From a photo, by Mr. Thomas Clark, Edinburgh
21, COMELY BANK, EDINBURGH
Carlyle and his wife lived at Comely Bank for eighteen months after their marriage
From a wood engraving by Pearson of Sir J. E. Boehm’s gold medallion
THOMAS CARLYLE
(Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Chapman and Hall)
Now, it must definitely be set to the credit of men like Cromwell and Mirabeau, that they were undoubtedly opposed to and embarrassed by men whose projects, even in their own eyes, were scarcely a part of practical politics. These men exist in every country and in every age. They are wilfully and eternally in opposition. They do not agree sufficiently with the active powers even to argue with them with any profit. Their ideal is so far away that they do not even desire it with any immediate hunger. They count it a pleasant and natural thing to live and die in revolt. They are ready to be critics, they are ready to be martyrs, they are emphatically not ready to be rulers. In this way Cromwell, considering how he might make some English polity out of a chaos of English parties, had to argue for hours together with Fifth Monarchy men, to whom the vital question was whether the children of malignants should not be slain, and whether a man who was caught swearing should not be stoned to death. In this way Mirabeau, striving to keep the tradition of French civilisation intact amid a hundred essential reforms, found his way blocked by men who insisted on discussing whether in the ideal commonwealth men would believe in immortality, or go through a rite of marriage. Now, while fully granting that both types have an eternal value, it is certainly not just that precisely the same ethical test should be applied to Cromwell and the Fifth Monarchy men, to Mirabeau and the worshipper of pure reason. It is not just that we should judge in precisely the same way the pace of a butcher’s cart which is obliged to get to Pimlico, and the pace of a butcher’s cart which is designed at some time or other to reach the site of the Garden of Eden. It is not just that we should judge in the same way the man who is simply anxious to erect a parish pump, and the opponent of the pump, who looks forward to a day when there shall not only be no pump, but no parish. The man of action, then, really has in this sane and limited sense a claim to a peculiar kind of allowance, in that it is of vital necessity to him that a certain limited grievance should be removed. It is easy enough to be the man who lives in a contented impotence; the man who luxuriates in an endless and satisfied defeat. He does not desire to be effective; he only desires to be right. He does not desire passionately that something should be done; he only desires that it should be triumphantly proved to be necessary.
