, the first-born, was thriftily educated; he had brisk Camille Desmoulins for schoolmate in the College of Louis le Grand, at Paris. But he begged our famed Necklace-Cardinal, Rohan, the patron, to let him depart thence, and resign in favor of a younger brother. The strict-minded Max departed, home to paternal Arras; and even had a Law-case there, and pleaded, not unsuccessfully, "in favor of the first Franklin thunder-rod." With a strict, painful mind, an understanding small but clear and ready, he grew in favor with official persons, who could foresee in him an excellent man of business, happily quite free from genius. The Bishop, therefore, taking counsel, appoints him Judge of his diocese, and he faithfully does justice to the people: till behold, one day, a culprit comes whose crime merits hanging, and the strict-minded Max must abdicate, for his conscience will not permit the dooming of any son of Adam to die. A strict-minded, strait-laced man! A man unfit for Revolutions? whose small soul, transparent wholesome-looking as small-ale, could by no chance ferment into virulent alegar,—the mother of ever-new alegar;—till all France were grown acetous virulent? We shall see.

Between which two extremes of grandest and meanest, so many grand and mean roll on, towards their several destinies, in that Procession! There is Cazalès, the learned young soldier, who shall become the eloquent orator of Royalism, and earn the shadow of a name. Experienced Mounier, experienced Malouet, whose Presidential Parlementary experience the stream of things shall soon leave stranded. A Pétion has left his gown and briefs at Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading; has not forgotten his violin, being fond of music. His hair is grizzled, though he is still young; convictions, beliefs placid-unalterable, are in that man; not hindmost of them, belief in himself. A Protestant-clerical Rabaut-St.-Étienne, a slender young eloquent and vehement Barnave, will help to regenerate France. There are so many of them young. Till thirty the Spartans did not suffer a man to marry: but how many men here under thirty; coming to produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a world of such! The old to heal up rents, the young to remove rubbish:—which latter is it not, indeed, the task here?

Dim, formless from this distance, yet authentically there, thou noticest the Deputies from Nantes? To us mere clothes-screens, with slouch-hat and cloak, but bearing in their pocket a Cahier of doléances with this singular clause, and more such, in it:—"That the master wigmakers of Nantes be not troubled with new guild-brethren, the actually existing number of ninety-two being more than sufficient!" The Rennes people have elected farmer Gérard, "a man of natural sense and rectitude without any learning." He walks there with solid step; unique, "in his rustic farmer-clothes;" which he will wear always, careless of short-cloaks and costumes. The name Gérard, or "Père Gérard, Father Gérard," as they please to call him, will fly far, borne about in endless banter, in Royalist satires, in Republican Didactic Almanacks. As for the man Gérard, being asked once what he did, after trial of it, candidly think of this Parlementary work,—"I think," answered he, "that there are a good many scoundrels among us." So walks Father Gérard, solid in his thick shoes, whithersoever bound.

And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one other time? If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see him with the eye of prophecy; for indeed the Parisian Deputies are all a little late. Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner: doomed by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal from his resting-place, the bosom of oblivion! Guillotin can improve the ventilation of the Hall; in all cases of medical police and hygiène be a present aid: but greater far, he can produce his 'Report on the Penal Code,' and reveal therein a cunningly devised Beheading Machine, which shall become famous and world-famous. This is the product of Guillotin's endeavors, gained not without meditation and reading; which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine derivative name, as if it were his daughter: La Guillotine! "With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter la tête) in a twinkling, and you have no pain;"—whereat they all laugh. Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Cæsar's.

See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honored Historian of Astronomy Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful Philosophizing, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends in foul thick confusion—of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the Drapeau Rouge: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last hell-day, thou must "tremble", though only with cold—"de froid." Speculation is not practice: to be weak is not so miserable, but to be weaker than our task. Woe the day when they mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on that wild Hippogriff of a Democracy, which, spurning the firm earth, nay, lashing at the very stars, no yet known Astolpho could have ridden!

In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of Letters; 374 Lawyers, and at least one Clergyman, the Abbé Sieyès. Him also Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him, the light, thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic; passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that can be called a passion, which in its independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind of godlike indifference, and look down on passion! He is the man, and wisdom shall die with him. This is the Sieyès who shall be System-builder, Constitution-builder General, and build Constitutions (as many as wanted) sky-high,—which shall all unfortunately fall before he get the scaffolding away. "La Politique", said he to Dumont, "polity is a science I think I have completed (achevée)." What things, O Sieyès, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou to see! But were it not curious to know how Sieyès, now in these days (for he is said to be still alive) looks out on all that Constitution masonry, through the rheumy soberness of extreme age? Might we hope, still with the old irrefragable transcendentalism? The victorious cause pleased the gods, the vanquished one pleased Sieyès (victa Catoni).

Thus, however, amid sky-rending vivats, and blessings from every heart, has the Procession of the Commons Deputies rolled by.

Next follow the Noblesse, and next the Clergy; concerning both of whom it might be asked What they specially have come for. Specially, little as they dream of it, to answer this question, put in a voice of thunder: What are you doing in God's fair Earth and Task-garden; where whosoever is not working is begging or stealing? Woe, woe to themselves and to all, if they can only answer; Collecting tithes, Preserving game! Remark, meanwhile, how D'Orléans affects to step before his own Order and mingle with the Commons. For him are vivats; few for the rest, though all wave in plumed "hats of a feudal cut," and have sword on thigh; though among them is D'Antraigues, the young Languedocian gentleman,—and indeed many a peer more or less noteworthy.

There are Liancourt and La Rochefoucault, the liberal Anglo-maniac Dukes. There is a filially pious Lally; a couple of liberal Lameths. Above all, there is a Lafayette; whose name shall be Cromwell-Grandison, and fill the world. Many a "formula" has this Lafayette, too, made away with; yet not all formulas. He sticks by the Washington-formula; and by that he will stick;—and hang by it, as by sure bower-anchor hangs and swings the tight war-ship, which, after all changes of wildest weather and water, is found still hanging. Happy for him, be it glorious or not! Alone of all Frenchmen he has a theory of the world, and right mind to conform thereto; he can become a hero and perfect character, were it but the hero of one idea. Note further our old parlementary friend, Crispin-Catiline d'Espréménil. He is returned from the Mediterranean islands, a red-hot royalist, repentant to the finger-ends;—unsettled-looking; whose light, dusky-glowing at best, now flickers foul in the socket; whom the National Assembly will by and by, to save time, "regard as in a state of distraction." Note lastly that globular Younger Mirabeau, indignant that his elder Brother is among the Commons; it is Viscomte Mirabeau; named oftener Mirabeau Tonneau (Barrel Mirabeau), on account of his rotundity, and the quantities of strong liquor he contains.

There, then, walks our French noblesse. All in the old pomp of chivalry; and yet, alas, how changed from the old position; drifted far down from their native latitude, like Arctic icebergs got into the Equatorial sea, and fast thawing there! Once these Chivalry Duces (Dukes, as they are still named) did actually lead the world,—were it only toward battle-spoil, where lay the world's best wages then; moreover, being the ablest leaders going, they had their lion's share, these Duces, which none could grudge them. But now, when so many Looms, improved Plow-shares, Steam-Engines, and Bills of Exchange have been invented; and for battle-brawling itself, men hire Drill-Sergeants at eighteen pence a day,—what mean these gold-mantled Chivalry Figures, walking there in "black-velvet cloaks," in high-plumed "hats of a feudal cut"? Reeds shaken in the wind!

The clergy have got up; with Cahiers for abolishing pluralities, enforcing residence of bishops, better payment of tithes. The Dignitaries, we can observe, walk stately, apart from the numerous Undignified,—who, indeed, are properly little other than Commons disguised in Curate-frocks. Here, however, though by strange ways, shall the Precept be fulfilled, and they that are greatest (much to their astonishment) become least. For one example out of many, mark that plausible Grégoire: one day Curé Grégoire shall be a Bishop, when the now stately are wandering distracted, as Bishops in partibus. With other thought, mark also the Abbé Maury; his broad bold face, mouth accurately primmed, full eyes, that ray out intelligence, falsehood,—the sort of sophistry which is astonished you should find it sophistical. Skillfulest vamper-up of old rotten leather, to make it look like new; always a rising man; he used to tell Mercier, "You will see; I shall be in the Academy before you." Likely indeed, thou skillfulest Maury; nay thou shalt have a Cardinal's hat, and plush and glory; but alas, also, in the long run—mere oblivion, like the rest of us, and six feet of earth! What boots it, vamping rotten leather on these terms? Glorious in comparison is the livelihood thy good old Father earns by making shoes,—one may hope, in a sufficient manner. Maury does not want for audacity. He shall wear pistols by-and-by; and at death-cries of "La lanterne, The Lamp-iron!" answer coolly, "Friends, will you see better there?"

But yonder, halting lamely along, thou noticest next Bishop Talleyrand-Perigord, his Reverence of Autun. A sardonic grimness lies in that irreverend Reverence of Autun. He will do and suffer strange things; and will become surely one of the strangest things ever seen, or like to be seen. A man living in falsehood and on falsehood; yet not what you can call a false man: there is the specialty! It will be an enigma for future ages, one may hope; hitherto such a product of Nature and Art was possible only for this age of ours—Age of Paper, and of the Burning of Paper. Consider Bishop Talleyrand and Marquis Lafayette as the topmost of their two kinds; and say once more, looking at what they did and what they were. O tempus ferax rerum!

On the whole, however, has not this unfortunate clergy also drifted in the Time-stream, far from its native latitude? An anomalous mass of men; of whom the whole world has already a dim understanding that it can understand nothing. They were once a Priesthood, interpreters of Wisdom, revealers of the Holy that is in Man; a true Clerus (or Inheritance of God on Earth): but now?—They pass silently, with such Cahiers as they have been able to redact; and none cries, God bless them.

King Louis with his Court brings up the rear: he cheerful, in this day of hope, is saluted with plaudits: still more Necker his Minister. Not so the Queen, on whom hope shines not steadily any more. Ill-fated Queen! Her hair is already gray with many cares and crosses; her first-born son is dying in these weeks: black falsehood has ineffaceably soiled her name—ineffaceably while this generation lasts. Instead of Vive la reine, voices insult her with Vive d'Orléans. Of her queenly beauty little remains except its stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid, silently enduring. With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no part, she resigns herself to a day she hoped never to have seen. Poor Marie Antoinette; with thy quick, noble instincts, vehement glancings, vision all-too fitful narrow for the work thou hast to do! O there are tears in store for thee, bitterest wailings, soft womanly meltings, though thou hast the heart of an imperial Theresa's Daughter. Thou doomed one, shut thy eyes on the future!

And so in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France. Some toward honor and quick fire-consummation; most toward dishonor; not a few toward massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation: all toward Eternity!—So many heterogeneities cast together into the fermenting-vat; there, with incalculable action, counteraction, elective affinities, explosive developments, to work out healing for a sick, Moribund System of Society! Probably the strangest Body of Men, if we consider well, that ever met together on our Planet on such an errand. So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst up from its infinite depths; and these men, its rulers and healers, without life-rule for themselves,—other life-rule than a Gospel according to Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an Accident under the sky. Man is without Duty round him; except it be "to make the Constitution." He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

What further or better belief can be said to exist in these Twelve Hundred? Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine right of Game-Destroyers. Belief, or what is still worse, canting half-belief; or worst of all, mere Machiavellic pretense-of-belief,—in consecrated dough-wafers, and the godhood of a poor old Italian Man! Nevertheless, in that immeasurable Confusion and Corruption, which struggles there so blindly to become less confused and corrupt, there is, as we said, this one salient point of a New Life discernible—the deep fixed Determination to have done with Shams. A determination which, consciously or unconsciously, is fixed; which waxes ever more fixed, into very madness and fixed-idea; which, in such embodiment as lies provided there, shall now unfold itself rapidly: monstrous, stupendous, unspeakable; new for long thousands of years!—How has the heaven's light, oftentimes in this Earth, to clothe itself in thunder and electric murkiness, and descend as molten lightning, blasting, if purifying! Nay, is it not rather the very murkiness, and atmospheric suffocation, that brings the lightning and the light? The new Evangel, as the old had been, was it to be born in the Destruction of a World?

