Kitabı oku: «Fresh Fields», sayfa 12

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A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW

I

While in London I took a bright Sunday afternoon to visit Chelsea, and walk along Cheyne Row and look upon the house in which Carlyle passed nearly fifty years of his life, and in which he died. Many times I paced to and fro. I had been there eleven years before, but it was on a dark, rainy night, and I had brought away no image of the street or house. The place now had a more humble and neglected look than I expected to see; nothing that suggested it had ever been the abode of the foremost literary man of his time, but rather the home of plain, obscure persons of little means. One would have thought that the long residence there of such a man as Carlyle would have enhanced the value of real estate for many squares around, and drawn men of wealth and genius to that part of the city. The Carlyle house was unoccupied, and, with its closed shutters and little pools of black sooty water standing in the brick area in front of the basement windows, looked dead and deserted indeed. But the house itself, though nearly two hundred years old, showed no signs of decay. It had doubtless witnessed the extinction of many households before that of the Carlyles.

My own visit to that house was in one autumn night in 1871. Carlyle was then seventy-six years old, his wife had been dead five years, his work was done, and his days were pitifully sad. He was out taking his after-dinner walk when we arrived, Mr. Conway and I; most of his walking and riding, it seems, was done after dark, an indication in itself of the haggard and melancholy frame of mind habitual to him. He presently appeared, wrapped in a long gray coat that fell nearly to the floor. His greeting was quiet and grandfatherly, and that of a man burdened with his own sad thoughts. I shall never forget the impression his large, long, soft hand made in mine, nor the look of sorrow and suffering stamped upon the upper part of the face, – sorrow mingled with yearning compassion. The eyes were bleared and filmy with unshed and unshedable tears. In pleasing contrast to his coarse hair and stiff, bristly, iron-gray beard, was the fresh, delicate color that just touched his brown cheeks, like the tinge of poetry that plays over his own rugged page. I noted a certain shyness and delicacy, too, in his manner, which contrasted in the same way with what is alleged of his rudeness and severity. He leaned his head upon his hand, the fingers thrust up through the hair, and, with his elbow resting upon the table, looked across to my companion, who kept the conversation going. This attitude he hardly changed during the two hours we sat there. How serious and concerned he looked, and how surprising that hearty, soliloquizing sort of laugh which now and then came from him as he talked, not so much a laugh provoked by anything humorous in the conversation, as a sort of foil to his thoughts, as one might say, after a severe judgment, "Ah, well-a-day, what matters it!" If that laugh could have been put in his Latter-day Pamphlets, where it would naturally come, or in his later political tracts, these publications would have given much less offense. But there was amusement in his laugh when I told him we had introduced the English sparrow in America. "Introduced!" he repeated, and laughed again. He spoke of the bird as a "comical little wretch," and feared we should regret the "introduction." He repeated an Arab proverb which says Solomon's Temple was built amid the chirping of ten thousand sparrows, and applied it very humorously in the course of his talk to the human sparrows that always stand ready to chirrup and cackle down every great undertaking. He had seen a cat walk slowly along the top of a fence while a row of sparrows seated upon a ridge-board near by all pointed at her and chattered and scolded, and by unanimous vote pronounced her this and that, but the cat went on her way all the same. The verdict of majorities was not always very formidable, however unanimous.

A monument had recently been erected to Scott in Edinburgh, and he had been asked to take part in some attendant ceremony. But he had refused peremptorily. "If the angel Gabriel had summoned me I would not have gone," he said. It was too soon to erect a monument to Scott. Let them wait a hundred years and see how they feel about it then. He had never met Scott: the nearest he had come to it was once when he was the bearer of a message to him from Goethe; he had rung at his door with some trepidation, and was relieved when told that the great man was out. Not long afterwards he had a glimpse of him while standing in the streets of Edinburgh. He saw a large wagon coming drawn by several horses, and containing a great many people, and there in the midst of them, full of talk and hilarity like a great boy, sat Scott. Carlyle had recently returned from his annual visit to Scotland, and was full of sad and tender memories of his native land. He was a man in whom every beautiful thing awakened melancholy thoughts. He spoke of the blooming lasses and the crowds of young people he had seen on the streets of some northern city, Aberdeen, I think, as having filled him with sadness; a kind of homesickness of the soul was upon him, and deepened with age, – a solitary and a bereaved man from first to last.

