Chapter I

PAST AND PRESENT

By Thomas Carlyle

Appreciation by Ralph Waldo Emerson

First published 1843

THOMAS CARLYLE, born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, the son of a

stonemason. Educated at Edinburgh University. Schoolmaster for

a short time, but decided on a literary career, visiting Paris

and London. Retired in 1828 to Dumfriesshire to write. In 1834

moved to Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and died there in 1881.

INTRODUCTION

Being an appreciation from "The Dial" (July 1843)

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here is Carlyle's new poem, his _Iliad_ of English woes, to

follow his poem on France, entitled the _History of the French

Revolution._ In its first aspect it is a political tract, and

since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with

it. It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men,

groups and disposes them with a master's mind, and, with a heart

full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his

brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and

accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the

dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has

conversed much on these topics with such wisemen of all ranks and

parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until, such daily and

nightly meditation has grown into a great connection, if not a

system of thoughts; and the topic of English politics becomes

the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking,

recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels,

and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a

brave and just book, and not a semblance. "No new truth," say

the critics on all sides. Is it so? Truth is very old, but the

merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their

right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount,

whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details

into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality

than any other. The book makes great approaches to true

contemporary history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to

daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and

European system. It is such an appeal to the conscience and

honour of England as cannot be forgotten, or be feigned to be

forgotten. It has the merit which belongs to every honest book,

that it was self-examining before it was eloquent, and so hits

all other men, and, as the country people say of good preaching,

"comes bounce down into every pew." Every reader shall carry

away something. The scholar shall read and write, the farmer and

mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget the book

when they resume their labour.

Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers, a believer

in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity

of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in

good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the

people, and the remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work

of genius, its great value is in telling such simple truths. As

we recall the topics, we are struck with force given to the plain

truths; the picture of the English nation all sitting enchanted,

the poor, enchanted so that they cannot work, the rich, enchanted

so that they cannot enjoy, and are rich in vain; the exposure of

the progress of fraud into all arts and social activities; the

proposition that the labourer must have a greater share in his

earnings; that the principle of permanence shall be admitted

into all contracts of mutual service; that the state shall

provide at least schoolmaster's education for all the citizens;

the exhortation to the workman that he shall respect the work and

not the wages; to the scholar that he shall be there for light;

to the idle, that no man shall sit idle; the picture of Abbot

Samson, the true governor, who "is not there to expect reason and

nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason

and nobleness;" the assumption throughout the book, that a new

chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labour, is replacing

the old nobilities. These things strike us with a force which

reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters,

and of no modern book. Truly in these things is great reward.

It is not by sitting so at a grand distance and calling the human

race _larvae,_ that men are to be helped, nor by helping the

depraved after their own foolish fashion; but by doing

unweariedly the particular work we were born to do. Let no man

think himself absolved because he does a generous action and

befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so holds his

property that a benefit goes from it to all. A man's diet should

be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is so

private a good. His house should be better, because that is for

the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of

the traveler. But his speech is a perpetual and public

instrument; let that always side with the race and yield neither

a lie nor a sneer. His manners,--let them be hospitable and

civilising, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught

anything better in canvas or stone; and his acts should be

representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in

his having, and poor in his want.

It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the

contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all

men for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of

the problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe

fruits. The task is superhuman; and the poet knows well that a

little time will do more than the most puissant genius. Time

stills the loud noise of opinions, sinks the small, raises the

great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect

harmony to all eyes; but the truth of the present hour, except

in particulars and single relations, is unattainable. Each man

can very well know his own part of duty, if he will; but to

bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature, surmounts the

powers of art. The most elaborate history of today will have the

oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The historian of

today is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend into the

turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence that

necessity of isolation which genius has always felt. He must

stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.

But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the

sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher

than Literary inspiration may succour him. It is a costly proof

of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should

take his reputation in his hand and should descend into the ring;

and he has added to his love whatever honour his opinions may

forfeit. To atone for this departure from the vows of the

scholar and his eternal duties to this secular charity, we have

at least this gain, that here is a message which those to whom it

was addressed cannot choose but hear. Though they die, they must

listen. It is plain that whether by hope or by fear, or were it

only by delight in this panorama of brilliant images; all the

great classes of English society must read, even those whose

existence it proscribes. Poor Queen Victoria--poor Sir Robert

Peel--poor Primate and Bishops--poor Dukes and Lords! There is

no help in place or pride or in looking another way; a grain of

wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm,

which no curtains or shutters will keep out. Here is a book

which will be read, no thanks to anybody but itself. What pains,

what hopes, what vows, shall come of the reading! Here is a book

as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lordship

and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism

tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air, with

merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is punishable by

statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal; and yet these

dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this darning sword of Cherubim

waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon, and shows to

the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all

for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all

sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane

conservatism, and impressing the reader with the conviction that

the satirist himself has the truest love for everything old and

excellent in English land and institutions, and a genuine respect

for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes.

We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of

this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the

talent displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special

criticism in the wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the

general objection which we feel. It appears to us as a certain

disproportion in the picture, caused by the obtrusion of the

whims of the painter. In this work, as in his former labours,

Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant. His humours are

expressed with so much force of constitution that his

fancies are more attractive and more credible than the sanity of

duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies

whilst it stimulated.

It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the

picture. It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in

lurid storm lights. Every object attitudinises, to the very

mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this

wonderful humorist; and instead of the common earth and sky, we

have a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always

arrived which requires a _deus ex machina._ One can hardly

credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world

always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us--as

of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to

begin again and try to do a little business. It was perhaps

inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and

imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis

and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should

appear, producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the

excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendour

of wit cannot out--dazzle the calm daylight, which always shows

every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work

out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such

glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has

its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young

people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself;

and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with

pride or with regret (according as he was practical or poetic),

that he had none. But after a short time, down go its follies

and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain,

and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful

superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in

the horizon with mist and colour. The revelation of Reason is

this of the un-changeableness of the fate of humanity under all

its subjective aspects; that to the cowering it always cowers,

to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only

venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial;

as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot

reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?

And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing

dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over-

colouring of the picture; and we at this distance are not so far

removed from any of the specific evils, and are deeply

participant in too many, not to share the gloom and thank the

love and the courage of the counselor. This book is full of

humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr.

Carlyle's works than the attitude of the writer. He has the

dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and

never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of

scholars, and sustains their office in the highest credit and

honour. If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this

unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for

its occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of

criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close.

Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye oft

from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.

As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main

one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how

adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his

expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he

entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of

straw from the cell,--and the respectable Sauerteig, or

Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveler, says what

is put into his mouth, and disappears. That morbid temperament

has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character; a luxury to

many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south-wind

with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over

the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of

reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were

possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be

forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes

with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,--in all this

glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet

ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the

crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level

tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game.

He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a

serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the

ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but

gives sincerity where it is due.

One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in

literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple

ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains.

Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though

deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has

entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and

wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of

these times--the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the

first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of

details, into style. We have been civilising very fast, building

London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New

Holland and Oregon--and it has not appeared in literature; there

has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books.

Carlyle's style is the first emergence of all this wealth and

labour with which the world has gone with child so long. London

and Europe, tunneled, graded corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and

East and West Indies for dependencies, and America, with the

Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in

literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How like

an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the

continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a

symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first

experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned

to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again,

sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did it first, though

never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character

pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything

in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He

"shakes with his mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the

Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house

and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo

the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in

his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his

frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full

of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but

in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music.

Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with

meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to

return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now

as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the

horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Life of Schiller (Lond. Mag., 1823-4), 1825, 1845. (Supplement

published in the People's Edition, 1873) Wilhelm Meister's

Apprenticeship, 1824. Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry

(from the French of Legendre), 1824. German Romance, 1827.

Sartor Resartus (Fraser's Mag., 1833-4), 1835 (Boston) 1838.

French Revolution, 1837,1839. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,

1839, 1840, 1847, 1857. (In these were reprinted Articles from

Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review, Foreign Quarterly Review,

Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, New Monthly Magazine,

London and Westminster Review, Keepsake, Proceedings of the

Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Times.) Chartism, 1840.

Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841. Past and

Present, 1843. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; with

Elucidations, 1845. Thirty-five Unpublished Letters of Oliver

Cromwell, 1847 (Fraser). Original Discourses on the Negro

Question (Fraser, 1849), 1853. Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850. Life

of John Sterling, 1851. History of Friedrich II. of Prussia,

1858-65. Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, 1866. Shooting

Niagara; and After? 1867 (from Macmillan). The Early Kings of

Norway; also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox, 1875.

There were also contributions to Brewster's Edinburgh

Encyclopaedia, vols. xiv. xv., and xvi.; to New Edinburgh

Review, 1821, 1822; Fraser's Magazine, 1830, 1831; The Times,

19 June, 1844 (Mazzini); 28 November, 1876; 5 May, 1877;

Examiner, 1848; Spectator 1848.

First Collected Edition of Works, 1857-58 (16 vols.)

Reminiscences (ed. J.A. Froude), 1881; (ed. C.E. Norton, 1887,

and preprinted in Everyman's Library; 1932, with an added

article on Professor John Wilson--"Christopher North")

Reminiscences of my Irish journey in 1849, 1882. Last Words of

Thomas Carlyle, 1882 (ed. by J.C.A.) Last Words of Thomas

Carlyle, 1892. Rescued Essays (ed. P. Newberry) 1892.

Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reign of

James I. and Charles I. (ed. A. Carlyle), 1898.

Sir Leslie Stephen's article on Carlyle in the Dictionary of

National Biography gives a list of his occasional writings which

have never been collected or reprinted.