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THE SIEGE OF THE BASTILLE

From 'The French Revolution'

But, to the living and the struggling, a new, Fourteenth morning dawns. Under all roofs of this distracted City is the nodus of a Drama, not untragical, crowding toward solution. The bustlings and preparings, the tremors and menaces; the tears that fell from old eyes! This day, my sons, ye shall quit you like men. By the memory of your fathers' wrongs; by the hope of your children's rights! Tyranny impends in red wrath: help for you is none, if not in your own right hands. This day ye must do or die.

From earliest light, a sleepless Permanent Committee has heard the old cry, now waxing almost frantic, mutinous: Arms! Arms! Provost Flesselles, or what traitors there are among you, may think of those Charleville Boxes. A hundred-and-fifty thousand of us, and but the third man furnished with so much as a pike! Arms are the one thing needful: with arms we are an unconquerable man-defying National Guard; without arms, a rabble to be whiffed with grape-shot.

Happily the word has arisen, for no secret can be kept,—that there lie muskets at the Hôtel des Invalides. Thither will we: King's Procureur M. Ethys de Corny, and whatsoever of authority a Permanent Committee can lend, shall go with us. Besenval's Camp is there; perhaps he will not fire on us; if he kill us, we shall but die.

Alas! poor Besenval, with his troops melting away in that manner, has not the smallest humor to fire! At five o'clock this morning, as he lay dreaming, oblivious in the École Militaire, a "figure" stood suddenly at his bedside; "with face rather handsome, eyes inflamed, speech rapid and curt, air audacious:" such a figure drew Priam's curtains! The message and monition of the figure was that resistance would be hopeless; that if blood flowed, woe to him who shed it. Thus spoke the figure: and vanished. "Withal there was a kind of eloquence that struck one." Besenval admits that he should have arrested him, but did not. Who this figure with inflamed eyes, with speech rapid and curt, might be? Besenval knows, but mentions not. Camille Desmoulins? Pythagorean Marquis Valadi, inflamed with "violent motions all night at the Palais Royal"? Fame names him "Young M. Meillar"; then shuts her lips about him forever.

In any case, behold, about nine in the morning, our National Volunteers, rolling in long wide flood south-westward to the Hôtel des Invalides, in search of the one thing needful. King's Procureur M. Ethys de Corny and officials are there; the Curé of Saint-Étienne du Mont marches unpacific at the head of his militant Parish; the Clerks of the Basoche in red coats we see marching, now Volunteers of the Palais Royal;—National Volunteers, numerable by tens of thousands; of one heart and mind. The King's Muskets are the Nation's; think, old M. de Sombreuil, how, in this extremity, thou wilt refuse them! Old M. de Sombreuil would fain hold parley, send couriers, but it skills not: the walls are scaled, no Invalide firing a shot; the gates must be flung open. Patriotism rushes in tumultuous, from grunsel up to ridge-tile, through all rooms and passages; rummaging distractedly for arms. What cellar or what cranny can escape it? The arms are found; all safe there, lying packed in straw,—apparently with a view to being burnt! More ravenous than famishing lions over dead prey, the multitude, with clangor and vociferation, pounces on them; struggling, dashing, clutching,—to the jamming-up, to the pressure, fracture, and probable extinction of the weaker Patriot. And so, with such protracted crash of deafening, most discordant Orchestra-music, the Scene is changed; and eight-and-twenty thousand sufficient firelocks are on the shoulders of as many National Guards, lifted thereby out of darkness into fiery light.

Let Besenval look at the glitter of these muskets as they flash by! Gardes Françaises, it is said, have cannon leveled on him; ready to open, if need were, from the other side of the river. Motionless sits he; "astonished," one may flatter one's self, "at the proud bearing (fière contenance) of the Parisians." And now to the Bastille, ye intrepid Parisians! There grape-shot still threatens; thither all men's thoughts and steps are now tending.

Old De Launay, as we hinted, withdrew "into his interior" soon after midnight of Sunday. He remains there ever since, hampered, as all military gentlemen now are, in the saddest conflict of uncertainties. The Hôtel-de-Ville "invites" him to admit National Soldiers, which is a soft name for surrendering. On the other hand, his Majesty's orders were precise. His garrison is but eighty-two old Invalides, reinforced by thirty-two young Swiss; his walls, indeed, are nine feet thick; he has cannon and powder, but alas! only one day's provision of victuals. The city, too, is French, the poor garrison mostly French. Rigorous old De Launay, think what thou wilt do!

All morning, since nine, there has been a cry everywhere: To the Bastille! Repeated "deputations of citizens" have been here, passionate for arms, whom De Launay has got dismissed by soft speeches through port-holes. Towards noon, Elector Thuriot de la Rosière gains admittance, finds De Launay indisposed for surrender, nay, disposed for blowing up the place, rather. Thuriot mounts with him to the battlements; heaps of paving-stones, old iron, and missiles lie piled; cannon all duly leveled; in every embrasure a cannon,—only drawn back a little! But outwards, behold, O Thuriot, how the multitude flows on, welling through every street, tocsin furiously pealing, all drums beating the générale; the suburb Saint-Antoine rolling hitherward wholly as one man! Such vision (spectral, yet real) thou, O Thuriot, as from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this moment: prophetic of what other Phantasmagories and loud-gibbering Spectral Realities which thou yet beholdest not, but shalt! "Que voulez-vous?" said De Launay, turning pale at the sight, with an air of reproach, almost of menace. "Monsieur," said Thuriot, rising into the moral-sublime, "what mean you? Consider if I could not precipitate both of us from this height,"—say only a hundred feet, exclusive of the walled ditch! Whereupon De Launay fell silent. Thuriot shows himself from some pinnacle to comfort the multitude becoming suspicious, fremes-cent, then descends, departs with protest, with warning addressed also to the Invalides, on whom however it produces but a mixed, indistinct impression. The old heads are none of the clearest; besides, it is said, De Launay has been profuse of beverages (prodigue des buissons). They think they will not fire—if not fired on—if they can help it; but must, on the whole, be ruled considerably by circumstances.

Wo to thee, De Launay, in such an hour, if thou canst not, taking some one firm decision, rule circumstances! Soft speeches will not serve, hard grape-shot is questionable, but hovering between the two is unquestionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men; their infinite hum waxing ever louder, into imprecations, perhaps into crackle of stray musketry,—which latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot do execution. The Outer Drawbridge has been lowered for Thuriot; now deputation of citizens (it is the third and noisiest of all) penetrates that way into the Outer Court; soft speeches producing no clearance of these, De Launay gives fire; pulls up his drawbridge. A slight sputter, which has kindled the too combustible chaos, made it a roaring fire-chaos! Bursts forth Insurrection, at sight of its own blood (for there were deaths by that sputter of fire), into endless, rolling explosion of musketry, distraction, execration;—and over head, from the fortress, let one great gun, with its grape-shot, go booming, to show what we could do. The Bastille is besieged!

On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in your bodies! Roar with all your throats of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of Liberty; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite thou, Louis Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment Dauphiné; smite at that Outer Drawbridge chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee! Never, over nave or felloe, did thy axe strike such a stroke. Down with it, man; down with it to Orcus: let the whole accursed edifice sink thither, and tyranny be swallowed up forever! Mounted, some say, on the roof of the guard-room, some "on bayonets stuck into joints of the wall," Louis Tournay smites, brave Aubin Bonnemère (also an old soldier) seconding him; the chain yields, breaks; the huge Drawbridge slams down, thundering (avec fracas). Glorious! and yet, alas! it is still but the outworks. The Eight Grim Towers, with their Invalide musketry, their paving-stones and cannon-mouths, still soar aloft intact;—Ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the inner Drawbridge with its back toward us; the Bastille is still to take!

To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most important in History) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan of the building! But there is open Esplanade at the end of the Rue Saint-Antoine; there are such Forecourts (Cour Avancé), Cour de l'Orme, arched gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new drawbridges, dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty years to four hundred and twenty;—beleaguered, in this its last hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance of all calibres; throats of all capacities; men of all plans, every man his own engineer; seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was there seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit of regimentals; no one would heed him in colored clothes; half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Françaises in the Place de Grève. Frantic patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot (or seemingly so), to the Hôtel-de-Ville:—Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt! Flesselles is "pale to the very lips," for the roar of the multitude grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering a minor whirlpool,—strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that grand Fire-Maelstrom which is lashing round the Bastille.

And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has become an impromptu cannoneer. See Georget of the marine service, fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we were not used to the like). Georget lay, last night, taking his ease at his inn; the King of Siam's cannon also lay, knowing nothing of him, for a hundred years; yet now, at the right instant, they have got together, and discourse eloquent music. For hearing what was toward, Georget sprang from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Françaises, also, will be here, with real artillery: were not the walls so thick!—Upward from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighboring roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease from behind stone; hardly through port-holes show the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression!

Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guardrooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted "Peruke-maker with two fiery torches" is for burning "the saltpetres of the Arsenal," had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful lady, seized, escaping, in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely to be De Launay's daughter, shall be burnt in De Launay's sight; she lies, swooned, on a paillasse; but again a Patriot—it is brave Aubin Bonnemère, the old soldier—dashes in, and rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled hither, go up in white smoke, almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart, and Réole the "gigantic haberdasher" another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!

Blood flows; the ailment of new madness. The wounded are carried into houses of the Rue Cerisaie; the dying leave their last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas! how fall? The walls are so thick! Deputations, three in number, arrive from the Hôtel-de-Ville; Abbé Fauchet (who was of one) can say with what almost superhuman courage of benevolence. These wave their Town-flag in the arched Gateway, and stand, rolling their drum, but to no purpose. In such Crack of Doom, De Launay cannot hear them, dare not believe them; they return, with justified rage, the whew of lead still singing in their ears. What to do? The Firemen are here, squirting with their fire-pumps on the Invalides cannon, to wet the touch-holes; they unfortunately cannot squirt so high; but produce only clouds of spray. Individuals of classical knowledge propose catapults. Santerre, the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, advises rather that the place be fired by a "mixture of phosphorus and oil of turpentine spouted up through forcing-pumps." O Spinola-Santerre, hast thou the mixture ready? Every man his own engineer! And still the fire-deluge abates not; even women are firing, and Turks; at least one woman (with her sweetheart), and one Turk. Gardes Françaises have come; real cannon, real cannoneers. Usher Maillard is busy; half-pay Elie, half-pay Hulin, rage in the midst of thousands.

How the great Bastille clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner Court, there, at its ease, hour after hour; as if nothing special, for it or the world, were passing! It tolled One when the firing began, and is now pointing toward Five, and still the firing slakes not.—Far down, in their vaults, the seven Prisoners hear muffled din as of earthquakes; their Turnkeys answer vaguely.

Woe to thee, De Launay, with thy poor hundred Invalides! Broglie is distant, and his ears heavy; Besenval hears, but can send no help. One poor troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoitring, cautiously along the Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf. "We are come to join you," said the Captain; for the crowd seems shoreless. A large-headed dwarfish individual, of smoke-bleared aspect, shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in him; and croaks, "Alight then, and give up your arms!" The Hussar-Captain is too happy to be escorted to the barriers and dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual was? Men answer, It is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific 'Avis au Peuple'! Great, truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of emergence and new-birth; and yet this same day come four years!—But let the curtains of the Future hang.