As I walked Cheyne Row that summer Sunday my eye rested again and again upon those three stone steps that led up to the humble door, each hollowed out by the attrition of the human foot, the middle one, where the force of the footfall would be greatest, most deeply worn of all, – worn by hundreds of famous feet, and many, many more not famous. Nearly every notable literary man of the century, both of England and America, had trod those steps. Emerson's foot had left its mark there, if one could have seen it, once in his prime and again in his old age, and it was perhaps of him I thought, and of his new-made grave there under the pines at Concord, that summer afternoon as I mused to and fro, more than of any other visitor to that house. "Here we are shoveled together again," said Carlyle from behind his wife, with a lamp high in his hand, that October night thirty-seven years ago, as Jane opened the door to Emerson. The friendship, the love of those two men for each other, as revealed in their published correspondence, is one of the most beautiful episodes in English literary history. The correspondence was opened and invited by Emerson, but as years went by it is plain that it became more and more a need and a solace to Carlyle. There is something quite pathetic in the way he clung to Emerson and entreated him for a fuller and more frequent evidence of his love. The New Englander, in some ways, appears stinted and narrow beside him; Carlyle was much the more loving and emotional man. He had less self-complacency than Emerson, was much less stoical, and felt himself much more alone in the world. Emerson was genial and benevolent from temperament and habit; Carlyle was wrathful and vituperative, while his heart was really bursting with sympathy and love. The savagest man, probably, in the world in his time, who had anything like his enormous fund of tenderness and magnanimity. He was full of contempt for the mass of mankind, but he was capable of loving particular men with a depth and an intensity that more than makes the account good. And let me say here that the saving feature about Carlyle's contempt, which is such a stumbling-block till one has come to understand it, is its perfect sincerity and inevitableness, and the real humility in which it has its root. He cannot help it; it is genuine, and has a kind of felicity. Then there is no malice or ill-will in it, but pity rather, and pity springs from love. We also know that he is always dominated by the inexorable conscience, and that the standard by which he tries men is the standard of absolute rectitude and worthiness. Contempt without love and humility begets a sneering, mocking, deriding habit of mind, which was far enough from Carlyle's sorrowing denunciations. "The quantity of sorrow he has, does it not mean withal the quantity of sympathy he has, the quantity of faculty and victory he shall yet have? 'Our sorrow is the inverted image of our nobleness.' The depth of our despair measures what capability, and height of claim we have, to hope." (Cromwell.) Emerson heard many responding voices, touched and won many hearts, but Carlyle was probably admired and feared more than he was loved, and love he needed and valued above all else. Hence his pathetic appeals to Emerson, the one man he felt sure of, the one voice that reached him and moved him among his contemporaries. He felt Emerson's serenity and courage, and seemed to cling to, while he ridiculed, that New World hope that shone in him so brightly.

The ship that carries the most sail is most buffeted by the winds and storms. Carlyle carried more sail than Emerson did, and the very winds of the globe he confronted and opposed; the one great movement of the modern world, the democratic movement, the coming forward of the people in their own right, he assailed and ridiculed in a vocabulary the most copious and telling that was probably ever used, and with a concern and a seriousness most impressive.

Much as we love and revere Emerson, and immeasurable as his service has been, especially to the younger and more penetrating minds, I think it will not do at all to say, as one of our critics (Mr. Stedman) has lately said, that Emerson is as "far above Carlyle as the affairs of the soul and universe are above those of the contemporary or even the historic world." Above him he certainly was, in a thinner, colder air, but not in any sense that implies greater power or a farther range. His sympathies with the concrete world and his gripe upon it were far less than Carlyle's. He bore no such burden, he fought no such battle, as the latter did. His mass, his velocity, his penetrating power, are far less. A tranquil, high-sailing, fair-weather cloud is Emerson, and a massive, heavy-laden storm-cloud is Carlyle. Carlyle was never placidly sounding the azure depths like Emerson, but always pouring and rolling earthward, with wind, thunder, rain, and hail. He reaches up to the Emersonian altitudes, but seldom disports himself there; never loses himself, as Emerson sometimes does; the absorption takes place in the other direction; he descends to actual affairs and events with fierce precipitation. Carlyle's own verdict, written in his journal on Emerson's second visit to him in 1848, was much to the same effect, and, allowing for the Carlylean exaggeration, was true. He wrote that Emerson differed as much from himself "as a gymnosophist sitting idle on a flowery bank may do from a wearied worker and wrestler passing that way with many of his bones broken."