Contents

Book I--Proem

I. Midas.

II. The Sphinx

III. Manchester Insurrection

IV. Morrison's Pill

V. Aristocracy of Talent

VI. Hero-Worship

Book II--The Ancient Monk

I. Jocelin of Brakelond

II. St. Edmundsbury

III. Landlord Edmund

IV. Abbot Hugo

V. Twelfth Century

VI. Monk Samson

VII. The Canvassing

VIII. The Election

IX. Abbot Samson

X. Government

XI. The Abbot's Ways

XII. The Abbot's Troubles

XIII. In Parliament

XIV. Henry of Essex

XV. Practical-Devotional

XVI St. Edmund

XVII The Beginnings

Book III--The Modern Worker

I. Phenomena,

II. Gospel of Mammonism

III. Gospel of Dilettantism

XV. Happy

V. The English

VI. Two Centuries

VII. Over-Production

VIII. Unworking Aristocracy

IX. Working Aristocracy

X. Plugson of Undershot

XI. Labour

XII Reward

XIII. Democracy

XIV Sir Jabesh Windbag

XV. Morrison Again

Book IV--Horoscope

I. Aristocracies

II. Bribery Committee

III. The One Institution

IV Captains of Industry

V. Permanence

VI. The Landed

VII. The Gifted

VIII The Didactic

Summary

Book I--Proem

Chapter I

Midas

The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the

course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on

in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most

ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this

world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce,

supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of

inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and

grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with

workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of

workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the

willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work

they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant,

exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as

of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers,

ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it,

no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted

fruit!" On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest

shape; but on the rich masterworkers too it falls; neither can

the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape,

but all are like to be brought low with it, and made 'poor'

enough, in the money-sense or a far fataller one.

Of these successful skillful workers some two millions, it is now

counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons; or have 'out-door

relief' flung over the wall to them,--the workhouse Bastille

being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder

by a stronger.* They sit there, these many months now; their

hope of deliverance as yet small. In workhouses, pleasantly so

named, because work cannot be done in them. Twelve hundred

thousand workers in England alone; their cunning right-hand

lamed, lying idle in their sorrowful bosom; their hopes,

outlooks, share of this fair world, shut in by narrow walls.

They sit there, pent up, as in a kind of horrid enchantment;

glad to be imprisoned and enchanted, that they may not perish

starved. The picturesque Tourist, in a sunny autumn day,

through this bounteous realm of England, describes the Union

Workhouse on his path. 'Passing by the Workhouse of St. Ives

in Huntingdonshire, on a bright day last autumn,' says the

picturesque Tourist, 'I saw sitting on wooden benches, in front

of their Bastille and within their ringwall and its railings,

some half-hundred or more of these men. Tall robust figures,

young mostly or of middle age; of honest countenance, many of

them thoughtful and even intelligent-looking men. They sat

there, near by one another; but in a kind of torpor, especially

in a silence, which was very striking. In silence: for, alas,

what word was to be said? An Earth all lying round, crying, Come

and till me, come and reap me;--yet we here sit enchanted! In

the eyes and brows of these men hung the gloomiest expression,

not of anger, but of grief and shame and manifold inarticulate

distress and weariness; they returned my glance with a glance

that seemed to say, "Do not look at us. We sit enchanted here,

we know not why. The Sun shines and the Earth calls; and, by

the governing Powers and Impotences of this England, we are

forbidden to obey. It is impossible, they tell us!" There was

something that reminded me of Dante's Hell in the look of all

this; and I rode swiftly away.

---------

* The Return of Paupers for England and Wales, at Ladyday, 1842,

is, "In-door 221,687, Out-door 1,207,402, Total 1,429,089."--

(_Official Report_)

---------

So many hundred thousands sit in workhouses: and other hundred

thousands have not yet got even workhouses; and in thrifty

Scotland itself, in Glasgow or Edinburgh City, in their

dark lanes, hidden from all but the eye of God, and of rare

Benevolence the minister of God, there are scenes of woe and

destitution and desolation, such as, one may hope, the Sun never

saw before in the most barbarous regions where men dwelt.

Competent witnesses, the brave and humane Dr. Alison, who speaks

what he knows, whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands

becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us:

these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no

reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only

to the common state. Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic

gangrene of this kind is Scotland suffering. A Poor-law, any and

every Poor-law, it may be observed, is but a temporary measure;

an anodyne, not a remedy: Rich and Poor, when once the naked

facts of their condition have come into collision, cannot long

subsist together on a mere Poor-law. True enough:--and yet,

human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till something

better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a

byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble

and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms;

valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,--which all the

metal of Potosi cannot purchase back; to which the metal of

Potosi, and all you can buy with _it,_ is dross and dust!

Why dwell on this aspect of the matter? It is too indisputable,

not doubtful now to any one. Descend where you will into the

lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by

Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by

Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking,

the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit

that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is

fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered,

there was literally never any parallel. At Stockport Assizes,--

and this too has no reference to the present state of trade,

being of date prior to that,--a Mother and a Father are arraigned

and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to defraud

a 'burial-society' of some _31.8s._ due on the death of each

child: they are arraigned, found guilty; and the official

authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not

solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that

department of things. This is in the autumn of 1841; the crime

itself is of the previous year or season. "Brutal savages,

degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of Newspapers; hardly

lingering on this incident. Yet it is an incident worth

lingering on; the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism

being never so well admitted. In the British land, a human

Mother and Father, of white skin and professing the Christian

religion, had done this thing; they, with their Irishism and

necessity and savagery, had been driven to do it. Such instances

are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view; under

which lies a whole mountain region and land, not yet emerged. A

human Mother and Father had said to themselves, What shall we do

to escape starvation? We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar;

and help is far.--Yes, in the Ugolino Hungertower stern things

happen; best-loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his Father's

knees!--The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint: Our poor

little starveling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will

see only evil and not good in this world: if he were out of

misery at once; he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept

alive? It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done. And now

Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little

starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?--

What an inquiry of ways and means!

In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old

Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and

said, 'The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own

children.' The stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no

blacker gulf of wretchedness; that was the ultimatum of degraded

god-punished man. And we here, in modern England, exuberant with

supply of all kinds, besieged by nothing if it be not by

invisible Enchantments, are we reaching that?--How come these

things? Wherefore are they, wherefore should they be?

Nor are they of the St. Ives workhouses, of the Glasgow lanes,

and Stockport cellars, the only unblessed among us. This

successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as

yet made nobody rich; it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet

to nobody. We might ask, Which of us has it enriched? We can

spend thousands where we once spent hundreds; but can purchase

nothing good with them. In Poor and Rich, instead of noble

thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury alternating with mean

scarcity and inability. We have sumptuous garnitures for our

Life, but have forgotten to _live_ in the middle of them. It is

an enchanted wealth; no man of us can yet touch it. The class

of men who feel that they are truly better off by means of it,

let them give us their name!

Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors,--with what

advantage they can report, and their Doctors can: but in the

heart of them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what

increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller,

stronger, braver? Are they even what they call 'happier? Do

they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in

this God's Earth; do more things and human faces look with

satisfaction on them? Not so. Human faces gloom discordantly,

disloyally on one another. Things, if it be not mere cotton and

iron things, are growing disobedient to man. The Master Worker

is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman;

clamours, in vain hitherto, for a very simple sort of 'Liberty:'

the liberty 'to buy where he finds it cheapest, to sell where he

finds it dearest.' With guineas jingling in every pocket, he was

no whit richer; but now, the very guineas threatening to vanish,

he feels that he is poor indeed. Poor Master Worker! And the

Master Unworker, is not he in a still fataller situation?

Pausing amid his game-preserves, with awful eye,--as he well may!

Coercing fifty-pound tenants; coercing, bribing, cajoling;

doing what he likes with his own. His mouth full of loud

futilities, and arguments to prove the excellence of his

Corn-law;* and in his heart the blackest misgiving, a desperate

half-consciousness that his excellent Corn-law is indefensible,

that his loud arguments for it are of a kind to strike men too

literally _dumb._

-------------

[* Digital transcriber note: The "corn-law" that Carlyle

repeatedly refers to was an English sliding-scale tariff on

grain, which kept the price of bread artificially inflated.]

-------------

To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that

it blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuller, in any way

better? Who has got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for

him, like a true servant, not like a false mock-servant; to do

him any real service whatsoever? As yet no one. We have more

riches than any Nation ever had before; we have less good of

them than any Nation ever had before. Our successful industry is

hitherto unsuccessful; a strange success, if we stop here! In

the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold

walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied.

Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men, come to a pause;

stand fixed, and cannot farther. Fatal paralysis spreading

inwards, from the extremities, in St. Ives workhouses, in

Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if towards the heart

itself. Have we actually got enchanted, then; accursed by

some god?--

Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians. He got gold,

so that whatsoever he touched became gold,--and he, with his long

ears, was little the better for it. Midas had misjudged the

celestial music-tones; Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods:

the gods gave him his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also

were a good appendage to it. What a truth in these old Fables!

Chapter II

The Sphinx

How true, for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who

sat by the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers,

which if they could not answer she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx

is this Life of ours, to all men and societies of men. Nature,

like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and

tenderness; the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws

and the body of a lioness. There is in her a celestial beauty,--

which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is

also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal.

She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned; one still

half-imprisoned,--the inarticulate, lovely still encased in the

inarticulate, chaotic. How true! And does she not propound her

riddles to us? Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet

with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the meaning of this

Day? What thou canst do Today; wisely attempt to do?" Nature,

Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand

unnameable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as

a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who

can discern her behests and do them; a destroying fiend to them

who cannot. Answer her riddle, it is well with thee. Answer it

not, pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself; the

solution for thee is a thing of teeth and claws; Nature is a

dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring. Thou

art not now her victorious bridegroom; thou art her mangled

victim, scattered on the precipices, as a slave found treacherous,

recreant, ought to be and must.

With Nations it is as with individuals: Can they rede the riddle

of Destiny? This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning

of _its_ strange new Today? Is there sense enough extant,

discoverable anywhere or anyhow, in our united twenty-seven

million heads to discern the same; valour enough in our

twenty-seven million hearts to dare and do the bidding thereof?

It will be seen!--

The secret of gold Midas, which he with his long ears never could

discover, was, That he had offended the Supreme Powers;--that he

had parted company with the eternal inner Facts of this Universe,

and followed the transient outer Appearances thereof; and so was

arrived _here._ Properly it is the secret of all unhappy men and

unhappy nations. Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's

right truth would have made them free. They have become

enchanted; stagger spell-bound, reeling on the brink of huge

peril, because they were not wise enough. They have forgotten

the right Inner True, and taken up with the Outer Sham-true.

They answer the Sphinx's question wrong. Foolish men cannot

answer it aright! Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for

eternal fact, and go astray more and more.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is

delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one, here below.

Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two,

some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death!