What shall De Launay do? One thing only De Launay could have done: what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from the first, with lighted taper, within arm's-length of the Powder-Magazine; motionless, like old Roman Senator, or Bronze Lamp-holder; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by a slight motion of his eye, what his resolution was:—Harmless he sat there, while unharmed; but the King's Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would, or should in nowise be surrendered save to the King's Messenger; one old man's life is worthless, so it be lost with honor: but think, ye brawling canaille, how will it be when a whole Bastille springs skyward? In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies De Launay might have left Thuriot, the red clerks of the Basoche, Curé of Saint-Stephen, and all the tagrag and bobtail of the world, to work their will.

And, yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men? Hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage in one of his noblest Operas was the voice of the populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser, Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice of men, the utterance of their instincts, which are truer than their thoughts; it is the greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing somewhere beyond Time. De Launay could not do it. Distracted, he hovers between two; hopes in the middle of despair; surrenders not his Fortress; declares that he will blow it up, seizes torches to blow it up, and does not blow it. Unhappy old De Launay, it is the death-agony of thy Bastille and thee! Jail, Jailoring, and Jailor, all three, such as they may have been, must finish.

For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared; call it the World-Chimæra, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets; they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge; a port-hole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank swinging over the abyss of that stone Ditch; plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots, he hovers perilous; such a Dove toward such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher; one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there, against the masonry! Usher Maillard falls not; deftly, unerring, he walks, with out-spread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his port-hole; the shifty Usher snatches it and returns. Terms of surrender, Pardon, immunity to all! Are they accepted? "Foi d'officier, On the word of an officer," answers half-pay Hulin, or half-pay Elie—for men do not agree on it—"they are!" Sinks the drawbridge,—Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes in the living deluge; the Bastille is fallen! Victoire! La Bastille est prise!

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Why dwell on what follows? Hulin's foi d'officier should have been kept, but could not. The Swiss stand drawn up, disguised in white canvas smocks; the Invalides without disguise, their arms all piled against the wall. The first rush of victors, in ecstasy that the death peril is passed, "leaps joyfully on their necks"; but new victors rush, and ever new, also in ecstasy not wholly of joy. As we said, it was a living deluge, plunging headlong; had not the Gardes Françaises, in their cool military way, "wheeled round with arms leveled," it would have plunged suicidally, by the hundred or the thousand, into the Bastille-ditch.

And so it goes plunging through court and corridor; billowing uncontrollable, firing from windows—on itself; in hot frenzy of triumph, of grief and vengeance for its slain. The poor Invalides will fare ill; one Swiss, running off in his white smock, is driven back, with a death-thrust. Let all prisoners be marched to the Town-hall to be judged! Alas, already one poor Invalide has his right hand slashed off him; his maimed body dragged to the Place de Grève, and hanged there. This same right hand, it is said, turned back De Launay from the Powder-Magazine, and saved Paris.

De Launay, "discovered in gray frock with poppy-colored riband," is for killing himself with the sword of his cane. He shall to the Hôtel-de-Ville; Hulin, Maillard, and others escorting him, Elie marching foremost, "with the capitulation-paper on his sword's point." Through roarings and cursings; through hustlings, clutchings, and at last through strokes! Your escort is hustled aside, fell down; Hulin sinks exhausted on a heap of stones. Miserable De Launay! He shall never enter the Hôtel-de-Ville; only his "bloody hair-queue, held up in a bloody hand"; that shall enter, for a sign. The bleeding trunk lies on the steps there; the head is off through the streets, ghastly, aloft on a pike.

Rigorous De Launay has died; crying out, "O friends, kill me fast!" Merciful De Losme must die; though Gratitude embraces him, in this fearful hour, and will die for him, it avails not. Brothers, your wrath is cruel! Your Place de Grève is become a Throat of the Tiger, full of mere fierce bellowings, and thirst of blood. One other officer is massacred; one other Invalide is hanged on the Lamp-iron; with difficulty, with generous perseverance, the Gardes Françaises will save the rest. Provost Flesselles, stricken long since with the paleness of death, must descend from his seat, "to be judged at the Palais Royal"; alas, to be shot dead by an unknown hand at the turning of the first street!

O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-Officers;—and also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel-de-Ville! Babel Tower, with the confusion of tongues, were not Bedlam added with the conflagration of thoughts, was no type of it. One forest of distracted steel bristles, endless, in front of an Electoral Committee; points itself, in horrid radii, against this and the other accused breast. It was the Titans warring with Olympus; and they, scarcely crediting it, have conquered; prodigy of prodigies; delirious,—as it could not but be. Denunciation, vengeance; blaze of triumph on a dark ground of terror; all outward, all inward things fallen into one general wreck of madness!

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CHARLOTTE CORDAY

From 'The French Revolution'

In the leafy months of June and July, several French Departments germinate a set of rebellious paper-leaves, named Proclamations, Resolutions, Journals, or Diurnals, "of the Union for Resistance to Oppression." In particular, the Town of Caen, in Calvados, sees its paper-leaf of Bulletin de Caen suddenly bud, suddenly establish itself as Newspaper there; under the Editorship of Girondin National Representatives!

CHARLOTTE CORDAY IN PRISON.
Photogravure from a painting by C. L. Muller.
Original in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d'Armans, a French young woman of noble birth, filled with horror at the excesses of the Reign of Terror, gained admission to the private apartments of Marat and stabbed him to death July 13, 1793. She was convicted by the Revolutionary tribunal and died by the guillotine July 17, 1793.

For among the proscribed Girondins are certain of a more desperate humor. Some, as Vergniaud, Valazé, Gensonné, "arrested in their own houses," will await with stoical resignation what the issue may be. Some, as Brissot, Rabaut, will take to flight, to concealment; which, as the Paris Barriers are opened again in a day or two, is not yet difficult. But others there are who will rush, with Buzot, to Calvados; or far over France, to Lyons, Toulon, Nantes and elsewhither, and then rendezvous at Caen: to awaken as with war-trumpet the respectable Departments; and strike down an anarchic Mountain Faction; at least not yield without a stroke at it. Of this latter temper we count some score or more, of the Arrested, and of the Not-yet-arrested: a Buzot, a Barbaroux, Louvet, Guadet, Pétion, who have escaped from Arrestment in their own homes; a Salles, a Pythagorean Valady, a Duchâtel, the Duchâtel that came in blanket and night-cap to vote for the life of Louis, who have escaped from danger and likelihood of Arrestment. These, to the number at one time of Twenty-seven, do accordingly lodge here, in the "Intendance," or Departmental Mansion, of the town of Caen in Calvados; welcomed by Persons in Authority; welcomed and defrayed, having no money of their own. And the Bulletin de Caen comes forth, with the most animating paragraphs: How the Bordeaux Department, the Lyons Department, this Department after the other is declaring itself; sixty, or say sixty-nine, or seventy-two respectable Departments either declaring, or ready to declare. Nay, Marseilles, it seems, will march on Paris by itself, if need be. So has Marseilles Town said that she will march. But on the other hand, that Montélimart Town has said, No thoroughfare; and means even to "bury herself" under her own stone and mortar first,—of this be no mention in Bulletin de Caen.

Such animating paragraphs we read in this new Newspaper; and fervors and eloquent sarcasm: tirades against the Mountain, from the pen of Deputy Salles; which resemble, say friends, Pascal's "Provincials." What is more to the purpose, these Girondins have got a General in chief, one Wimpfen, formerly under Dumouriez; also a secondary questionable General Puisaye, and others; and are doing their best to raise a force for war. National Volunteers, whosoever is of right heart: gather in, ye National Volunteers, friends of Liberty; from our Calvados Townships, from the Eure, from Brittany, from far and near: forward to Paris, and extinguish Anarchy! Thus at Caen, in the early July days, there is a drumming and parading, a perorating and consulting: Staff and Army; Council; Club of Carabots, Anti-jacobin friends of Freedom, to denounce atrocious Marat. With all which, and the editing of Bulletins, a National Representative has his hands full.

At Caen it is most animated; and, as one hopes, more or less animated in the "Seventy-two Departments that adhere to us." And in a France begirt with Cimmerian invading Coalitions, and torn with an internal La Vendée, this is the conclusion we have arrived at: To put down Anarchy by Civil War! Durum et durum, the Proverb says, non faciunt murum. La Vendée burns; Santerre can do nothing there; he may return home and brew beer. Cimmerian bombshells fly all along the North. That Siege of Mentz is become famed;—lovers of the Picturesque (as Goethe will testify), washed country-people of both sexes, stroll thither on Sundays, to see the artillery work and counter-work; "you only duck a little while the shot whizzes past." Condé is capitulating to the Austrians; Royal Highness of York, these several weeks, fiercely batters Valenciennes. For, alas, our fortified Camp of Famars was stormed; General Dampierre was killed; General Custine was blamed,—and indeed is now come to Paris to give "explanations."

Against all which the Mountain and atrocious Marat must even make head as they can. They, anarchic Convention as they are, publish Decrees, expostulatory, explanatory, yet not without severity: they ray-forth Commissioners, singly or in pairs, the olive-branch in one hand, yet the sword in the other. Commissioners come even to Caen; but without effect. Mathematical Romme, and Prieur named of the Côte d'Or, venturing thither, with their olive and sword, are packed into prison: there may Romme lie, under lock and key, "for fifty days"; and meditate his New Calendar, if he please. Cimmeria, La Vendée, and Civil War! Never was Republic One and Indivisible at a lower ebb.

Amid which dim ferment of Caen and the World, History specially notices one thing: in the lobby of the Mansion de l'Intendance, where busy Deputies are coming and going, a young Lady with an aged valet, taking grave graceful leave of Deputy Barbaroux. She is of stately Norman figure: in her twenty-fifth year; of beautiful still countenance: her name is Charlotte Corday, heretofore styled D'Armans, while Nobility still was. Barbaroux has given her a Note to Deputy Duperret,—him who once drew his sword in the effervescence. Apparently she will to Paris on some errand? "She was a Republican before the Revolution, and never wanted energy." A completeness, a decision is in this fair female Figure: "By energy she means the spirit that will prompt one to sacrifice himself for his country." What if she, this fair young Charlotte, had emerged from her secluded stillness, suddenly like a Star; cruel-lovely, with half-angelic, half-demonic splendor; to gleam for a moment, and in a moment be extinguished: to be held in memory, so bright complete was she, through long centuries!—Quitting Cimmerian Coalitions without, and the dim-simmering twenty-five million within, History will look fixedly at this one fair Apparition of a Charlotte Corday; will note whither Charlotte moves, how the little Life burns forth so radiant, then vanishes swallowed of the Night.

With Barbaroux's Note of Introduction, and slight stock of luggage, we see Charlotte on Tuesday the 9th of July seated in the Caen Diligence, with a place for Paris. None takes farewell of her, wishes her Good-journey: her Father will find a line left, signifying that she is gone to England, that he must pardon her, and forget her. The drowsy Diligence lumbers along; amid drowsy talk of Politics, and praise of the Mountain; in which she mingles not: all night, all day, and again all night. On Thursday, not long before noon, we are at the bridge of Neuilly; here is Paris with her thousand black domes, the goal and purpose of thy journey! Arrived at the Inn de la Providence in the Rue des Vieux Augustins, Charlotte demands a room; hastens to bed; sleeps all afternoon and night, till the morrow morning.

On the morrow morning, she delivers her Note to Duperret. It relates to certain Family Papers which are in the Minister of the Interior's hands; which a Nun at Caen, an old Convent friend of Charlotte's, has need of; which Duperret shall assist her in getting: this then was Charlotte's errand to Paris? She has finished this, in the course of Friday:—yet says nothing of returning. She has seen and silently investigated several things. The Convention, in bodily reality, she has seen; what the Mountain is like. The living physiognomy of Marat she could not see; he is sick at present, and confined to home.

