THREE days the gold-finders worked alone upon the pre-Adamite river's
bed. At evening on the third day they looked up and saw a figure perched
watching them with a pipe in its mouth. It disappeared in silence.
Next day there were men on their knees beside them, digging, scraping,
washing and worshipping gold. Soon they were the center of a group--soon
after of a humming mob. As if the birds had really carried the secret
north, south, east and west, men swarmed and buzzed and settled like
locusts on the gold-bearing tract. They came in panting, gleaming, dusty
and travel-stained and flung off their fatigue at sight, and, running
up, dived into the gullies and plied spade and pickax with clinched
teeth and throbbing hearts. They seamed the face of Nature for miles;
turned the streams to get at their beds; pounded and crushed the solid
rock to squeeze out the subtle stain of gold it held in its veins;
hacked through the crops as through any other idle impediment; pecked
and hewed and fought and wrestled with Nature for the treasure that lay
so near yet in so tight a grip.
We take off our clothes to sleep and put them on to play at work, but
these put on their clothes to sleep in, and tore them off at peep of
day, and labor was red-hot till night came and cooled it; and in
this fight lives fell as quickly as in actual war, and by the same
enemy--Disease. Small wonder, when hundreds and hundreds wrought the
livelong day one half in icy water, the other half dripping with sweat.
Men rotted like sheep, and died at the feet of that Gold whom they
stormed here in his fortress; and some alas met a worse fate. For that
befell which the world has seen in every age and land where gold has
come to light upon a soil; men wrestling fiercely with Nature jostled
each other; cupidity inflamed hate to madness, and human blood flowed
like water over that yellow dirt. And now from this one burning spot
gold fever struck inward to the heart of the land; burned its veins and
maddened its brain. The workman sold his tools, bought a spade and a
pickax, and fled to the gold; the lawyer flung down his parchment and
off to the gold; the penny-a-liner his brass pen and off to a greater
wonder than he had ever fabricated; the schoolmaster to whom little boys
were puzzling out
Quid non mortalia pectora cogis
Auri sacra fames--
made the meaning perfectly clear; he dropped ferrule and book and ran
with the national hunt for gold. Shops were closed for want of buyers
and sellers; the grass crept up between the paving-stones in great
thoroughfares; outward-bound ships lay deserted and helpless in the
roads; the wilderness was peopled and the cities desolate; commerce
was paralyzed, industry contracted. The wise and good trembled for the
destiny of the people, the government trembled for itself--idle fear.
That which shook this colony for a moment settled it as firm as a
granite mountain and made it great with a rapidity that would have
astounded the puny ages cant appeals to as the days of wonders.
The _sacra fames_ was not Australian, but human; and so at the first
whisper of gold the old nations poured the wealth they valued--their
food and clothes and silk and coin--and the prime treasure they valued
not, their men--into that favored land.
Then did great Labor, insulted and cheated so many years in narrow,
overcrowded corners of the huge unpeopled globe, lift his bare arm and
cry, “Who bids for this?” and a dozen gloved hands jumped and clutched
at the prize. And in bargains where a man went on one side and money
on the other, the money had to say, “Thank you,” over it instead of the
man.
But still, though the average value of labor was now full as high in the
cities as in the mine, men flowed to the desert and the gold, tempted by
the enormous prizes there, that lay close to all and came to fortune's
favorites.
Hence a new wonder, a great moral phenomenon the world had never seen
before on such a wide scale. At a period of unparalleled civilization
and refinement, society, with its artificial habits and its jealous
class distinctions on its back, took a sudden unprepared leap from
the heights it had been centuries constructing--into a gold mine; it
emerged, its delicate fabric crushed out of all recognizable shape,
its petty prides annihilated, and even its just distinctions turned
topsy-turvey. For mind is really more honorable than muscle, yet when
these two met in a gold mine it fared ill with mind. Classical and
mathematical scholars joined their forces with navvies to dig gold;
and nearly always the scholars were found after a while cooking, shoe
cleaning, and doing generally menial offices for the navvies.
Those who had no learning, but had good birth, genteel manners and kid
gloves and feeble loins, sunk lower and became the dregs of gold-digging
society ere a week's digging had passed over their backs. Not that all
wit yielded to muscle. Low cunning often held its own; hundreds of lazy
leeches settled on labor's bare arm and bled it. Such as could minister
to the diggers' physical needs, appetites, vices, had no need to dig;
they made the diggers work for them, and took toll of the precious dust
as it fell into their hands.
One brute that could not spell chicory to save himself from the gallows
cleared two thousand pounds a month by selling it and hot water at a
pinch a cup. Thus ran his announcement, “Cofy allus rady.”
Meantime Trigonometry was frying steaks and on Sunday blacking boots.
After a while lucky diggers returned to the towns clogged with gold, and
lusting and panting for pleasure.
They hired carriages and sweethearts, and paraded the streets all day,
crying, “We be the hairy-stocracy, now!!”
The shopkeepers bowed down and did them homage.
Even here Nature had her say. The sexes came out--the men sat in the
carriages in their dirty fustian and their checkered shirts and no
jacket; their inamoritas beside them glittered in silk and satin. And
some fiend told these poor women it was genteel to be short-sighted; so
they all bought gold spy-glasses, and spied without intermission.