In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest

days, dwells and speaks a God. The great soul of the world is

_just._ O brother, can it be needful now, at this late epoch of

experience, after eighteen centuries of Christian preaching for

one thing, to remind thee of such a fact; which all manner of

Mahometans, old Pagan Romans, Jews, Scythians and heathen Greeks,

and indeed more or less all men that God made, have managed at

one time to see into; nay which thou thyself, till 'redtape'

strangled the inner life of thee, hadst once some inkling of:

That there is justice here below; and even, at bottom, that

there is nothing else but justice! Forget that, thou hast

forgotten all. Success will never more attend thee: how can it

now? Thou hast the whole Universe against thee. No more

success: mere sham-success, for a day and days; rising ever

higher,--towards its Tarpeian Rock. Alas, how, in thy soft-hung

Longacre vehicle, of polished leather to the bodily eye, of

redtape philosophy, of expediencies, clubroom moralities,

Parliamentary majorities to the mind's eye, thou beautifully

rollest: but knowest thou whitherward? It is towards the

_road's end._ Old use-and-wont; established methods, habitudes,

once true and wise; man's noblest tendency, his perseverance,

and man's ignoblest, his inertia; whatsoever of noble and

ignoble Conservatism there is in men and Nations, strongest

always in the strongest men and Nations: all this is as a road

to thee, paved smooth through the abyss,--till all this _end._

Till men's bitter necessities can endure thee no more. Till

Nature's patience with thee is done; and there is no road or

footing any farther, and the abyss yawns sheer--

Parliament and the Courts of Westminster are venerable to me;

how venerable; grey with a thousand years of honourable age!

For a thousand years and more, Wisdom and faithful Valour,

struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most

sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up; and they

are as we see. For a thousand years, this English Nation has

found them useful or supportable; they have served this English

Nation's want; _been_ a road to it through the abyss of Time.

They are venerable, they are great and strong. And yet it is

good to remember always that they are not the venerablest, nor

the greatest, nor the strongest! Acts of Parliament are

venerable; but if they correspond not with the writing on the

Adamant Tablet, what are they? Properly their one element of

venerableness, of strength or greatness, is, that they at all

times correspond therewith as near as by human possibility they

can. They are cherishing destruction in their bosom every hour

that they continue otherwise.

Alas, how many causes that can plead well for themselves in the

Courts of Westminster; and yet in the general Court of the

Universe, and free Soul of Man, have no word to utter!

Honourable Gentlemen may find this worth considering, in times

like ours. And truly, the din of triumphant Law-logic, and all

shaking of horse-hair wigs and learned-sergeant gowns having

comfortably ended, we shall do well to ask ourselves withal, What

says that high and highest Court to the verdict? For it is the

Court of Courts, that same; where the universal soul of Fact and

very Truth sits President;--and thitherward, more and more

swiftly, with a really terrible increase of swiftness, all causes

do in these days crowd for revisal,--for confirmation, for

modification, for reversal with costs. Dost thou know that

Court; hast thou had any Law-practice there? What, didst thou

never enter; never file any petition of redress, reclaimer,

disclaimer or demurrer, written as in thy heart's blood, for thy

own behoof or another's; and silently await the issue? Thou

knowest not such a Court? Hast merely heard of it by faint

tradition as a thing that was or had been? Of thee, I think, we

shall get little benefit.

For the gowns of learned-sergeants are good: parchment records,

fixed forms, and poor terrestrial justice, with or without

horse-hair, what sane man will not reverence these? And yet,

behold, the man is not sane but insane, who considers these alone

as venerable. Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and

learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned

tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth,

cannot make unjust just. The grand question still remains, Was

the judgment just? If unjust, it will not and cannot get harbour

for itself, or continue to have footing in this Universe, which

was made by other than One Unjust. Enforce it by never such

statuting, three readings, royal assents; blow it to the four

winds with all manner of quilted trumpeters and pursuivants, in

the rear of them never so many gibbets and hangmen, it will not

stand, it cannot stand. From all souls of men, from all ends of

Nature, from the Throne of God above, there are voices bidding

it: Away, away! Does it take no warning; does it stand, strong

in its three readings, in its gibbets and artillery-parks? The

more woe is to it, the frightfuller woe. It will continue

standing, for its day, for its year, for its century, doing

evil all the while; but it has One enemy who is Almighty:

dissolution, explosion, and the everlasting Laws of Nature

incessantly advance towards it; and the deeper its rooting, more

obstinate its continuing, the deeper also and huger will its ruin

and overturn be.

In this God's-world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad

foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and

judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think

that there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath

said in his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, were wise

because they denied, and knew forever not to be. I tell thee

again, there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I

find here below: the just thing, the true thing. My friend, if

thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in

support of an unjust thing; and infinite bonfires visibly

waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long for thy victory on

behalf of it,--I would advise thee to call halt, to fling down

thy baton, and say, "In God's name, No!" Thy 'success?' Poor

devil, what will thy success amount to? If the thing is unjust,

thou hast not succeeded; no, not though bonfires blazed

from North to South, and bells rang, and editors wrote

leading-articles, and the just thing lay trampled out of sight,

to all mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing. Success?

In few years, thou wilt be dead and dark,--all cold, eyeless,

deaf; no blaze of bonfires, ding-dong of bells or leading-articles

visible or audible to thee again at all forever: What kind of

success is that!--

It is true all goes by approximation in this world; with any not

insupportable approximation we must be patient. There is a noble

Conservatism as well as an ignoble. Would to Heaven, for the

sake of Conservatism itself, the noble alone were left, and the

ignoble, by some kind severe hand, were ruthlessly lopped away,

forbidden ever more to skew itself! For it is the right and

noble alone that will have victory in this struggle; the rest is

wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of

the victory. Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness,

and of that only, is all this confusion tending. We already know

whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will

have none! The Heaviest will reach the centre. The Heaviest,

sinking through complex fluctuating media and vortices, has its

deflexions, its obstructions, nay at times its resiliences, its

reboundings; whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating,

"See, your Heaviest ascends!"--but at all moments it is moving

centreward, fast as is convenient for it; sinking, sinking; and,

by laws older than the World, old as the Maker's first Plan of

the World, it has to arrive there.

Await the issue. In all battles, if you await the issue, each

fighter has prospered according to his right. His right and his

might, at the close of the account, were one and the same. He

has fought with all his might, and in exact proportion to all his

right he has prevailed. His very death is no victory over him.

He dies indeed; but his work lives, very truly lives. A heroic

Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his

Scotland become, one day, a part of England: but he does hinder

that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part of it;

commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and

Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of

brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of

slave and master. If the union with England be in fact one of

Scotland's chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was

not the chief curse. Scotland is not Ireland: no, because brave

men rose there, and said, "Behold, ye must not tread us down like

slaves; and ye shall not,--and cannot!" Fight on, thou brave

true heart, and falter not, through dark fortune and through

bright. The cause thou fightest for, so far as it is true, no

farther, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory. The

falsehood alone of it will be conquered, will be abolished, as it

ought to be: but the truth of it is part of Nature's own Laws,

cooperates with the World's eternal Tendencies, and cannot

be conquered.

The _dust_ of controversy, what is it but the _falsehood_ flying

off from all manner of conflicting true forces, and making such a

loud dust-whirlwind,--that so the truths alone may remain, and

embrace brother-like in some true resulting-force! It is ever

so. Savage fighting Heptarchies: their fighting is an

ascertainment, who has the right to rule over whom; that out of

such waste-bickering Saxondom a peacefully cooperating England

may arise. Seek through this Universe; if with other than owl's

eyes, thou wilt find nothing nourished there, nothing kept in

life, but what has right to nourishment and life. The rest, look

at it with other than owl's eyes, is not living; is all dying,

all as good as dead! Justice was ordained from the foundations

of the world; and will last with the world and longer.

From which I infer that the inner sphere of Fact, in this present

England as elsewhere, differs infinitely from the outer sphere

and spheres of Semblance. That the Temporary, here as elsewhere,

is too apt to carry it over the Eternal. That he who dwells in

the temporary Semblances, and does not penetrate into the eternal

Substance, will _not_ answer the Sphinx-riddle of Today, or of

any Day. For the substance alone is substantial; that is the

law of Fact: if you discover not that, Fact, who already knows

it, will let you also know it by and by!

What is justice? that, on the whole, is the question of the

Sphinx to us. The law of Fact is, that justice must and will be

done. The sooner the better; for the Time grows stringent,

frightfully pressing! "What is justice?" ask many, to whom cruel

Fact alone will be able to prove responsive. It is like jesting

Pilate asking, What is Truth? Jesting Pilate had not the

smallest chance to ascertain what was Truth. He could not have

known it, had a god shewn it to him. Thick serene opacity,

thicker than amaurosis, veiled those smiling eyes of his to

Truth; the inner _retina_ of them was gone paralytic, dead. He

looked at Truth; and discerned her not, there where she stood.

"What is justice?" The clothed embodied justice that sits in

Westminster Hall, with penalties, parchments, tipstaves, is very

visible. But the unembodied justice, whereof that other is

either an emblem, or else is a fearful indescribability, is not

so visible! For the unembodied Justice is of Heaven; a Spirit,

and Divinity of Heaven,--invisible to all but the noble and pure

of soul. The impure ignoble gaze with eyes, and she is not

there. They will prove it to you by logic, by endless Hansard

Debatings, by bursts of Parliamentary eloquence. It is not

consolatory to behold! For properly, as many men as there are in

a Nation who _can_ withal see Heaven's invisible Justice, and

know it to be on Earth also omnipotent, so many men are there who

stand between a Nation and perdition. So many, and no more.

Heavy-laden England, how many hast thou in this hour? The

Supreme Power sends new and ever new, all _born_ at least with

hearts of flesh and not of stone;--and heavy Misery itself, once

heavy enough, will prove didactic!--

Chapter III

Manchester Insurrection

Blusterowski, Colacorde, and other Editorial prophets of the

Continental Democratic Movement, have in their leading-articles

shewn themselves disposed to vilipend the late Manchester

Insurrection, as evincing in the rioters an extreme backwardness

to battle; nay as betokening, in the English People itself,

perhaps a want of the proper animal-courage indispensable in

these ages. A million hungry operative men started up, in utmost

paroxysm of desperate protest against their lot; and, ask

Colacorde and company, How many shots were fired? Very few in

comparison! Certain hundreds of drilled soldiers sufficed to

suppress this million-headed hydra's and tread it down, without

the smallest appeasement or hope of such, into its subterranean

settlements again, there to reconsider itself. Compared

with our revolts in Lyons, in Warsaw and elsewhere, to say

nothing of incomparable Paris City past or present, what a

lamblike Insurrection!--

The present Editor is not here, with his readers, to vindicate

the character of Insurrections; nor does it matter to us whether

Blusterowski and the rest may think the English a courageous

people or not courageous. In passing, however, let us mention

that, to our view, this was not an unsuccessful Insurrection;

that as Insurrections go, we have not heard lately of any that

succeeded so well.

