CARLYLE, THE PROPHET.

LETTER, now twenty years old, from Mr. Carlyle to a 11. lady who had been troubled in mind about the future state, was published last Saturday in the early edition of the Pall Mall Gazette. It is a very characteristic specimen of his soberer manner. There is nothing wild or maledictory about it, as there has been about not a few of his more recent pronuneiantentos. At the same time, it has all the most striking features of his invariable style of dealing both with Heaven and Earth. Mr. Carlyle has always been to literature something like what Turner was to landscape. Both had an early style of great simplicity and beauty, in which, however, the great stores of latent power were but imperfectly indicated. Both had a middle style of remarkable splendour, in which, however, nature is uniformly represented as displaying an intensity of colour and a vividness of effect which is at least her rarest mood. Both have had a later style, in which the colours have been brilliant, violent, turbid, and confused, their productions reminding us rather of those Hindoo mythologies in which chaos is described as being churned by superhuman powers till it separates into Heaven and Earth, than of the quiet skies and, if not tranquil, at least by no means fiercely-tossing and foaming humanity, of our own generation. Turner's picture of the "Angel Standing in the Sun" might well be regarded as the pictorial analogue of some of Mr. Carlyle's 'Latter-Day' addresses, or his Occasional Thoughts on the Nigger Question,' or his 'Shooting Niagara ; and After.' There are the same confused and confusing splendours of conception, the same vaguenesses of execution, the same visionary excitement of brain, the same startling presentation of the glory of the impossible, in both. But this private prophecy of Mr. Carlyle's belongs, in style at least, rather to the end of his middle period, than to the uncontrolled licence of moral colour characteristic of his latter days. Yet it contains, as indeed all his greater writings contain, the clearest evidence of those elements of his nature which have led to his later extravagances. It is worth noting that Mr. Carlyle, even in his many graphic pictures of human beings, —(which he prefers to paint, as the analytic chemist's spectroscope paints the substances which it analyzes, by one or two bright or dark lines, as the case may be),—always resolves them back again into simple but undefined energies,—fiery or earthly,— the effect of which is at once infinitely less complex, and also infinitely more exciting, if not blinding, to the eye of the Spectator, than the actual men as we spell them out from the actual story of their lives. His remarkable picture of Stirling, the "beautiful soul-pulsing auroras," of Coleridge's monologue with its mystic drone of " ommject " and " suinmject," and

its sunny islands of lucid thought, will occur to every one; but of these figures Mr. Carlyle spoke with the fullness of personal knowledge. Where he has deciphered a man by study and imagination chiefly, as in his picture of Cromwell, or Napoleon, or even Johnson, or Goethe (whom, though he knew him personally, he has painted more from the impressions produced by literary study than from those of personal acquaintance), this spectro-analytic style, which reduces men to a few dark or fiery elements of half-impersonal energy, is still more pronounced. We all know the features of this impressive but also excessive, this

shadowy and sometimes lurid, but also large and vivid, style of painting,—a style too peculiar and sometimes grotesque not to have been so much imitated that the faults of the disciples have tended to alienate our sympathies from the master. Here is a specimen :— " His grand excellency," wrote Mr. Carlyle of Goethe, "was this, —that he was genuine. As his primary faculty, the basis of all others, was Intellect, depth and force of Vision ; so his primary virtue was Justice, was the courage to be just. A giant's strength we admired in him ; yet strength ennobled into softest mildness, even

like that silent rock-bound strength of a world,' on whose bosom, which rests on the adamant, grow flowers. The greatest of hearts was also the bravest, fearless, unwearied, pre-eminently invincible." That is Mr. Carlyle's least shadowy, least impersonal, least dispersive, and indefinite style of portraiture. Yet even there we have the adamant,' and ' the flowers,' the large naturalistic metaphor, the vague image of a few great qualities looming through a sheen of mist and sunlight, rather than a delineation.

And, of course, what Mr. Carlyle is in conceiving and describing man, he is to a much more remarkable degree in speaking of the mysteries of Heaven and Hell. His imagination spurns both complexity and limitation. He cannot endure not to believe. He cannot endure to believe in anything beyond the vaguest Immensities of moral possibility. the Eternities," the

Infinitudes," the Veracities," the Unveracities,'—in a word, in the penumbra, as you may say, of human life, i.e., the part of it neither quite in shadow nor quite in light, but " shot " with wide, shadowy streaks of alternate hope and fear, Mr. Carlyle prefers to bow his head. That he thinks lightly of all the definite declarations of revelation, it is easy enough to see. The letter to which we have alluded would alone show it. "The question that perplexes you," he writes in it [the question of a future life], "is one that no man can answer. You may comfort yourself by reflecting that it is by its nature insoluble to human creatures, that what human creatures mainly have to do with such a question is to get it well put to rest, suppressed if not answered, that so their life awl its duties may be attended to without impediment from it..

