The mothers who loved us, whom we love, religious, social, political order; but it is on are snatched away; friendships die, and we condition that the revolutionists take no part survive them. The phantom of death watch-in them: he has written many admirable es by the pillow of those dear to us: the pages on Knox and Cromwell; but the liveliest and purest love would be a bitter chances are that he would have written as irony, were it not a promise for the future; admirably, although less truly, against them, and this promise itself is not felt strongly had he lived at the commencement of their enough by us, such as we are at the present struggles. Give him the past-give him a day. The intellectual adoration of truth, power, an idea, something which has triwithout hope of realization, is sterile: there umphed and borne its fruits-so that, placed is a larger void in our souls, more room for thus at a distance, he can examine and comthe truth than we can fill during our short prehend it under all its points of view, calmterrestrial existence. Break the bond of ly, at his ease, without fear of being troubled continuity between ourselves and the genera- by it, or drawn into the sphere of its action tions which have preceded, and shall follow and he will see in it all that there is to see, us upon the earth, and what is the devotion to ideas but a sublime folly? Annihilate the connection of all human lives, efface the infallibility which lies in the progression of penetration, is clouded. If his judgment re

more than others are able to see. Bring the object near to him, and as with Dante's souls in the 'Inferno,' his vision, his faculty of

collective mankind, and what becomes martyrdom but a suicide without an object? Who would sacrifice-not his life, for that is little-but all the days of his life, his affections, the peace of those he loves, for coun

specting the French revolution be in our opinion very incomplete, the reason is that the event is still continued, and that it appears to him living and disturbing. The past has every thing to expect from him-the pre

try, for human liberty, for the evolution of a sent, nothing-not even common justice. great moral thought, when a few years, per- Have patience, he says, to those who comhaps a few days, will suffice to destroy it? plain; all will come to pass, but not in your Sadness, exhaustless sadness, discordance be- way: God will provide the means. By whom tween the will and the power, disenchant- then will God provide means upon earth unment, discouragement, such constitute life, less by us? are we not his agents here bewhen looked at only from the individual low? Our destinies are within us: to unpoint of view. A few rare intellects escape derstand them, we need intellect-to accomthe common law and attain calmness; but it plish them, power. And why does he design is the calm of inaction, of contemplation; us the first, without the second? Wherefore and contemplation here on earth is the sel- does he speak to us, at times, in such beautifishness of genius.

ful passages, of hope and faith, of the divine principle that is within us, of the duty which calls us to act, and the next instant smile with pity upon all that we attempt, and point to us the night, the vast night of extinction, swallowing up all our efforts ?

We repeat, that Mr. Carlyle has instinctively all the presentiments of the period; but not understanding, not admitting throughout, where he labors with the intellect rather than with the heart, the collective life, it is absolutely impossible for him to find the means of realization. A perpetual antagonism prevails throughout all that he does; his instincts drive him to action, his theory to contemplation. Faith and discouragement alternate in his works, as they must in his soul. He weaves and unweaves his without meaning: such objects as the exten

There is, in our opinion, something very incomplete, very narrow, in this kind of contempt which Mr. Carlyle exhibits, whenever he meets in his path with any thing that men have agreed to call political reform. The forms of government appear to him almost

sion of suffrage, the guarantee of any kind

web, like Penelope: he preaches by turns life and nothingness: he destroys the powers of political right, are evidently in his eyes

pitiful things, materialism more or less disguised. What he requires is, that men should grow better, that the number of just men should increase: one wise man more in the world would be to him a fact of more importance than ten political revolutions. It would be so to us also, were we able to create him, as Wagner does his Homunculus, by blowing on the furnaces, if the changes in

of his readers, by continually carrying them from heaven to hell, from hell to heaven. Ardent, and almost menacing, upon the ground of idea, he becomes timid and skeptical as soon as he is engaged on that of its application. We may agree with him with respect to the aim-we cannot respecting the means; he rejects them all, but he proposes no others. He desires progress, but dislikes progressives: he foresees, he announces as the political order of things did not preciseinevitable, great changes or revolutions in the ❘ly constitute those very manifestations which appear to us indispensable to the life of the the notion of life, of sacred life, to him who just and wise man. When a creed is the knows it only by the material labor that professed object, we must not capriciously crushes him, and by the wages that abase destroy the instruments which may enable us him? Alas! this man's name is Million; he is fully to attain it.

