'generation; and even admit the not too judicious Historian 'to see his face before he die. 'But, ha!' cried he, and stood wide-staring, horror-struck, " as if some Cribb's fist had knocked the wind out of him: "O horror of horrors! Is it not Myself I see? Roman 'Inquisition! Long months of cruel baiting! Life of Giuseppe Balsamo! Cagliostro's Body still lying in St. Leo "Castle, his Self fled· whither? Bystanders wag their 'heads, and say: "The Brow of Brass, behold how it has 'got all unlackered; these Pinchbeck lips can lie no more!" 'Eheu! Ohoo!'- And he burst into unstanchable blubbering of tears; and sobbing out the moanfullest broken howl, sank down in swoon; to be put to bed by De Launay and others. Thus spoke (or thus might have spoken), and prophesied, the Arch-Quack Cagliostro and truly much better than he ever else did for not a jot or tittle of it (save only that of our promised Interview with Nestor de Lamotte, which looks unlikelier than ever, for we have not heard of him, dead or living, since 1826) - but has turned out to be literally true. As indeed, in all this History, one jot or tittle of untruth, that we could render true, is perhaps not discoverable; much as the distrustful reader may have disbelieved. Here, then, our little labour ends. The Necklace was, and is no more: the stones of it again circulate in Commerce,' some of them perhaps in Rundle's at this hour; and may give rise to what other Histories we know not. The Conquerors of it, every one that trafficked in it, have they not all had their due, which was Death? This little Business, like a little cloud, bodied itself forth in skies clear to the unobservant: but with such hues of deep-tinted villany, dissoluteness and general delirium as, to the observant, betokened it electric; and wise men, a Goethe for example, boded Earthquakes. Has not the Earthquake come? MIRABEAU.1 [1837.] A PROVERB says, 'The house that is a-building looks not as the house that is built.' Environed with rubbish and mortar-heaps, with scaffold-poles, hodmen, dust-clouds, some rudiments only of the thing that is to be, can, to the most observant, disclose themselves through the mean tumult of the thing that hitherto is. How true is this same with regard to all works and facts whatsoever in our world; emphatically true in regard to the highest fact and work which our world witnesses, the Life of what we call an Original Man. Such a man is one not made altogether by the common pattern; one whose phases and goings-forth cannot be prophesied of, even approximately; though, indeed, by their very newness and strangeness they most of all provoke prophecy. A man of this kind, while he lives on earth, is 'unfolding himself out of nothing into something,' surely under very complex conditions: he is drawing continually towards him, in continual succession and variation, the materials of his structure, nay his very plan of it, from the whole realm of Accident, you may say, and from the whole realm of Free-will: he is building his life together in this manner; a guess and a problem as yet, not to others only but to himself. Hence such criticism by the bystanders; loud no-knowledge, loud mis 1 LONDON AND WESTMINSTER REVIEW, No. 8. — Mémoires biographiques, littéraires et politiques de Mirabeau; écrits par lui-même, par son Père, son Oncle et son Fils Adoptif (Memoirs, biographical, literary and political, of Mirabeau; written by himself, by his Father, his Uncle and his Adopted Son). 8 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1834-36. knowledge! It is like the opening of the Fisherman's Casket. in the Arabian Tale, this beginning and growing-up of a life: vague smoke waving hither and thither; some features of a Genie looming through; of the ultimate shape of which no fisherman or man can judge. And yet, as we say, men do judge, and pass provisional sentence, being forced to it; you can predict with what accuracy! 'Look at the audience in 'a theatre,' says one: the life of a man is there compressed 'within five-hours duration; is transacted on an open stage, 'with lighted lamps, and what the fittest words and art of 'genius can do to make the spirit of it clear; yet listen, when 'the curtain falls, what a discerning public will say of that!' And now, if the drama extended over threescore and ten years; and were enacted, not with a view to clearness, but rather indeed with a view to concealment, often in the deepest attainable involution of obscurity; and your discerning public, occupied otherwise, cast its eye on the business now here for a moment, and then there for a moment? Woe to him, answer we, who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment! He is a doomed man: doomed by conviction to hard penalties; nay purchasing acquittal (too probably) by a still harder penalty, that of being a triviality, superficiality, self-advertiser, and partial or total quack, which is the hardest penalty