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constitutional way, the Job's news. "Mais," said Poor Louis, "c'est une révolte," Why, that is a revolt!-"Sire," answered Liancourt, "it is not a revolt,-it is a revolution."

THE DEATH-BIRTH OF A WORLD

THOMAS CARLYLE

[From The French Revolution] Here perhaps is the place to fix, a little more precisely, what these two words, French Revolution, shall mean; for, strictly considered, they may have as many meanings as there are speakers of them. All things are in revolution; in change from moment to moment, which becomes sensible from epoch to epoch; in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation, and even nothing else conceivable. Revolution, you answer, means speedier change. Whereupon one has still to ask: How speedily? At what degree of speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never stop till Time itself stops, does Revolution begin and end; cease to be ordinary mutation, and again become such? It is a thing that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary.

For ourselves, we answer that French Revolution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disemprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn-out Authority: how Anarchy breaks prison; bursts up from the infinite Deep, and rages uncontrollable, immeasurable, enveloping a world; in phasis after phasis of fever-frenzy;-till the frenzy burning itself out, and what elements of new Order it held (since all Force holds such-developing themselves), the Uncontrollable be got, if not reimprisoned, yet harnessed, and its mad forces made to work toward their object as sane regulated ones. For as Hierarchies and Dynasties of all kinds, Theocracies, Autocracies, Strumpetocracies, have ruled over the world; so it was appointed, in the decrees of Providence, that this same Victorious Anarchy, Jacobinism, Sansculottism, French Revolution, Horrors of French Revolution, or what else mortals name it, should have its turn. The "destructive wrath" of Sanscullotism: this is what we speak, having unhappily no voice for singing.

Surely a great Phenomenon: nay it is a transcendental one, overstepping all rules

and experience; the crowning Phenomenon of our Modern Time. For here again, most unexpectedly, comes antique Fanaticism in new and newest vesture; miraculous, as all. Fanaticism is. Call it the Fanaticism of "making away with formulas, de humer les formules." The world of formulas, the formed, regulated world, which all habitable world is, must needs hate such Fanaticism like death; and be at deadly variance with it. The world of formulas must conquer it; or, failing that, must die execrating it, anathematizing it;-can nevertheless in no wise prevent its being and its having been. The Anathemas are there, and the miraculous thing is there.

Whence it cometh?

Whither it goeth? These are questions! When the age of Miracles lay faded into the distance as an incredible tradition, and even the age of Conventionalities was now old; and Man's Existence had for long generations rested on mere formulas which were grown hollow by course of time; and it seemed as if no Reality any longer existed, but only Phantasms of realities, and God's Universe were the work of the Tailor and Upholsterer mainly, and men were buckram masks that went about becking and grimacing there,on a sudden, the Earth yawns asunder, and amid Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises SANSCULOTTISM, manyheaded, fire-breathing, and asks: What think ye of me? Well may the buckram masks start together, terror-struck; "into expressive well concerted groups!" It is indeed, Friends, a most singular, most fatal thing. Let whosoever is but buckram and a phantasm look to it: ill verily may it fare with him; here methinks he cannot much longer be. Woe also to many a one who is not altogether buckram, but partly real and human! The age of Miracles has come back! "Behold the World-Phoenix, in fireconsummation and fire-creation: wide are her fanning wings; loud is her death-melody, of battle-thunders and falling towns; skyward lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things: it is the Death-Birth of a World!"

THE STORM

MATTHEW ARNOLD

[From Obermann Once More, 1867] But slow that tide of common thought, Which bathed our life, retired;

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[From The Prelude, 1850]

Genius of Burke! forgive the pen seduced

By specious wonders, and too slow to tell Of what the ingenuous, what bewildered men,

Beginning to mistrust their boastful guides, And wise men, willing to grow wiser, caught, Rapt auditors! from thy most eloquent tongue

Now mute, for ever mute in the cold grave.
I see him,-old, but vigorous in age,-
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches
start

Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But

some

While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,

Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high dis-
dain,

Exploding upstart Theory, insists

Upon the allegiance to which men are bornSome say at once a froward multitudeMurmur (for truth is hated, where not loved)

As the winds fret within the Eolian cave, Galled by their monarch's chain. The times were big

With ominous change, which, night by night, provoked

Keen struggles, and black clouds of passion raised;

But memorable moments intervened, When Wisdom, like the Goddess from Jove's brain,

Broke forth in armor of resplendent words, Startling the Synod. Could a youth, and

one

In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved

Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?