All men would choose Emerson's fate, Emerson's history; how rare, how serene, how inspiring, how beautiful, how fortunate! But as between these two friends, our verdict must be that Carlyle did the more unique and difficult, the more heroic, piece of work. Whether the more valuable and important or not, it is perhaps too early in the day to say, but certainly the more difficult and masterful. As an artist, using the term in the largest sense, as the master-worker in, and shaper of, the Concrete, he is immeasurably Emerson's superior. Emerson's two words were truth and beauty, which lie, as it were, in the same plane, and the passage from one to the other is easy; it is smooth sailing. Carlyle's two words were truth and duty, which lie in quite different planes, and the passage between which is steep and rough. Hence the pain, the struggle, the picturesque power. Try to shape the actual world of politics and human affairs according to the ideal truth, and see if you keep your serenity. There is a Niagara gulf between them that must be bridged. But what a gripe this man had upon both shores, the real and the ideal! The quality of action, of tangible performance, that lies in his works, is unique. "He has not so much written as spoken," and he has not so much spoken as he has actually wrought. He experienced, in each of his books, the pain and the antagonism of the man of action. His mental mood and attitude are the same; as is also his impatience of abstractions, of theories, of subtleties, of mere words. Indeed, Carlyle was essentially a man of action, as he himself seemed to think, driven by fate into literature. He is as real and as earnest as Luther or Cromwell, and his faults are the same in kind. Not the mere saying of a thing satisfies him as it does Emerson; you must do it; bring order out of chaos, make the dead alive, make the past present, in some way make your fine sayings point to, or result in, fact. He says the Perennial lies always in the Concrete. Subtlety of intellect, which conducts you, "not to new clearness, but to ever-new abstruseness, wheel within wheel, depth under depth," has no charms for him. "My erudite friend, the astonishing intellect that occupies itself in splitting hairs, and not in twisting some kind of cordage and effectual draught-tackle to take the road with, is not to me the most astonishing of intellects."

Emerson split no hairs, but he twisted very little cordage for the rough draught-horses of this world. He tells us to hitch our wagon to a star; and the star is without doubt a good steed, when once fairly caught and harnessed, but it takes an astronomer to catch it. The value of such counsel is not very tangible unless it awakes us to the fact that every power of both heaven and earth is friendly to a noble and courageous activity.

Carlyle was impatient of Emerson's fine-spun sentences and transcendental sleight-of-hand. Indeed, from a literary point of view, one of the most interesting phases of the published correspondence between these two notable men is the value which each unwittingly set upon his own methods and work. Each would have the other like himself.

Emerson wants Emersonian epigrams from Carlyle, and Carlyle wants Carlylean thunder from Emerson. Each was unconsciously his own ideal. The thing which a man's nature calls him to do, – what else so well worth doing? Certainly nothing else to him, – but to another? How surely each one of us would make our fellow over in our own image! Carlyle wants Emerson more practical, more concrete, more like himself in short. "The vile Pythons of this Mud-world do verily require to have sun-arrows shot into them, and red-hot pokers stuck through them, according to occasion;" do this as I am doing it, or trying to do it, and I shall like you better. It is well to know that nature will make good compost of the carcass of an Oliver Cromwell, and produce a cart-load of turnips from the same; but it is better to appreciate and make the most of the live Oliver himself. "A faculty is in you for a sort of speech which is itself action, an artistic sort. You tell us with piercing emphasis that man's soul is great; show us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such; this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to do this. I long to see some concrete Thing, some Event, Man's Hope, American Forest, or piece of Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well Emersonized, depicted by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson and cast forth from him, then to live by itself." Again: "I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy; I have a body myself; in the brown leaf, sport of the Autumn winds, I find what mocks all prophesyings, even Hebrew ones." "Alas, it is so easy to screw one's self up into high and even higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me; but whither does it lead? I dread always, to inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!" – with more of the same sort.