of all. But suppose farther, that the man, as we caid, was an original man; that his life-drama would not and could not be measured by the three unities alone, but partly by a rule of its own too: still farther, that the transactions he had mingled in were great and world-dividing; that of all his judges there were not one who had not something to love him for unduly, to hate him for unduly! Alas, is it not precisely in this case, where the whole world is promptest to judge, that the whole world is likeliest to be wrong; natural opacity being so doubly and trebly darkened by accidental difficulty and perversion? The crabbed moralist had some show of reason who said: To judge of an original contemporary man, you must, in general, reverse the world's judgment about him; the world is not only wrong on that matter, but cannot on any such matter be right. One comfort is, that the world is ever working itself righter and righter on such matters; that a continual revisal and rectification of the world's first judgment on them is inevitably going on. For, after all, the world loves its original men, and can in no wise forget them; not till after a long while; sometimes not till after thousands of years. Forgetting them, what, indeed, should it remember? The world's wealth is its original men; by these and their works it is a world and not a waste: the memory and record of what MEN it bore - this is the sum of its strength, its sacred property forever,' whereby it upholds itself, and steers forward, better or worse, through the yet undiscovered deep of Time. All knowledge, all art, all beautiful or precious possession of existence, is, in the long-run, this, or connected with this. Science itself, is it not under one of its most interesting aspects, Biography; is it not the Record of the Work which an original man, still named by us, or not now named, was blessed by the heavens to do? That Sphere-and-cylinder is the monument and abbreviated history of the man Archimedes; not to be forgotten, probably, till the world itself vanish. Of Poets, and what they have done, and how the world loves them, let us, in these days, very singular in respect of that Art, say nothing, or next to nothing. The greatest modern of the poetic guild has already said: 'Nay, if thou wilt have it, who but 'the poet first formed gods for us, brought them down to us, 'raised us up to them?' Another remark, on a lower scale, not unworthy of notice, is by Jean Paul: that as in art, so in conduct, or what we 'call morals, before there can be an Aristotle with his critical 'canons, there must be a Homer, many Homers with their 'heroic performances.' In plainer words, the original man ist the true creator (or call him revealer) of Morals too: it is from his example that precepts enough are derived, and writ ten down in books and systems: he properly is the thing; all that follows after is but talk about the thing, better or worse interpretation of it, more or less wearisome and ineffectual discourse of logic on it. A remark this of Jean Paul's which, well meditated, may seem one of the most pregnant lately written on these matters. If any man had the ambition of building a new system of morals (not a promising enterprise, at this time of day), there is no remark known to us which might better serve him as a chief corner-stone, whereon to found, and to build, high enough, nothing doubting; high, for instance, as the Christian Gospel itself. And to whatever other heights man's destiny may yet carry him! Consider whether it was not, from the first, by example, or say rather by human exemplars, and such reverent imitation or abhorrent aversion and avoidance as these gave rise to, that man's duties were made indubitable to him? Also, if it is not yet, in these last days, by very much the same means (example, precept, prohibition, force of public opinion,' and other forcings and inducings), that the like result is brought about; and, from the Woolsack down to the Treadmill, from Almack's to Chalk Farm and the west-end of Newgate, the incongruous whirlpool of life is forced and induced to whirl with some attempt at regularity? The two Mosaic Tables were of simple limited stone; no logic appended to them: we, in our days, are privileged with Logic, Systems of Morals, Professors of Moral Philosophy, Theories of Moral Sentiment, Utilities, Sympathies, Moral Senses, not a few; useful for those that feel comfort in them. But to the observant eye, is it not still plain that the rule of man's life rests not very steadily on logic (rather carries logic unsteadily resting on it, as an excuse, an exposition, or ornamental solacement to oneself and others); that ever, as of old, the thing a man will do is the thing he feels commanded to do: of which command, again, the origin and reasonableness remains often as good as indemonstrable by logic; and, indeed, lies mainly in this, That it has been demonstrated |