war between the governors and governed in politics, disguised under the name of a system of guarantees, of balance, or of parliamentary majorities, war between individuals in economy under the name of free competition (free competition between those who have nothing and who work for their livelihood, and those who have much and seek a superfluity),— war, or moral anarchy, by effacing all social faith before the absolute independence of individual opinion. This is nearly the present state of things in the world,-a state from which we must at any cost escape. We must come to the conviction, in this as in all other cases, that there exist no rights but those which result from the fulfilment of duty; that our concernment here below is not to be happy, but to become better; that there is no other object in human life than to discover, by collective effort, and to execute, every one for himself, the law of God, without regarding individual results. Mr. Carlyle is an eloquent advocate of this doctrine, and it is this which creates his power: for there are, thank God, enow good instincts at the bottom of our hearts to make us render homage to the truth, although failing in its practice, when it finds among us a pure-minded and sincere interpreter.

We place in the third rank our author's cosmopolitan tendencies,―humanitarian we would say, if the word were in use; for cosmopolitism has at the present day come to indicate rather the indifference than the universality of sympathies. He well knows that there is a holy land, in which, under whatever latitude they may be born, men are brethren. He seeks among his equals in intelligence, not the Englishman, the Italian, the German, but man: he adores, not the god of one sect, of one period, or of one people, but God; and, as the reflex of God upon earth, the beautiful, the noble, the great, wherever he finds it: knowing well, that whencesoever it beams, it is, or will be, sooner or later for all. His points of view are always elevated; his horizon always extends beyond the limits of country; his criticism is never stamped with that spirit of nationalism (we will not say of nationality, a thing sacred with us all), which is only too much at work amongst us, and which retards the progress of our intellectual life by isolating it from the universal life,

derived from the millions of our brethren abroad. He has attached himself earnestly to the widest literature endued with this assimilating power, and has revealed it to us. His Essays on Schiller, on Goethe, on Jean Paul, on Werner, his excellent translations from the German, will remain a testimony of the naturalization which he has given to German literature amongst us; as the beautiful pages in his Lectures on Dante, and some of those which he has devoted to French writers, testify the universality of that tendency which we distinguish here as forming the third characteristic of his mind.

To descend to qualities purely literary, Mr. Carlyle is moreover a powerful artist. Since the appearance of his work on the French Revolution, no one can any longer dispute his claim to this title. The brilliant faculties which were revealed in flashes in his previous writings burst out in this work, and one must have a very limited view of the actual duties of the historian to be able to judge it coldly and to remark its defects. He carries his reader along, he fascinates him. Powerful in imagination, which is apt to discover the sympathetic side of things and to seize its salient point,-expressing himself in an original style, which, though it often appear whimsical, is yet the true expression of the man, and perfectly conveys his thought, Mr. Carlyle rarely fails of his effect. Gifted with that objectivity, of which Goethe has in recent times given us the highest model, he so identifies himself with the things, events or men which he exhibits, that in his portraits and his descriptions he attains a rare lucidness of outline, force of colouring and graphic precision: they are not imitations, but reproductions. And yet he never loses, in the detail, the characteristic, the unity of the object, being, or idea which he wishes to exhibit. He works in the manner of a master, indicating by certain features, firm, deep and decisive, the general physiognomy of the object, concentrating the effort of his labour and the richness of his light upon the central point, or that which he deems such, and placing this so well in relief that we cannot forget it. Humour, or the faculty of setting off small things, after the manner of Jean Paul, abounds in his writings. Beside the principal idea, secondary ideas meet us at every step, often new and important in themselves, particles of gold scat

tered

upon the shore by the broad wave of the writer's thought. His epithets, although numerous, are seldom without force: they mark a progression in the development of the idea or the qualities of the object. His diction may have faults; of these we shall not treat here, but we may remark that the charge of obscurity so commonly brought against all thinkers endowed with originality, is, generally speaking, only a declaration of incompetence to comprehend or to judge of their ideas. Moreover his style is, as we have said, the spontaneous expression of the genius of Mr. Carlyle, the aptest form to symbolize his thought, the body shaped by the soul. We would not that it were otherwise; what we require in all things is, man as he was meant to be.

Thus frank, honest and powerful, “ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast," Mr. Carlyle pursues his career: may he long continue it, and reap the honours that he merits,-not for himself so much, as for the gratification of those who esteem him, of all those who would see the relation between intelligence and the public drawn more and more close; and may he thus, in his pilgrimage here, attain the consciousness that the seed which he has scattered has not been given to the wind.