About eight on the Saturday morning, she purchases a large sheath-knife in the Palais Royal; then straightway, in the Place des Victoires, takes a hackney-coach: "To the Rue de l'École de Médecine, No. 44." It is the residence of the Citoyen Marat!—The Citoyen Marat is ill, and cannot be seen; which seems to disappoint her much. Her business is with Marat, then? Hapless beautiful Charlotte; hapless squalid Marat! From Caen in the utmost West, from Neuchâtel in the utmost East, they two are drawing nigh each other; they two have, very strangely, business together.—Charlotte, returning to her Inn, dispatches a short Note to Marat; signifying that she is from Caen, the seat of rebellion; that she desires earnestly to see him, and "will put it in his power to do France a great service." No answer. Charlotte writes another Note, still more pressing; sets out with it by coach, about seven in the evening, herself. Tired day-laborers have again finished their Week; huge Paris is circling and simmering, manifold according to its vague wont; this one fair Figure has decision in it; drives straight,—toward a purpose.

It is yellow July evening, we say, the 13th of the month; eve of the Bastille day,—when "M. Marat," four years ago, in the crowd of the Pont Neuf, shrewdly required of that Besenval Hussar-party, which had such friendly dispositions, "to dismount, and give up their arms, then"; and became notable among Patriot men. Four years: what a road he has traveled:—and sits now, about half-past seven of the clock, stewing in slipper-bath; sore afflicted; ill of Revolution Fever,—of what other malady this History had rather not name. Excessively sick and worn, poor man: with precisely eleven-pence-half-penny of ready-money, in paper; with slipper-bath; strong three-footed stool for writing on, the while; and a squalid—Washer-woman, one may call her: that is his civic establishment in Medical-School Street; thither and not elsewhither has his road led him. Not to the reign of Brotherhood and Perfect Felicity: yet surely on the way toward that?—Hark, a rap again! A musical woman's voice, refusing to be rejected: it is the Citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat, recognizing from within, cries, Admit her. Charlotte Corday is admitted.

Citoyen Marat, I am from Caen the seat of rebellion, and wished to speak with you.—Be seated, mon enfant. Now what are the Traitors doing at Caen? What Deputies are at Caen?—Charlotte names some Deputies. "Their heads shall fall within a fortnight," croaks the eager People's-friend, clutching his tablets to write: Barbaroux, Pétion, writes he with bare shrunk arm, turning aside in the bath: Pétion, and Louvet, and—Charlotte has drawn her knife from the sheath; plunges it with one sure stroke, into the writer's heart. "À moi, chère amie (Help, dear)!" no more could the Death-choked say or shriek. The helpful Washer-woman running in—there is no Friend of the People, or Friend of the Washer-woman, left; but his life with a groan gushes out, indignant, to the shades below!

And so Marat, People's-friend, is ended; the lone Stylites has got hurled down suddenly from his pillar—whitherward He that made him knows. Patriot Paris may sound triple and tenfold, in dole and wail; re-echoed by patriot France; and the Convention, "Chabot pale with terror, declaring that they are to be all assassinated," may decree him Pantheon Honors, Public Funeral, Mirabeau's dust making way for him; and Jacobin Societies, in lamentable oratory, summing up his character, parallel him to One, whom they think it honor to call "the good Sans-culotte,"—whom we name not here; also a Chapel may be made, for the urn that holds his Heart, in the Place du Carrousel; and new-born children be named Marat; and Lago-di-Como Hawkers bake mountains of stucco into unbeautiful Busts; and David paint his Picture, or Death-Scene; and such other Apotheosis take place as the human genius, in these circumstances, can devise: but Marat returns no more to the light of this Sun. One sole circumstance we have read with clear sympathy, in the old Moniteur Newspaper: how Marat's Brother comes from Neuchâtel to ask of the Convention, "that the deceased Jean-Paul Marat's musket be given to him." For Marat too had a brother and natural affections; and was wrapped once in swaddling-clothes, and slept safe in a cradle like the rest of us. Ye children of men!—A sister of his, they say, lives still to this day in Paris.

As for Charlotte Corday, her work is accomplished; the recompense of it is near and sure. The chère amie, and the neighbors of the house, flying at her, she "overturns some movables," intrenches herself till the gendarmes arrive; then quietly surrenders; goes quietly to the Abbaye Prison: she alone quiet, all Paris sounding, in wonder, in rage or admiration, round her. Duperret is put in arrest, on account of her; his Papers sealed,—which may lead to consequences. Fauchet, in like manner; though Fauchet had not so much as heard of her. Charlotte, confronted with these two Deputies, praises the grave firmness of Duperret, censures the dejection of Fauchet.

On Wednesday morning the thronged Palais de Justice and Revolutionary Tribunal can see her face; beautiful and calm: she dates it "fourth day of the Preparation of Peace." A strange murmur ran through the Hall, at sight of her; you could not say of what character. Tinville has his indictments and tape-papers: the cutler of the Palais Royal will testify that he sold her the sheath-knife; "All these details are needless," interrupted Charlotte; "it is I that killed Marat." By whose instigation?—"By no one's." "What tempted you, then?" "His crimes. I killed one man," added she, raising her voice extremely (extrêmement), as they went on with their questions, "I killed one man to save a hundred thousand; a villain to save innocents; a savage wild-beast to give repose to my country. I was a Republican before the Revolution; I never wanted energy." There is therefore nothing to be said. The public gazes astonished: the hasty limners sketch her features, Charlotte not disapproving: the men of law proceed with their formalities. The doom is Death as a murderess. To her Advocate she gives thanks; in gentle phrase, in high-flown classical spirit. To the Priest they send her she gives thanks; but needs not any shriving, any ghostly or other aid from him.

On this same evening, therefore, about half-past seven o'clock, from the gate of the Conciergerie, to a City all on tip-toe, the fatal Cart issues; seated on it a fair young creature, sheeted in red smock of Murderess; so beautiful, serene, so full of life; journeying toward death,—alone amid the World. Many take off their hats, saluting reverently; for what heart but must be touched? Others growl and howl. Adam Lux, of Mentz, declares that she is greater than Brutus; that it were beautiful to die with her; the head of this young man seems turned. At the Place de la Révolution, the countenance of Charlotte wears the same still smile. The executioners proceed to bind her feet; she resists, thinking it meant as an insult; on a word of explanation, she submits with cheerful apology. As the last act, all being now ready, they take the neckerchief from her neck, a blush of maidenly shame overspreads her fair face and neck; the cheeks were still tinged with it when the executioner lifted the severed head, to show it to the people. "It is most true," says Forster, "that he struck the cheek insultingly; for I saw it with my eyes; the Police imprisoned him for it."

In this manner have the Beautifulest and the Squalidest come in collision, and extinguished one another. Jean-Paul Marat and Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday both, suddenly, are no more. "Day of the Preparation of Peace"? Alas, how were peace possible or preparable, while for example, the hearts of lovely Maidens, in their convent-stillness, are dreaming not of Love-paradises and the light of Life, but of Codrus's-sacrifices and Death well-earned? That twenty-five million hearts have got to such temper, this is the Anarchy; the soul of it lies in this, whereof not peace can be the embodiment! The death of Marat, whetting old animosities tenfold, will be worse than any life. O ye hapless Two, mutually extinctive, the Beautiful and the Squalid, sleep ye well,—in the Mother's bosom that bore you both!

This is the History of Charlotte Corday; most definite, most complete: angelic-demonic: like a Star!

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THE SCAPEGOAT

From the 'French Revolution'

To this conclusion, then, hast thou come, O hapless Louis! The Son of Sixty Kings is to die on the Scaffold by form of Law. Under Sixty Kings this same form of Law, form of Society, has been fashioning itself together these thousand years; and has become, one way and other, a most strange Machine. Surely, if needful, it is also frightful, this Machine; dead, blind; not what it should be; which, with swift stroke, or by cold slow torture, has wasted the lives and souls of innumerable men. And behold now a King himself, or say rather King-hood in his person, is to expire here in cruel tortures,—like a Phalaris shut in the belly of his own red-heated Brazen Bull! It is ever so; and thou shouldst know it, O haughty tyrannous man; injustice breeds injustice; curses and falsehoods do verily return "always home," wide as they may wander. Innocent Louis bears the sins of many generations: he too experiences that man's tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.

A King dying by such violence appeals impressively to the imagination; as the like must do, and ought to do. And yet at bottom it is not the King dying, but the man! Kingship is a coat: the grand loss is of the skin. The man from whom you take his Life, to him can the whole combined world do more? Lally went on his hurdle; his mouth filled with a gag. Miserablest mortals, doomed for picking pockets, have a whole five-act Tragedy in them, in that dumb pain, as they go to the gallows, unregarded; they consume the cup of trembling down to the lees. For Kings and for Beggars, for the justly doomed and the unjustly, it is a hard thing to die. Pity them all: thy utmost pity, with all aids and appliances and throne-and-scaffold contrasts, how far short is it of the thing pitied!

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A Confessor has come; Abbé Edgeworth, of Irish extraction, whom the King knew by good report, has come promptly on this solemn mission. Leave the Earth alone, then, thou hapless King; it with its malice will go its way, thou also canst go thine. A hard scene yet remains: the parting with our loved ones. Kind hearts, environed in the same grim peril with us; to be left here! Let the Reader look with the eyes of Valet Cléry through these glass-doors, where also the Municipality watches; and see the cruelest of scenes:—

"At half-past eight, the door of the ante-room opened: the Queen appeared first, leading her Son by the hand; then Madame Royale and Madame Elizabeth: they all flung themselves into the arms of the King. Silence reigned for some minutes; interrupted only by sobs. The Queen made a movement to lead his Majesty towards the inner room, where M. Edgeworth was waiting unknown to them: 'No', said the King, 'let us go into the dining-room; it is there only that I can see you.' They entered there; I shut the door of it, which was of glass. The King sat down, the Queen on his left hand, Madame Elizabeth on his right, Madame Royale almost in front; the young Prince remained standing between his Father's legs. They all leaned toward him, and often held him embraced. This scene of woe lasted an hour and three-quarters; during which we could hear nothing; we could see only that always when the King spoke, the sobbing of the Princesses redoubled, continued for some minutes; and that then the King began again to speak." And so our meetings and our partings do now end! The sorrows we gave each other; the poor joys we faithfully shared, and all our lovings and our sufferings, and confused toilings under the earthly Sun, are over. Thou good soul, I shall never, never through all ages of Time, see thee any more!—Never! O Reader, knowest thou that hard word?

For nearly two hours this agony lasts; then they tear themselves asunder. "Promise that you will see us on the morrow." He promises:—Ah yes, yes; yet once; and go now, ye loved ones; cry to God for yourselves and me!—It was a hard scene, but it is over. He will not see them on the morrow. The Queen, in passing through the ante-room, glanced at the Cerberus Municipals; and with woman's vehemence, said through her tears, "Vous êtes tous des scélérats".

King Louis slept sound, till five in the morning, when Cléry, as he had been ordered, awoke him. Cléry dressed his hair: while this went forward, Louis took a ring from his watch, and kept trying it on his finger; it was his wedding-ring, which he is now to return to the Queen as a mute farewell. At half-past six, he took the Sacrament; and continued in devotion, and conference with Abbé Edgeworth. He will not see his Family: it were too hard to bear.

At eight, the Municipals enter: the King gives them his Will, and messages and effects; which they at first brutally refuse to take charge of; he gives them a roll of gold pieces, 125 louis; these are to be returned to Malesherbes, who had lent them. At nine, Santerre says the hour is come. The King begs yet to retire for three minutes. At the end of three minutes, Santerre again says the hour is come. "Stamping on the ground with his right foot, Louis answers: 'Partons' (Let us go)."—How the rolling of those drums comes in, through the Temple bastions and bulwarks, on the heart of a queenly wife; soon to be a widow! He is gone, then, and has not seen us? A Queen weeps bitterly; a King's Sister and Children. Over all these Four does Death also hover: all shall perish miserably save one; she, as Duchesse d'Angoulême, will live,—not happily.

