Last words of Thomas Carlyle - Warburg Institute

!;VAENHAGEN VON ENSE IN THE YEAES 1837-57 215standing ranked there, with their three-cornered hatsand stiff hair-queues and fighting apparatus ; dumb,standing hke stone statues to be blasted in pieceswith cannon-shot :— there are 'inarticulate meanings'without end in such a thing for me ! Surely I muchapprove your further biographic projects ; and bid you* Frisch zu!' How true also is that of Goethe in hisadvicato you : ^ I have felt it a hundred times ;—indeedit is properly the grand difficulty with my own poorCromwell at present ; that he lies buried so deepthat his dialect, thought, aim, whole costume andenvironment are grown so obsolete for men. Whatan English Puritan properly meant and struggledin the seventeenth Century : I say to myself ' Is all thatfordead ? Or is it only asleep (not entirely with goodconsequences for us) ; a thing that can never die atall ? ' If it be dead, we ought to leave it alone !*Let the dead bury then' dead ' is as true in Literatureas elsewhere.Hence indeed so few Histories, and somany Pedantries and mere Sham Histories,—which ifmen were resolute enough, they would verily flinginto the fire at once and make an end of'In the essay Varnhagen von Ense's Biograpliien,' in the sixth'volume of Ucber Eunst und Alterthiim (1827). The woids of GoetheCarlyle here refers to are the following: We wish that he [Varnhagen]'may proceed, with his biographical reiDresentations, more and moreto the eighteenth centmy, and promote, by delineating the individualitiesand the spirit of the time with which they stood in action andreaction, clearness of the whole state of things. Clearness necessitatesinsight, insight creates tolerance, tolerance alone is able toprocure a peace active in all parts and talents.'