Then the old colonial aristocracy, who had been born in broadcloth and
silk, and unlike the new had not been transported, but only their papas
and mammas, were driven to despair; but at last they hit upon a remedy.
They would be distinguished by hook or by crook, and the only way left
now was always to go on foot. So they walked the pavement--wet or dry,
nothing could induce them to enter the door of a carriage. Item: they
gave up being shortsighted; the few who for reasons distinct from
fashion could not resign the habit concealed it, as if it was a defect
instead of a beauty.
This struggle of classes in the towns, with its hundred and one
incidents, was an excellent theme for satire of the highest class. How
has it escaped? is it that even Satire, low and easy art, is not so low
and easy as Detraction? But these are the outskirts of a great theme.
The theme itself belonged, not to little satire, but to great epic.
In the sudden return of a society far more complex, artificial and
conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to elements more primitive
than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its novelty, and nature, and
strange contrasts,
In the old barbaric force and native color of the passions, as they
burst out undisguised around the gold,
In the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning,
In a desert peopled, and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity,
In a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one
man's constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by
his own heart,
In “the siege of Gold,” defended stoutly by Rock and Disease,
In the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at
last according to Heaven's long-published and resisted design,
Fate offered poetry a theme broad and high, yet piquant, and various as
the dolphin and the rainbow.
I cannot sing this song, because I am neither Lamartine, nor Hugo, nor
Walter Scott. I cannot hum this song, because the severe conditions of
my story forbid me even to make the adventurous attempt. I am here to
tell, not the great tale of gold, but the little story of how Susan
Merton was affected thereby. Yet it shall never be said that my pen
passed close to a great man or a great thing without a word of homage
and sympathy to set against the sneers of groveling criticasters,
the blindness of self-singing poetasters, and the national itch for
detraction of all great things and men that live, and deification of
dead dwarfs.
God has been bountiful to the human race in this age. Most bountiful
to Poets; most bountiful to all of us who have a spark of nobleness in
ourselves, and so can see and revere at sight the truly grand and noble
(any snob can do this after it has been settled two hundred years by
other minds that he is to do it). He has given us warlike heroes more
than we can count--far less honor as they deserve; and valor as full of
variety as courage in the Iliad is monotonous--except when it takes to
its heels.
He has given us one hero, a better man than Hector or Achilles. For
Hector ran away from a single man; this hero was never known to run
away at all. Achilles was a better egotist than soldier; wounded in his
personal vanity, he revenged himself, not on the man who had wronged
him--Prudence forbade--but on the army, and on his country. This antique
hero sulked; my hero, deprived of the highest command, retained a
higher still--the command that places the great of heart above all petty
personal feeling. He was a soldier, and could not look from his tent on
battle and not plunge into it. What true soldier ever could? He was
not a Greek but a Frenchman--and could not love himself better than his
country. Above all, he was not Achilles, but Canrobert.
He has given us to see Nineveh disinterred by an English hero.
He has given us to see the northwest passage forced, and winter bearded
on his everlasting throne, by another. (Is it the hero's fault if self
and snowdrop-singing poetasters cannot see this feat with the eyes of
Camoens?)
He has given us to see Titans enslaved by man; Steam harnessed to our
carriages and ships; Galvanism tamed into an alphabet--a Gamut, and its
metal harp-strings stretched across the earth _malgre'_ mountains and
the sea, and so men's minds defying the twin monsters Time and Space;
and now, gold revealed in the East and West at once, and so mankind now
first in earnest peopling the enormous globe. Yet old women and children
of the pen say, this is a bad, a small, a lifeless, an unpoetic age--and
they are not mistaken. For they lie.
As only tooth-stoppers, retailers of conventional phrases, links in
the great cuckoo-chain, universal pill-venders, Satan, and ancient
booksellers' ancient nameless hacks can lie, they lie.
It is they who are _small-eyed._ Now, as heretofore, weaklings cannot
rise high enough to take a bird's-eye view of their own age, and
calculate its dimensions.
The age, smaller than epochs to come, is a giant compared with the past,
and full of mighty materials for any great pen in prose or verse.
My little friends aged nineteen and downward--fourscore and upward--who
have been lending your ears to the stale little cant of every age, as
chanted in this one by Buffo-Bombastes and other foaming-at-the-pen
old women of both sexes--take by way of antidote to all that poisonous,
soul-withering drivel, ten honest words.
I say before heaven and earth that the man who could grasp the facts of
this day and do an immortal writer's duty by them, i.e., so paint them
as a later age will be content to engrave them, would be the greatest
writer ever lived. Such is the force, weight and number of the grand
topics that lie this day on the world's face. I say that he who has eyes
to see may now see greater and far more poetic things than human eyes
have seen since our Lord and his Apostles and his miracles left the
earth.
It is very hard to write a good book or a good play, or to invent a good
picture, and having invented paint it. But it always was hard, except
to those--to whom it was impossible. Bunglers will not mend matters
by blackening the great canvases they can't paint on, nor the impotent
become males by detraction.
“Justice!”
When we write a story or sing a poem of the great nineteenth century,
there is but one fear--not that our theme will be beneath us, but we
miles below it; that we shall lack the comprehensive vision a man
must have from heaven to catch the historical, the poetic, the lasting
features of the Titan events that stride so swiftly past IN THIS
GIGANTIC AGE.