At the Temple gate were some faint cries, perhaps from voices of pitiful women: "Grâce! Grâce!" Through the rest of the streets there is silence as of the grave. No man not armed is allowed to be there: the armed, did any even pity, dare not express it, each man overawed by all his neighbors. All windows are down, none seen looking through them. All shops are shut. No wheel-carriage rolls, this morning, in these streets, but one only. Eighty thousand armed men stand ranked, like armed statues of men; cannons bristle, cannoneers with match burning, but no word or movement: it is as a city enchanted into silence and stone: one carriage with its escort, slowly rumbling, is the only sound. Louis reads, in his Book of Devotion, the Prayers of the Dying: clatter of this death-march falls sharp on the ear in the great silence; but the thought would fain struggle heavenward, and forget the Earth.

As the clocks strike ten, behold the Place de la Révolution, once Place de Louis Quinze: the Guillotine, mounted near the old Pedestal where once stood the Statue of that Louis! Far round, all bristles with cannons and armed men: spectators crowding in the rear; D'Orléans Égalité there in cabriolet. Swift messengers, hoquetons, speed to the Town-hall, every three minutes: near by is the Convention sitting,—vengeful for Lepelletier. Heedless of all, Louis reads his Prayers of the Dying; not till five minutes yet has he finished; then the Carriage opens. What temper he is in? Ten different witnesses will give ten different accounts of it. He is in the collision of all tempers; arrived now at the black Maelstrom and descent of Death: in sorrow, in indignation, in resignation struggling to be resigned. "Take care of M. Edgeworth," he straitly charges the Lieutenant who is sitting with them: then they two descend.

The drums are beating: "Taisez-vous (Silence)!" he cries "in a terrible voice (d'une voix terrible)." He mounts the scaffold, not without delay; he is in puce coat, breeches of gray, white stockings. He strips off the coat; stands disclosed in a sleeve-waistcoat of white flannel. The Executioners approach to bind him: he spurns, resists; Abbé Edgeworth has to remind him how the Savior, in whom men trust, submitted to be bound. His hands are tied, his head bare; the fatal moment is come. He advances to the edge of the Scaffold, "his face very red," and says: "Frenchmen, I die innocent: it is from the Scaffold and near appearing before God that I tell you so. I pardon my enemies; I desire that France—" A General on horseback, Santerre or another, prances out, with uplifted hand: "Tambours!" The drums drown the voice. "Executioners, do your duty!" The Executioners, desperate lest themselves be murdered (for Santerre and his Armed Ranks will strike, if they do not), seize the hapless Louis: six of them desperate, him singly desperate, struggling there; and bind him to their plank. Abbé Edgeworth, stooping, bespeaks him: "Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven." The Axe clanks down; a King's Life is shorn away. It is Monday, the 21st of January, 1793. He was aged Thirty-eight years four months and twenty-eight days.

Executioner Samson shows the Head: fierce shout of Vive la République rises, and swells; caps raised on bayonets, hats waving: students of the College of Four Nations take it up, on the far Quais; fling it over Paris. D'Orléans drives off in his cabriolet: the Town-hall Councillors rub their hands, saying, "It is done, It is done." There is dipping of handkerchiefs, of pike-points in the blood. Headsman Samson, though he afterward denied it, sells locks of the hair: fractions of the puce coat are long after worn in rings. And so, in some half-hour it is done; and the multitude has all departed. Pastry-cooks, coffee-sellers, milkmen sing out their trivial quotidian cries, the world wags on, as if this were a common day. In the coffee-houses that evening, says Prudhomme, Patriot shook hands with Patriot in a more cordial manner than usual. Not till some days after, according to Mercier, did public men see what a grave thing it was.

A grave thing it indisputably is; and will have consequences. On the morrow morning, Roland, so long steeped to the lips in disgust and chagrin, sends in his demission. His accounts lie all ready, correct in black-on-white to the utmost farthing: these he wants but to have audited, that he might retire to remote obscurity, to the country and his books. They will never be audited, those accounts: he will never get retired thither.

It was on Tuesday that Roland demitted. On Thursday comes Lepelletier St.-Fargeau's Funeral, and passage to the Pantheon of Great Men. Notable as the wild pageant of a winter day. The Body is borne aloft, half-bare; the winding-sheet disclosing the death-wound; sabre and bloody clothes parade themselves; a "lugubrious music" wailing harsh næniæ. Oak-crowns shower down from windows; President Vergniaud walks there, with Convention, with Jacobin Society, and all Patriots of every color, all mourning brother-like.

Notable also for another thing this Burial of Lepelletier; it was the last act these men ever did with concert! All parties and figures of Opinion, that agitate this distracted France and its Convention, now stand, as it were, face to face, and dagger to dagger; the King's Life, round which they all struck and battled, being hurled down. Dumouriez, conquering Holland, growls ominous discontent, at the head of Armies. Men say Dumouriez will have a King; that young D'Orléans Égalité shall be his King. Deputy Fauchet, in the Journal des Amis, curses his day more bitterly than Job did; invokes the poniards of Regicides, of "Arras Vipers" or Robespierres, of Pluto Dantons, of horrid Butchers Legendre and Simulacra d'Herbois, to send him swiftly to another world than theirs. This is Te-Deum Fauchet, of the Bastille Victory, of the Cercle Social. Sharp was the death-hail rattling round one's Flag-of-truce, on that Bastille day: but it was soft to such wreckage of high Hope as this; one's New Golden Era going down in leaden dross, and sulphurous black of the Everlasting Darkness!

---

BLISS CARMAN

(1861-)

BY CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

liss Carman was born at Fredericton, New Brunswick, on April 15th, 1861. On both sides of the house he belongs to that United Empire Loyalist stock which at the time of the American Revolution sacrificed wealth and ease to a principle, and angrily withdrew from the young republic to carve out new commonwealths in the wilds of Canada. His father was William Carman, Clerk of the Pleas, a man of influence and distinction in his Province. His mother was one of the Blisses of Fredericton, the Loyalist branch of that Connecticut family to which Emerson's mother belonged. Mr. Carman was educated at the Collegiate School and the University of New Brunswick, both at Fredericton. He distinguished himself in classics and mathematics, took his B. A. in 1881, his M. A. in 1884, and afterwards took partial courses at Edinburgh and Harvard. He has been connected editorially with several American periodicals, the Independent and the Chap-Book among them, but now devotes himself exclusively to literature. He divides his time between Boston and Washington, returning to the Maritime Provinces for the hot months of each year.

Bliss Carman

Mr. Carman issued his first volume of poems in 1893, when he had already won reputation as a contributor to the magazines. The volume was called 'Low Tide on Grand Pré: a Book of Lyrics.' It was published in New York and London, and ran quickly into a second edition. Equally successful was the volume called 'Songs from Vagabondia,' published in 1894. About half the poems in this volume are by Mr. Richard Hovey, whose name appears on the title-page with that of Mr. Carman. In 1895 appeared 'Behind the Arras: a Book of the Unseen.' Much of Mr. Carman's known work remains still uncollected.

In that outburst of intellectual energy which has of late won for Canada a measure of recognition in the world of letters, Mr. Carman's work has played a large part. The characteristics of the Canadian school may perhaps be defined as a certain semi-Sufristic worship of nature, combined with freshness of vision and keenness to interpret the significance of the external world. These characteristics find intense expression in Mr. Carman's poems. And they find expression in an utterance so new and so distinctive that its influence is already active in the verse of his contemporaries.

There are two terms which apply pre-eminently to Mr. Carman. These are Lyrist and Symbolist. His note is always the lyric note. The "lyric cry" thrills all his cadences. If it be true that poetry is the rhythmical expression in words of thought fused in emotion, then in his work we are impressed by the completeness of the fusion. Every phrase is filled with lyric passion. At its best, the result is a poem which not only haunts the ear with its harmonies but at the same time makes appeal to the heart and intellect. When the result is less successful it seems sometimes as if the thought were too much diluted with words,—as if, in fact, verbal music and verbal coloring were allowed to take the place of the legitimate thought-process. Even in such cases, the verse, however nebulous in meaning, is rarely without some subtlety of technique, some charm of diction, to justify its existence. But there are poems of Mr. Carman's, wherein what seems at first to be the obscurity of an over-attenuated thought is really an attempt to express thought in terms of pure music or pure color. In a curious and beautiful poem called 'Beyond the Gamut' he elaborates a theory of the oneness and interchangeability of form, sound, and color.

In the matter of conception and interpretation Mr. Carman is a symbolist. This word is not used here in any restricted sense, and must be divorced from all association with the shibboleths of warring schools. The true symbolist—and all the supreme artists of the world have been in this sense symbolists—recognizes that there are truths too vast and too subtle to endure definition in scientific phrase. They elude set words; as a faint star, at the coming on of evening, eludes the eye which seeks for it directly, while unveiling itself to a side glance. Mr. Carman conveys to us, by the suggestion of thrilling color or inimitable phrase, perceptions and emotions which a more strictly defined method could never capture.

In subject-matter Mr. Carman is simple and elemental. He looks at his themes curiously, often whimsically; but the themes are those of universal and eternal import,—life, love, and death, the broad aspects of the outer world, the "deep heart of man," and the spirit that informs them all. His song is sometimes in a minor key, plangent and piercing; sometimes in a large and virile major,—as for instance when he sings the 'War-song of Gamelba.' To his gifts of imagination, insight, and lyric passion he adds a fine humor, the outflowing of a broad and tolerant humanity. This is well exemplified in 'Resignation' and 'A More Ancient Mariner.' His chief defects, besides the occasional obscurity already referred to, are a tendency to looseness of structure in his longer poems, and once in a while, as in parts of 'The Silent Lodger,' a Browningesque lapse into hardness and baldness when the effect aimed at is colloquial simplicity.

---

HACK AND HEW

Hack and Hew were the sons of God
In the earlier earth than now;
One at his right hand, one at his left,
To obey as he taught them how.

And Hack was blind and Hew was dumb,
But both had the wild, wild heart;
And God's calm will was their burning will,
And the gist of their toil was art.

They made the moon and the belted stars,
They set the sun to ride;
They loosed the girdle and veil of the sea,
The wind and the purple tide.

Both flower and beast beneath their hands
To beauty and speed outgrew,—
The furious fumbling hand of Hack,
And the glorying hand of Hew.

Then, fire and clay, they fashioned a man,
And painted him rosy brown;
And God himself blew hard in his eyes:
"Let them burn till they smolder down!"

And "There!" said Hack, and "There!" thought Hew,
"We'll rest, for our toil is done."
But "Nay," the Master Workman said,
"For your toil is just begun.

"And ye who served me of old as God
Shall serve me anew as man,
Till I compass the dream that is in my heart
And perfect the vaster plan."

And still the craftsman over his craft,
In the vague white light of dawn,
With God's calm will for his burning will
While the mounting day comes on,

Yearning, wind-swift, indolent, wild,
Toils with those shadowy two,—
The faltering restless hand of Hack,
And the tireless hand of Hew.

From 'Behind the Arras': copyrighted 1895, by Lamson, Wolffe and Company

---

AT THE GRANITE GATE

There paused to shut the door
A fellow called the Wind.
With mystery before,
And reticence behind,

A portal waits me too
In the glad house of spring;
One day I shall pass through
And leave you wondering.

It lies beyond the marge
Of evening or of prime,
Silent and dim and large,
The gateway of all time.

There troop by night and day
My brothers of the field;
And I shall know the way
Their wood-songs have revealed.

The dusk will hold some trace
Of all my radiant crew
Who vanished to that place,
Ephemeral as dew.

Into the twilight dun,
Blue moth and dragon-fly
Adventuring alone,—
Shall be more brave than I?

There innocents shall bloom,
And the white cherry tree,
With birch and willow plume
To strew the road for me.

The wilding orioles then
Shall make the golden air
Heavy with joy again,
And the dark heart shall dare

Resume the old desire,—
The exigence of spring
To be the orange fire
That tips the world's gray wing.