We have stated sufficiently at large what is absolutely good in the writer we have undertaken to estimate, that we might the more freely fulfil a second duty, that of declaring what appears to us to render this noble talent incomplete, and to vitiate his work by keeping it behind what the times require elsewhere, and will soon require here. It is a very important question (too important for the few pages we can here devote to it) that we must now glance at: upon it depends the question of the duty imposed at the present time on the whole world. It appears to us that Mr. Carlyle's tendency, hitherto appreciated from only one point of view,tory, whig, or sectarian,-well deserves that we should seek to appreciate it from the point of view of the future, from which all the present transitionary parties are excluded.

There is but one defect in Mr. Carlyle, in our opinion, but that one is vital: it influences all he does, it determines all his views; for logic and system rule the intellect even when the latter pretends to rise the most against them. We refer to his view of the collective intelligence of our times.

That which rules the period, which is now commencing, in all its manifestations,-that which makes every one in the present day complain, and seek good as well as bad remedies,—that which everywhere tends to substitute, in politics, democracy for governments founded upon privilege,—in social economy, association for unlimited competition,-in religion, the spirit of universal tradition for the solitary inspiration of the conscience, is the work of an idea, which not only distances the object, but misplaces the starting-point of human activity; it is the collective thought seeking to supplant, as the point of view in the social organism, the individual thought; the spirit of humanity visibly surpassing (for it has been always silently and unperceived at work) the spirit of man. In the past, we studied one by one the small leaves of the calix, the petals of the corolla; at the present day our attention is turned to the full expansion of the flower. Two thousand years, from the earliest times of Greece down to the latest times of Pagan Rome, worked out Individuality under one of its phases; eighteen centuries have enlightened and developed it under the other. At the present day other horizons reveal themselves,-we leave the individual for the species. The instrument is organized; we seek for it a law of activity and an outward object. From the point of view of the individual we have gained the idea of right; we have worked out (were it only in thought) liberty and equality -the two great guarantees of all personality: we proceed further-we stammer out the word Duty, that is to say, something which can only be derived from the general law, association-that is to say, something which requires a common object, a common belief. The prolonged plaint of millions crushed beneath the wheels of competition has warned us that freedom of labour does not suffice to render industry what it ought to be, the source of material life to the state in all its members: the intellectual anarchy to which we are a prey, has shown us that liberty of conscience does not suffice to render religion the source of moral life to the state in all its members. We have begun to suspect, not only that there is upon the earth something greater, more holy, more divine than the individual,-collective Humanity,—an existence always living, learning, advancing toward God, of

which we are but the instruments,-but that it is alone from the summit of this collective idea, from the conception of the Universal Mind, "of which," as Emerson says, "each individual man is one more incarnation," that we can derive our function, the rule of our life, the ideal of our societies. We labour at this at the present day. It signifies little that our first essays are strange aberrations: it signifies little, that falling upon their weak side, the doctrines of St. Simon, of Owen, of Fourier and others, who have arisen or shall arise, may be condemned to ridicule. That which is important is the idea common to all these doctrines, and the breath of which has rendered them fruitful; it is the object which they all instinctively propose, the starting-point they take. Half a century ago, all the boldest and most innovating theories sought in the organization of societies guarantees for free individual action; society was fundamentally only the power of all directed to the support of the rights of each: at the present day, the most timid reformers start with a social principle to define the part of the individual,-with the admission of a law, to seek what may be its best interpreter and its best application. What, in the political world, are all these tendencies to centralization, to universal suffrage, to the annihilation of castes? Whence arise, in the religious world, all these discontents, all these reversions toward the past, all these aspirations toward a future, confused, uncertain, but wide, tolerant and reconciliatory of creeds at present opposed? Why is history, which in old times was satisfied with relating the deeds of princes or of ruling bodies of men, directed at the present day so much to the masses, and why does it feel the want of descending from the summits of society to its base? And what means that word Progress, which, understood in a thousand ways, is yet found on every lip, and becomes more from day to day the watchword of all labours? We thirst for unity: we seek it in a new and larger expression of the mutual responsibility of all men towards each other, the indissoluble copartnery of all generations and all individuals in the human race. We begin to comprehend those beautiful words of St. Paul (Romans xii. 5), "We being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of "another." We resolve the incertitude and caprices of indiviVOL. XVI.-N°. XXXI.

66

T