On the other hand, Emerson evidently tires of Carlyle's long-winded heroes. He would have him give us the gist of the matter in a few sentences. Cremate your heroes, he seems to say; get all this gas and water out of them, and give us the handful of lime and iron of which they are composed. He hungered for the "central monosyllables." He praises Cromwell and Frederick, yet says to his friend, "that book will not come which I most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a liber veritatis, a few sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men."

This is highly characteristic of Emerson; his bid for the quintessence of things. He was always impatient of creative imaginative works; would sublunate or evaporate them in a hurry. Give him the pith of the matter, the net result in the most pungent words. It must still be picture and parable, but in a sort of disembodied or potential state. He fed on the marrow of Shakespeare's sentences, and apparently cared little for his marvelous characterizations. One is reminded of the child's riddle: Under the hill there is a mill, in the mill there is a chest, in the chest there is a till, in the till there is a phial, in the phial there is a drop I would not give for all the world. This drop Emerson would have. Keep or omit the chest and the mill and all that circumlocution, and give him the precious essence. But the artistic or creative mind does not want things thus abridged, – does not want the universe reduced to an epigram. Carlyle wants an actual flesh-and-blood hero, and, what is more, wants him immersed head and ears in the actual affairs of this world.

Those who seek to explain Carlyle on the ground of his humble origin shoot wide of the mark. "Merely a peasant with a glorified intellect," says a certain irate female, masquerading as the "Day of Judgment."

It seems to me Carlyle was as little of a peasant as any man of his time, – a man without one peasant trait or proclivity, a regal and dominating man, "looking," as he said of one of his own books, "king and beggar in the face with an indifference of brotherhood and an indifference of contempt." The two marks of the peasant are stolidity and abjectness; he is dull and heavy, and he dare not say his soul is his own. No man ever so hustled and jostled titled dignitaries, and made them toe the mark, as did Carlyle. It was not merely that his intellect was towering; it was also his character, his will, his standard of manhood, that was towering. He bowed to the hero, to valor and personal worth, never to titles or conventions. The virtues and qualities of his yeoman ancestry were in him without doubt; his power of application, the spirit of toil that possessed him, his frugal, self-denying habits, came from his family and race, but these are not peasant traits, but heroic traits. A certain coarseness of fibre he had also, together with great delicacy and sensibility, but these again he shares with all strong first-class men. You cannot get such histories as Cromwell and Frederick out of polished littérateurs; you must have a man of the same heroic fibre, of the same inexpugnableness of mind and purpose. Not even was Emerson adequate to such a task; he was fine enough and high enough, but he was not coarse enough and broad enough. The scholarly part of Carlyle's work is nearly always thrown in the shade by the manly part, the original raciness and personal intensity of the writer. He is not in the least veiled or hidden by his literary vestments. He is rather hampered by them, and his sturdy Annandale character often breaks through them in the most surprising manner. His contemporaries soon discovered that if here was a great writer, here was also a great man, come not merely to paint their picture, but to judge them, to weigh them in the balance. He is eminently an artist, and yet it is not the artistic or literary impulse that lies at the bottom of his works, but a moral, human, emotional impulse and attraction, – the impulse of justice, of veracity, or of sympathy and love.

What love of work well done, what love of genuine leadership, of devotion to duty, of mastery of affairs, in fact what love of man pure and simple, lies at the bottom of "Frederick," lies at the bottom of "Cromwell"! Here is not the disinterestedness of Shakespeare, here is not the Hellenic flexibility of mind and scientific impartiality Mr. Arnold demands: here is espousal, here is vindication, here is the moral bias of the nineteenth century. But here also is reality, here is the creative touch, here are men and things made alive again, palpable to the understanding and enticing to the imagination. Of all histories that have fallen into my hands, "Frederick" is the most vital and real. If the current novels were half so entertaining, I fear I should read little else. The portrait-painting is like that of Rembrandt; the eye for battles and battle-fields is like that of Napoleon, or Frederick himself; the sifting of events, and the separating of the false from the true, is that of the most patient and laborious science; the descriptive passages are equaled by those of no other man; while the work as a whole, as Emerson says, "is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict, on the men and nations and manners of modern times." It is to be read for its honest history; it is to be read for its inexhaustible wit and humor; it is to be read for its poetic fire, for its felicities of style, for its burden of human sympathy and effort, its heroic attractions and stimulating moral judgments. All Carlyle's histories have the quick, penetrating glance, that stroke of the eye, as the French say, that lays the matter open to the heart. He did not write in the old way of a topographical survey of the surface: his "French Revolution" is more like a transverse section; more like a geologist's map than like a geographer's; the depths are laid open; the abyss yawns; the cosmic forces and fires stalk forth and become visible and real. It was this power to detach and dislocate things and project them against the light of a fierce and lurid imagination that makes his pages unique and matchless, of their kind, in literature. He may be deficient in the historical sense, the sense of development, and of compensation in history; but in vividness of apprehension of men and events, and power of portraiture, he is undoubtedly without a rival. "Those devouring eyes and that portraying hand," Emerson says.