met with on every side; he constitutes nearly

We know well enough, that there are too three-fourths of the population of Europe. many men who lose the remembrance of God How will you give him more time and more in the symbol, who do not go beyond ques-energy to develope his faculties, except by tions of form, contract a love for them, and lessening the number of his hours of labor, end in a kind of liberalism for liberalism's and increasing his profits? How can you

sake. We do not need to enter our protest against this caprice, if the reader has paid attention to what we have already said. In our view the real problem, which rules all political agitation, is one of education. We believe in the progressive moral amelioration of man, as the sole important object of all labor, as the sole strict duty which ought to direct us: the rest is only means. But

render his contact with the enlightened classes serviceable to him, except by altering the nature of his relations toward them? How, above all, will you raise this fallen soul, except by saying to him, -by telling him in acts, not reasonings which he does not understand, -" Thou, too, art man; the breath of God is in thee: thou art here below to develope thy being under all its aspects: thy body

where the liberty of means does not exist, is a temple; thy immortal soul is the priest, is not its attainment the first thing needful? which ought to sacrifice there for all "? And Take an enslaved country, Italy for exam- what is this act, this token destined to raise ple, there we find no education, no press, him in his own eyes, to show to him that he has no public meetings; but censors, who, after a mission upon earth, to give him the conhaving mutilated a literary journal for years, sciousness of his duties and his rights, except seeing that it still survives, suppress it alto- his initiation into citizenship, the suffrage? gether; archbishops, who preach against What is meant by "re-organizing labor," but

all kinds of popular instruction, and declare the establishment of infant schools to be immoral;t-princes, who stamp all the books belonging to their subjects. What can be done to ameliorate in such a country the moral and intellectual condition of the people? Take a country of serfs, -Poland or Russia, for example, how can we set about the attempt to annihilate the really existing distinction? Could the education of these nations be commenced otherwise than by a revolution? Take a man, for instance, who labors hard from fourteen to sixteen hours a day to obtain the bare necessaries of existence; he eats his bacon and potatoes (when

bringing back the dignity of labor? What is a new form, but the case of a new idea? We perhaps have had a glimpse of the ideal in all its purity, we feel ourselves capable of soaring into the invisible regions of the spirit. But are we, on this account, to isolate ourselves from the movement which is going on among our brethren beneath us? Must we hear ourselves addressed thus, "You profane the sanctity of the idea," because the men into whom we seek to instil it are flesh and blood, and we are obliged to speak to their senses? Condemn all action, then; for action is only a form of thought, - its application, practice. "The end of

indeed he can get them) in a place which man is an action, and not a thought." Mr.

Carlyle himself repeats this in his 'Sartor Resartus' (Book 2. ch. vi.), and yet the spirit which pervades his works seems to us too often of a nature to make his readers forget it.

It has been asked, what is at the present day the duty of which we have spoken so

might rather be called a den than a house; and then, worn out, lies down and sleeps: he is brutalized in a moral and physical point of view; he has not ideas, but propensities, -not belief, but instinct; he does not read, -he cannot read; he has not within his reach the least means of self-enlightenment, and his contact with the upper class is only much? A complete reply would require a the relation of a servant to a master, of a ma- volume, but we can point it out in a few chine to the director of the machine. Of what words. Duty consists of that which the life use are books to such a being? How can of the individual represents in all possible you come at him, how kindle the divine spark which is torpid in his soul, how give

* The Subalpino,' the 'Letture Popolari, in Piedmont; the Antologia'at Florence, etc.

† The Archbishop of Turin, Franzoni, in a pastoral letter.

