coup d'état, each ounce of injustice in it has got to be atoned for in the years. No seeming success justifies it, no temporary order which it establishes. The man who acts upon a principle one remove from justice may incarnate the historical spirit of a decade or of a millennium; but the world-historical spirit resides only in him who is first of all and altogether faithful to conscience. A man is safe in this universe, and invincible, says Carlyle himself, just when he joins himself to the bottom law of the universe, with no thought of consequences, no profit and loss calculations. Success is not the criterion; or, rather, as Carlyle says again, "if the thing is unjust, thou hast not succeeded." Austerlitz was no more heaven's stamp of approval upon Napoleon than Waterloo was his condemnation and vice versa. And Philippi and five hundred years of emperors no more prove Julius Cæsar the incarnation of the world-historical than Calvary and the centuries of martyrdom prove it of Herod and Pontius Pilate. Of Frederick himself, Mr. John Morley well urges, "If the strength of Prussia now proves that he had a right to seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist assume, from the fact of the Restoration and the consequent obliteration of Cromwell's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a phantasm captain?" Let these things be said the more forcibly, to counteract, if NOTHING BUT JUSTICE. - 59 need be, any false influences which chapters of Carlyle himself may have strengthened. But Carlyle would take no exception to these things. His justification of "blood and iron," in cases where to us they seem subversive of liberty and of law, springs from a different reading of the particular situation and not from a different definition of abstract justice. His general conception of humanity, no doubt, lies at the bottom of his different reading of the situation, and of this there will be something to say; but here I only wish to urge that every society approximates despotism and justifies high-handedness as dangers become thick and threatening, and that we need to carry the reasons for this firmly in mind in considering Carlyle's treatment of critical and anarchic epochs. As for Carlyle, it was not in Sartor Resartus, but in Past and Present, that he wrote, "In this God's-world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath said in his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, were wise because they denied, and knew forever not to be. I tell thee again, there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I find here below: the just thing, the true thing. My friend, if thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in support of an unjust thing, and infinite bonfires visibly Carlyle never waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long for rejoice in evi I think of two passages which exactly express the two phases of Carlyle's thought on this much. debated point, the one a well-remembered passage in Past and Present, the other a recently reported observation to an American friend. "In all battles," he says in that inspired chapter on "The Sphinx," "if you await the issue, each fighter has prospered according to his right. His right and his might, at the close of the account, were one and the same. He has fought with all his might, and in exact proportion to all his right he has prevailed. His very death is no victory over him. He dies, indeed, but his work lives, very truly lives. A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his Scotland become, one day, a part of England; but he does hinder that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part of it," etc. To Mr. Smalley Carlyle said, speaking of our Civil CARLYLE AND GERMAN THOUGHT. 61 War and Ilias in nuce, “You were the stronger at last; you conquered, and you know people will have it I have said might is right. Suppose I did say it? I knew what I meant by it, - not what you think I meant, - there is a real true meaning a man is an atheist who believes that in the long run what God allows to triumph is not the right.1 in it, Ja VI. We shall best understand Carlyle's general phi losophy, its movement and its seeming contradic tions, by considering it with reference to the German idealism in which it has its roots. Carlyle is a 6 1 The temptation to multiply passages bearing on this point is almost irresistible. I cannot forbear to repeat one passage from Mr. Conway's interesting paper. 'Speaking of the mere worship of force,' which had been attributed to him, Carlyle said: 'Most of that which people call force is but the phantasm of it, not reverend in the slightest degree to any sane mind. Here is some small, unnoted thing silently working, or for the most part invisibly, in which lies the real force. Plenty of noise and show of power around us. Men in the pulpits, platforms, street corners, crying (as I hear it), "Ho! all ye that wish to be convinced of the thing that is not true, come hither; " but the quietly true thing prevails at last.'" Mr. Conway refers to several important things, in the same general connection. "No man was a stronger hater of tyranny. He rejoiced in the American Revolution, and also in the story of the Dutch as related by Motley." And this of Bismarck: "Since Bismarck was suspected of conniving with the pope, I never heard Carlyle mention him." sort of epitome of the German mind and almost all the clashing elements of German thought from Kant to Schopenhauer and Hartmann find some sort of representation in him. The learning of the German language, at a time when the knowledge of it was rare in England, was the making of Carlyle. It was in the midst of his troubles with the doctrines of his father's kirk, that some good friend providentially told him that he would find what he wanted in German; and it was by the help of the German thinkers, especially of Goethe and Schelling, that he managed to get through his Slough of Despond and to "find his soul." No man of our time has had so profound a grasp of the German mind as he. "He is almost more at home in our literature than ourselves," said Goethe. It was Goethe himself in whom he found the deepest satisfaction, and who, above all others, is to be looked upon as his master. "Eager for a firm foothold,” says Mr. Morley, "yet wholly revolted by the too narrow and unelevated positivity of the eighteenth century; eager also for some recognition of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly unsatisfied by the transcendentalism of the English and Scotch philosophic reactions; he found in Goethe that truly free and adequate positivity which accepts all things as facts of a natural or historic order, and, while insisting on the recognition of the actual conditions of this order as indispensable, and condemning attempted evasions of such recognition |