And the lone wood-bird—Hark!
The whippoorwill, night-long,
Threshing the summer dark
With his dim flail of song!—

Shall be the lyric lift,
When all my senses creep,
To bear me through the rift
In the blue range of sleep.

And so I pass beyond
The solace of your hand.
But ah, so brave and fond!
Within that morrow-land,

Where deed and daring fail,
But joy forevermore
Shall tremble and prevail
Against the narrow door,

Where sorrow knocks too late,
And grief is overdue,
Beyond the granite gate
There will be thoughts of you.

From 'Behind the Arras': copyrighted 1895, by Lamson, Wolffe and Company

---

A SEA CHILD

The lover of child Marjory
Had one white hour of life brim full;
Now the old nurse, the rocking sea,
Hath him to lull.

The daughter of child Marjory
Hath in her veins, to beat and run,
The glad indomitable sea,
The strong white sun.

Copyrighted by Bliss Carman.

---

LEWIS CARROLL

(CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON)

(1832-)

hat the author of the best nonsense-writing in the language should be a professional mathematician and logician, is not a paradox but a sequence. A gymnast cannot divert us by pretending to lose his balance unless perfectly able to keep his balance. Actors who counterfeit insanity must be acutely sane. Only a competent classical scholar can write good macaronics; only a good poet can write clever doggerel. The only ones who can use slang effectively are those who do not need to use it at all. Nor is the tone and temper of mind evinced by these dry and severe studies out of keeping with the airiest play of fancy or the maddest fun. The one is indeed a frequent relief from the other, and no intellectual bent is related in the least to any special temperament. Extravagant drollery can be mated to an aptitude for geometry or a passion for analysis as well as to a love of pictures or of horses.

But the parentage of 'Alice in Wonderland' and its fellows is closer to their creator's intellectual being even than this. A very slight glance at their matter and mechanism shows that they are the work of one trained to use words with the finest precision, to teach others to use them so, to criticize keenly any inconsistency or slovenliness in their use, and to mock mercilessly any vagueness or incoherence in thought or diction. The fantastic framework and inconsequent scenes of these wonder-stories mask from the popular view the qualities which give them their superlative rank and enduring charm.

The mere machinery, ingenious and amusing as it is, would not entertain beyond a single reading; it can be and has often been imitated, along with the incarnated nursery rhymes and old saws. Yet these grotesque chimeras, under Lewis Carroll's touch, are as living to us as any characters in Dickens or the 'Ingoldsby Legends,' and even more so to the elders than the children. Who does not know and delight in the King and Queen and Knave of Hearts, the elegant White Rabbit and the conceited and monosyllabic Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat and the Mock-Turtle, the March Hare and the Hatter and the Dormouse; or the chess White King and the Queens and the White Knight, the Walrus and the Carpenter, of Looking-Glass Land?

The very genesis of many of these is the logical analysis of a popular comparison into sober fact, as "grinning like a Cheshire cat," "mad as a hatter" or "March hare," "sleeping like a dormouse," etc.; and a large part of their wit and fun consists in plays on ambiguous terms in current use, like the classic "jam every other day," "French, music, and washing," "The name of the song is called—" or in parodies on familiar verses (or on the spirit of ballads rather than the wording, as in 'Jabberwocky'), or in heaps of versified non-sequiturs, like the exquisite "poem" read at the trial of the Knave of Hearts. The analyst and the logician is as patent in 'Alice' as in the class lectures the author gave or the technical works he has issued; only turning his criticism and his reductiones ad absurdum into bases for witty fooling instead of serious lessons or didactic works. Hence, while his wonder-books are nominally for children, and please the children through their cheaper and commoner qualities, their real audience is the most cultivated and keen-minded part of the mature world; to whom indeed he speaks almost exclusively in such passages as the Rabelaisian satire of the jury trial in 'Alice in Wonderland,' or the mob in 'Sylvie and Bruno' yelling "Less bread! More taxes!" before the Lord Chancellor's house, or the infinitely touching pathos of the Outlandish Watch.

'Alice in Wonderland' appeared in 1865; it received universal admiration at once, and was translated into many languages. By the rarest of good fortune, it was illustrated by an artist (John Tenniel) who entered into its spirit so thoroughly that the characters in popular memory are as much identified with his pictures as with Lewis Carroll's text, and no other representation of them would be endured. 'Through the Looking-Glass' followed in 1871; its prose matter was almost equal to that of its predecessor,—the chapter of the White Knight is fully equal to the best of the other,—and its verse is superior. Part of the first book was based on the game of cards; the whole setting of the second is based on chess moves, and Alice's progress to queenship along the board. He has published several books of humorous prose and verse since; some of the verse equal to the best of his two best books, but the prose generally spoiled by conscious didacticism, as in 'Sylvie and Bruno,' which however contains some of his happiest nonsense verse. 'The Hunting of the Snark' is a nonsense tale in verse, but oddly the best things in it are his prose tags. 'Rhyme and Reason' is a collection of verse, some of it of high merit in its kind: 'The Three Voices' is spun out and ill-ended, but has some passages which deserve to be classic.

Lewis Carroll is in fact the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who (disliking publicity) lives in retirement at Oxford, and the world knows little of him. He was born in 1833 and received his degree in Christ Church, Oxford, with high honors in mathematics. In 1861 he took orders in the Church of England. From 1855 to 1881 he was mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. He has published several works on mathematics, including 'Euclid and His Modern Rivals,' and 'Mathematica Curiosa,' a very valuable work. 'A Tangled Tale,' 'Pillow Problems,' and a 'Game of Logic' are scientific and humorous, but are only appreciated by experts in mathematics and logic. Delighted with 'Alice in Wonderland' on its appearance, Queen Victoria asked Mr. Dodgson for his other works; and in response "Lewis Carroll" sent her his 'Elementary Treatise on Determinants' and other mathematical works. It is seldom that the dualism of a mind—writing now nonsense so thoroughly and vigorously witty, and now exploring the intricacies of higher mathematics—has a more curious illustration. Certainly the illustration is seldom as diverting to the public.

---

ALICE, THE PIG-BABY, AND THE CHESHIRE CAT

From 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'

"Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!" said the Duchess to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. "I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen," and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went, but it just missed her.

Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions,—"just like a star-fish," thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again; so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.

As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself), she carried it out into the open air. "If I don't take this child away with me," thought Alice, "they're sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?" She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). "Don't grunt," said Alice: "that's not at all the proper way of expressing yourself."

The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small, for a baby: altogether, Alice did not like the look of the thing at all,—"but perhaps it was only sobbing," she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.

No, there were no tears. "If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear," said Alice, seriously, "I'll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!" The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.

Alice was just beginning to think to herself, "Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?" when it grunted again, so violently that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further.

So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. "If it had grown up," she said to herself, "it would have been a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think." And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, "If one only knew the right way to change them—" when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt it ought to be treated with respect.

"Cheshire Puss," she began,—rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. "Come, it's pleased so far," thought Alice, and she went on: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where—" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you walk," said the Cat.

"—so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. "What sort of people live about here?"

"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter; and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we are all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on, "And how do you know that you're mad?"

"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"

"I suppose so," said Alice.

"Well then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.

"Call it what you like," said the Cat. "Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?"

"I should like it very much," said Alice, "but I haven't been invited yet."

"You'll see me there," said the Cat, and vanished.

Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so well used to queer things happening. While she was still looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.

"By-the-by, what became of the baby?" said the Cat. "I'd nearly forgotten to ask."

"It turned into a pig," Alice answered very quietly, just as if the Cat had come back in a natural way.

"I thought it would," said the Cat, and vanished again.

Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. "I've seen hatters before," she said to herself: "the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March." As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.

"Did you say pig, or fig?" said the Cat.

"I said pig," replied Alice; "and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy."

"All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat!—it's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

---

THE MOCK-TURTLE'S EDUCATION

From 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'

"When we were little," the Mock-Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, "we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—"

"Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?" Alice asked.

"We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock-Turtle angrily; "really you are very dull!"

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question," added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock-Turtle, "Drive on, old fellow! Don't be all day about it!" and he went on in these words:—

"Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn't believe it—"

"I never said I didn't!" interrupted Alice.

"You did," said the Mock-Turtle.

"Hold your tongue!" added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock-Turtle went on.

"We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—"

"I've been to a day-school too," said Alice; "you needn't be so proud as all that."

"With extras?" asked the Mock-Turtle a little anxiously.

"Yes," said Alice, "we learned French and music."

"And washing?" said the Mock-Turtle.

"Certainly not!" said Alice indignantly.

"Ah! then yours wasn't a really good school," said the Mock-Turtle in a tone of great relief. "Now at ours they had at the end of the bill, 'French, music, and washing—extra.'"

"You couldn't have wanted it much," said Alice; "living at the bottom of the sea."

"I couldn't afford to learn it," said the Mock-Turtle with a sigh. "I only took the regular course."

"What was that?" inquired Alice.

"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock-Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."

"I never heard of 'Uglification,'" Alice ventured to say. "What is it?"

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. "Never heard of uglifying!" it exclaimed. "You know what to beautify is, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Alice, doubtfully; "it means—to—make—anything—prettier."

"Well then," the Gryphon went on, "if you don't know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton."

Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock-Turtle and said, "What else had you to learn?"

"Well, there was Mystery," the Mock-Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,—"Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography; then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils."

"What was that like?" said Alice.

"Well, I can't show it you, myself," the Mock-Turtle said: "I'm too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it."

"Hadn't time," said the Gryphon: "I went to the Classical master, though. He was an old crab, he was."

"I never went to him," the Mock-Turtle said with a sigh: "he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say."

"So he did, so he did," said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn, and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.

"And how many hours a day did you do lessons?" said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

"Ten hours the first day," said the Mock-Turtle: "nine the next, and so on."

"What a curious plan!" exclaimed Alice.

"That's the reason they're called lessons," the Gryphon remarked: "because they lessen from day to day."

This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. "Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?"

"Of course it was," said the Mock-Turtle.

"And how did you manage on the twelfth?" Alice went on eagerly.

"That's enough about lessons," the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone.

---

A CLEAR STATEMENT

From 'Alice in Wonderland'

They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him:
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.

He sent them word I had not gone
(We know it to be true);
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?

I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more;
They all returned from him to you,
Though they were mine before.

If I or she should chance to be
Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to set them free,
Exactly as we were.

My notion was that you had been
(Before she had this fit)
An obstacle that came between
Him, and ourselves, and it.

Don't let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret, kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.

---

THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER

From 'Through the Looking-Glass'

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright—
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done—
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky.
No birds were flying overhead—
There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

"O Oysters, come and walk with us!"
The Walrus did beseech.
"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each."

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head—
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat—
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more—
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar beside
Are very good indeed—
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said:
"Do you admire the view?"

"It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf—
I've had to ask you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but—
"The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said;
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?"
But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

---

THE BAKER'S TALE

From 'The Hunting of the Snark'

They roused him with muffins—they roused him with ice—
They roused him with mustard and cress—
They roused him with jam and judicious advice—
They set him conundrums to guess.

When at length he sat up and was able to speak,
His sad story he offered to tell;
And the Bellman cried "Silence! Not even a shriek!"
And excitedly tingled his bell.

There was silence supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream,
Scarcely even a howl or a groan,
As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe
In an antediluvian tone.

"My father and mother were honest, though poor—"
"Skip all that!" cried the Bellman in haste.
"If it once becomes dark, there's no chance of a Snark—
We have hardly a minute to waste!"

"I skip forty years," said the Baker, in tears,
"And proceed without further remark
To the day when you took me aboard of your ship
To help you in hunting the Snark.

"A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named)
Remarked when I bade him farewell—"
"Oh, skip your dear uncle!" the Bellman exclaimed,
As he angrily tingled his bell.

