380 HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF. the battles on sea and shore, the desperate sieges, the slippery alliances, the traits of generosity, audacity, and cruelty, the trustful confidence, the broken faith, seem so closely to repeat themselves, that History appears to present the self-same drama played over and over again, with but a change of actors and costume. He descries more than a fanciful resemblance between Civilis and William the Silent, two heroes of ancient German stock, who had learnt the arts of war and peace in the service of a foreign and haughty world-empire; the ambition of each was subordinate to the cause which he served, for both refused the crown, although each, perhaps, contemplated, in the sequel, a Batavian realm of which he would have been the inevitable chief. Both, it is added, offered the throne to a Gallic prince, for Classicus was but the prototype of Anjou, as Brinno of Brederode, and neither was destined in this world to see his sacrifices crowned with success. Marcus Aurelius averred, that by looking back into history, one might be able to "almost prophesy upon the future," so strangely uniform are things past, present, and to come. "De tout temps les choses en pareil cas se sont passées à peu près de même," says another meditating spirit sur l'éternelle ressemblance de ces éternelles vicissitudes. De Quincey cites it as the opinion of one he deems the subtlest and most convincing (if not the most useful) philosopher whom England has produced, that a true knowledge of history confers the gift of prophecy; or that intelligently and sagaciously to have looked backwards, is potentially to have looked forwards. It is admitted for certain that the political movements of nations obey everlasting laws, and travel through the stages of known cycles, which thus insure enough of resemblance to guarantee the general outline of a sagacious prophecy; so that sameness enough there HISTORICAL CYCLES AND PARALLELS. 381 will always be to encourage the true political seer, with difference enough to confer upon each revolution its own separate character and its peculiar interest. Coleridge complained, that as every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case, there are never wanting answers and explanations and specious fallacies of hope. "I well remember," says he in The Friend, "that when the examples of former Jacobins, Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, etc., were adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French Consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of such usurpation at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century." It was from quite another standpoint that Jeffrey alleged the adage of nothing new under the sun, to be a reflection more and more impressed upon him, the more minutely he was enabled to inform himself of the events and opinions of former times: the same sanguine anticipations, the same groundless alarm, the same indestructible prejudices, and the same infallible panaceas, continue, said he, with slight modifications, to occupy and amuse the spirit of successive generations; while the world goes on in its own grand and undisturbed progression, to the equal disappointment of the enthusiast and the alarmist. Society is ever changing; but amidst the infinite diversity of human affairs, there are, as Alison admits, certain general principles of universal application, and the neglect or observance of which has led, in all ages, to the same consequences. The historical studies of the Marquis de La Fare led him to the conclusion that history is "un va-et-vient, un jeu de bascule perpétuel." From other sources had Philosopher Chips been led to the theory, that the universe had its cycle of events which turned round, so 382 THE SEEING EYE. that in a certain period of time (27,762 years) everything was to happen over again. It is one of the poets of our day who gives us to understand that "Dame History is so old, she knows not well THESE XXXV. THE SEEING EYE. ECCLESIASTES ii. 14; ISAIAH xlii. 20. HESE be among the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king of Jerusalem: "The wise man's eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness." The seeing eye, and the hearing ear, the Lord hath made them both. But there is such a thing as an eye that sees not. There are eyes and eyes; or, as the wellknown title runs, Eyes and No Eyes. "Seeing many things, but thou observest not," we read in the prophecies of Isaiah. Men with an Eye are, in point of phrase, the peculiar people of Mr. Carlyle. In them his soul delighteth, and for him it may be almost said that their might makes right. "For Ziethen too had good eyesight," he says of a favourite, in his latest history; and the next chapter opens with a description of George II., whose "eyes, proud as Jove's, are nothing like so perspicacious: and he has to scan with them, and unriddle, under pain of death, such a waste of insoluble intricacies, troubles, and world-perils as seldom was,—even in dreams." Where no vision is, on the part of rulers, the people perish. MR. CARLYLE'S 'MEN WITH AN EYE? 383 The appeal of Moses to Hobab, not to leave him and his people in the wilderness, urges this reason for his continuance with them, "Thou mayest be to us instead of eyes." Like those of the children of Issachar that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. In dealing with such a statesman as Oliver Cromwell, the philosopher of hero-worship finds occasion everywhere to note the decisive practical "eye" of the man, and his genuine "insight" into what is fact. Such an intellect, he maintains, in his defence of Oliver's sincerity, does not belong to a false man: the false man sees false shows, plausibilities, expediencies; the true man is needed to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's counsel about the Parliament army, for instance, early in the contest, "is advice by a man who saw. Fact answers, if you see into Fact!" Mirabeau, again: "With rich munificence, in a most blinkard, bespectacled, logicchopping generation, Nature has gifted this man with an eye." Danton: "This man also, like Mirabeau, has a natural eye, and begins to see whither Constitutionalism is tending." Later again, in the French Revolution chapter on the Death of Mirabeau: "Of men who, in such sense, are alive, and see with eyes, the number is now not great." In an earlier work Mr. Carlyle had explained the wise man and the strong to be he that has insight into what is what, into what will follow out of what, the eye to see and the hand to do; and it is the heart always that sees, before the head can see. The prevailing defect of the age bewailed by him in Past and Present is "less a defect of telescopes than of some eyesight. Those superstitious blockheads of the Twelfth *The italics, wherever occurring in these extracts from Mr. Carlyle, are that author's own. 384 MR. CARLYLE ON CLEAR VISION. Century," as he ironically characterizes Abbot Samson and his like, "had no telescopes, but they still had an eye." "The clear-beaming eyesight of Abbot Samson, steadfast, severe, penetrating,-it is like Fiat lux in that inorganic waste whirlpool;" that is to say, penetrating gradually into all nooks, of the chaos it makes a kosmos or ordered world. Elsewhere again he suggestively apostrophizes the reader: "Eyesight enough, O reader, a man in that case were a god, and could do various things!" The nature of the being of our great men, he says, in the essay on Johnson, was, "that they lived not by Hearsay, but by clear Vision, saw into the things themselves," etc. Cunning (as Cagliostro's) he declares to be the vehement exercise of a short, poor vision, of an intellect sunk, bemired, which can attain to no free vision, otherwise it would lead the esurient man to be honest. And in the sequel to that essay, The Diamond Necklace, a leading theme is the reflection," Of the eyes that men do glare withal so few can see." Quite an anax andron is the potentate in Dryden's adaptation of Chaucer, every inch a king,-with "Eyes that confest him born for kingly sway, So keen, they flashed intolerable day." Applicable in a largely applied sense to the philosophy of veritable insight, is the sententious utterance of Eunapius, that to see with the mere bodily eye is one thing; to perceive with the mind, quite another: "ЕTEρOV TI ἐστὶ τῷ νῷ θεωρεῖν, καὶ τοῖς τοῦ σώματος ἀπατηλοῖς ὄμμασιν. All too often it happens that, as Churchill words it, the Eye, that nicest sense, Neglects to send intelligence Unto the Brain, distinct and clear, Of all that passes in her sphere”— a fact overlooked, as are the lessons it may teach, by those who fail to distinguish between eyes and no eyes, |