The Duke of Modena.

acts, for the love of God and of man, all that he believes to be the truth, absolute or relative. Duty is progressive, as the evolution of the truth; it is modified and enlarges with ages; it changes its manifestations according

* Mr. Horne, in his Preface to Gregory VII.

to the acquirement of times and circum- so far as, taken literally, and falling into the stances. There are times in which we must hands of men whose tendencies to self-sacribe able to die like Socrates; there are others, fice are feeble, it may lead to the revival of in which we must be able to struggle like selfishness, and cause that which at bottom Washington: one period claims the pen of should only be regarded as the wages of duty the sage, another requires the sword of the to be mistaken for duty itself. It is well hero. But ever, and every where, its source known what use Goethe, the high-priest of is God and his law, -its object, Humanity, the doctrine, made of this maxim, shrouding -its guarantee, the mutual responsibility of himself in what he called 'Art;' and amidst men,-its measure, the intellect of the in- a world in misery, putting away the question dividual and the demands of the period, -its limit, power. Study the universal tradition of humanity, with all the faculties, with all the disinterestedness, with all the comprehensiveness of which God has made you capable; where you find the general per

of Religion and politics, -" a troubled element for Art," though a vital one for man, - and giving himself up to the contemplation of forms and the admiration of self. There are at the present day but too many who imagine they have perfectly done their duty,

manent voice of humanity agreeing with the because they are kind toward their friends, voice of your conscience, be sure that you affectionate in their families, inoffensive tohold in your grasp something of absolute ward the rest of the world. The maxim of truth,-gained, and for ever yours. Study Goethe and of Mr. Carlyle will always suit also with interest, attention, and comprehen- and serve such men, by transforming into siveness, the tradition of your epoch and of duties the individual, domestic, or other afyour nation, the idea, the want, which fer- fections, -in other words, the consolations ments within them: where you find that of life. Mr. Carlyle probably does not carry your conscience sympathizes with the gen-out his maxim in practice; but his principle eral aspiration, you are sure of possessing leads to this result, and cannot theoretically the relative truth. Your life must embody have any other. "Here on earth we are as both these truths, must represent and com- soldiers," he says:- true, but "we undermunicate them, according to your intelli- stand nothing, nor do we require to undergence and your means; you must be not stand any thing, of the plan of the camonly MAN, but a man of your age; you must paign." What law, what sure object can we act as well as speak; you must be able to then have for action, excepting those to

die without being compelled to acknowledge, "I have known such a fraction of the truth, I could have done such a thing for its triumph, and I have not done it." Such is, in our opinion, duty, in its most general expression. As to its special application to our times, we have said enough on this point in the commencement of the part of our article which establishes our difference from the views of Mr. Carlyle, to render its deduction easy. The question at the present day is a perfecting the principle of association, a change of the medium in which mankind moves: duty therefore lies in a collective labor,-every one to measure his powers, and to see what part of this labor falls to him The greater the intellect and influence a man enjoys, the greater his responsibility; but assuredly contemplation cannot satisfy duty in any degree.

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which our individual instincts lead us? Religion is the first of our wants, he will go on to say: but whilst to us religion is a belief. and a worship in common, an ideal, the realization of which mankind collectively must seek, a heaven, the visible symbol of which the earth must be rendered by our efforts, -to him it is only a simple relation of the individual to God. It ought therefore, according to our view, to preside over the development of collective life; according to his view, its only office is to pacify the troubled soul.

Does it at least lead to this conclusion? Is he (we speak of the writer, of whom alone we have a right to speak) calm? No, he is not: in this continual alternation between aspirations as of a Titan and powers necessarily very limited, between the feeling of life and that of nothingness, his powers are paralyzed as well as those of his readers. At times there escape from his lips accents of distress, which, whatever he may do, he cannot remove from the minds of those who listen to him with attention and sympathy. What else is that incessant and discouraged yearning after rest, which, although he has formally renounced the happiness of life, per