Those who contract their view of Carlyle till they see only his faults do a very unwise thing. Nearly all his great traits have their shadows. His power of characterization sometimes breaks away into caricature; his command of the picturesque leads him into the grotesque; his eloquent denunciation at times becomes vituperation; his marvelous power to name things degenerates into outrageous nicknaming; his streaming humor, which, as Emerson said, floats every object he looks upon, is not free from streaks of the most crabbed, hide-bound ill-humor. Nearly every page has a fringe of these things, and sometimes a pretty broad one, but they are by no means the main matter, and often lend an additional interest. The great personages, the great events, are never caricatured, though painted with a bold, free hand, but there is in the border of the picture all manner of impish and grotesque strokes. In "Frederick" there is a whole series of secondary men and incidents that are touched off with the hand of a master caricaturist. Some peculiarity of feature or manner is seized upon, magnified, and made prominent on all occasions. We are never suffered to forget George the Second's fish eyes and gartered leg; nor the lean May-pole mistress of George the First; nor the Czarina's big fat cheek; nor poor Bruhl, "vainest of human clothes-horses," with his twelve tailors and his three hundred and sixty-five suits of clothes; nor Augustus, "the dilapidated strong," with his three hundred and fifty-four bastards. Nor can any reader of that work ever forget "Jenkins' Ear," – the poor fraction of an ear of an English sailor snipped off by the Spaniards, and here made to stand for a whole series of historical events. Indeed, this severed ear looms up till it becomes like a sign in the zodiac of those times. His portrait of the French army, which he calls the Dauphiness, is unforgettable, and is in the best style of his historical caricature. It makes its exit over the Rhine before Duke Ferdinand, "much in rags, much in disorder, in terror, and here and there almost in despair, winging their way like clouds of draggled poultry caught by a mastiff in the corn. Across Weser, across Ems, finally across the Rhine itself, every feather of them, – their long-drawn cackle, of a shrieky type, filling all nature in those months." A good sample of the grotesque in Carlyle, pushed to the last limit, and perhaps a little beyond, is in this picture of the Czarina of Russia, stirred up to declare war against Frederick by his Austrian enemies: "Bombarded with cunningly-devised fabrications, every wind freighted for her with phantasmal rumors, no ray of direct daylight visiting the poor Sovereign Woman; who is lazy, not malignant, if she could avoid it; mainly a mass of esurient oil, with alkali on the back of alkali poured in, at this rate for ten years past, till, by pouring and by stirring, they get her to the state of soap and froth."

Carlyle had a narrow escape from being the most formidable blackguard the world had ever seen; was, indeed, in certain moods, a kind of divine blackguard, – a purged and pious Rabelais, who could bespatter the devil with more telling epithets than any other man who ever lived. What a tongue, what a vocabulary! He fairly oxidizes, burns up, the object of his opprobrium, in the stream of caustic epithets he turns upon it. He had a low opinion of the contemporaries of Frederick and Voltaire: they were "mere ephemera; contemporary eaters, scramblers for provender, talkers of acceptable hearsay; and related merely to the butteries and wiggeries of their time, and not related to the Perennialities at all, as these two were." He did not have to go very far from home for some of the lineaments of Voltaire's portrait: "He had, if no big gloomy devil in him among the bright angels that were there, a multitude of ravening, tumultuary imps, or little devils, very ill-chained, and was lodged, he and his restless little devils, in a skin far too thin for him and them!"