THE CHARACTER OF BURKE

JOHN MORLEY

In every man there is a certain inevitable connection of opinion. We hold our views by sets and series. If we espouse one, we have unconsciously let in along with this a little, or it may be a long, train of others. A man comes to a certain conclusion upon some greatly controverted point of science. His eye has possibly never turned aside from the straitened bounds of scientific matter, and yet his single conclusion here leads him insensibly to a whole parcel of conclusions in religious matter or in ethical matter. We ought to remember this in the case of Burke. Few men's opinions hang together so closely and compactly as his did. The fiery glow of his nature fused all his ideas into a tenacious and homogeneous mass. What in more commonplace minds is effected by a process of bad logic, or by what seems to be hazard and caprice, in him was wrought by an inborn ardor of character. His passionate enthusiasm for Order

-and this is not a jot more strong in the "Reflections," in 1790 than it was in the "Thoughts on the Present Discontents" twenty years before-subjugated him as profoundly in one field as in another, in theology as in philosophy, in speculation as in practical politics. In that restlessness to which the world is so deeply indebted in some respects, by which it has been so much injured in others, Burke could recognize but scanty merit, wherever it was exhibited. Himself the most industrious, the most active-minded of men, he was ever sober in fixing the limits, in cutting the channels of his activity, and he would fain have had others equally moderate. Abstract illimitable speculation had no attraction for him in any of its departments. Perceiving that plain and righteous conduct is the end of life in this world, he prayed men not to be over-curious in searching for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic base on which the prerogatives of virtue repose. Perceiving that the happiness of a people is the end of its government he abhorred equally the royal clique who took the end of government to be the gratification of the royal will, the old Whig clique who took it to be the enrichment of old Whigs, and the revolutionists, who, as Burke thought, supposed that the happiness of a people could never be secure save where there is no government, but only anarchy. Perceiving that the belief in a future life with changed conditions adds dignity to mortals in their hours of happiness, and brings comfort in their hours of anguish, and that the belief in a divine mediator may be in the same way a source of elevation and solace, he burned with a holy rage against men who seemed to him as thieves wantonly robbing humanity of its most precious treasures. Provided that there was peace, that is to say, general happiness and content, Burke felt that too great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle, but mischievous and cruel.

We have already seen how he considered the comparative strength of the claims upon us of truth and peace to be an open question. "As we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one as we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace." In another place. he exclaims in precisely the same spirit, "The bulk of mankind, on their part, are not ex

ceedingly curious concerning any theories, whilst they are really happy; and one sure symptom of an ill-conducted state is the propensity of the people to resort to them." And Burke thought the bulk of mankind in the right. Even in a state of things which the most eager of optimists would have hesitated to look on as a state of peace, Burke was always careful to approach the ailing organ, whether ecclesiastical or political, with that awe and reverence, as he expressed it, with which a young physician approaches to the cure of the disorders of his aged parent. Every institution or idea under which any mass of men found shelter or comfort, he regarded with this filial awe and affectionate reverence. I feel an insuperable reluctance, he said in one place, in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of Government upon a theory, however plausible it may be. Rightly conceiving that a stable equilibrium in society, or peace, as he always called it, is the aim and standard of all things, he was willing to believe in some mysterious finality of Nature, whom he supposed to have established once for all in 1688 the entire conditions of our national health. He habitually confounded existing usage and traditions, to be gently modified and tenderly repaired, if unfortunate occasion should require, with a moral and just equilibrium. The philosophic partisan of Order, who entreats men to be sure they get the best out of the systems under which the time constrains them to live, before casting recklessly about for new things, commonly receives something less than justice from the anxious and ardent partisans of Progress. And this has perhaps been Burke's lot. Men constitutionally, or by habit, unable to realize the pleasures conferred by a reverent love of political, social, and moral order, have dealt little sympathy to one who threw himself so consistently and vehemently as Burke did athwart the revolutionary or critical movement of his time. But those of us who are not estopped by vain shibboleths from protesting that living, after all, must be the end of life, and that stable peace must be the end of society, may see that Burke's horror of the critical spirit in all its various manifestations, was the intelligible pain of one in the ghastly presence of dissolution, not knowing that the angel of a new life is already at his side.