A million of hungry operative men, as Blusterowski says, rose

all up, came all out into the streets, and--stood there. What

other could they do? Their wrongs and griefs were bitter,

insupportable, their rage against the same was just: but who are

they that cause these wrongs, who that will honestly make effort

to redress them? Our enemies are we know not who or what; our

friends are we know not where! How shall we attack any one,

shoot or be shot by any one? O, if the accursed invisible

Nightmare, that is crushing out the life of us and ours, would

take a shape; approach us like the Hyrcanian tiger, the Behemoth

of Chaos, the Archfiend himself; in any shape that we could see,

and fasten on!--A man can have himself shot with cheerfulness;

but it needs first that he see clearly for what. Shew him the

divine face of justice, then the diabolic monster which is

eclipsing that: he will fly at the throat of such monster, never

so monstrous, and need no bidding to do it. Woolwich grapeshot

will sweep clear all streets, blast into invisibility so many

thousand men: but if your Woolwich grapeshot be but eclipsing

Divine justice, and the God's-radiance itself gleam recognisable

athwart such grapeshot,--then, yes then is the time come for

fighting and attacking. All artillery-parks have become weak,

and are about to dissipate: in the God's-thunder, their poor

thunder slackens, ceases; finding that it is, in all senses of

the term, a _brute_ one!--

That the Manchester Insurrection stood still, on the streets,

with an indisposition to fire and bloodshed, was wisdom for it

even as an Insurrection. Insurrection, never so necessary, is a

most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct

them, are surely getting into the fatallest courses,--proving

themselves Sons of Nox and Chaos, of blind Cowardice, not of

seeing Valour! How can there be any remedy in insurrection? It

is a mere announcement of the disease,--visible now even to Sons

of Night. Insurrection usually 'gains' little; usually wastes

how much! One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the

rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each

other, by violence done; which is always sure to be injustice

done, for violence does even justice unjustly.

Who shall compute the waste and loss, the obstruction of every

sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by Peterloo

alone! Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut down,--the number

of the slain and maimed is very countable: but the treasury of

rage, burning hidden or visible in all hearts ever since, more or

less perverting the effort and aim of all hearts ever since, is

of unknown extent. "How ye came among us, in your cruel armed

blindness, ye unspeakable County Yeomanry, sabres flourishing,

hoofs prancing, and slashed us down at your brute pleasure;

deaf, blind to all _our_ claims and woes and wrongs; of quick

sight and sense to your own claims only! There lie poor sallow

workworn weavers, and complain no more now; women themselves are

slashed and sabred, howling terror fills the air; and ye ride

prosperous, very victorious,--ye unspeakable: give us sabres

too, and then come-on a little!" Such are Peterloos. In

all hearts that witnessed Peterloo, stands written, as in

fire-characters, or smoke-characters prompt to become fire again,

a legible balance-account of grim vengeance; very unjustly

balanced, much exaggerated, as is the way with such accounts;

but payable readily at sight, in full with compound interest!

Such things should be avoided as the very pestilence. For men's

hearts ought not to be set against one another; but set _with_

one another, and all against the Evil Thing only. Men's souls

ought to be left to see clearly; not jaundiced, blinded, twisted

all awry, by revenge, mutual abhorrence, and the like. An

Insurrection that can announce the disease, and then retire with

no such balance-account opened anywhere, has attained the highest

success possible for it.

And this was what these poor Manchester operatives, with all the

darkness that was in them and round them, did manage to perform.

They put their huge inarticulate question, "What do you mean to

do with us?" in a manner audible to every reflective soul in this

kingdom; exciting deep pity in all good men, deep anxiety in all

men whatever; and no conflagration or outburst of madness came

to cloud that feeling anywhere, but everywhere it operates

unclouded. All England heard the question: it is the first

practical form of our Sphinx-riddle. England will answer it;

or, on the whole, England will perish;--one does not yet expect

the latter result!

For the rest, that the Manchester Insurrection could yet discern

no radiance of Heaven on any side of its horizon; but feared

that all lights, of the O'Connor or other sorts, hitherto

kindled, were but deceptive fish-oil transparencies, or bog

will-o'-wisp lights, and no dayspring from on high: for this

also we will honour the poor Manchester Insurrection, and augur

well of it. A deep unspoken sense lies in these strong men,--

inconsiderable, almost stupid, as all they can articulate of it

is. Amid all violent stupidity of speech, a right noble instinct

of what is doable and what is not doable never forsakes them:

the strong inarticulate men and workers, whom _Fact_ patronises;

of whom, in all difficulty and work whatsoever, there is good

augury! This work too is to be done: Governors and Governing

Classes that _can_ articulate and utter, in any measure, what the

law of Fact and Justice is, may calculate that here is a Governed

Class who will listen.

And truly this first practical form of the Sphinx-question,

inarticulately and so audibly put there, is one of the most

impressive ever asked in the world. "Behold us here, so many

thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every

hour. We are right willing and able to work; and on the Planet

Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many.

We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead us,

--by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of Time?

Or if you declare that you cannot lead us? And expect that we

are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of

starvation? What is it you expect of us? What is it you mean to

do with us?" This question, I say, has been put in the hearing

of all Britain; and will be again put, and ever again, till some

answer be given it.

Unhappy Workers, unhappier Idlers, unhappy men and women of this

actual England! We are yet very far from an answer, and there

will be no existence for us without finding one. "A fair

day's-wages for a fair day's-work:" it is as just a demand as

Governed men ever made of Governing. It is the everlasting

right of man. Indisputable as Gospels, as arithmetical

multiplication-tables: it must and will have itself fulfilled;

--and yet, in these times of ours, with what enormous difficulty,

next-door to impossibility! For the times are really strange;

of a complexity intricate with all the new width of the

ever-widening world; times here of half-frantic velocity of

impetus, there of the deadest-looking stillness and paralysis;

times definable as shewing two qualities, Dilettantism and

Mammonism;--most intricate obstructed times! Nay, if there

were not a Heaven's radiance of justice, prophetic, clearly

of Heaven, discernible behind all these confused worldwide

entanglements, of Landlord interests, Manufacturing interests,

Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other interests,

expediencies, vested interests, established possessions,

inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms,--it would

seem to everyone a flat impossibility, which all wise men

might as well at once abandon. If you do not know eternal

justice from momentary Expediency, and understand in your

heart of hearts how justice, radiant, beneficent, as the

all-victorious Light-element, is also in essence, if need be,

an all-victorious _Fire_-element, and melts all manner of vested

interests, and the hardest iron cannon, as if they were soft wax,

and does ever in the long-run rule and reign, and allows nothing

else to rule and reign,--you also would talk of impossibility!

But it is only difficult, it is not impossible. Possible? It

is, with whatever difficulty, very clearly inevitable.

Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man;

alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on

it, was that ever realised? The day's-wages of John Milton's

day's-work, named _Paradise Lost_ and _Milton's Works,_ were Ten

Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death

on the gallows. Consider that: it is no rhetorical flourish;

it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,--emblematic, quietly

documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history

began. Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming; undertook a

Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean

Hydracoil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its

thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads; and he

did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have

heard of; and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good

many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in

comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from

it;--and his wages, as I understand, were burial under the

gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his head on the gable of

Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed cursing and

ridicule from all manner of men. His dust lies under the

Edgeware Road, near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour; and his

memory is--Nay, what matters what his memory is? His memory, at

bottom, is or yet shall be as that of a god: a terror and horror

to all quacks and cowards and insincere persons; an everlasting

encouragement, new memento, battleword, and pledge of victory to

all the brave. It is the natural course and history of the

Godlike, in every place, in every time. What god ever carried it

with the Tenpound Franchisers; in Open Vestry, or with any

Sanhedrim of considerable standing? When was a god found

agreeable to everybody? The regular way is to hang, kill,

crucify your gods, and execrate and trample them under your

stupid hoofs for a century or two; till you discover that they

are gods,--and then take to braying over them, still in a very

long-eared manner!--So speaks the sarcastic man; in his wild

way, very mournful truths.

Day's-wages for day's-work? continues he: The Progress of Human

Society consists even in this same. The better and better

apportioning of wages to work. Give me this, you have given me

all. Pay to every man accurately what he has worked for, what he

has earned and done and deserved,--to this man broad lands and

honours, to that man high gibbets and treadmills: what more have

I to ask? Heaven's Kingdom, which we daily pray for, _has_ come;

God's will is done on Earth even as it is in Heaven! This _is_

the radiance of celestial justice; in the light or in the fire

of which all impediments, vested interests, and iron cannon, are

more and more melting like wax, and disappearing from

the pathways of men. A thing ever struggling forward;

irrepressible, advancing inevitable; perfecting itself, all

days, more and more,--never to be _perfect_ till that general

Doomsday, the ultimate Consummation, and Last of earthly Days.

True, as to 'perfection' and so forth, answer we; true enough!

And yet withal we have to remark, that imperfect Human Society

holds itself together, and finds place under the Sun, in virtue

simply of some _approximation_ to perfection being actually made

and put in practice. We remark farther, that there are

supportable approximations, and then likewise insupportable.

With some, almost with any, supportable approximation men are

apt, perhaps too apt, to rest indolently patient, and say, It

will do. Thus these poor Manchester manual workers mean only, by

day's-wages for day's-work, certain coins of money adequate to

keep them living;--in return for their work, such modicum of

food, clothes and fuel as will enable them to continue their work

itself! They as yet clamour for no more; the rest, still

inarticulate, cannot yet shape itself into a demand at all, and

only lies in them as a dumb wish; perhaps only, still more

inarticulate, as a dumb, altogether unconscious want. _This_ is

the supportable approximation they would rest patient with, That

by their work they might be kept alive to work more!--_This_ once

grown unattainable, I think, your approximation may consider

itself to have reached the insupportable stage; and may prepare,

with whatever difficulty, reluctance and astonishment, for one of

two things, for changing or perishing! With the millions no

longer able to live, how can the units keep living? It is too

clear the Nation itself is on the way to suicidal death.

