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sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there; the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his life generally, is truth. The life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage in all great

men.

message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,-his visit to Edinburgh.12 5 Often it seems to me as if his demeanour there were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength of a man. So

Hero-worship,-Odin, Burns?10 Well: These 10 sudden; all common Lionism, which ruins

innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery Lieutenantcy in the Regiment La Fère. Burns,

Men of Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship; but what a strange condition has that got into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch any words that fell from Burns, were 15 still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for worshipper, Rousseau11 had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor moon- 20 struck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even get his 25 that will stand adversity. I admire much the

longer even a ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred

way in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither

music copied: "By dint of dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at home." For his worshippers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of vital wellbeing or 30 awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that illbeing to a generation, can we say that these generations are very first-rate?-And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing it by any 35 means whatever. The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The world can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,— 40 of the body;" worse than a living dog!-Burns

he there is the man Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show what man, not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched inflated wind-bag,-inflated till he burst, and become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection

is admirable here.

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible

with unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice. Not 45 for him to live! They gathered round him in his

Farm; hindered his industry; no place was remote enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into discontents,

whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we shall have to do it. What 50 into miseries, faults; the world getting ever

name or welcome we give him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. It, the new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a 10 Carlyle began his series of lectures on Heroes and Hero Worship, with that on "The Hero as Divinity," in which he first considered the Norse god Odin.

11 Rousseau (1712-78), was one of the greatest French writers of the pre-revolutionary period. Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns, are the three illustrations of the "Hero as Man of Letters" used by Carlyle in this lecture.

more desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind, all gone;-solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but

12 The winter of 1786-7, Burns spent in Edinburgh, where he became the lion of the season and was courted by the witty, the fashionable, and the learned. Just before this he was on the point of leaving the country "to escape disgrace, or jail," and "of flying to the West Indies." News of the success of his poems, however, determined him to go to Edinburgh to publish a second edition.

to see him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement: they got their amusement; -and the Hero's life went for it!

which are far from thee. "Cannot I do what I like with my own?" Gracious Heaven, my brother, this that thou seest with those sick eyes is no firm Eldorado, and Corn-Law Para5 dise of Donothings, but a dream of thy own fevered brain. It is a glass-window, I tel thee, so many stories from the street; where are iron spikes and the law of gravitation!

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of "Lightchafers," large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honour to 10 be "noble?" In a valiant suffering for others, the Fire-flies! But-!

THE GOSPEL OF WORK

(From Past and Present, 1843)

What is the meaning of nobleness, if this

not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men; fronting the peril which frightens back all others; which, if 15 it be not vanquished, will devour the others. Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns. The Pagan Hercules, why was he accounted a hero? Because he had slain Nemean Lions, cleaned Augean Stables,

A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has been crumbling. Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr withal. Is there a man who pretends to live luxuriously 20 undergone Twelve Labors2 only not too heavy housed up; screened from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over which is what we name work, he himself to sit serene, amid down-bolsters and appliances, and have all his work and battling done by other men? 25 the difficulty be not overcome. And such man calls himself a noble-man? His fathers worked for him, he says; or successfully gambled for him: here he sits; professes, not in sorrow but in pride, that he and his have done no work, time out of mind. It is 30 and how to cure it? The czar of Russia' be

for a god. In modern, as in ancient and in all societies, the Aristocracy, doing them or not. have taken the post of honor; which is the post of difficulty, the post of danger, of death, if Il faut payer

de sa vie. Why was our life given us, if not that we should manfully give it? Descend, O Donothing Pomp; quit thy down-cushions; expose thyself to learn what wretches feel,

came a dusty toiling shipwright; worked with his axe in the docks of Saardam; and his aim was small to thine. Descend thou: undertake this horrid "living chaos of Ignorance and

will heal it, or behold I will die foremost in it." Such is verily the law. Everywhere and everywhen a man has to "pay with his life;" to do his work, as a soldier does, at the expense

