tic--its crowning glory in war.

Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a
visionary, not less great than Tolstoi--Carlyle. Like Tolstoi, Carlyle
is above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as the Hebrew
prophet felt deeply and with resentful passionateness, the contrast
between what his race, nation, or people is, and what, by God's
decrees, it is meant to be. Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war?
His work is the witness. After the brief period of Goethe-worship,
from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not
monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his
work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty,
and the mystery of war. One flame-picture after another sets this
principle forth. What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of
Tolstoi! Consider the long array of them from the first engagements of
the French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemappes. These represent
Carlyle in the flush of manhood. His fiftieth year ushers in the
battle-pictures of the Civil War--Marston Moor, Naseby, and Dunbar,
when Cromwell defeats the men of Carlyle's own nation. The greatest
epoch of Carlyle's life, the epoch of the writing of _Frederick_, is
also that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings. And
finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses himself to write the
last of all his battles, yet at once in characterization and vividness
of heroic vision one of his finest, the death of the great Berserker,
Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king. In the last sea-fight of Olaf
there flames up within Carlyle's spirit, now in extreme age,[5] the
same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when
he wrote Valmy and Jemappes. Since the heroic age there are no such
battle-pictures as these. The spirit of war that leaps and laughs
within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of _Beowulf_ and
the _Song of Roland_, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a
sun. The breath that blows through the _Iliad_ stirs the pages of
_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick_; Mollwitz, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf,
Leignitz, and Torgau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of
modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of tactics, what the
combats drawn by Homer are to the warfare of earlier times.

Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than that of Tolstoi, not
less fixedly cons