Mr. Carlyle's expression of duty is naturally different. Thinking only of individuality, calculating only the powers of the individual, he would rather restrict than enlarge its sphere. The rule which he adopts is that laid down by Goethe,-" Do the duty which lies nearest thee." And this rule is good, inasfar as it is, like all other moral rules, susceptible of a wide interpretation,-bad, vades all his works, -' Sartor Resartus' espe

cially, and which so constantly calls to our re-attaching life to heaven,-in raising it minds the expression of Arnaud to Nicolle, again, in restoring to it the consciousness of "N'avons-nous pas toute l'éternité pour its power and sanctity. The means consist nous reposer ?" -" Let me rest here, for I am in tempering the individual life in the comway-weary, and life-weary; I will rest here, mon elements, in the universal life: they conwere it but to die; to die or to live is alike sist in restoring to the individual that which to me, alike insignificant..... Here, then, we have from the outset called the feeling of as I lay in that CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE the collective, in pointing out to him his place

the heavy dreams rolled gradually in the tradition of the species, in bringing away Alas! no, poor Teufelsdröck! him into communion, by love and by works, there is no repose here on earth. It matters with all his fellow-men. By isolating ourlittle if the limbs be bruised, the faculties exhausted. Life is a conflict and a march; the "heavy dreams" will return; we are still too low; the air is still too heavy around us for them to "roll away." Strength consists

selves, we have begun to feel ourselves feeble and little; we have begun to despise our efforts and those of our brethren toward the attainment of the ideal; and we have in despair set ourselves to repeat and comment upon

in advancing in the midst and in spite of the Carpe diem" of the heathen poet: we them, not in causing them to vanish. must make ourselves great and strong again They will vanish higher, when, after mount- by association; we must not dishonor life, ing a step upon the ladder, life shall expand but make it holy. By persisting to search in a purer medium: the flower, too, springs out the secret, the law of individuality in the

and unfolds in the earth, to expand only in another element, in the air and sun of God. Meanwhile suffer and act; suffer for thyself, act for thy brethren, and with them. Speak not ill of science, of philosophy, of the spirit of inquiry; these are the implements which God has given us for our labor,-good or bad, according as they are employed for good or for evil. Tell us no longer that "life itself is a disease,-knowledge, the symptom

individuality itself, man ends only in egoism, if he is evil-minded-in skepticism, in fatalism, or in contemplation, if he is virtuous. Mr. Carlyle, whatever he may himself think, fluctuates between these last three tendencies.

The function which Mr. Carlyle at present fulfils in England appears to us therefore important, but incomplete. Its level is perhaps not high enough for the demands of the age;

of derangement;" talk no more of a "first nevertheless it is noble, and nearer to the obstate of freedom and paradisiacal unconscious- ject which we have pointed out than that ness."† There is more Byronism in these perhaps of any other living writer. All that few words than in the whole of Byron. he combats is indeed really false, and has

Freedom and paradise are not behind, but before us. Not life itself, but the deviation from life, is disease: life is sacred; life is our aspiration toward the ideal, our affections, engagements, which will one day be fulfilled, our virtues, advanced toward greater. It is blasphemy to pronounce a word of disrespect against it.

The evil at the present day is, not that men assign too much value to life, but the reverse. Life has fallen in estimation, because, as at all periods of crisis and disorganization, the chain is broken which in all forms of belief attaches it through humanity to heaven. It has fallen, because the consciousness of mutual human responsibility, which alone constitutes its dignity and strength, being lost together with the community of belief, its sphere of activity has become restricted, and it has been compelled to fall back upon material interests, little objects, minor passions. It has fallen, because it has been too much individualized; and the remedy lies in

never been combated more energetically: that which he teaches is not always true. His longings belong to the future, the temper and habits of his intelligence attach him to the past. Our sympathies may claim the one half of the man, -the other half escapes us. All that we regard as important, he considers so also: all that we foresee, he foresees likewise. We only differ respecting the road to follow, the means to be adopted: we serve the same God, we separate only in the worship. Whilst we dive into the midst of present things, in order to draw inspiration from them, while we mingle with men in order to draw strength from them, he retires to a distance and contemplates. We appeal perhaps more than he to tradition; he appeals more than we to individual conscience. We perhaps run the risk of sacrificing something of the purity of the idea, in the pursuit of the means; he runs the risk, without intending it, of deserting his brother-laborers.

Nevertheless, let each follow his own path. There will always be a field for the fraternity of noble spirits, even if they differ in their notion of the present life. Their outward