the law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe, that he, alone of recorded men, shall have no task laid on him, except that of eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging himself out of window. Once more I 35 Hunger" weltering round thy feet; say, "I will say, there was no stranger spectacle ever shown under this Sun. A veritable fact in our England of the Nineteenth Century. His victuals he does eat: but as for keeping in the inside of the window-have not his friends, 40 of life. In no Pie-powder earthly court can like me, enough to do? Truly, looking at his Corn-Laws, Game-Laws, Chandos-Clauses, Bribery-Elections and much else, you do shudder over the tumbling and plunging he makes, held back by the lapels and coat-45 Court of the Universe, in which all Fact comes

skirts; only a thin fence of window-glass before him, and in the streets mere horrid iron spikes! My sick brother, as in hospital-maladies men do, thou dreamest of Paradises and Eldorados,

1 The Corn laws were a source of great agitation in the early 19th century. They were laws passed in the interests of the land-owners; they restricted the importation of grain by imposing a heavy tax on the imports. They were not repealed until 1846. The Game laws were very strict and cruel and were in the interests of the landed gentry. The Chandos Clauses proposed by Lord Chandos in 1831, as an alteration of the First Reform Bill, extended the county suffrage to all tenants-atwill of £50 rental, and thus aimed to strengthen the aristocracy and in a measure to check the cause of Reform. Bribery Elections refers to the extensive practice of bribing voters at elections, which was partly corrected by the Corrupt Practices Prevention Act passed in 1854.

you sue an Aristocracy to do its work, at this moment: but in the Higher Court, which even it calls "Court of Honor," and which is the Court of Necessity withal, and the eternal

to plead, and every Human Soul is an apparitor, the Aristocracy is answerable, and even now answering, there. . . .'

The killing of the Nemean Lion, and the cleansing of the Augean stable were two of the twelve labors of Hercules.

3 One must pay with one's life.

4 Peter the Great (1672-1725), who, in his desire to create a Russian navy, visited among other countries, Holland, and worked as a common shipwright at Amster dam and Saardam.

The Pie powder courts of the middle ages in England had jurisdiction for the trial of controversies arising at fairs, markets, etc. The phrase is an English version of the French pie poudre (pied poudre), "dusty foot" which probably referred to the dusty-footed tradesmen, pedlars, etc., who resorted to these courts.

An official who serves the summons and executes the process of an ecclesiastical court.

For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so mammonish, mean, is in communion with Nature: the real desire to get work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.

10

The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. "Know thyself:" long enough has that poor "self" of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing 15 thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what 5 expensive coloring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squintcornered, amorphous botch,— a mere enamelled vessel of dishonor! Let the idle think of this. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;-draining off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart

It has been written, "an endless significance lies in Work!" a man perfects himself 20 by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of 25 awakens him to all nobleness,-to all knowlLabor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the 30 poor day-worker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valor against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labor in 35 logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. "Doubt,

him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!

Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless Chaos, once set 40 it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted World. What would

edge, "self-knowledge" and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless

of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone."

Thomas Babington Macaulay

1800-1859

BOSWELL

become of the Earth, did she cease to revolve? 45 (From Review of Croker's Boswell's Johnson,

In the poor old Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the Potter's wheel, one of the venerablest ob- 50 jects; old as the Prophet Ezekiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to 55 making dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease; that would not work

1831)

The "Life of Johnson" is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.

We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography.

Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the "Dunciad" was written. Beauclerk1 used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the 10 wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his

frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment annoyed 5 the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argle and with what stately contempt ste put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father, and the very

laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and beg

fooleries-all these things he proclaimed to al the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity,

in the air, he displayed with a cool selcomplacency, a perfect unconsciousness that bwas making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He had used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.

ging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He 15 all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and the "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself, at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, 20 with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell.2 In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, shallow 25 and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, and eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to 30 know everybody that was talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvered, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most childish distinctions, that when he had been 35 His blunders would not come in amiss amorg to Court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was this man,

That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being.