Shall we say then, The world has retrograded in its talent of

apportioning wages to work, in late days? The world had always a

talent of that sort, better or worse. Time was when the mere

_hand_worker needed not announce his claim to the world by

Manchester Insurrections!--The world, with its Wealth of Nations,

Supply-and-demand and such like, has of late days been terribly

inattentive to that question of work and wages. We will not say,

the poor world has retrograded even here: we will say rather,

the world has been rushing on with such fiery animation to get

work and ever more work done, it has had no time to think of

dividing the wages; and has merely left them to be scrambled for

by the Law of the Stronger, law of Supply-and-demand, law of

Laissez-faire, and other idle Laws and Un-laws,--saying, in its

dire haste to get the work done, That is well enough!

And now the world will have to pause a little, and take up that

other side of the problem, and in right earnest strive for some

solution of that. For it has become pressing. What is the use

of your spun shirts? They hang there by the million unsaleable;

and here, by the million, are diligent bare backs that can get no

hold of them. Shirts are useful for covering human backs;

useless otherwise, an unbearable mockery otherwise. You have

fallen terribly behind with that side of the problem! Manchester

Insurrections, French Revolutions, and thousandfold phenomena

great and small, announce loudly that you must bring it forward a

little again. Never till now, in the history of an Earth which

to this hour nowhere refuses to grow corn if you will plough it,

to yield shirts if you will spin and weave in it, did the mere

manual two-handed worker (however it might fare with other

workers) cry in vain for such "wages" as _he_ means by "fair

wages," namely food and warmth! The Godlike could not and cannot

be paid; but the Earthly always could. Gurth, a mere swineherd,

born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the wood, and did

get some parings of the pork. Why, the four-footed worker has

already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for! How

often must I remind you? There is not a horse in England, able

and willing to work, but _has_ due food and lodging; and goes

about sleek-coated, satisfied in heart. And you say, It is

impossible. Brothers, I answer, if for you it be impossible,

what is to become of you? It is impossible for us to believe it

to be impossible. The human brain, looking at these sleek

English horses, refuses to believe in such impossibility for

English men. Do you depart quickly; clear the ways soon, lest

worse befall. We for our share do purpose, with full view of the

enormous difficulty, with total disbelief in the impossibility,

to endeavour while life is in us, and to die endeavouring, we and

our sons, till we attain it or have all died and ended.

Such a Platitude of a World, in which all working horses could be

well fed, and innumerable working men should die starved, were it

not best to end it; to have done with it, and restore it once

for all to the _Jotuns,_ Mud-giants, Frost-giants and Chaotic

Brute-gods of the Beginning? For the old Anarchic Brute-gods it

may be well enough, but it is a Platitude which Men should be

above countenancing by their presence in it. We pray you, let

the word _impossible_ disappear from your vocabulary in this

matter. It is of awful omen; to all of us, and to yourselves

first of all.

Chapter IV

Morrison's Pill

What is to be done, what would you have us do? asks many a one,

with a tone of impatience, almost of reproach; and then, if you

mention some one thing, some two things, twenty things that might

be done, turns round with a satirical tehee, and, "These are your

remedies!" The state of mind indicated by such question, and

such rejoinder, is worth reflecting on.

It seems to be taken for granted, by these interrogative

philosophers, that there is some 'thing,' or handful of 'things,'

which could be done; some Act of Parliament, 'remedial measure

or the like, which could be passed, whereby the social malady

were fairly fronted, conquered, put an end to; so that, with

your remedial measure in your pocket, you could then go on

triumphant, and be troubled no farther. "You tell us the evil,"

cry such persons, as if justly aggrieved, "and do not tell us how

it is to be cured!"

How it is to be cured? Brothers, I am sorry I have got

no Morrison's Pill for curing the maladies of Society. It

were infinitely handier if we had a Morrison's Pill, Act of

Parliament, or remedial measure, which men could swallow, one

good time, and then go on in their old courses, cleared from all

miseries and mischiefs! Unluckily we have none such; unluckily

the Heavens themselves, in their rich pharmacopoeia, contain none

such. There will no 'thing' be done that will cure you. There

will a radical universal alteration of your regimen and way of

life take place; there will a most agonising divorce between you

and your chimeras, luxuries and falsities, take place; a most

toilsome, all but 'impossible' return to Nature, and her

veracities, and her integrities, take place: that so the inner

fountains of life may again begin, like eternal Light-fountains,

to irradiate and purify your bloated, swollen, foul existence,

drawing nigh, as at present, to nameless death! Either death or

else all this will take place. Judge if, with such diagnosis,

any Morrison's Pill is like to be discoverable!

But the Life-fountain within you once again set flowing,

what innumerable 'things,' whole sets and classes and continents

of 'things,' year after year, and decade after decade, and

century after century, will then be doable and done! Not

Emigration, Education, Corn-Law Abrogation, Sanitary Regulation,

Land Property-Tax; not these alone, nor a thousand times as much

as these. Good Heavens, there will then be light in the inner

heart of here and there a man, to discern what is just, what is

commanded by the Most High God, what _must_ be done, were it

never so 'impossible.' Vain jargon in favour of the palpably

unjust will then abridge itself within limits. Vain jargon, on

Hustings, in Parliaments or wherever else, when here and there a

man has vision for the essential God's-Truth of the things

jargoned of, will become very vain indeed. The silence of here

and there such a man, how eloquent in answer to such jargon!

Such jargon, frightened at its own gaunt echo, will unspeakably

abate; nay, for a while, may almost in a manner disappear,--the

wise answering it in silence, and even the simple taking cue from

them to hoot it down wherever heard. It will be a blessed time;

and many 'things' will become doable,--and when the brains are

out, an absurdity will die! Not easily again shall a Corn-Law

argue ten years for itself; and still talk and argue, when

impartial persons have to say with a sigh that, for so long back,

they have heard no 'argument' advanced for it but such as might

make the angels and almost the very jackasses weep!--

Wholly a blessed time: when jargon might abate, and here and

there some genuine speech begin. When to the noble opened heart,

as to such heart they alone do, all noble things began to grow

visible; and the difference between just and unjust, between

true and false, between work and sham-work, between speech and

jargon, was once more, what to our happier Fathers it used to be,

_infinite,_--as between a Heavenly thing and an Infernal: the

one a thing which you were _not_ to do, which you were wise not

to attempt doing; which it were better for you to have a

millstone tied round your neck, and be cast into the sea, than

concern yourself with doing!--Brothers, it will not be a

Morrison's Pill, or remedial measure, that will bring all this

about for us.

And yet, very literally, till, in some shape or other, it be

brought about, we remain cureless; till it begin to be brought

about, the cure does not begin. For Nature and Fact, not Redtape

and Semblance, are to this hour the basis of man's life; and on

those, through never such strata of these, man and his life and

all his interests do, sooner or later, infallibly come to rest,--

and to be supported or be swallowed according as they agree with

those. The question is asked of them, not, How do you agree with

Downing-streets and accredited Semblance? but, How do you agree

with God's Universe and the actual Reality of things? This

Universe _has_ its Laws. If we walk according to the Law, the

Law-Maker will befriend us; if not, not. Alas, by no Reform

Bill, Ballot-box, Five-point Charter, by no boxes or bills or

charters, can you perform this alchemy: 'Given a world of Knaves

to produce an Honesty from their united action!' It is a

distillation, once for all, not possible. You pass it through

alembic after alembic, it comes out still a Dishonesty, with a

new dress on it, a new colour to it. 'While we ourselves

continue valets, how can any hero come to govern us?' We are

governed, very infallibly, by the 'sham-hero,'--whose name is

Quack, whose work and governance is Plausibility, and also is

Falsity and Fatuity; to which Nature says, and must say when it

comes to _her_ to speak, eternally No! Nations cease to be

befriended of the Law-Maker, when they walk _not_ according to

the Law. The Sphinx-question remains unsolved by them, becomes

ever more insoluble.

If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis,

What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present,

almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if

possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays,

egoisms, purblind dilettantisms; and become, were it on the

infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt

descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a

_soul_ there; till then there can be nothing done! O brother,

we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us,

exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of

stone for living hearts of flesh. Then shall we discern, not one

thing, but, in clearer or dimmer sequence, a whole endless host

of things that can be done. _Do_ the first of these; do it;

the second will already have become clearer, doabler; the

second, third and three-thousandth will then have begun to be

possible for us. Not any universal Morrison's Pill shall we

then, either as swallowers or as venders, ask after at all; but

a far different sort of remedies: Quacks shall no more have

dominion over us, but true Heroes and Healers!

Will not that be a thing worthy of 'doing;' to deliver ourselves

from quacks, sham-heroes; to deliver the whole world more and

more from such? They are the one bane of the world. Once clear

the world of them, it ceases to be a Devil's-world, in all fibres

of it wretched, accursed; and begins to be a God's-world,

blessed, and working hourly towards blessedness. Thou for one

wilt not again vote for any quack, do honour to any edge-gilt

vacuity in man's shape: cant shall be known to thee by the sound

of it;--thou wilt fly from cant with a shudder never felt before;

as from the opened litany of Sorcerers' Sabbaths, the true Devil-

worship of this age, more horrible than any other blasphemy,

profanity or genuine blackguardism elsewhere audible among men.

It is alarming to witness,--in its present completed state! And

Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and

under of the selfsame substance; convertible personages: turn

up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he

himself can become a quack; there is in him the due prurient

insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for

truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds, are made.

Alas, it is not to the hero, it is to the sham-hero that, of

right and necessity, the valet-world belongs. 'What is to be

done?' The reader sees whether it is like to be the seeking and

swallowing of some 'remedial measure!'

Chapter V

Aristocracy of Talent

When an individual is miserable, what does it most of all behove

him to do? To complain of this man or of that, of this thing or

of that? To fill the world and the street with lamentation,

objurgation? Not so at all; the reverse of so. All moralists

advise him not to complain of any person or of any thing, but of

himself only. He is to know of a truth that being miserable he

has been unwise, he. Had he faithfully followed Nature and her

Laws, Nature, ever true to her Laws, would have yielded fruit and

increase and felicity to him: but he has followed other than

Nature's Laws; and now Nature, her patience with him being

ended, leaves him desolate; answers with very emphatic

significance to him: No. Not by this road, my son; by another

road shalt thou attain well-being: this, thou perceivest is the

road to ill-being; quit this!--So do all moralists advise: that

the man penitently say to himself first of all, Behold I was not

wise enough; I quitted the laws of Fact, which are also called

the Laws of God, and mistook for them the laws of Sham and

Semblance, which are called the Devil's Laws; therefore

am I here!