"He remarked to me then," said that mildest of men,—
"'If your Snark be a Snark that is right,
Fetch it home by all means—you may serve it with greens,
And it's handy for striking a light.

"'You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap—'"

("That's exactly the method," the Bellman bold
In a hasty parenthesis cried:—
"That's exactly the way I have always been told
That the capture of Snarks should be tried!")

"'But oh, beamish nephew! beware of the day
If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!'

"It is this, it is this, that oppresses my soul
When I think of my uncle's last words;
And my heart is like nothing so much as a bowl
Brimming over with quivering curds!

"It is this, it is this"—"We have had that before!"
The Bellman indignantly said.
And the Baker replied: "Let me say it once more;
It is this, it is this that I dread!

"I engage with the Snark—every night after dark—
In a dreamy delirious fight;
I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,
And I use it for striking a light:

"But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day,
In a moment (of this I am sure),
I shall softly and silently vanish away—
And the notion I cannot endure!"

---

YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM

From 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
Pray what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
Allow me to sell you a couple."

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak:
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth; "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever:
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"

---

CASANOVA

(JEAN JACQUES CASANOVA DE SEINGALT)

(1725-1803)

he unique figure of Casanova stands out as a type of all that was most vicious and most brilliant in the eighteenth century. The pre-revolutionary philosophies, filtering through society, were weakening religious restraints and producing a hypocritical conformity to tradition and a new uncertainty which inclined people to present enjoyment and epicureanism. But even the court aristocracy, to whom self-indulgence was the rule of life, were astounded at the unrestraint of Casanova's pleasure-seeking. He professed himself a Christian, but during all his vicious career was never influenced by a conscientious scruple. In a period when social graces were extolled above all others, when conversation was cultivated as a fine art, and when the salon was perhaps the greatest power in France, he was pre-eminent for talent and charm. His physical beauty fascinated both men and women; his fearlessness, often running into a mad bravado which lost no chance to fight, won him the respect of men. He could be witty in many tongues; he was an adept in fashionable fads of the day; was supposed to have a gift for mesmerism, and to be something of a sorcerer.

He could adapt himself to any society, appearing both as the idol of European courts and a boon companion in low taverns. He had countless duels and love affairs, and concluded one after another with the same cynical heartlessness: always a gay soldier of fortune, experimenting with his various talents; now a diplomat, now an abbé or popular preacher, and now a writer of political essays.

When Casanova's father, a man of gentle birth, became an actor and married a pretty actress, Zanetta Farusi, the daughter of an Italian shoemaker, he hopelessly alienated his family. Jean-Jacques, their first child, was born in Venice, and during their professional travels was left there with his grandmother. Her earnest desire was to educate the beautiful and precocious child; and she economized from her scanty means until she was able to send him to the Seminary of Saint Cyprian in Venice. He passed his entrance examinations, and studied there for a time, exhibiting unusual ability. Then at sixteen he was expelled for a disgraceful intrigue, which would have consigned him to prison but for his mother, whose influence secured him the protection of Cardinal Acquaviva and a position in his household, which the boy soon resigned for a gayer life.

After this came a long series of adventurous years, during which he visited Rome, Naples, Constantinople, and other places, and was admitted to many orders of chivalry. During these wanderings he became acquainted with Rousseau and Voltaire; visited the court of Frederick the Great; went to Russia, where he was smiled upon by the Empress Catharine II. At Versailles, where he was a familiar figure, Louis XV. honored him with a personal interview. But even in a society disposed to be lenient to any one who was amusing, Casanova incurred disgrace. After becoming notorious over Europe as a trickster at cards, and for his dissipations, he returned to Venice in 1755.

There he was as gay and as dissolute as ever, but in his intervals of spare time he wrote a refutation of a work by Amelot de la Houssaye upon the condition of the Republic. He had hoped it would reinstate him in public opinion, but it failed to do so, and before long he was denounced to the government as a spy and thrown into prison. In the 'Récit de sa Captivité' (1788) he himself has told the dramatic story of his confinement in the garret of a ducal palace, and of his wonderful escape. The hot Italian sun beating down on the leaden roof added to his discomfort, and he was too daring and too ingenious to suffer long in patience. With the aid of an iron bolt which he had sharpened, he bored a hole through the wall of his cell and gained access to another prisoner, Father Balbi. For a long time they plotted together, and at last after many efforts and dangers they extricated themselves by way of the roofs.

This feat added greatly to his fame. He was fêted and courted everywhere, and his extravagances set the fashions for years. But in spite of the admiration he excited, he was too dangerous a citizen to be allowed long in a place. He was expelled from Varsovia in consequence of a duel. Then Paris, and later Madrid, drove him away.

His life of excesses had broken his health, when in 1782 he attached himself to the Count of Waldstein, a German prince whom he followed into Bohemia. Soon after, he began the famous 'Memoires,' his chief literary achievement. He wrote several historical works, a translation in verse of the Iliad, and many political sketches. Others of his writings, such as 'Eighty Years Spent among the Inhabitants of the Interior of the Globe,' show him possessed of a lively imagination. But he evinced especial zest in the preparation of the 'Memoires.' In a style as audacious as his life, strong and sparkling with wit, he told the strange story of his career. He reflects the social habits of his time, the contemporary point of view.

He lived on in Bohemia until he was seventy-eight, and then he died at Dux, retaining to the end what Janin terms "his marvelous instinct for vice and corruption."

---

CASANOVA'S ESCAPE FROM THE DUCAL PALACE

From 'The Escapes of Casanova and Latude from Prison'

The greatest comfort to a man in suffering is the hope of a speedy release. He sighs for the moment when he shall see the end of his woes; he fancies that his wishes can hasten it on, and would do anything on earth to know what hour is fixed for the cessation of his misery: but no one can tell at what moment an event will happen which depends on the determination of another, unless that person has announced it. But the sufferer, who is weak and impatient, is predisposed to be superstitious. "God," says he, "must know the very moment when my pain will cease; and God may permit that it should be revealed to me, never mind how." When he has once fallen into this train of argument, he no longer hesitates to try his fortune by any means his fancy may dictate, if he is more or less inclined to believe in the revelations of the oracle he happens to select. This frame of mind is not conspicuously unlike that of the greater number of those who were wont to consult the Pythia, or the oaks of Dodona, or of those who, even in our own day, study the Cabbala, or seek the revelation they hope for in a verse of the Bible or a line of Virgil;—this indeed has made the Sortes Virgilianæ famous, of which many writers tell us; or finally, of those who are firmly convinced that their difficulties will all be solved by the fortuitous or premeditated arrangement of a mere pack of cards.

I was in this state of mind. But not knowing what means to employ to compel Fate to reveal through the Bible the end in store for me—that is to say, the hour at which I should recover the incomparable blessing of liberty—I resolved to consult the divine poem of Messer Ludovico Ariosto, 'Orlando Furioso,' which I knew by heart, and in which I delighted up in my cell. I worshiped the genius of that great poet, and thought him far better fitted than Virgil to tell my fortune. With this idea I wrote down a question addressed to the imaginary intelligence, asking in which canto of Ariosto's poem I should find the day of my deliverance prophesied. Afterwards I composed an inverted pyramid of the numbers derived from the words in the question, and by subtracting nine from each pair of figures I had nine for a remainder. I concluded that the prophecy I sought must be in the ninth canto. I pursued the same method to arrive at the line and stanza containing the oracle, and I found seven as the number of the stanza, and one for the line.

I took up the poem, my heart beating as though I really had the most entire confidence in this oracle. I opened it, turned over the leaves, and read these words:—

"Fra il fin d'Ottobre e il capo di Novembre."

The perfect appropriateness of the line struck me as so remarkable that, though I cannot say that I altogether believed in the oracle, the reader will forgive me if I confess I did my utmost to verify it. The curious part of the matter is, that between the last of October and the beginning of November there is but the one instant of midnight; and it was exactly as the clock struck midnight on the 31st of October that I quitted my prison, as the reader will presently learn....

The hour strikes. Hark! the angel!

Soradaci was about to fall on his face, but I assured him that this was superfluous. In three minutes the hole was pierced through; the board fell at my feet, and Father Balbi slid into my arms.

"Your task is done," said I, "and now mine begins."

We embraced, and he gave me my crowbar and a pair of scissors. I desired Soradaci to trim our beards, but I could not help laughing as I saw the creature, open-mouthed, staring at this strange angel, who looked more like a demon. Though utterly bewildered, he cut our beards to perfection.

Being impatient to survey the locality, I desired the monk to remain with Soradaci, for I would not leave him alone, and I went out. I found the hole rather narrow; however, I got through. I got above the cell in which the Count lay; I went down and cordially embraced the venerable gentleman. I saw a man of a figure ill suited to surmount the difficulties of such an escape over a steep roof covered with sheet lead. He asked me what my plan was, and told me that he thought I had been rather heedless in my action.

"I only want to go on," said I, "step by step to liberty or death."

"If you imagine," said he, "that you can pierce the roof and find a way along the leads,—from which, too, you must get down,—I do not see how you can possibly succeed unless you have wings. I have not courage enough to accompany you. I shall stay where I am and pray to God for you."

I left him to inspect the outer roof, getting as close as I could to the outer side of the loft. Having succeeded in touching the inside of the rafters at the part where it was lowest, I perched myself on a beam, such as are to be found under the roof of every large palace. I poked at the rafters with the end of my bar, and to my joy found them half-rotten; at each touch the wood fell in dust. Being sure, therefore, that I could make a large enough opening in less than an hour, I returned to my cell and spent the next four hours in cutting up sheets, counterpanes, and mattress covers, to make ropes of. I took care to tie all the knots myself, to be sure of their firmness, for a single knot badly tied would have cost us our life. When all was done I found we had about a hundred yards of rope. There are certain things in every great enterprise which are of the highest importance, and for which a leader worthy of the name trusts no one.

When the rope was finished, I made a bundle of my coat, my silk cloak, some shirts, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and we all three went into the Count's cell. This worthy man first congratulated Soradaci on having been so lucky as to be put in the same room with me, and being so soon enabled to recover his freedom. The man's stupid amazement almost made me laugh. I no longer attempted any concealment, for I had thrown off the mask of Tartuffe, which I had found most inconvenient while this villain had compelled me to wear it. I saw that he was convinced I had deceived him, but he could not understand how; for he could not imagine how I had communicated with the sham angel so as to make him come and go at fixed hours. He was listening eagerly to the Count, who declared we were rushing on our fate; and, coward that he was, he was revolving in his mind a scheme for avoiding the perilous attempt. I told the monk to collect his things while I went to make the hole in the roof of the loft.

At two hours after sunset the hole was finished; I had worked the rafters to powder, and the opening was twice as large as was needful. I could touch the sheet of lead outside. I could not raise it single-handed, because it was riveted; the friar helped me, and by pushing the crowbar between the gutter and the sheet of lead I detached it; then raising it on our shoulders, we bent it up high enough to allow of our squeezing through the opening. Putting my head out to reconnoitre, I saw with dismay how bright the moon was, now in the first quarter. It was a check which we must endure with patience, and wait till midnight to escape, when the moon would have gone to light up the Antipodes. On such a glorious night all Venice would be out on the Piazza below, and we dared not venture out on the roof; our shadows cast on the ground would have attracted attention; our extraordinary appearance up there would excite general curiosity, and above all, that of Messer Grande and his spies, the sole guards of Venice. Our fine scheme would soon have been disturbed by their odious interference. I therefore decided positively that we were not to creep out till the moon had set....

It was time to be off. The moon had set. I hung half the rope round Balbi's neck on one side and his bundle of clothes on the other shoulder. I did the same for myself; and both, in our waistcoats with our hats on, went to the opening in the roof.

"And issuing forth we then beheld the stars."—Dante.