"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like por Poll." 6

La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton.

the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool

Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality

and such he was content and proud to be. 40 he would never have been a great writer. Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly 45 things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and took a hair 50 of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was 55

1 Topham Beauclerk, a young aristocrat who was the intimate friend of Johnson.

2 V. p. 676, and n. 2. * V. p. 677, and n. 4. The Anglo-American patriot and political philosopher, author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man.

5 A remark of Horace Walpole's. Cf. Johnson's remark on Goldsmith, as reported by Boswell, No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or met wise when he had."

6 Garrick's impromptu epitaph:

"Here lies poet Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." 7 Jean de La Fontaine (1621-95), a famous Fret-h poet, noted for his tales and fables.

A very old collection of jokes and amusing stories in Greek, told under the name of Hicrocles.

An inquisitive character in a comedy, Paul Pry, by John Poole, 1825.

by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol1o Johnson.

passions than proclaim all his little vanities. and wild fancies. It would be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those of Cæsar Borgia12 or Danton, 13 than one who 5 would publish a day-dream like those of Alnaschar1 and Malvolio.15 Those weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of love, were pre

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely 10 cisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on heredi

before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous.

versation of the inmates of the Palace of Truth.

tary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the 15 His book resembles nothing so much as the con-
entailing of landed estates, may serve as ex-
amples. To say that these passages are
sophistical would be to pay them an extrava-
gant compliment. They have no pretense to
argument, or even to meaning. He has re- 20 infamy. We remember no other case in which

ported innumerable observations made by
himself in the course of conversation. Of those
observations we do not remember one which is
above the intellectual capacity of a boy of
fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, 25
and in these letters he is always ranting or
twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all
those things which are generally considered
as making a book valuable were utterly wanting
to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation 30
and a retentive memory. These qualities,
if he had been a man of sense and virtue would
scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make
him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce,

His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed marvellously resembles

the world has made so great a distinction between a book and its author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the only exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting, instructive, eminently original; yet it has brought him nothing but contempt. All the world reads it; yet we do not remember ever to have read or ever to have heard any expression of respect and admiration for the man to whom we owe so much instruction and amusement. While edition after edition of his book was coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker16 tells us, was ashamed of it, and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was

a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made 35 natural and reasonable. Sir Alexander saw him immortal.

that, in proportion to the celebrity of the work, was the degradation of the author. The very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten their allegiance, and like those Puritan casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his person, have attacked the writer while doing homage to his writings. Mr. Croker, for example, has published two thousand five hundred notes on the life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer whose performance he has taken such pains to illustrate without some expression of contempt.

Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of the character of the writer. Bad in them- 40 selves, they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of Justice Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced consonants of Fluellen." Of all confessors, Boswell is the most candid. Other men who have 45 pretended to lay open their own hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be then most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely 50 not; yet the malignity of the most malignant any man who would not rather accuse himself of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous

10 Tacitus' Agricola, one of his most famous works, is a masterpiece of biography. The earl of Clarendon (1609-74) wrote among other things a famous biography. Vittorio, Count Alfieri (1749-1803), an Italian dramatic poet, wrote an Autobiography of absorbing interest. Johnson's Lives of the Poets, is well known.

11 Justice Shallow is the weak-minded country justice of Shakespeare's Merry Wives and II Henry IV.; Dr. Caius is a physician in Merry Wives, and Fluellen is a Welsh Captain in Henry V.

An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was

satirist could scarcely cut deeper than his thoughtless loquacity. Having himself no

12 One of the most cruel and unscrupulous Italian dukes of the 15th century, was guilty of treachery and murder in the furthering of his ambition.

13 One of the leaders of the French Revolution.

14 A character in the Arabian Nights, proverbial as a dreamer.

15 The steward in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, who aspires to the hand of his mistress.

16 The editor of the edition of Boswell's Johnson which Macaulay is reviewing.

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