Neither with Nations that become miserable is it fundamentally

otherwise. The ancient guides of Nations, Prophets, Priests, or

whatever their name, were well aware of this; and, down to a

late epoch, impressively taught and inculcated it. The modern

guides of Nations, who also go under a great variety of names,

journalists, Political Economists, Politicians, Pamphleteers,

have entirely forgotten this, and are ready to deny this. But it

nevertheless remains eternally undeniable: nor is there any

doubt but we shall all be taught it yet, and made again to

confess it: we shall all be striped and scourged till we do

learn it; and shall at last either get to know it, or be striped

to death in the process. For it is undeniable! When a Nation is

unhappy, the old Prophet was right and not wrong in saying to it:

Ye have forgotten God, ye have quitted the ways of God, or ye

would not have been unhappy. It is not according to the laws of

Fact that ye have lived and guided yourselves, but according to

the laws of Delusion, Imposture, and wilful and unwilful

_Mistake_ of Fact; behold therefore the Unveracity is worn out;

Nature's long-suffering with you is exhausted; and ye are here!

Surely there is nothing very inconceivable in this, even to the

Journalist, to the Political Economist, Modern Pamphleteer, or

any two-legged animal without feathers! If a country finds

itself wretched, sure enough that country has been _mis_guided:

it is with the wretched Twenty-seven Millions, fallen wretched,

as with the Unit fallen wretched: they as he have quitted the

course prescribed by Nature and the Supreme Powers, and so are

fallen into scarcity, disaster, infelicity; and pausing to

consider themselves, have to lament and say, Alas, we were not

wise enough. We took transient superficial Semblance for

everlasting central Substance; we have departed far away from

the _Laws_ of this Universe, and behold now lawless Chaos and

inane Chimera is ready to devour us!--'Nature in late centuries,'

says Sauerteig, 'was universally supposed to be dead; an old

eight-day clock, made many thousand years ago, and still ticking,

but dead as brass,--which the Maker, at most, sat looking at, in

a distant, singular, and indeed incredible manner: but now I am

happy to observe, she is everywhere asserting herself to be not

dead and brass at all, but alive and miraculous, celestial-

infernal, with an emphasis that will again penetrate the thickest

head of this Planet by and by!--

Indisputable enough to all mortals now, the guidance of this

country has not been sufficiently wise: men too foolish have

been set to the guiding and governing of it, and have guided it

hither; we must find wiser,--_wiser,_ or else we perish! To

this length of insight all England has now advanced; but as yet

no farther. All England stands wringing its hands, asking

itself, nigh desperate, What farther? Reform Bill proves to be a

failure; Benthamee Radicalism, the gospel of 'Enlightened

Selfishness,' dies out, or dwindles into Five-point Chartism,

amid the tears and hootings of men: what next are we to hope or

try? Five-point Charter, Freetrade; Church-extension, Sliding-

scale; what, in Heaven's name, are we next to attempt, that we

sink not in inane Chimera, and be devoured of Chaos?--The case is

pressing, and one of the most complicated in the world. A God's-

message never came to thicker-skinned people; never had a God's-

message to pierce through thicker integuments, into heavier ears.

It is Fact, speaking once more, in miraculous thunder-voice, from

out of the centre of the world;--how unknown its language to the

deaf and foolish many; how distinct, undeniable, terrible and

yet beneficent, to the hearing few: Behold, ye shall grow wiser,

or ye shall die! Truer to Nature's Fact, or inane Chimera will

swallow you; in whirlwinds of fire, you and your Mammonisms,

Dilettantisms, your Midas-eared philosophies, double-barreled

Aristocracies, shall disappear!--Such is the God's-message to

_us,_ once more; in these modern days.

We must have more Wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the

Wisest, we must have an Aristocracy of Talent! cry many. True,

most true; but how to get it? The following extract from our

young friend of the _Houndsditch Indicator_ is worth perusing:

'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry everywhere,

articulate or inarticulate, for an "Aristocracy of Talent," a

Governing Class namely which did govern, not merely which took

the wages of governing, and could not with all our industry be

kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and playing the very deuce

with us,--it may not be altogether useless to remind some of the

greener-headed sort what a dreadfully difficult affair the

getting of such an Aristocracy is! Do you expect, my friends,

that your indispensable Aristocracy of Talent is to be enlisted

straightway, by some sort of recruitment aforethought, out of the

general population; arranged in supreme regimental order; and

set to rule over us? That it will be got sifted, like wheat out

of chaff, from the Twenty-seven Million British subjects; that

any Ballot-box, Reform Bill, or other Political Machine, with

Force of Public Opinion never so active on it, is likely to

perform said process of sifting? Would to Heaven that we had a

sieve; that we could so much as fancy any kind of sieve, wind-

fanners, or ne-plus-ultra of machinery, devisable by man, that

would do it!

'Done nevertheless, sure enough, it must be; it shall and will

be. We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction; every

hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure, done. The

doing of it is not doubtful; only the method and the costs! Nay

I will even mention to you an infallible sifting-process whereby

he that has ability will be sifted out to rule among us, and that

same blessed Aristocracy of Talent be verily, in an approximate

degree, vouchsafed us by and by: an infallible sifting-process;

to which, however, no soul can help his neighbour, but each must,

with devout prayer to Heaven, endeavour to help himself. It is,

O friends, that all of us, that many of us, should acquire the

true eye for talent, which is dreadfully wanting at present! The

true _eye_ for talent presupposes the true reverence for it,--O

Heavens, presupposes so many things!

'For example, you Bobus Higgins, Sausage-maker on the great

scale, who are raising such a clamour for this Aristocracy of

Talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours,

chiefly in very fact pay reverence to? Is it to talent,

intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus? The

manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever

reverence him; did you so much as know that he was a manly man

at all, till his coat grew better? Talent! I understand you to

be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity

or other success of talent; but the talent itself is a thing you

never saw with eyes. Nay what is it in yourself that you

are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in surveying

meditatively in thoughtful moments? Speak now, is it the bare

Bobus stript of his very name and shirt, and turned loose upon

society, that you admire and thank Heaven for; or Bobus with

his cash-accounts and larders dropping fatness, with his

respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony-chaise, admirable in

some measure to certain of the flunkey species? Your own degree

of worth and talent, is it of _infinite_ value to you; or only

of finite,--measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of

praise or pudding, it has brought you to? Bobus, you are in a

vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages; and will

never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-

talent has already _got_ itself voted for!'--We here cut short

the _Indicator;_ all readers perceiving whither he now tends.

'More Wisdom' indeed: but where to find more Wisdom? We have

already a Collective Wisdom, after its kind,--though 'class-

legislation,' and another thing or two, affect it somewhat! On

the whole, as they say, Like people like priest; so we may say,

Like people like king. The man gets himself appointed and

elected who is ablest--to be appointed and elected. What can the

incorruptiblest _Bobuses_ elect, if it be not some _Bobissimus,_

should they find such?

Or, again, perhaps there is not, in the whole Nation, Wisdom

enough, 'collect' it as we may, to make an adequate Collective!

That too is a case which may befall: a ruined man staggers down

to ruin because there was not wisdom enough in him; so, clearly

also, may Twenty-seven Million collective men!--But indeed one of

the infalliblest fruits of Unwisdom in a Nation is that it cannot

get the use of what Wisdom is actually in it: that it is not

governed by the wisest it has, who alone have a divine right to

govern in all Nations; but by the sham-wisest, or even by the

openly not-so-wise if they are handiest otherwise! This is the

infalliblest result of Unwisdom; and also the balefullest,

immeasurablest,--not so much what we can call a poison-_fruit,_

as a universal death-disease, and poisoning of the whole tree.

For hereby are fostered, fed into gigantic bulk, all manner of

Unwisdoms, poison-fruits; till, as we say, the life-tree

everywhere is made a upas-tree, deadly Unwisdom overshadowing all

things; and there is done what lies in human skill to stifle all

Wisdom everywhere in the birth, to smite our poor world barren of

Wisdom,--and make your utmost Collective Wisdom, were it

collected and elected by Rhadamanthus, AEacus and Minos, not to

speak of drunken Tenpound Franchisers with their ballot-boxes, an

inadequate Collective! The Wisdom is not now there: how will

you 'collect' it? As well wash Thames mud, by improved methods,

to find more gold in it.

Truly, the first condition is indispensable, That Wisdom be

there: but the second is like unto it, is properly one with it:

these two conditions act and react through every fibre of them,

and go inseparably together. If you have much Wisdom in your

Nation, you will get it faithfully collected; for the wise love

Wisdom, and will search for it as for life and salvation. If you

have little Wisdom, you will get even that little ill-collected,

trampled under foot, reduced as near as possible to annihilation;

for fools do not love Wisdom; they are foolish, first of all,

because they have never loved Wisdom,--but have loved their own

appetites, ambitions, their coroneted coaches, tankards of heavy-

wet. Thus is your candle lighted at both ends, and the progress

towards consummation is swift. Thus is fulfilled that saying in

the Gospel: To him that hath shall be given; and from him that

hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Very

literally, in a very fatal manner, that saying is here fulfilled.

Our 'Aristocracy of Talent' seems at a considerable distance yet;

does it not, O Bobus?

Chapter VI

Hero-Worship

To the present Editor, not less than to Bobus, a Government of

the Wisest, what Bobus calls an Aristocracy of Talent, seems the

one healing remedy: but he is not so sanguine as Bobus with

respect to the means of realizing it. He thinks that we have at

once missed realising it, and come to need it so pressingly,

by departing far from the inner eternal Laws and taking up

with the temporary outer semblances of Laws. He thinks that

'enlightened Egoism,' never so luminous, is not the rule by

which man's life can be led. That 'Laissez-faire,' 'Supply-and-

demand,' 'Cash-payment for the sole nexus,' and so forth, were

not, are not, and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a

Society of Men. That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing,

cannot long live together on any such Law of Union. Alas, he

thinks that man has a soul in him, _different_ from the stomach

in any sense of this word; that if said soul be asphyxied, and

lie quietly forgotten, the man and his affairs are in a bad way.

He thinks that said soul will have to be resuscitated from its

asphyxia; that if it prove irresuscitable, the man is not long

for this world. In brief, that Midas-eared Mammonism, double-

barreled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries,

are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this his

Universe to go. That, once for all, these are not the Law:

and then farther that we shall have to return to what is

the Law,--not by smooth flowery paths, it is like, and with

'tremendous cheers' in our throat; but over steep untrodden

places, through stormclad chasms, waste oceans, and the bosom of

tornadoes; thank Heaven, if not through very Chaos and the

Abyss! The resuscitating of a soul that has gone to asphyxia is

no momentary or pleasant process, but a long and terrible one.

