[STEWART] THOMAS CARLYLE 17 



put away, but only what is worse. In this great duel Nature herself 

 is umpire, and can do no wrong." What is this. Professor Sherman 

 asks, but the now too familiar doctrine of Bernhardi that the survivor 

 in all contests is biologically justified ? 



The same sort of moral. is next drawn from Cromwell's Letters. 

 We are told that Carlyle's special admiration for the Lord Protector 

 arose from the fact that here seemed to be a superman, one who 

 unhesitatingly slashed through the red tape of parliamentary procedure 

 with a sword. We are reminded how the Long Parliament was sent 

 about its business because it "rebelled against the rôle of an obedient 

 jack-in-the-box," how Cromwell actually told the members that they 

 had been there long enough! Professor Sherman suggests that this 

 was a foretaste of the iron hand which shut up so lately the "ungag- 

 gable" members of the Reichstag in a guardhouse. Whether the 

 critic thinks that it would have been democratic to allow the Long 

 Parliament having sat twelve years without an election to sit twelve 

 more at its own choice, or what democratic instrument he would 

 himself in Cromwell's place have devised to dissolve it, I shall not 

 presume to guess. Carlyle was in short, he tells us, just a realistic 

 politician of the type we have now so painfully learned to know. 



Now, about Professor Sherman's rapid summarising of the 

 "lessons" in The French Revolution it is difficult to know just what to 

 say, for — as has been well remarked — no other objection is quite so 

 hard to meet as an objection that is totally irrelevant. Carlyle does 

 reproach Louis XVI with not knowing his business; he does deride 

 the extravagances of the French Assembly; and he does approve the 

 whiff of grape-shot with which Napoleon tamed the Paris mob. Nor 

 can I think of any recent writer, except apparently Professor Sherman, 

 who would question the justice of these estimates. Louis XVI did 

 not know his business, but Carlyle does not mean by such "business" 

 either the waging of war or the suppression of democratic reform. He 

 means the guidance of men, the organising of a nation's welfare, the 

 directing of equal justice, the curbing of class selfishness, the securing 

 for twenty or twenty-five millions of people those human rights which 

 an entrenched oligarchy was determined to deny them. This was a 

 great task indeed, and poor Louis was as unfit for it as the late Tsar 

 for a task very much the same a few years ago. What Professor 

 Sherman means by saying that in Carlyle's view Louis deserved to die 

 for his incompetence I have not the remotest idea, nor are we given 

 any reference in the text by which such an absurd charge could be 

 supported. The author of The French Revolution was not so destitute 

 of the historical sense as some of those who pretended to read the 



Sec. II, Sig. 2 



