Fresh Fields

by John Burroughs

into froth,"—no butter of sweet thought or sweet content at all. Yet Carlyle could say of her, "Not a bad little dame at all. She and I did aye very weel together; and 'tweel, it was not every one that could have done with her," which was doubtless the exact truth. Froude also speaks from personal knowledge when he says: "His was the soft heart and hers the stern one."

We are now close on to the cardinal fact of Carlyle's life and teachings, namely, the urgency of his quest for heroes and heroic qualities. This is the master key to him; the main stress of his preaching and writing is here. He is the medium and exemplar of the value of personal force and prowess, and he projected this thought into current literature and politics, with the emphasis of gunpowder and torpedoes. He had a vehement and overweening conceit in man. A sort of anthropomorphic greed and hunger possessed him always, an insatiable craving for strong, picturesque characters, and for contact and conflict with them. This was his ruling passion (and it amounted to a passion) all his days. He fed his soul on heroes and heroic qualities, and all his literary exploits were a search for these things. Where he found them not, where he did not come upon some trace of them in books, in society, in politics, he saw only barrenness and futility. He was an idealist who was inhospitable to ideas; he must have a man, the flavor and stimulus of ample concrete personalities. "In the country," he said, writing to his brother

in 1821, "I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land." His faculties were "up in mutiny, and slaying one another for lack of fair enemies." He must to the city, to Edinburgh, and finally to London, where, thirteen years later, we find his craving as acute as ever. "Oct. 1st. This morning think of the old primitive Edinburgh scheme of engineership; almost meditate for a moment resuming it yet! It were a method of gaining bread, of getting into contact with men, my two grand wants and prayers."

Nothing but man, but heroes, touched him, moved him, satisfied him. He stands for heroes and hero-worship, and for that alone. Bring him the most plausible theory, the most magnanimous idea in the world, and he is cold, indifferent, or openly insulting; but bring him a brave, strong man, or the reminiscence of any noble personal trait,—sacrifice, obedience, reverence,—and every faculty within him stirs and responds. Dreamers and enthusiasts, with their schemes for the millennium, rushed to him for aid and comfort, and usually had the door slammed in their faces. They forgot it was a man he had advertised for, and not an idea. Indeed, if you had the blow-fly of any popular ism or reform buzzing in your bonnet, No. 5 Cheyne Row was the house above all others to be avoided; little chance of inoculating such a mind as Carlyle's with your notions,—of blowing a toiling and sweating hero at his work. But welcome to any man with real work to do and the

courage to do it; welcome to any man who stood for any real, tangible thing in his own right. "In God's name, what art thou? Not Nothing, sayest thou! Then, How much and what? This is the thing I would know, and even must soon know, such a pass am I come to!" ("Past and Present.")

Caroline Fox, in her Memoirs, tells how, in 1842, Carlyle's sympathies were enlisted in behalf of a Cornish miner who had kept his place in the bottom of a shaft, above a blast the fuse of which had been prematurely lighted, and allowed his comrades to be hauled up when only one could escape at a time. He inquired out the hero, who, as by miracle, had survived the explosion, and set on foot an enterprise to raise funds for the bettering of his condition. In a letter to Sterling, he said there was help and profit in knowing that there was such a true and brave workman living, and working with him on the earth at that time. "Tell all the people," he said, "that a man of this kind ought to be hatched,—that it were shameful to eat him as a breakfast egg!"

All Carlyle's sins of omission and commission grew out of this terrible predilection for the individual hero: this bent or inclination determined the whole water-shed, so to speak, of his mind; every rill and torrent swept swiftly and noisily in this one direction. It is the tragedy in Burns's life that attracts him; the morose heroism in Johnson's, the copious manliness in Scott's, the lordly and regal quality in Goethe. Emerson praised Plato to him;

but the endless dialectical hair-splitting of the Greek philosopher,—"how does all this concern me at all?" he said. But when he discovered that Plato hated the Athenian democracy most cordially, and poured out his scorn upon it, he thought much better of him. History swiftly resolves itself into biography to him; the tide in the affairs of men ebbed and flowed in obedience to the few potent wills. We do not find him exploiting or elucidating ideas and principles, but moral qualities,—always on the scent, on the search of the heroic.

He raises aloft the standard of the individual will, the supremacy of man over events. He sees the reign of law; none see it clearer. "Eternal Law is silently present everywhere and everywhen. By Law the Planets gyrate in their orbits; by some approach to Law the street-cabs ply in their thoroughfares." But law is still personal will with him, the will of God. He can see nothing but individuality, but conscious will and force, in the universe. He believed in a personal God. He had an inward ground of assurance of it in his own intense personality and vivid apprehension of personal force and genius. He seems to have believed in a personal devil. At least he abuses "Auld Nickie-Ben" as one would hardly think of abusing an abstraction. However impractical we may regard Carlyle, he was entirely occupied with practical questions; an idealist turned loose, in the actual affairs of this world, and intent only on bettering them. That which so drew reformers and all ardent

ideal natures to him was not the character of his conviction, but the torrid impetuosity of his belief. He had the earnestness of fanaticism, the earnestness of rebellion; the earnestness of the Long Parliament and the National Convention,—the only two parliaments he praises. He did not merely see the truth and placidly state it, standing aloof and apart from it; but, as soon as his intellect had conceived a thing as true, every current of his being set swiftly in that direction; it was an outlet at once for his whole pent-up energies, and there was a flood and sometimes an inundation of Carlylean wrath and power. Coming from Goethe, with his marvelous insight and cool, uncommitted moral nature, to the great Scotchman, is like coming from dress parade to a battle, from Melancthon to Luther. It would be far from the truth to say that Goethe was not in earnest: he was all eyes, all vision; he saw everything, but saw it for his own ends and behoof, for contemplation and enjoyment. In Carlyle the vision is productive of pain and suffering, because his moral nature sympathizes so instantly and thoroughly with his intellectual; it is a call to battle, and every faculty is enlisted. It was this that made Carlyle akin to the reformers and the fanatics, and led them to expect more of him than they got. The artist element in him, and his vital hold upon the central truths of character and personal force, saved him from any such fate as overtook his friend Irving.