CARLYLE AND FREDERICK. 53 dence, and I never cared very much about him." And, indeed, no one can fail to be impressed by the world-wide difference between Carlyle's feeling for Frederick and his feeling, for instance, for Cromwell. Frederick was certainly a genuine hero so at least I hold him, in spite of all that is said. He was in the main, I do believe, doing God's work in the world, if with very little thought about God. Whatever may be said of his first seizure of Silesia, and nothing good can be said of it; Carlyle's own apology is miserable enough,— there is no doubt that in the Seven Years' War Frederick stood pitted against despicable governments and despicable men and women, Pompadour, Elizabeth of Russia - who waged war on him chiefly out of personal animosity and vexation at his biting but just satire, and whose victory would have been calamity. If he was a despot, his despotism was of the healthy sort, a despotism of brains, and his victories were victories over rotten despotisms. His wars left the map of Europe in a condition twice as promising as he found it in, and it is to his indomitable energy more than to anything else political that Germany is indebted for the beginning of her new national life, to his example as much as anything else that she is indebted for her freedom of thought. And, Mr. Lowell to the contrary notwithstanding, Frederick could and did apply his masterly talent for organization to the arts of peace, not truly in the very - best and highest way, the best and highest way does not belong to absolutism, — but in a way only second to the best, and certainly in a very thor ough and effective way. Carlyle was warranted in taking him into his Walhalla. On the whole, I do not think that he could have found so genuine a political hero in that age, one who had so important an idea united with so much energy and serious purpose. Yet Frederick was, in truth, as Mr. Lowell says, "essentially hard, narrow, and selfish,” with nothing spiritual or religious about him, nothing of Puritanism or Westminster Calvinism, no haunting thoughts of the infinities, but only of Potsdam, Maria Theresa, and the campaign; and this is why Carlyle, who is first of all religious and thinks first of all of the infinities, never felt quite at home with him, as with Cromwell, and came at last to tire of his company altogether. Only the man of great moral depth is hero enough to give Carlyle any large and lasting satisfaction. When Mr. James declares the force of unprincipled will to be the deity of Carlyle's unscrupulous worship, it seems to me a sad mistake, an exaggeration of what was true in a certain way of a single phase of Carlyle's thought. "His guiding genius," says Emerson, "is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice." This is the profound and true, it seems to me, going below all semblances and aberrations. Force in a cause absolutely bad Carlyle never glorified, he has not THE RIGHT OF MIGHT. 55 been "always on the side of the biggest battalion;" and here, in the case of Frederick, we find him, the principle of force and will worked completely out, and that in a cause essentially good, dissatisfied and sick of the workman. Set it down. Carlyle's hero that is the final verdict — must not only do the work needed there and then in the best way, but with the best and deepest motives. Will is not enough; there must be soul too. The true hero is Cromwell, who walks valiantly on the earth, with < his head in heaven. If Carlyle for a time, in his impatience with indecision and shilly-shally and good-natured weakness in the midst of chaos, was willing to give almost any amount of rope to the man who could handle tools effectually and bring one thing or another to pass, even to the extent sometimes of almost seeming to reckon might right and success justice, we are bound to read all in the light of this final verdict, and of such earlier utterances as these: "That Goethe was a great teacher of men, means already that he was a good man; " and "Voltaire was not the wisest of men because he was not the best. Because the thinking and the moral nature are but different phases of the same indissoluble unity— a living mind.” Concerning this general question of the proper place of force in right action,- before a man passes very dogmatic judgment on Carlyle, he is bound to come to some understanding with himself as to why it is that he owns that which is written, Thou shalt not kill, yet holds it right to dispatch every man that comes within musket-shot at Bunker Hill and Bull Run. We should, I suppose, every one, call the man who grounded arms at Bull Run or before the mob, for fear he should do murder, a "blockhead." What exigencies warrant violence? None so much certainly as those which bode anarchy to the state or threaten the state's authority. If George the Third could have caught Washington, and Hancock, and Sam Adams, he would have hung them, but since he could n't catch them he offered to make them peers of the realm, and finally concluded to treat them as his equals. The fathers and their cause were no whit better at the end than at the beginning to the royal George, but prudential considerations were quite enough to justify an altered tone. The difference between rebellion and revolution is a difference of success. And had the royal George and his ministers been sincere in believing the colonists unreasonable and wrong sincere as Dr. Johnson was history would not have convicted them of monstrosity, though it would have condemned their judgment, if they had indeed hung Sam Adams in front of Fanueil Hall, for the admonition of the obstreperous Boston people. History has shown plenty of instances of good men's revolutionary attempts to push ideas intrinsically good, which, ill-timed and involving greater evils than benefits to the state, have had to be suppressed by iron at the cost of DESPOTISM better thaN ANARCHY. 57 excellent blood. Men's instincts have always told them that despotism is better than anarchy and they have given long rope to governments in the suppression of rebellion. And if rebellion compels much arbitrariness and incidental wrong, much more are these necessitated when there is only lawlessness in the state. Anarchy can only be put an end to by the violent self-assertion of some strong power, which appeals to history for justification of its motives and its comprehension of the situation. If people will carry these trite things in mind, they will be more apt to understand what Carlyle is thinking about when he calls the drawing of fine lines about certain blood in the French Revolution the "blockhead's distinction" than a good many seem able to do now. Whether the September Massacre is to be approved is another question. Mr. Morley — certainly no spokesman of despotism or the right of might is a resolute defender of Danton's general policy. My own point here is simply that duty is something determined by relations, and that what is right under certain circumstances becomes dangerous and wrong in conflict with a larger duty. In conflict with a larger duty, I say; and if experience does not prove that the larger deed was prompted by recognition of a time and larger need, then history never justifies it. There is no standpoint higher than the ethical, -it is a delusion and a snare to say that there is. No matter how brilliant or decisive a |