Page:Studyofvictorhug00swin.djvu/147

and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of 'golden silence'—whose own speech, it may be admitted, was 'quite other' than 'silvern'—is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its existence on the existence of liberty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a brother philosopher whose 'reminiscences' may be gathered from Shakespeare, and whose views of his contemporaries were identical in tone and expression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, was mouldy before our grandsires had nails on their toes. It is far more intelligent, more original, more ingenious than all the old cant and rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers and blood-spillers, to discover the soul of goodness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the Third, and observingly distil it out into analytic and mono-dramatic blank verse. And it will never be said that this reaction against the puerile or senile preference of right to wrong and principle to prosperity has not been carried far enough in our time. Carlyle, the man of brass, and Musset, the man of clay, as far apart on all other points as two writers of genius could well be, have shown themselves at one in high-souled scorn for 'principles of mere rebellion' such as Landor's and Milton's, or for such 'belief in a new Brutus' as might disturb the dream of Augustulus. But, even as an old paradox becomes with time a commonplace, so does an old commonplace become in its turn a paradox; and a generation whose poets and historians have long blown the trumpet before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or the bastardy of Bonapartes may properly be startled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity of an old-world idealist who