Of Frederick's cynicism he says there was "always a kind of vinegar cleanness in it, except in theory." Equally original and felicitous is the "albuminous simplicity" which he ascribes to the Welfs. Newspaper men have never forgiven him for calling them the "gazetteer owls of Minerva;" and our Catholic brethren can hardly relish his reference to the "consolations" the nuns deal out to the sick as "poisoned gingerbread." In "Frederick" one comes upon such phrases as "milk-faced," "bead-roll histories," "heavy pipe-clay natures," a "stiff-jointed, algebraic kind of piety," etc.

Those who persist in trying Carlyle as a philosopher and man of ideas miss his purport. He had no philosophy, and laid claim to none, except what he got from the German metaphysicians, – views which crop out here and there in "Sartor." He was a preacher of righteousness to his generation, and a rebuker of its shams and irreverences, and as such he cut deep, cut to the bone, and to the marrow of the bone. That piercing, agonized, prophetic, yet withal melodious and winsome voice, how it rises through and above the multitudinous hum and clatter of contemporary voices in England, and alone falls upon the ear as from out the primal depths of moral conviction and power! He is the last man in the world to be reduced to a system or tried by logical tests. You might as well try to bind the sea with chains. His appeal is to the intuitions, the imagination, the moral sense. His power of mental abstraction was not great; he could not deal in abstract ideas. When he attempted to state his philosophy, as in the fragment called "Spiritual Optics," which Froude gives, he is far from satisfactory. His mathematical proficiency seemed to avail him but little in the region of pure ideality. His mind is precipitated at once upon the concrete, upon actual persons and events. This makes him the artist he is, as distinguished from the mystic and philosopher, and is perhaps the basis of Emerson's remark, that there is "more character than intellect in every sentence;" that is, more motive, more will-power, more stress of conscience, more that appeals to one as a living personal identity, wrestling with facts and events, than there is that appeals to him as a contemplative philosopher.

Carlyle owed everything to his power of will and to his unflinching adherence to principle. He was in no sense a lucky man, had no good fortune, was borne by no current, was favored and helped by no circumstance whatever. His life from the first was a steady pull against both wind and tide. He confronted all the cherished thoughts, beliefs, tendencies, of his time; he spurned and insulted his age and country. No man ever before poured out such withering scorn upon his contemporaries. Many of his political tracts are as blasting as the Satires of Juvenal. The opinions and practices of his times, in politics, religion, and literature, were as a stubbly, brambly field, to which he would fain apply the match and clean the ground for a nobler crop. He would purge and fertilize the soil by fire. His attitude was one of warning and rebuking. He was refused every public place he ever aspired to, – every college and editorial chair. Every man's hand was against him. He was hated by the Whigs and feared by the Tories. He was poor, proud, uncompromising, sarcastic; he was morose, dyspeptic, despondent, compassed about by dragons and all manner of evil menacing forms; in fact, the odds were fearfully against him, and yet he succeeded, and succeeded on his own terms. He fairly conquered the world; yes, and the flesh and the devil. But it was one incessant, heroic struggle and wrestle from the first. All through his youth and his early manhood he was nerving himself for the conflict. Whenever he took counsel with himself it was to give his courage a new fillip. In his letters to his people, in his private journal, in all his meditations, he never loses the opportunity to take a new hitch upon his resolution, to screw his purpose up tighter. Not a moment's relaxation, but ceaseless vigilance and "desperate hope." In 1830 he says in his journal: "Oh, I care not for poverty, little even for disgrace, nothing at all for want of renown. But the horrible feeling is when I cease my own struggle, lose the consciousness of my own strength, and become positively quite worldly and wicked." A year later he wrote: "To it, thou Taugenichts! Gird thyself! stir! struggle! forward! forward! Thou art bundled up here and tied as in a sack. On, then, as in a sack race; running, not raging!" Carlyle made no terms with himself nor with others. He would not agree to keep the peace; he would be the voice of absolute conscience, of absolute justice, come what come might. "Woe to them that are at ease in Zion," he once said to John Sterling. The stern, uncompromising front which he first turned to the world he never relaxed for a moment. He had his way with mankind at all times; or rather conscience had its way with him at all times in his relations with mankind. He made no selfish demands, but ideal demands. Jeffries, seeing his attitude and his earnestness in it, despaired of him; he looked upon him as a man butting his head against a stone wall; he never dreamed that the wall would give way before the head did. It was not mere obstinacy; it was not the pride of opinion: it was the thunders of conscience, the awful voice of Sinai, within him; he dared not do otherwise.