of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbé de Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace, shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the dread morning of Borodino anxious only about the quality of the eau de Cologne with which he lavishly sprinkles his handkerchief, vest, and coat. And the campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial? Lodi, Arcola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, Champaubert, and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of Chance, of happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark, unthinking force resident in masses of men. This is Tolstoi's conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the Semitic--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.