To the present Editor 'Hero-worship,' as he has elsewhere named

it, means much more than an elected Parliament, or stated

Aristocracy, of the Wisest; for, in his dialect, it is the

summary, ultimate essence, and supreme practical perfection of

all manner of 'worship,' and true worships and noblenesses

whatsoever. Such blessed Parliament and, were it once in

perfection, blessed Aristocracy of the Wisest, god-honoured and

man-honoured, he does look for, more and more perfected,--as the

topmost blessed practical apex of a whole world reformed from

sham-worship, informed anew with worship, with truth and

blessedness! He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in

every different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social

business among men; that the doing of it well, or the doing of

it ill, measures accurately what degree of well-being or of ill-

being there is in the world's affairs. He thinks that we, on the

whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any Nation in this world

ever did it before: that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a

Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser

and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the Mahomet a Prophet

of God. It is this Editor's clear opinion, accordingly, that we

must learn to do our Hero-worship better; that to do it better

and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its

asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,--Heaven's blessed

life, not Mammon's galvanic accursed one. To resuscitate the

Asphyxied, apparently now moribund, and in the last agony if not

resuscitated: such and no other seems the consummation.

'Hero-worship,' if you will,--yes, friends; but, first of all,

by being ourselves of heroic mind. A whole world of Heroes; a

world not of Flunkeys, where no Hero-King _can_ reign: that is

what we aim at! We, for our share, will put away all Flunkeyism,

Baseness, Unveracity from us; we shall then hope to have

Noblenesses and Veracities set over us; never till then. Let

Bobus and Company sneer, "That is your Reform!" Yes, Bobus, that

is our Reform; and except in that, and what will follow out of

that, we have no hope at all. Reform, like Charity, O Bobus,

must begin at home. Once well at home, how will it radiate

outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak

and work; kindling ever new light, by incalculable contagion,

spreading in geometric ratio, far and wide,--doing good only,

wheresoever it spreads, and not evil.

By Reform Bills, Anti-Corn-Law Bills, and thousand other bills

and methods, we will demand of our Governors, with emphasis, and

for the first time not without effect, that they cease to be

quacks, or else depart; that they set no quackeries and

blockheadisms anywhere to rule over us, that they utter or act no

cant to us,--that it will be better if they do not. For we shall

now know quacks when we see them; cant, when we hear it, shall

be horrible to us! We will say, with the poor Frenchman at the

Bar of the Convention, though in wiser style than he, and 'for

the space' not 'of an hour' but of a lifetime: _"Je demande

l'arrestation des coquins et des laches."_ 'Arrestment of the

knaves and dastards:' ah, we know what a work that is; how long

it will be before _they_ are all or mostly got 'arrested:'--but

here is one; arrest him, in God's name; it is one fewer! We

will, in all practicable ways, by word and silence, by act

and refusal to act, energetically demand arrestment,--_"le

demande cette arrestation-la!"_--and by degrees infallibly

attain it. Infallibly: for light spreads; all human

souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled

spreads, till all is luminous;--till the cry, "_Arrest_ your

knaves and dastards rises imperative from millions of hearts, and

rings and reigns from sea to sea. Nay, how many of them may we

not 'arrest' with our own hands, even now; we! Do not

countenance them, thou there: turn away from their lackered

sumptuosities, their belauded sophistries, their serpent

graciosities, their spoken and acted cant, with a sacred horror,

with an _Apage Satanas._--Bobus and Company, and all men will

gradually join us. We demand arrestment of the knaves and

dastards, and begin by arresting our own poor selves out of that

fraternity. There is no other reform conceivable. Thou and I,

my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us,

_one_ non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes

to begin with:--Courage! even that is a whole world of heroes to

end with, or what we poor Two can do in furtherance thereof!

Yes, friends: Hero-kings and a whole world not unheroic, there

lies the port and happy haven, towards which, through all these

stormtost seas, French Revolutions, Chartisms, Manchester

Insurrections, that make the heart sick in these bad days, the

Supreme Powers are driving us. On the whole, blessed be the

Supreme Powers, stern as they are! Towards that haven will we, O

friends; let all true men, with what of faculty is in them, bend

valiantly, incessantly, with thousandfold endeavour, thither,

thither! There, or else in the Ocean-abysses, it is very clear

to me, we shall arrive.

Well; here truly is no answer to the Sphinx-question; not the

answer a disconsolate Public, inquiring at the College of Health,

was in hopes of! A total change of regimen, change of constitution

and existence from the very centre of it; a new body to be got,

with resuscitated soul,--not without convulsive travail-throes;

as all birth and new-birth presupposes travail! This is sad news

to a disconsolate discerning Public, hoping to have got off by

some Morrison's Pill, some Saint-John's corrosive mixtures and

perhaps a little blistery friction on the back!--We were prepared

to part with our Corn-Law, with various Laws and Unlaws: but

this, what is this?

Nor has the Editor forgotten how it fares with your ill-boding

Cassandras in Sieges of Troy. Imminent perdition is not usually

driven away by words of warning. Didactic Destiny has other

methods in store; or these would fail always. Such words

should, nevertheless, be uttered, when they dwell truly in the

soul of any man. Words are hard, are importunate; but how much

harder the importunate events they foreshadow! Here and there a

human soul may listen to the words,--who knows how many human

souls? whereby the importunate events, if not diverted and

prevented, will be rendered _less_ hard. The present Editor's

purpose is to himself full of hope.

For though fierce travails, though wide seas and roaring gulfs

lie before us, is it not something if a Loadstar, in the eternal

sky, do once more disclose itself; an everlasting light, shining

through all cloud-tempests and roaring billows, ever as we emerge

from the trough of the sea: the blessed beacon, far off on the

edge of far horizons, towards which we are to steer incessantly

for life? Is it not something; O Heavens, is it not all? There

lies the Heroic Promised Land; under that Heaven's-light, my

brethren, bloom the Happy Isles,--there, O there! Thither

will we;

There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew.*

-------------

* Tennyson's _Poems_ (Ulysses)

-----------

There dwell all Heroes, and will dwell: thither, all ye heroic-

minded!--The Heaven's Loadstar once clearly in our eye, how will

each true man stand truly to _his_ work in the ship; how, with

undying hope, will all things be fronted, all be conquered. Nay,

with the ship's prow once turned in that direction, is not all,

as it were, already well? Sick wasting misery has become noble

manful effort with a goal in our eye. 'The choking Nightmare

chokes us no longer; for we _stir_ under it; the Nightmare has

already fled.'--

Certainly, could the present Editor instruct men how to know

Wisdom, Heroism, when they see it, that they might do reverence

to it only, and loyally make it ruler over them,--yes, he were

the living epitome of all Editors, Teachers, Prophets, that

now teach and prophesy; he were an _Apollo_-Morrison, a

Trismegistus! and _effective_ Cassandra! Let no Able Editor hope

such things. It is to be expected the present laws of copyright,

rate of reward per sheet, and other considerations, will save him

from that peril. Let no Editor hope such things: no;--and yet

let all Editors aim towards such things, and even towards such

alone! One knows not what the meaning of editing and writing is,

if even this be not it.

Enough, to the present Editor it has seemed possible some

glimmering of light, for here and there a human soul, might lie

in these confused Paper-Masses now intrusted to him; wherefore

he determines to edit the same. Out of old Books, new Writings,

and much Meditation not of yesterday, he will endeavour to select

a thing or two; and from the Past, in a circuitous way,

illustrate the Present and the Future. The Past is a dim

indubitable fact: the Future too is one, only dimmer; nay

properly it is the same fact in new dress and development. For

the Present holds in it both the whole Past and the whole

Future;--as the LIFE-TREE IGDRASIL, wide-waving, many-toned, has

its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead

dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars;

and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree!

Book II--The Ancient Monk

Chapter I

Jocelin of Brakelond

We will, in this Second Portion of our Work, strive to penetrate

a little, by means of certain confused Papers, printed and other,

into a somewhat remote Century; and to look face to face on it,

in hope of perhaps illustrating our own poor Century thereby. It

seems a circuitous way; but it may prove a way nevertheless.

For man has ever been a striving, struggling, and, in spite of

wide-spread calumnies to the contrary, a veracious creature: the

Centuries too are all lineal children of one another; and often,

in the portrait of early grandfathers, this and the other

enigmatic feature of the newest grandson shall disclose itself,

to mutual elucidation. This Editor will venture on such a thing.

Besides, in Editors' Books, and indeed everywhere else in the

world of Today, a certain latitude of movement grows more and

more becoming for the practical man. Salvation lies not in tight

lacing, in these times;--how far from that, in any province

whatsoever! Readers and men generally are getting into strange

habits of asking all persons and things, from poor Editors' Books

up to Church Bishops and State Potentates, not, By what

designation are thou called; in what wig and black triangle dost

thou walk abroad? Heavens, I know thy designation and black

triangle well enough! But, in God's name, what _art_ thou? Not

Nothing, sayest thou! Then if not, How much and what? This is

the thing I would know; and even _must_ soon know, such a pass

am I come to!--What weather-symptoms,--not for the poor Editor of

Books alone! The Editor of Books may understand withal that if,

as is said, 'many kinds are permissible,' there is one kind not

permissible, 'the kind that has nothing in it, _le genre

ennuyeux;'_ and go on his way accordingly.

A certain Jocelinus de Brakelonda, a natural-born Englishman, has

left us an extremely foreign Book,* which the labours of the

Camden Society have brought to light in these days. Jocelin's

Book, the 'Chronicle,' or private Boswellean Notebook, of

Jocelin, a certain old St. Edmundsbury Monk and Boswell, now

seven centuries old, how remote is it from us; exotic,

extraneous; in all ways, coming from far abroad! The language

of it is not foreign only but dead: Monk-Latin lies across not

the British Channel, but the ninefold Stygian Marshes, Stream of

Lethe, and one knows not where! Roman Latin itself, still

alive for us in the Elysian Fields of Memory, is domestic

in comparison. And then the ideas, life-furniture, whole

workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin; covered deeper than

Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven

hundred years!