Such questions in this our earthly existence are many." Everywhere Mr. Carlyle speaks reverently of Christ, but he sublimes

Him, too, into an agency of vague, shadowy, moral sublimity. In musing over Goethe's grave, he moralizes how the Word of man

(uttered Thought of man) is still " a magic formula whereby he rules the world." " Do not the winds and waters and all tumultuous powers, inanimate and animate," he asks, " obey him?" And the illustration of this is not Christ upon the raging lake, but

the steamships of our own century ? " A poor, quite mechanical Magician speaks ; and fire-winged ships cross the ocean at his

bidding." Then he goes on, " Or mark, above all, that raging of the nations,' wholly in contention, desperation, and dark, chaotic fury; how the meek voice of a Hebrew Martyr and Redeemer stills it into order, and a savage Earth becomes kind and beautiful, and the habitation of horrid cruelty a temple of peace. The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world, like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world, the inspired Thinker, whoie in these days, we name Poet. The true Sovereign is the Wise Man." Obviously Mr. Carlyle's worship is given to the moral In

definite. In his sphere of faith the "light is neither clear nor dark." He loves a looming form, he distrusts a clear figure. Ile cannot endure a definite doctrine. Ile never reduces nian to the level of nature, for the moral law is with hint infinitely higher than nature. But he does reduce man to a sort of embodiment of

wild moral anarchies, or imposing moral harmonies. With all his clear recognition of the forces of right and wrong, he likes to have the vast shadowy elemental forces of nature as his type of

human motive and volition. Ile tills up the interior world, behind the will, with images derived from the primeval powers creative

and destructive. His whole soul revolts against the limitations of doctrine or logic. He almost despises human thought directly it becomes "articulate." While it is inarticulate and dumb he bows his head before it. Note how he instructs his correspondent as to the doctrine of future reward or punishment :— " There are two things,' says the German philosopher, 'that strike me dumb—the starry firmament (palpably infinite), and the sense of right and wrong in man.' Who ever follows out that 'dumb' thought will come upon the origin of our conceptions of heaven and hell—of an infinitude of merited happiness, and an infinitude of merited woo—and have much to reflect upon under an aspect considerably changed. Qonsequences good and evil, blessed and accursed, it is very clear, do follow from all our acti,ns here below, and prolong, and propagate, and spread themselves into the infinite, or beyond our calculation and conception ; but whether the notion of reward and penalty be not, on the whole, rather a human one, transferred to that immense divine fact, has been doubtful to many. Add this consideration, which the best philosophy teaches us, 'that the very consequences (not to speak of the penalties at all) of evil actions die away and become abolished long before eternity ends; and it is only the consequences of good actions that are eternal— for these are in harmony with the laws of this universe, and add themselves to it, and co-operate with it for ever; while all that is in disharmony with it must necessarily be without continuance and soon fall dead '—as perhaps you have heard in the sound of a Scottish psalm amid the mountains, the true notes alone support one another, and the psalm which was discordant enough near at hand, is a perfect melody when heard from afar."

How strange the struggle here between Mr. Carlyle's old childish faith where he speaks of "the infinitude of merited woe," and his newer doctrine of "the best philosophy," that "the very consequences (not to speak of the penalties at all) of evil actions die away and become abolished, "—between his childish belief in reward and retribution, and his maturer hint that rewards and penalties are rather erroneous human ideas! Surely, if sin there be at all—in the old deep sense of a free and voluntary violation of an inward law of righteousness, the memory of sin, even though repented and forgiven, must be a penalty as eternal as the mind which contains it ; and that solvent of "the best philosophy," by the application of which Mr. Carlyle hopes to get rid of his first, truer, and deeper, though definite conviction, that there may be an "infinitude of merited woe," can hardly be held, even by himself, to effect its purpose. Probably what he really meant to plunge into that region of sublime haze in which he wraps our life, was the doctrine of any continuous personal existence at all, lie never for a moment hesitates to assert the difference between right and wrong. There, at least, Mr. Carlyle is as definite as he is intense. But beyond this he cannot endure to define. A thought loses its fascination for his imagination the moment its boundaries are sharply illuminated. Ile ends this letter pretty much as he began it,—" On the whole, I must account it but a morbid weak imagination that shudders over this wondrous divine universe as a place of despair to any creature ; and contrariwise, a most degraded human sense, sunk down to the region of the brutal (however common it be) that in any case remains blind to the infinite difference there ever is between right and wrong for a human creature—or God's law and the Devil's law ;" that is,—as we understand our Chelsea prophet's spirit., though not his words,—though any intellect which sees less than the infinitude of the distinction between right and wrong in the wonders of creation, is brutal and degraded, yet any that sees 'wife, that believes that God has really shone out of darkness into the human heart, and created there an orderly world of divine truth, as full of organic distinction, and law, and growth, as the world of nature itself, limits the mystic grandeur of the universe by his credulous definition, and makes it less glorious in making it less shadowy and undefined.

Ibis curious that Mr. Carlyle, while admiring as profoundly as be does every man who builds upon a new principle of order, who abolishes an existing anarchy, in human life, should seem always to wish to refer that creative and ordering power to vaguely fermenting instincts of genius, rather than to clear and luminous purpose. But he does precisely the same in his theology. While insisting perpetually on the minute beauty of the divine order of the universe, he cannot bear to refer it back to any definite divine character and will ; he loves to think of it as produced less by purpose and thought, and minute love, than by grand vague forces, which lie calls the Immensities and Eternities, and the rest ; and evidently he thinks he should worship less profoundly than he does, if he could see through that mystic, shadowy penumbra of the universe in which he loves to bow his head, into the clear soft light of Christ.