UNCERTAIN PROSPECTS.

9

when he was seen and more widely known, some editorship, secretaryship, or analogous employment might fall in his way, which would enable him to live. Even Brougham and Macaulay and the orthodox Whigs of the Edinburgh Review,' admitted his talents, though they disliked the use which he made of them, and would have taken him up and provided for him if he would have allowed Jeffrey to put him into harness. But harness it was impossible for him to wear, even harness as light as was required by booksellers and editors. They had wondered at him and tried him, but since the appearance of Sartor' they had turned their backs upon him as hopeless, and had closed in his face the door of periodical literature. He was impracticable, unpersuadable, unmalleable, as independent and wilful as if he were an eldest son and the heir of a peerage. He had created no 'public' of his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings and would not buy them, nor could he be induced so much as to attempt to please it; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more neglected than he had been in Scotland. No one seemed to want his services, no one applied to him for contributions. At the Bullers' house, at the Austins', and in a gradually increasing circle, he went into society and was stared at as if he were a strange wild animal. His conversational powers were extraordinary. His unsparing veracity, his singular insight, struck everyone who came in contact with him, but were more startling than agreeable. He was unobtrusive, but when asked for his opinion he gave it in his metaphoric manner, and when contradicted was contemptuous and over

bearing, too sarcastic for so young a man,' too sarcastic by far for the vanity of those whom he mortified. A worse fault was that he refused to attach himself to any existing sect, either religious or political. He abhorred cant in all its forms, and as cant in some shape gathers about every organised body of English opinion, he made many enemies and few friends; and those few, fearful of the consequences, were shy of confessing themselves his disciples. Month after month went by, and no opening presented itself of which he was able to avail himself. Molesworth founded a Radical Review,' but the management of it was not offered to Carlyle, though he hoped it might be offered. His money flowed away, and with the end of it would end also the prospect of making a livelihood in London.

I said no opening of which he could avail himself, but one opening there was which if he had chosen would have led him on to fortune, and which any one but Carlyle would have grasped at. In the small number of men who had studied 'Sartor' seriously, and had discovered the golden veins in that rugged quartz rock, was John Sterling, then fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained a clergyman, of vehement but most noble nature, who though far from agreeing with Carlyle, though shrinking from and even hating, so impetuous was he, many of Carlyle's opinions, yet saw also that he was a man like none that he had yet fallen in with, a man not only brilliantly gifted, but differing from the common run of people in this, that he would not lie, that he would not equivocate, that he would say always what he actually thought, careless whether he pleased or offended. Such a quality,

OFFERS OF EMPLOYMENT.

II

rare always, and especially rare in those who are poor and unfriended, could not but recommend the possessor of it to the brave and generous Sterling. He introduced Carlyle to his father, who was then the guiding genius of the 'Times;' and the great editor of the first periodical of the world offered Carlyle work there, of course on the implied conditions. When a man enlists in the army, his soul as well as his body belong to his commanding officer. He is to be no judge of the cause for which he has to fight. His enemies are chosen for him and not by himself. His duty is to obey orders and to ask no questions. Carlyle, though with poverty at his door, and entire penury visible in the near future, turned away from a proposal which might have tempted men who had less excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to last was to truth, truth as it presented itself to his own intellect and his own conscience. He could not, would not, advocate what he did not believe; he would not march in the same regiment with those who did advocate what he disbelieved; nor would he consent to suppress his own convictions when he chose to make them known. By this resolution not the 'Times' only, but the whole world of party life and party action, was necessarily closed against him. Organisation of any kind in free communities is only possible where individuals will forget their differences in general agreement. Carlyle, as he said himself, was fated to be an Ishmaelite, his hand against every man and every man's hand against him; and Ishmaelites, if they are to prosper at all in such a society as ours, and escape being trampled under the horses'

hoofs, require better material sources behind them than a fast-shrinking capital of 2001.

One occupation, and one only, absorbed Carlyle's time and thought during these first years of his London life, the writing his history of the French Revolution. He had studied it at Craigenputtock. He had written as a preliminary flight, and as if to try his wings, the exquisite sketch of the episode of the Diamond Necklace, which lay in his desk still unpublished. He had written round the subject, on Voltaire, on Diderot, and on Cagliostro. The wild tornado in which the French monarchy perished had fascinated his attention, because it illustrated to him in all its features such theory as he had been able to form of the laws under which this world is ruled, and he had determined to throw it out of himself if afterwards he was to abandon literature for ever. His mind had been formed in his father's house upon the Old Testament and the Presbyterian creed, and, far as he had wandered and deeply as he had read, the original lesson had remained indelible.

To the Scotch people and to the Puritan part of the English, the Jewish history contained a faithful account of the dealings of God with man in all countries and in all ages. As long as men kept God's commandments it was well with them; when they forgot God's commandments and followed after wealth and enjoyment, the wrath of God fell upon them. Commerce, manufactures, intellectual enlightenment, political liberty, outward pretences of religiosity, all that modern nations mean when they speak of wealth and progress and improvement, were but Moloch or Astarte in a new disguise, and now as then it was

'HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.' 13

impossible to serve God and Baal. In some form or other retribution would come, wherever the hearts of men were set on material prosperity.

To this simple creed Carlyle adhered as the central principle of all his thoughts. The outward shell of it had broken. He had ceased to believe in miracles and supernatural interpositions. But to him the natural was the supernatural, and the tales of signs and wonders had risen out of the efforts of men to realise the deepest of truths to themselves. The Jewish history was the symbol of all history. All nations in all ages were under the same dispensation. We did not come into the world with rights which we were entitled to claim, but with duties which we were ordered to do. Rights men had none, save to be governed justly. Duties waited for them everywhere. Their business was to find what those duties were and faithfully fulfil them. So and only so the commonweal could prosper, only so would they be working in harmony with nature, only so would nature answer them with peace and happiness. Of forms of government, that which was best administered was best.' Any form would answer where there was justice between man and man. Constitutions, Bills of Rights, and such like were no substitutes for justice, and could not further justice, till men were themselves just. They must seek first God's kingdom, they must be loyally obedient to the law which was written in their consciences; or though miracles had ceased, or had never been, there were forces in the universe terrible as the thunders of Sinai or Assyrian armies, which would bring them to their senses or else destroy them. The French Revo