----------

* _Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, de rebus gestis Samsonis

Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi: nunc primum typis mandata,

curante Johanne Gage Rokewood._ (Camden Society, London, 1840)

----------

Jocelin of Brakelond cannot be called a conspicuous literary

character; indeed few mortals that have left so visible a work,

or footmark, behind them can be more obscure. One other of those

vanished Existences, whose work has not yet vanished;--almost a

pathetic phenomenon, were not the whole world full of such! The

builders of Stonehenge, for example:--or alas, what say we,

Stonehenge and builders? The writers of the _Universal Review_

and _Homer's Iliad;_ the paviers of London streets;--sooner

or later, the entire Posterity of Adam! It is a pathetic

phenomenon; but an irremediable, nay, if well meditated, a

consoling one.

By his dialect of Monk-Latin, and indeed by his name, this

Jocelin seems to have been a Norman Englishman; the surname de

Brakelonda indicates a native of St. Edmundsbury itself,

_Brakelond_ being the known old name of a street or quarter in

that venerable Town. Then farther, sure enough, our Jocelin was

a Monk of St. Edmundsbury Convent; held some _'obedientia,'_

subaltern officiality there, or rather, in succession several;

was, for one thing, 'chaplain to my Lord Abbot, living beside him

night and day for the space of six years;'--which last, indeed,

is the grand fact of Jocelin's existence, and properly the origin

of this present Book, and of the chief meaning it has for us now.

He was, as we have hinted, a kind of born _Boswell,_ though an

infinitesimally small one; neither did he altogether want his

_Johnson_ even there and then. Johnsons are rare; yet, as has

been asserted, Boswels perhaps still rarer,--the more is the pity

on both sides! This Jocelin, as we can discern well, was an

ingenious and ingenuous, a cheery-hearted, innocent, yet withal

shrewd, noticing, quick-wilted man; and from under his monk's

cowl has looked out on that narrow section of the world in a

really _human_ manner; not in any _simial,_ canine, ovine, or

otherwise inhuman manner,--afflictive to all that have humanity!

The man is of patient, peaceable, loving, clear-smiling nature;

open for this and that. A wise simplicity is in him; much

natural sense; a _veracity_ that goes deeper than words.

Veracity: it is the basis of all; and, some say, means genius

itself; the prime essence of all genius whatsoever. Our

Jocelin, for the rest, has read his classical manuscripts, his

Virgilius, his Flaccus, Ovidius Naso; of course still more, his

Homilies and Breviaries, and if not the Bible, considerable

extracts of the Bible. Then also he has a pleasant wit; and

loves a timely joke, though in mild subdued manner: very amiable

to see. A learned grown man, yet with the heart of a good

child; whose whole life indeed has been that of a child,--St.

Edmundsbury Monastery a larger kind of cradle for him, in which

his whole prescribed duty was to _sleep_ kindly, and love his

mother well! This is the Biography of Jocelin; 'a man of

excellent religion,' says one of his contemporary Brother Monks,

_'eximiae religionis, potens sermone et opere.'_

For one thing, he had learned to write a kind of Monk or Dog-

Latin, still readable to mankind; and, by good luck for us, had

bethought him of noting down thereby what things seemed notablest

to him. Hence gradually resulted a _Chronica Jocelini;_ new

Manuscript in the _Liber Albus_ of St. Edmundsbury. Which

Chronicle, once written in its childlike transparency, in its

innocent good-humour, not without touches of ready pleasant wit

and many kinds of worth, other men liked naturally to read:

whereby it failed not to be copied, to be multiplied, to be

inserted in the _Liber Albus;_ and so surviving Henry the

Eighth, Putney Cromwell, the Dissolution of Monasteries, and all

accidents of malice and neglect for six centuries or so, it got

into the _Harleian Collection,_--and has now therefrom, by Mr.

Rokewood of the Camden Society, been deciphered into clear print;

and lies before us, a dainty thin quarto, to interest for a few

minutes whomsoever it can.

Here too it will behove a just Historian gratefully to say that

Mr. Rokewood, Jocelin's Editor, has done his editorial function

well. Not only has he deciphered his crabbed Manuscript into

clear print; but he has attended, what his fellow editors are

not always in the habit of doing, to the important truth that the

Manuscript so deciphered ought to have a meaning for the reader.

Standing faithfully by his text, and printing its very errors in

spelling, in grammar or otherwise, he has taken care by some note

to indicate that they are errors, and what the correction of them

ought to be. Jocelin's Monk-Latin is generally transparent, as

shallow limpid water. But at any stop that may occur, of which

there are a few, and only a very few, we have the comfortable

assurance that a meaning does lie in the passage, and may by

industry be got at; that a faithful editor's industry had

already got at it before passing on. A compendious useful

Glossary is given; nearly adequate to help the uninitiated

through: sometimes one wishes it had been a trifle larger;

but, with a Spelman and Ducange at your elbow, how easy to have

made it far too large! Notes are added, generally brief;

sufficiently explanatory of most points. Lastly, a copious

correct Index; which no such Book should want, and which

unluckily very few possess. And so, in a word, the _Chronicle of

Jocelin_ is, as it professes to be, unwrapped from its thick

cerements, and fairly brought forth into the common daylight, so

that he who runs, and has a smattering of grammar, may read.

We have heard so much of Monks; everywhere, in real and

fictitious History, from Muratori Annals to Radcliffe Romances,

these singular two-legged animals, with their rosaries and

breviaries, with their shaven crowns, hair-cilices, and vows of

poverty, masquerade so strangely through our fancy; and they are

in fact so very strange an extinct species of the human family,--

a veritable Monk of Bury St. Edmunds is worth attending to, if by

chance made visible and audible. Here he is; and in his hand a

magical speculum, much gone to rust indeed, yet in fragments

still clear; wherein the marvelous image of his existence does

still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an intermittent

light! Will not the reader peep with us into this singular

_camera lucida,_ where an extinct species, though fitfully, can

still be seen alive? Extinct species, we say; for the live

specimens which still go about under that character are too

evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History: the

Gospel of Richard Arkwright once promulgated, no Monk of the old

sort is any longer possible in this world. But fancy a deep-

buried Mastodon, some fossil Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were

to begin to speak from amid its rock-swathings, never so

indistinctly! The most extinct fossil species of Men or Monks

can do, and does, this miracle,--thanks to the Letters of the

Alphabet, good for so many things.

Jocelin, we said, was somewhat of a Boswell; but unfortunately,

by Nature, he is none of the largest, and distance has now

dwarfed him to an extreme degree. His light is most feeble,

intermittent, and requires the intensest kindest inspection;

otherwise it will disclose mere vacant haze. It must be owned,

the good Jocelin, spite of his beautiful childlike character, is

but an altogether imperfect 'mirror' of these old-world things!

The good man, he looks on us so clear and cheery, and in his

neighbourly soft-smiling eyes we see so well our _own_ shadow,--

we have a longing always to cross-question him, to force from him

an explanation of much. But no; Jocelin, though he talks with

such clear familiarity, like a next-door neighbour, will not

answer any question: that is the peculiarity of him, dead these

six hundred and fifty years, and quite deaf to us, though still

so audible! The good man, he cannot help it, nor can we.

But truly it is a strange consideration this simple one, as we go

on with him, or indeed with any lucid simple-hearted soul like

him: Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no

chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous

Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but

a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things.

The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human

fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug,

furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and

cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to

their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived

nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between

Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil,

between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very

Hell. Not vapour Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all! Coeur-de-

Lion was not a theatrical popinjay with greaves and steelcap on

it, but a man living upon victuals,--_not_ imported by Peel's

Tariff. Coeur-de-Lion came palpably athwart this Jocelin at St.

Edmundsbury; and had almost peeled the sacred gold _'Feretrum,'_

or St. Edmund Shrine itself, to ransom him out of the Danube Jail.

These clear eyes of neighbour Jocelin looked on the bodily

presence of King John; the very John _Sansterre,_ or Lackland,

who signed _Magna Charta_ afterwards in Runnymead. Lackland,

with a great retinue, boarded once, for the matter of a

fortnight, in St. Edmundsbury Convent; daily in the very

eyesight, palpable to the very fingers of our Jocelin: O

Jocelin, what did he say, what did he do; how looked he, lived

he;--at the very lowest, what coat or breeches had he on?

Jocelin is obstinately silent. Jocelin marks down what interests

_him;_ entirely deaf to _us._ With Jocelin's eyes we discern

almost nothing of John Lackland. As through a glass darkly, we

with our own eyes and appliances, intensely looking, discern at

most: A blustering, dissipated, human figure, with a kind of

blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain

texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing; amid

numerous other human figures of the like; riding abroad with

hawks; talking noisy nonsense;--tearing out the bowels of St.

Edmundsbury Convent (its larders namely and cellars) in the most

ruinous way, by living at rack and manger there. Jocelin notes

only, with a slight subacidity of manner, that the King's

Majesty, _Dominus Rex,_ did leave, as gift for our St. Edmund

Shrine, a handsome enough silk cloak,--or rather pretended to

leave, for one of his retinue borrowed it of us, and we never got

sight of it again; and, on the whole, that the _Dominus Rex,_ at

departing, gave us 'thirteen _sterlingii,'_ one shilling and one

penny, to say a mass for him; and so departed,--like a shabby

Lackland as he was! 'Thirteen pence sterling,' this was what the

Convent got from Lackland, for all the victuals he and his had

made away with. We of course said our mass for him, having

covenanted to do it,--but let impartial posterity judge with what

degree of fervour!

And in this manner vanishes King Lackland; traverses swiftly our

strange intermittent magic-mirror, jingling the shabby thirteen

pence merely; and rides with his hawks into Egyptian night

again. It is Jocelin's manner with all things; and it is men's

manner and men's necessity. How intermittent is our good

Jocelin; marking down, without eye to _us,_ what _he_ finds

interesting! How much in Jocelin, as in all History, and indeed

in all Nature, is at once inscrutable and certain; so dim, yet

so indubitable; exciting us to endless considerations. For King

Lackland was there, verily he; and did leave these _tredecim

sterlingii_ if nothing more, and did live and look in one way

or the other, and a whole world was living and looking along

with him! There, we say, is the grand peculiarity; the

immeasurable one; distinguishing, to a really infinite degree,

the poorest historical Fact from all Fiction whatsoever. Fiction,

'Imagination,' 'Imaginative Poetry,' &c. &c., except as the

vehicle for truth, or _fact_ of some sort,--which surely a man

should first try various other ways of vehiculating, and

conveying safe,--what is it? Let the Minerva and other Presses

respond!--But it is time we were in St. Edmundsbury Monastery,

and Seven good Centuries off. If indeed it be possible, by any

aid of Jocelin, by any human art, to get thither, with a reader

or two still following us?