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VIRTUE AND SUCCESS.

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ard but lucre. "Though you had California in fee-simple, and could buy all the upholsteries, groceries, funded-properties, temporary (very temporary) landed properties of the world, at one swoop, it would avail you nothing." But the picturesque pith or poetical splendor of such denunciations of false success do not compensate for the absence from his works of any definition, even approximately precise, of true success; and when we make such definition for ourselves, however careful we may be to avoid the pedantry of ethical purism, we find that, if moral success is to be distinguished from material success, his Hohenzollern heroes, father and son, can scarcely be called successful.

The pity-the thousand-fold pity-is that, in tracing Mr. Carlyle's literary career, we cannot shut our eyes to the gradual hardening and darkening of his ideal of heroic virtue and of heroic success. In the works which established his reputation, including the History of the French Revolution, he was in sympathy not only with spiritual worth and purity, whether successful or unsuccessful, but with the grand impulse of political progress, in obedience to which all great nations have aspired to be free and self-governing. In his book on Cromwell he reached the zenith of his intellectual and literary power, but for the first time the deep shadow of distrust in the social aggregate-scepticism as to the capacity of nations to choose and loyally obey their governors-may be observed falling across his mind. Since then it has always been his tacitly-assumed axiom that mankind are politically divisible into two partsthe many, whose sole duty is to obey, and the few, the heroic units, whose duty is to compel obedience. England rejected Cromwell, crouching under his sword, but implacably hating him in her heart, and for that shortcoming in hero-worship Carlyle virtually turned away from England as his sphere of historical labor. Individual Englishmen-Chatham, Carteret, Wolfe-he might admire, but in the destiny of England as a

whole-in the evolution of political civilization by means of representative institutions-he had ceased to believe. In Germany he found a kingdom, built up from small beginnings, of which the architects were not men of the people addressing Parliaments, but individual rulers who, having bought a territory with money, governed it by arbitrary methods, strangled such representative institutions as had existed from of old, and dealt with patriots as Charles the First dealt with Eliot, and as Strafford would have liked to deal with Pym.

Mr. Carlyle, therefore, in writing of the Hohenzollerns, is satisfied with a much lower kind of success than would have sufficed him in his earlier and better day. Deliberate lying, of a mean and cowardly kind, was not incompatible, in his eyes, with exemplary veracity of the Hohenzollern type. But the lie in question had this redeeming quality, that it was intended to shelter an act of thrift; and we must always, if we are to be just to Mr. Carlyle, and if we are to derive from his writings the amount of instruction which they legitimately afford, take notice that the deviations from a right moral code which he palliates are connected with the public interest, and do not proceed from mere selfish motives. When the despot, however capable, forgets the public interest, thinks only of his own advancement, or that of his family, and has, comparatively speaking, no regard for the life and property of his subjects, he becomes, for Mr. Carlyle, a mere pirate and bandit, deserving of no approbation. It is for this reason that he has finally condemned and abandoned Napoleon. The Hohenzollern kingsand the same may be said of another of his favorites, the Paraguayan dictator, Francia-were no bandits. They were diligent in their business, and their business was to make their subjects happy. Their kingship was no sinecure. Frederick the Great was one of the hardest workers that ever lived. Nor was it in merely extending their dominions that they toiled. Their countries attested the beneficence of their influence by

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STRENUOUS DESPOTISM.

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the smile of prosperity they wore. Their name was stamped on roads and canals. The traveller, in passing from the Popish regions of Westphalia into the plains of Brandenburg, passed from a lower civilization into a higher. Everywhere there was order, industry, comfort. The churches were commodious and in good repair. The dwelling-houses and inns were paradisiacal, after the slovenly hovels of Westphalia. This was directly due to the Hohenzollerns. In this they took as much pride as in the extension of their own dominions, or more. And it is on the condition that their kingship is of this kind that Mr. Carlyle applauds them. This is a most important point. Though it may be true, as an acute writer observes, that the adored Frederick was not less coarse and material" than the condemned Napoleon, it can hardly be affirmed that Napoleon showed the same singleness of eye in his service of France which the Hohenzollerns showed in their service of Prussia. That Mr. Carlyle has permitted admiration for military methods to grow upon him with disastrous results, I admit; but he has never consciously honored the sword except as the pioneer or the ally of the plough.

