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how, provisionally useful as these maxims have been, their prolonged existence and reputation tends to keep Europe in a state of anarchy. In the very language of M. Comte, too, diametrically different as his philosophical point of view is from that of Mr. Carlyle, there is an interesting resemblance to the language which Mr. Carlyle employs. Divest Mr. Carlyle's phraseology of its religious spirit, translate his burning "regulations of the universe," into the calmer and more algebraic expression, "positive scientific laws," and you have exactly what M. Comte has been saying on this subject on the other side of the Channel. Proudhon, too, has been working at the same vein; and among his various intellectual exhibitions during the last year or two, has been as desperate a criticism as we remember ever to have read, on the popular expectation from universal suffrage. In short, here again, we find the most curious coincidence between the conclusions of Mr. Carlyle, and those of the extreme Socialist thinkers.

Practically, however, there is a difference. And, doing our best to find out the precise nature of the difference, we should say that it consists in this, that whereas such French writers as we have named occupy the scientific point of view, and regard the whole subject in the light of that largest and most splendid of scientific generalizations, the idea of evolution; Mr. Carlyle, on the other hand, throws evolution to the winds, and attacks the subject, regardlessly of past or future, by the sheer force of his immediately agitated personality. Hence, however, we cannot but think, that, much as his method enables him to excel in impressiveness, yet, as regards completeness, the others have the advantage of him. Entertaining as low an opinion as Mr. Carlyle of the absolute benefit that would be derived from never so perfect a representative system, and denouncing as distinctly as he does the infatuation of those that build their hopes of social reorganization on universal suffrage, or any such abstraction, MM. Comte and Proudhon would yet, as we believe, allow a certain social value to that direction of political activity for some time to come, and would even, we imagine, consent, with ulterior views, to lend a portion of their personal energy to accelerate the termination of that particular avatar. As many of our best thinkers in this country worked for the repeal of the Corn-Laws, not because they had high expectations of an increase of national prosperity from that measure, but because they wished to get the whole moral hinderance of the subject well out of the way; so there are not a few who believe that, though an extended suffrage will by no means be a panacea, nor even a partial cure for social wrongs, yet, in the inevitable process of

evolution, our path lies through a movement in its favour. For one thing, such persons say with a considerable amount of really just irony, there is nothing to be dreaded in universal suffrage, at least in comparison with any existing system according to which the governors of countries are appointed; for another, they believe that there is a benefit in the principle of representation, as applied to government, not yet exhausted, and promised in an extended suffrage-the benefit, namely, of mingling up more thoroughly particulars relative to the proletarian or industrial interests with the general mass of political hubbub and hearsay out of which the genuine germs of government are to be got; and, finally, distinguishing between the permanent methods of government, the sum of which, they would agree with Mr. Carlyle, consists in the appointment of the most competent men in the community to the chief official places, and the variable historic conditions under which at different times these methods must be put in force-they would maintain that the operation of a full representative system is in this age an established condition of government, and that the true wisdom would be, not to dash the method in the face of the condition, but to study how, the condition remaining, the method may be carried out. It is a law of the historic evolution, they say, that the number of persons taking ostensible part in the business of governing the world shall increase from age to age; what we should try, therefore, is not to fight against this law, but to put it in harness. But we can pursue the controversialists no farther.

There remains only one other of the topics treated in Mr. Carlyle's Pamphlets on which we feel it necessary to say a word. It is the topic formally discussed in the pamphlet entitled "StumpOrator," but casually adverted to also in other pamphlets of the series-the intrinsic merit, namely, and the present condition of that peculiar mode of human activity called Speech or (more prominently) Literature. The previous topics that we have touched on, may be regarded as of an expressly social character; this topic, however, though it has also a distinct social bearing, is concerned, in the first instance, with considerations that go deep into the nature of the individual. The following sentences. contain the kernel of Mr. Carlyle's ideas on the subject:

"It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we

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may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,-this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest horn-book upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.

* Directly in the teeth of all this it may be asserted, that speaking is by no means the chief faculty a human being can attain to; that his excellence therein is by no means the best test of his general human excellence, or availability in this world; nay that, unless we look well to it, it is liable to become the very worst test ever devised for said availability. * Excellent speech, even speech really excellent, is not, and never was, the chief test of human faculty, or the measure of a man's ability, for any true function whatsoever; on the contrary, excellent silence needed always to accompany excellent speech, and was and is a much rarer and more difficult gift. * * * Do you want a man not to practise what he believes, then encourage him to keep often speaking it in words. Every time he speaks it, the tendency to do it will grow less. His empty speech of what he believes, will be a weariness and an affliction to the wise man."-StumpOrator, pp. 1-12.

