"When," exclaims Mr. Carlyle, "shall we have done with all this of British liberty, voluntary principle, dangers of centralization, and the like? It is really getting too bad. For British liberty, it seems, the people can not be taught to read. British liberty, shuddering to interfere with the rights of capital, takes six or eight millions of money annually to feed the idle laborer whom it dare not employ. For British liberty we live over poisonous cess-pools, gully-drains, and detestable abominations; and omnipotent London can not sweep the dirt out of itself. British liberty produces-what? Floods of Hansard debates every year, and apparently little else at present. If these are the results of British liberty, I, for one, move we should lay it on the shelf a little, and look out for something other and further. We have achieved British liberty hundreds of years ago; and are fast growing, on the strength of it, one of the most absurd populations the sun, among his great Museum of Absurdities, looks down upon at present." Now we desire specially to have it observed here, that we consider it necessary for no one, in order to comprehend and intelligently judge of the few observations we have to offer in the succeeding paragraphs, to agree fully in all the preceding remarks: let it not even be thought that we pronounce the state of Britain decadent: it will not be denied that, if more energy could, in perfect combination with freedom, be introduced into the practical working, external and internal, of our nation, and of free nations in general, it were well. We certainly attach importance to what we have said, and we have not only Mr. Carlyle on our side, but all those thinkers, among whom are to be ranged Fichte and Richter, who designate this a transition era; yet we demand nothing more of the reader, than that he call to mind the commonplace about the in efficiency of freedom as compared with despotism, and yield us a hearing while we offer one or two suggestions toward the practical solution of what we must believe to be the great problem before the free nations at present, The combination of modern freedom, thought, and enlightenment, with the strength ard activity of despotism. Omitting the consideration of certain views of less import ance, we deem it right to notice two solutions of our problem proposed, either explicitly or implicitly, by classes of thinkers who recognize the necessity of reaching a solution. With each party, we have one important point of argument: from each we differ in matters of vital moment. The first solution is that which, however modified, had its source in the montanism of the first French Revolution, and has ever continued in essential particulars to agree with it; that of liberal, or, more strictly, infidel radicalism. The one thing which we accept from the French Revolution, and from the party whose view we now consider, is their testimony to human freedom. We will recognize a sublimity in the attempt of the French nation to be free and self-governing; we will allow it was an apple of celestial hue and fragrance France stretched out her hand to pluck; and if she found it but bitter and bloody dust, we shall not the less believe that it proved such, only because the hand with which she grasped it was that of a blaspheming demon. The sun looked down on strange sights in that Revolution tumult; on sights whose significance can never be exhausted, and in which the eyes of nations will in all time have deep lessons to read. down on a people that turned its gaze on the past, and saw generation after generation trooping dimly down the vista of years from the cavern of vacant Chance, which had the heart to cast its eye on the future, and see all men sinking from the It looked verge of the world into the blank abyss of annihilation, and which, even in the ghastly loneliness of such a universe as this, standing for one cheerless moment between two vast and eternal graves, could contrive to be riotous and gay. It looked down on a cathedral where men were grimacing in idiot laughter round what they called the goddess of reason. It looked down on a Convention where they were "decreeing" the existence of the Supreme Being; the existence of Him, to whom the whole universe is a film of breath on the morning air. Perhaps more wonderful still, it looked down upon a na tion having, with all this, the name of freedom on its lips, and uttering words which sounded like those of heroic patriots and poets, asserting the equality of man, and declaring that it would rule itself. But it had been most wonderful of all, if it had seen these words made good, if a people denying its im mortality and believing the universe to have no moral Sun, knit by no sacred memories to the past and owning no treasure of hope in the future, its spirit stubborned by none of the iron of duty and its appetites calling aloud for pleasure, had been able to become free. This it did not behold. That nation first mocked freedom by the mummeries of children, and then made its name a loathing over the world by the horror of bloody cruelty. Federation fêtes, statues of liberty, endless outflowing of meaningless mellifluous oratory, and then foaming hatred, and the long line of death tumbrils; the dream that freedom was no-government, and the awakening to find that it was the government of madness;—such was the history of the French Revolution. If we accept even from it the imperishable truth that freedom is the inalienable inheritance and ultimate goal of man, we will also read in it this other lesson, that without religion a nation can never be free, but will either go mumming and fooling to plant liberty-trees and inaugurate plaster-of-Paris images, or will awaken the Furies of anarchy, and join with them in a dance of death. Never did revolution so completely fail as that of France; and never in this world was there a revolution so profoundly infidel. Its source was the infidelity of Voltaire; the philosophers who supported it were, as a body, infidel; and its poet Shelley, while believ ing in the immortality of the soul, refused to bow the knee to the Christian God. Soft, and glowing, and streaming from the very heart, that music of Shelley's, one might almost deem, would have charmed the maniac fury from godless freedom, and bent the minds of men to truth's own sway; that temple which he reared to the sound of dulcet melody, and over which rested the glories of one of the princeliest imaginations that ever sublimed enthusiasm or personified thought, would, one might think, have drawn the nations to the worship of a calm and benign freedom, whose every word was wisdom and all whose looks were love; but it was not so: the entrancing poetry of Shelley seems to us like an Æolian harp, hung out in the tempest of modern democracy, whose soft tremblings, whose plaintive persuasive murmurings, will never attune to harmony that hoarse and wintery blast. To another music than that must the nation march that will be free; to no such gentle melody did the legions of the Republic march to meet Pyrrhus, the Ten Thousand to the field of Marathon; other and inferior gifts God may grant to nations that have utterly forgotten Him, but it would seem that the crowning gift of freedom will be granted only to one in whose heart there is the belief in a God, and which can reverence an oath. Nor is it difficult to discern the reason why: whatever may appear in the philosophic diagram, there are passions sleeping in the human breast that, in the open sea of actual life, will always awake, and overwhelm the vessel of freedom, if they are not quelled by one Eye. For this reason, we turn away from infidel radicalism; it aims at an impossibility, it contradicts human history. From irreligious radicalism, which must end either in folly or in anarchy, we turn to Mr. Carlyle. We think that an earnest student of his works can discover in them a solution of our problem, though not one which can be pronounced hopeful or flattering. We have already defined what we believe to be the theory of government which is philosophically deducible from pantheism, and which, whether deliberately, consciously, and avowedly deduced or not, shapes itself naturally out in the mind of a thinker whose general mode of viewing human affairs is pantheistic. It will be no small confirmation of our statement, if we find that it coincides with actual circumstances in the case of one, whose writings, however wrathful and torrent-like, flow from a fountain of love, and who, in the prime of his gigantic energies, turned away from the pleasant places of literature, and the calm inviting fields of abstract speculation, to concentrate his powers upon practical life, and the answering of the great social questions of the day, but the whole tenor of whose thinking is pantheistic. Now, though we find in Mr. Carlyle's latest writings what seems to expose him to the objection of looking somewhat too fixedly on the past; and although we can not think it impossible that our time and land might have furnished him with scenes and with men, as well fitted to enforce dramatically certain of those lessons, sumless we allow in their value, which he has read us in his Past and Present, as St. Edmundsbury and Abbot Samson; yet we think it is but a superficial view of his whole works which does not unvail a deeper truth behind all his applause of the past, and prove that his eye is on the future. His mighty intellect and iron will are drawn, as by the sympathy of brotherhood, toward the giant forces of the olden time; he invaria |