Questionable.
Or is this same Age of Hope itself but a simulacrum; as Hope too
often is? Cloud-vapour with rainbows painted on it, beautiful to
see, to sail towards,—which hovers over Niagara Falls? In that
case, victorious Analysis will have enough to do.
Alas, yes! a whole world to remake, if she could see it; work for
another than she! For all is wrong, and gone out of joint; the
inward spiritual, and the outward economical; head or heart,
there is no soundness in it. As indeed, evils of all sorts are
more or less of kin, and do usually go together: especially it is
an old truth, that wherever huge physical evil is, there, as the
parent and origin of it, has moral evil to a proportionate extent
been. Before those five-and-twenty labouring Millions, for
instance, could get that haggardness of face, which old Mirabeau
now looks on, in a Nation calling itself Christian, and calling
man the brother of man,—what unspeakable, nigh infinite
Dishonesty (of _seeming_ and not _being_) in all manner of
Rulers, and appointed Watchers, spiritual and temporal, must
there not, through long ages, have gone on accumulating! It will
accumulate: moreover, it will reach a head; for the first of all
Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.
In fact, if we pierce through that rosepink vapour of
Sentimentalism, Philanthropy, and Feasts of Morals, there lies
behind it one of the sorriest spectacles. You might ask, What
bonds that ever held a human society happily together, or held it
together at all, are in force here? It is an unbelieving people;
which has suppositions, hypotheses, and froth-systems of
victorious Analysis; and for _belief_ this mainly, that Pleasure
is pleasant. Hunger they have for all sweet things; and the law
of Hunger; but what other law? Within them, or over them,
properly none!
Their King has become a King Popinjay; with his Maurepas
Government, gyrating as the weather-cock does, blown about by
every wind. Above them they see no God; or they even do not look
above, except with astronomical glasses. The Church indeed still
is; but in the most submissive state; quite tamed by
Philosophism; in a singularly short time; for the hour was come.
Some twenty years ago, your Archbishop Beaumont would not even
let the poor Jansenists get buried: your Loménie Brienne (a
rising man, whom we shall meet with yet) could, in the name of
the Clergy, insist on having the Anti-protestant laws, which
condemn to death for preaching, “put in execution.”[31] And,
alas, now not so much as Baron Holbach’s Atheism can be
burnt,—except as pipe-matches by the private speculative
individual. Our Church stands haltered, dumb, like a dumb ox;
lowing only for provender (of tithes); content if it can have
that; or, dumbly, dully expecting its further doom. And the
Twenty Millions of “haggard faces;” and, as finger-post and
guidance to them in their dark struggle, “a gallows forty feet
high”! Certainly a singular Golden Age; with its Feasts of
Morals, its “sweet manners,” its sweet institutions
(_institutions douces_); betokening nothing but peace among
men!—Peace? O Philosophe-Sentimentalism, what hast thou to do
with peace, when thy mother’s name is Jezebel? Foul Product of
still fouler Corruption, thou with the corruption art doomed!
Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together,
provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it
continues standing, “with a ghastly affectation of life,” after
all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit
their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on
new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued
itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and
stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work
and live, or once did so. Widely shall men cleave to that, while
it will endure; and quit it with regret, when it gives way under
them. Rash enthusiast of Change, beware! Hast thou well
considered all that Habit does in this life of ours; how all
Knowledge and all Practice hang wondrous over infinite abysses of
the Unknown, Impracticable; and our whole being is an infinite
abyss, _overarched_ by Habit, as by a thin Earth-rind,
laboriously built together?
But if “every man,” as it has been written, “holds confined
within him a _mad_-man,” what must every Society do;—Society,
which in its commonest state is called “the standing miracle of
this world”! “Without such Earth-rind of Habit,” continues our
author, “call it System of Habits, in a word, _fixed ways_ of
acting and of believing,—Society would not exist at all. With
such it exists, better or worse. Herein too, in this its System
of Habits, acquired, retained how you will, lies the true
Law-Code and Constitution of a Society; the only Code, though an
unwritten one which it can in nowise _dis_obey. The thing we call
written Code, Constitution, Form of Government, and the like,
what is it but some miniature image, and solemnly expressed
summary of this unwritten Code? _Is_,—or rather alas, is _not;_
but only should be, and always tends to be! In which latter
discrepancy lies struggle without end.” And now, we add in the
same dialect, let but, by ill chance, in such ever-enduring
struggle,—your “thin Earth-rind” be once _broken!_ The fountains
of the great deep boil forth; fire-fountains, enveloping,
engulfing. Your “Earth-rind” is shattered, swallowed up; instead
of a green flowery world, there is a waste wild-weltering
chaos:—which has again, with tumult and struggle, to _make_
itself into a world.
On the other hand, be this conceded: Where thou findest a Lie
that is oppressing thee, extinguish it. Lies exist there only to
be extinguished; they wait and cry earnestly for extinction.
Think well, meanwhile, in what spirit thou wilt do it: not with
hatred, with headlong selfish violence; but in clearness of
heart, with holy zeal, gently, almost with pity. Thou wouldst not
_replace_ such extinct Lie by a new Lie, which a new Injustice of
thy own were; the parent of still other Lies? Whereby the latter
end of that business were worse than the beginning.
So, however, in this world of ours, which has both an
indestructible hope in the Future, and an indestructible tendency
to persevere as in the Past, must Innovation and Conservation
wage their perpetual conflict, as they may and can. Wherein the
“dæmonic element,” that lurks in all human things, _may_
doubtless, some once in the thousand years—get vent! But indeed
may we not regret that such conflict,—which, after all, is but
like that classical one of “hate-filled Amazons with heroic
Youths,” and will end in _embraces_,—should usually be so
spasmodic? For Conservation, strengthened by that mightiest
quality in us, our indolence, sits for long ages, not victorious
only, which she should be; but tyrannical, incommunicative. She
holds her adversary as if annihilated; such adversary lying, all
the while, like some buried Enceladus; who, to gain the smallest
freedom, must stir a whole Trinacria with it Ætnas.
Wherefore, on the whole, we will honour a Paper Age too; an Era
of hope! For in this same frightful process of Enceladus Revolt;
when the task, on which no mortal would willingly enter, has
become imperative, inevitable,—is it not even a kindness of
Nature that she lures us forward by cheerful promises, fallacious
or not; and a whole generation plunges into the Erebus Blackness,
lighted on by an Era of Hope? It has been well said: “Man is
based on Hope; he has properly no other possession but Hope; this
habitation of his is named the Place of Hope.”