I crept out first; Balbi followed me. Soradaci, who had accompanied us to the roof, was ordered to pull the sheet of lead down again and then to go and pray to his saint. Crawling on my knees on all fours, I clutched my crowbar firmly, and stretching as far as I could, I slipped it obliquely between the points of the sheets; then, grasping the end of the sheet I had turned up, I dragged myself up to the ridge of the roof. The friar, to follow me, inserted the fingers of his right hand into the belt of my breeches. Thus I had the double task of a beast which drags and carries both at once, and that on a steep roof, made slippery by a dense fog. Half-way up this dreadful climb, Balbi bid me stop, for one of his parcels had fallen, and he hoped it might not have gone further than the gutter. My first impulse was to give him a kick and send him after his bundle; but God be praised, I had enough self-command not to do this, for the punishment would have been too severe for both of us, since I alone could never have escaped. I asked him whether it was the packet of ropes, but as he replied that it was only his bundle, in which he had a manuscript he had found in the loft, and which he had hoped would make his fortune, I told him he must take patience; for that a step backwards would be fatal. The poor monk sighed, and clinging still to my waist-band, we climbed on again.

After having got over fifteen or sixteen sheets of lead with immense difficulty, we reached the ridge, on which I perched myself astride, and Balbi did the same. We had our backs to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and two hundred yards in front of us we saw the numerous cupolas of the church of Saint Mark, which is in fact part of the Ducal Palace; for the church of Saint Mark is, properly speaking, no more than the Doge's chapel, and certainly no sovereign can boast of a finer one. I began by relieving myself of my load, and desired my companion to follow my example. He tucked his bundle of ropes under him as best he might, but wanting to take off his hat, which inconvenienced him, he managed so badly that it rolled from ledge to ledge, and went to join the bundle of clothes in the canal. My poor comrade was in despair.

"A bad omen!" he exclaimed. "Here I am at once without a shirt, without a hat, and bereft of a precious manuscript containing a most curious and unknown history of the festivals at the Ducal Palace."

I, less disposed to be fierce than I had been when I was climbing, calmly assured him that these two little accidents had nothing so extraordinary about them as that a superstitious spirit should regard them as ominous; that I did not think them so, and that they did not in the least discourage me.

"They should serve you, my good fellow," said I, "as a warning to be prudent and wise, and to suggest to you that God certainly protects us; for if your hat, instead of tumbling to the right, had slipped off to the left, we should have been lost. It would have fallen into the courtyard, where the guards must have found it, and it would of course have told them that there must be some one on the roof. We should have been recaptured at once."

After sitting some minutes looking about me, I desired the monk to remain motionless till I should return, and I made my way forward, shuffling along astride on the roof without any difficulty, my bolt in my hand. I spent above an hour going about the roof, examining and observing every corner, but in vain; nowhere did I see anything to which I could attach a cord. I was in the greatest perplexity. I could not for a moment think of the canal, nor of the palace courtyard, and among the many cupolas of the church I saw nothing but precipitous walls leading to no open space. To get beyond the church to the Canonica I should have had to surmount such steep slopes that I had no hope of achieving it, and it was natural that I should reject as impossible everything that did not seem feasible. The situation in which I found myself required daring, but absolutely no rashness. It was such a dilemma as I imagine can have no parallel for difficulty in any moral question.

However, I had to come to some conclusion: I must either get away or return to my cell, never probably to leave it again; or again, throw myself into the canal. In this predicament a great deal must be left to chance, and I must begin somewhere. I fixed my eyes on a dormer window on the side towards the canal, and about two-thirds of the way down. It was far enough from the spot we had started from to make me think that the loft it lighted was not connected with the prison I had broken out of. It could light only an attic, inhabited or vacant, over some room in the palace, where, when day should dawn, the doors no doubt would be opened. I was morally certain that the attendants in the palace, even those of the Doge himself, who should happen to see us, would be eager to favor our escape rather than place us in the hands of justice, even if they had recognized us as the greatest of state criminals; so horrible was the inquisition in their eyes.

With this idea I decided on inspecting that window; so, letting myself slip gently down, I soon was astride on the little roof. Then resting my hands on the edge, I stretched my head out and succeeded in seeing and touching a little barred grating, behind which there was a window glazed with small panes set in lead. The window did not trouble me, but the grating, slight as it was, seemed to me an insurmountable difficulty, for without a file I could not get through the bars, and I only had my crowbar. I was checked, and began to lose heart, when a perfectly simple and natural incident revived my spirit....

It was the clock of Saint Mark's at this moment striking midnight which roused my spirit, and by a sudden shock brought me out of the perplexed frame of mind in which I found myself. That clock reminded me that the morning about to dawn was that of All Saints' Day; that consequently of my saint's day—if indeed I had a patron saint—and my Jesuit confessor's prophecy recurred to my mind. But I own that what tended most to restore my courage, and really increased my physical powers, was the profaner oracle of my beloved Ariosto:—

"Between the end of October and the beginning of November."

If a great misfortune sometimes makes a small mind devout, it is almost impossible that superstition should not have some share in the matter. The sound of the clock seemed to me a spoken charm which bade me act and promised me success. Lying flat on the roof with my head over the edge, I pushed my bar in above the frame which held the grating, determined to dislodge it bodily. In a quarter of an hour I had succeeded; the grating was in my hands unbroken, and having laid it by the side of the dormer I had no difficulty in breaking in the window, though the blood was flowing from a wound I had made in my left hand.

By the help of my bar I got back to the ridge of the roof in the same way as before, and made my way back to where I had left my companion. I found him desperate and raging; he abused me foully for having left him there so long. He declared he was only waiting for seven to strike to go back to prison.

"What did you think had become of me?"

"I thought you had fallen down some roof or wall."

"And you have no better way of expressing your joy at my return than by abusing me?"

"What have you been doing all this time?"

"Come with me and you will see."

Having gathered up my bundles, I made my way back to the window. When we were just over it I explained to Balbi exactly what I had done, and consulted him as to how we were to get into the loft through the window. The thing was quite easy for one of us; the other could let him down. But I did not see how the second man was to follow him, as there was no way of fixing the rope above the window. By going in and letting myself drop I might break my legs and arms, for I did not know the height of the window above the floor. To this wise argument, spoken with perfect friendliness, the brute replied in these words:—

"Let me down, at any rate, and when I am in there you will have plenty of time to find out how you can follow me."

I confess that in my first impulse of indignation I was ready to stab him with my crowbar. A good genius saved me from doing so, and I did not even utter one word of reproach for his selfishness and baseness. On the contrary, I at once unrolled my bundle of rope, and fastening it firmly under his arm-pits I made him lie flat on his face, his feet outwards, and then let him down on to the roof of the dormer. When he was there, I made him go over the edge and into the window as far as his hips, leaving his arms on the sill. I next slipped down to the little roof, as I had done before, lay down on my stomach, and holding the rope firmly, told the monk to let himself go without fear. When he had landed on the floor of the attic he undid the rope, and I, pulling it up, found that the height was above fifty feet. To jump this was too great a risk. As for the monk, now he was safe after nearly two hours of anguish on a roof, where, I must own, his situation was far from comfortable, he called out to me to throw in the ropes and he would take care of them. I, as may be supposed, took good care not to follow this absurd injunction.

Not knowing what to do, and awaiting some inspiration, I clambered once more to the ridge; and my eye falling on a spot near a cupola, which I had not yet examined, I made my way thither. I saw a little terrace or platform covered with lead, close to a large window closed with shutters. There was here a tub full of wet mortar with a trowel, and by the side a ladder, which I thought would be long enough to enable me to get down into the attic where my comrade was. This settled the question. I slipped my rope through the top rung, and dragged this awkward load as far as the window. I then had to get the clumsy mass into the window; it was above twelve yards long. The difficulty I had in doing it made me repent of having deprived myself of Balbi's assistance. I pushed the ladder along till one end was on the level of the dormer and the other projected by a third beyond the gutter. Then I slid down on to the dormer roof; I drew the ladder close to my side and fastened the rope to the eighth rung, after which I again allowed it to slip till it was parallel with the window. Then I did all I could to make it slip into the window, but I could not get it beyond the fifth rung because the end caught against the inner roof of the dormer, and no power on earth could get it any further without breaking either the ladder or the roof. There was nothing for it but to tilt the outer end; then the slope would allow it to slide in by its own weight. I might have placed the ladder across the window and have fastened the rope to it to let myself down, without any risk; but the ladder would have remained there, and next morning would have guided the archers and Lorenzo to the spot where we might still be hiding.

I would not run the risk of losing by such an act of imprudence the fruit of so much labor and peril, and to conceal all our traces the ladder must be got entirely into the window. Having no one to help me, I decided on getting down to the gutter to tilt it, and attain my end. This in fact I did, but at so great a risk that but for a sort of miracle I should have paid for my daring with my life. I ventured to let go of the cord that was attached to the ladder without any fear of its falling into the canal, because it was caught on the gutter by the third rung. Then, with my crowbar in my hand, I cautiously let myself slide down to the gutter by the side of the ladder; the marble ledge was against my toes, for I let myself down with my face to the roof. In this attitude I found strength enough to lift the ladder a few inches, and I had the satisfaction of seeing it go a foot further in. As the reader will understand, this diminished its weight very perceptibly. What I now wanted was to get it two feet further in, by lifting it enough; for after that I felt sure that by climbing up to the roof of the dormer once more, I could, with the help of the rope, get it all the way in. To achieve this I raised myself from my knees; but the force I was obliged to use to succeed made me slip, so that I suddenly found myself over the edge of the roof as far as my chest, supported only by my elbows.

It was an awful moment, which to this day I shudder to think of, and which it is perhaps impossible to conceive of in all its horror. The natural instinct of self-preservation made me almost unconsciously lean with all my weight, supporting myself on my ribs, and I succeeded—miraculously, I felt inclined to say. Taking care not to relax my hold, I managed to raise myself with all the strength of my wrists, leaning at the same time on my stomach. Happily there was nothing to fear for the ladder, for the lucky—or rather the unlucky—push which had cost me so dear, had sent it in more than three feet, which fixed it firmly. Finding myself resting on the gutter literally on my wrists and my groin, I found that by moving my right side I could raise first one knee and then the other on to the parapet. Then I should be safe.

However, my troubles were not yet over, for the strain I was obliged to exert in order to succeed gave me such a nervous spasm that a violent attack of painful cramp seemed to cripple me completely. I did not lose my head, and remained perfectly still till the spasm was over, knowing that perfect stillness is the best cure for nervous cramps—I had often found it so. It was a frightful moment. A few minutes after, I gradually renewed my efforts. I succeeded in getting my knees against the gutter, and as soon as I had recovered my breath I carefully raised the ladder, and at last got it to the angle where it was parallel with the window. Knowing enough of the laws of equilibrium and the lever, I now picked up my crowbar; and climbing in my old fashion, I hauled myself up to the roof and easily succeeded in tilting in the ladder, which the monk below received in his arms. I then flung in my clothes, the ropes and the broken pieces, and got down into the attic, where Balbi received me very heartily and took care to remove the ladder.

Arm in arm, we surveyed the dark room in which we found ourselves; it was thirty paces long by about twenty wide. At one end we felt a double door formed of iron bars. This was unpromising, but laying my hand on the latch in the middle it yielded to the pressure, and the door opened. We first felt our way round this fresh room, and then, trying to cross it, ran up against a table with arm-chairs and stools around it. We returned to the side where we had felt windows, and having opened one, by the dim starlight we could see nothing but steep roofs between domes. I did not for an instant think of escaping by the window; I must know where I was going, and I did not recognize the spot where we were. So I closed the window, and we went back to the first room, where we had left our baggage. Quite worn out, I let myself drop on to the floor, and putting a bundle of rope under my head, utterly bereft of all power of body or of mind, I fell into a sweet sleep. I gave myself up to it so passively, that even if I had known that death must be the end of it I could not have resisted it; and I remember distinctly that the pleasure of that sleep was perfectly delicious.

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BARTOLOMEO DE LAS CASAS