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Where he has erred is in the mildness of his censures of, or his positive sympathy with, the immoral means which the Hohenzollerns permitted themselves to use, in the promotion of their laudable ambition of making Prussia a powerful and prosperous State. I have given an example of Frederick William's lying. His murderous harshness was shown in putting to death Lieutenant Katte for aiding and abetting the Crown Prince in disobedience to his father. He was with difficulty deterred from killing his own son. The judicial murder of Katte does not startle Mr. Carlyle into an acknowledgment that it is not good either for king or for nation that the life of the subject should depend absolutely upon the will of one man. The preposterous father, by his narrow and boorish contempt for learning, science, the fine arts, and all that lends re

finement and adornment to life, as well as by the mixture of bigotry and ignorant folly which constituted his creed, disgusted the son with religion, and prepared him to become a scoffer and a cynic. Hardness breeds hardness, and the prince grew up a man of polished steel without a heart. As the murder of Katte does not shake Mr. Carlyle's faith in strenuous and thrifty despotism, neither is he much scandalized by the circumstance that a man so thoroughly incapable of forming an opinion on any philosophical question as was Frederick William should have had it in his power to order Wolff, one of the greatest thinkers of his time, without trial, to quit the Prussian dominions in forty-eight hours, under pain of death. The crazy eagerness with which he sought for gigantic men, weak, probably, both physically and intellectually, to be drilled into grenadiers, might have suggested to Mr. Carlyle the question whether, even in the sense of adjusting himself to fact, "suppressing platitudes, ripping-off futilities, turning deceptions inside out," Frederick William was the model of veracity which he pronounces him to have been. If, as Carlyle says, there is "a mendacity in sham things," there surely was a streak of mendacity in those knock-kneed hobgoblins whom this rugged Orson thought the finest soldiers in the universe.

But it is in his description of the "Tobacco Parliament" that Mr. Carlyle presents Frederick William in the light which strikes me as reflecting most detrimentally both upon the herodespot and upon the worshipper of such royalty. The theory of Parliaments propounded by Mr. Carlyle in the Latter-day Pamphlets was to the effect that their use is exclusively to inform and to advise the monarch, never to declare to him, as authoritative, the nation's will. It was an ancient custom, he says, for kings to debate matters with their chief nobles, once before dinner, when they were probably sober, once after dinner, when they were pretty sure to be drunk. The Tobacco Parliament was shaped on this model rather than on that of the Parlia

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THE TOBACCO PARLIAMENT.

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ment which voted the Bill of Rights. "Friedrich Wilhelm " -I quote from Mr. Carlyle-" has not the least shadow of a Constitutional Parliament, nor even a Privy Council, as we understand it, his Ministers being in general mere clerks, to register and execute what he had otherwise resolved upon but he had his Tabaks-Collegium, Tobacco-College, Smoking Congress, Tabagie, which has made so much noise in the world, and which, in a rough, natural way, affords him the uses of a Parliament, on most cheap terms, and without the formidable inconveniences attached to that kind of institution. A Parliament reduced to its simplest expression, and, instead of Parliamentary eloquence, provided with Dutch clay pipes and tobacco: so we may define this celebrated Tabagie of Friedrich Wilhelm's." In this Parliament "State consultations, in a fitful, informal way, took place; and the weightiest affairs might, by dexterous management, cunning insinuation and manœuvring from those that understood the art and the place, be bent this way or that, and ripened toward such issue as was desirable." One of the "uses" which Frederick William had of this "Parliament" was, that Seckendorf and Grumkow, two diplomatic gentlemen selected for the task by Austria, availed themselves of its opportunities to make an egregious fool of him, to the destruction of his domestic peace, and almost to the breaking of his own heart and those of his wife and son. Mr. Carlyle looks with great contempt upon constitutional kings and their Parliaments; but it would have been difficult for Seckendorf and Grumkow to practise so villanously against Frederick William under the eyes of a representative Chamber.

It is, however, to the diversions of the Tobacco Parliament, as illustrative of the heroism of Frederick William, that I chiefly call attention. In the early part of his career Mr. Carlyle spoke with respect of men of letters, honoring the profession of which he has been himself so illustrious an ornament. He seems now to share the opinion of Frederick William, that

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