The observation here presented in its most concentrated shape is developed by Mr. Carlyle, both in that particular pamphlet and in others, into an absolute torrent of invective against certain portions of the procedure of our age. More than half of the various mass of corruption with which our age is labouring may be traced, he seems to think, to this very fact of the undue value assigned in modern times to Speech or Stump-oratory. In the first place, seeing that every new occasion of unnecessary speech compels a new departure from fact and nature, a new thrashing, as it were, of the mere chaff of previous impressions and asseverations,--it has necessarily happened, he thinks, that, in consequence of the inordinate stimulus given during the last century or two to the function of expression, whether oral or written, not only have fallacies and falsehoods been generated during all that while at a rate previously unknown; but, by the incorporation of these fallacies and falsehoods with the hereditary thought of the race, the very faculty of discerning the true from the false has been everywhere sensibly weakened, and the world rendered everywhere less capable of distinguishing the quack from the wise man. Nay more, by the undue determination that has been thus occasioned even of sound and true intellect towards those professions whose business consists chiefly of talk, and especially towards the profession of literature, society, he thinks,

has been cheated of the full use and benefit of such intellect; receiving in the shape, as it were, of mere external festooning and adornment, much of that virtue which, under a better economy, might have gone, by means of a natural process of absorption and circulation, to the sustenance of the central vitality, and the improvement of the general health of the body-politic. Thus Burns, instead of helping to govern Great Britain, which was his true function, had to take to writing Scotch songs, pouring his genius as he best could through that gimlet-hole; and Tennyson, a man fit to command an industrial army at the Bog of Allen, has to compose an In Memoriam.

Now, here again, great as we consider the service done by Mr. Carlyle in having pressed such reflections on the notice of the public, and fully aware as we are that whatever suggestions may be advanced on the other side must be perfectly familiar to him, we cannot but feel that the effect on the whole is one of exaggeration. To state, in a word, wherein it is that we think the source of this exaggeration lies, we should say that Mr. Carlyle seems throughout this particular discussion to have regarded speech or expression only as a mode of intellectual presentation, whereas it is, in fact, also a mode of intellectual production. "Considered," says Mr. Carlyle, "as the last finish of education, or of human culture, worth, and acquirement, the art of speech is noble, and even divine; it is like the kindling of a Heaven's light to show us what a glorious world exists and has perfected itself in a man." This, it seems to us, is true, but less than the whole truth. The art of speech is noble and divine, not only as being the last finish of human education, but also as being one of the permanent methods of that education; not only as showing what a glorious world may exist in a man, but as conspicuous among the agencies whereby such a world may be created. For, not to concern ourselves with the questions whether men may not, and whether many men do not, think through another symbolic mechanism than that of language, as, for example, by a process of rapid reference to illustrative pictures, diagrams, or models conceived by the mind spontaneously and immediately, and requiring, as it were, to be afterwards interpreted or read off into languageit may certainly be affirmed that men first grasp their thoughts firmly by phrasing them; that even to a man's self his thought does not attain its full value till it has been incorporated in some phrase; that all important human thoughts are connected with phrases, and nearly all important intellectual changes transacted by means of them; and that, as the lost child in the story could trace his way back by the pebbles he had dropped, so every

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pro

man, in advancing from the first efforts to the full maturity of his intellect, has, in one sense, but marched, as it were, along a succession of phrases. We believe, for example, that Mr. Carlyle's own intellectual route, from its commencement until now, could be traced and historically represented by a series of verbal formulæ. At any one point in that route, we are aware, the phrases accumulated up till then were not all that constituted his being; there was still behind them the strong vital soul that made them, tremulous to its own impulses, reverent under the stars, and melancholy to the moan of the sea; but what we say is, that if at any point in his career he had been struck transcendentally dumb, and denied the power of creating new phrases, then, by the very necessities of the human constitution, according to which, even in poetic minds, the method of intellectual duction must be in so far algebraic, he would have sustained an arrest, and been prevented from advancing very much farther. Speech, then, we hold to be the gift of the gods, not for representing noble thought merely, but also for attaining it. Hence, though we see the fine meaning involved in our author's gigantic wish that by some means or other speech could be annihilated over the globe for the space of one whole generation; though we see how, in that case, whirlwinds of verbal nonsense, now loading the intercourse of men, would be blown away, and the general human soul brought back into contact with the hard skeleton of things-we would yet vote against any proposal to carry the terrible wish into effect, on the score that the dumb interregnum would be positively so much time lost to the intellectual business of our planet. And though all this does not affect the value of Mr. Carlyle's denunciations of Stump-oratory, yet it affects, we think, some of his accompanying asseverations. Even the high social function, for example, which he would still consistently enough reserve for true literature, appears to us far too low. According even to his own views, as it seems to us, it would by no means be necessary to abolish pure literature; to regard the song-writing of a Burns or of a Tennyson as a mere paltry solace in the absence of better work; or to compel such men into more express participation than such devotion to the exquisite would imply, in the ongoings of the social tumult. Much less so, however, according to the view we have attempted to indicate. For if the gift of speech be not independent of the power of thought, but in a manner bound up with it in our present state of being; if this gift be intended not merely as a means of publishing what we have learnt out of Nature, but also as a mechanism whereby we as men may seize upon Nature and weave forth from her those higher existences called truths, con