He was always a lover of order in his

most enlarged and liberal moods. He was never more than a lover of order when his deference to the wishes of the people was at its lowest. The institutions to which he was attached during the eight-and-twenty years of his life in the House of Commons, passed through two phases of peril. First, they were oppressed and undermined by the acts of the court, and the resurrection of prerogative in the guise of privilege. Then they were menaced by the democratic flood which overtook England after the furious rising of the popular tide in France. We at this distance of time may see that in neither case was the danger so serious and so real as it appeared in the eyes of contemporaries. But in both cases Burke was filled with an alarm that may serve as a measure of the depth and sincerity of his reverence for the fabric whose overthrow, as he thought, was gravely threatened. In both cases he set his face resolutely against innovation; in both cases he defied the enemies who came up from two different quarters to assail the English constitution, and to destroy a system under which three generations. of Englishmen had been happy and prosperous. He changed his front, but he never changed his ground. "I flatter myself," he said, with justice, "that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty." And again: "The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order."

The

court tried to regulate liberty too severely. It found in him an inflexible opponent. Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty. They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing of all remonstrants. The arbitrary majority in the House of Commons forgot for whose benefit they held power, from whom they derived their authority, and in what description of government it was that they had a place. Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in the ranks of the independent minority. He withstood to the face the King and the King's friends. He withstood to the face Charles Fox and the friends of the people. He may have been wrong in both, or in either, but let us not be told that he turned back in his course; that he was a revolutionist in 1770 and a reactionist in 1790; that he was in his sane mind when he opposed the supremacy of the Court, but that his reason was tottering before he opposed the supremacy of the rabble.

"A LIBERTY CONNECTED WITH ORDER"

EDMUND BURKE

[Selections from Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790]

1. Of the Nature of Liberty

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without enquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same. nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate an highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agita

tion of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.

All these considerations, however, were below the transcendental dignity of the Revolution Society. Whilst I continued in the country, from whence I had the honor of writing to you, I had but an imperfect idea of their transactions. On my coming to town, I sent for an account of their proceedings, which had been published by their authority, containing a sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de Rochefoucault's and the Archbishop of Aix's letter, and several other documents annexed. The whole of that publication, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of France with those of England, by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect of that conduct upon the power, credit, prosperity, and tranquillity of France, became every day more evident. The form of constitution to be settled, for its future polity, became more clear. We are now in a

condition to discern, with tolerable exactness, the true nature of the object held up to our imitation. If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence in some circumstances, in others prudence of an higher order may justify us in speaking our thoughts. The beginnings of confusion with us in England are at present feeble enough; but with you, we have seen an infancy still more feeble, growing by moments into a strength to heap mountains upon mountains, and to wage war with Heaven itself. Whenever our neighbor's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

Solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but by no means unconcerned for yours, I wish to communicate more largely, what was at first intended only for your private satisfaction. I shall still keep your affairs in my eye, and continue to address myself to you. Indulging myself in the freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to throw out my thoughts, and express my feelings, just as they arise in my mind, with very little attention to formal method. I set out with the proceedings of the Revolution Society; but I shall not confine myself to them. Is it possible I should? It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.

This political Divine dogmatically asserts, that by the principles of the Revolution the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights, ali which, with him, compose one system, and lie together in one short sentence; namely, that we have an acquired right

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