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THOMAS CARLYLE'S
COLLECTED WORKS.
LIBRARY EDITION.
_IN THIRTY VOLUMES._
VOL. XIII.
PAST AND PRESENT.
LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL (LIMITED),
11 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN.
PAST AND PRESENT.
BY
THOMAS CARLYLE.
Ernst ist das Leben.
SCHILLER.
[1843.]
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
PROEM.
CHAP. PAGE
I. Midas 3
II. The Sphinx 10
III. Manchester Insurrection 19
IV. Morrison's Pill 29
V. Aristocracy of Talent 34
VI. Hero-Worship 41
BOOK II.
THE ANCIENT MONK.
I. Jocelin of Brakelond 51
II. St. Edmundsbury 60
III. Landlord Edmund 65
IV. Abbot Hugo 73
V. Twelfth Century 79
VI. Monk Samson 84
VII. The Canvassing 92
VIII. The Election 96
IX. Abbot Samson 105
X. Government 112
XI. The Abbot's Ways 117
XII. The Abbot's Troubles 124
XIII. In Parliament 131
XIV. Henry of Essex 134
XV. Practical-Devotional 139
XVI. St. Edmund 148
XVII. The Beginnings 157
BOOK III.
THE MODERN WORKER.
I. Phenomena 171
II. Gospel of Mammonism 181
III. Gospel of Dilettantism 188
IV. Happy 192
V. The English 197
VI. Two Centuries 208
VII. Over-Production 213
VIII. Unworking Aristocracy 218
IX. Working Aristocracy 228
X. Plugson of Undershot 235
XI. Labour 244
XII. Reward 250
XIII. Democracy 260
XIV. Sir Jabesh Windbag 275
XV. Morrison again 280
BOOK IV.
HOROSCOPE.
I. Aristocracies 297
II. Bribery Committee 312
III. The One Institution 318
IV. Captains of Industry 333
V. Permanence 341
VI. The Landed 348
VII. The Gifted 355
VIII. The Didactic 361
Summary and Index 371, 383
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course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in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
master-workers 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 fataler
one.
Of these successful skilful 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.[1] 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, descries 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
ring-wall 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.'
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 _3l. 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 a committee
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, beautifuler, 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 fataler 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 _in_defensible, that
his loud arguments for it are of a kind to strike men too literally
_dumb_.
To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it
blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuler, 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!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 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._
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 dis-imprisoned; one still
half-imprisoned,--the articulate, 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 unnamable 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
expediences, 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; gray 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-serjeant 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-serjeants 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-serjeant 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 frightfuler
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 evermore
to show 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,
co-operates 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 cooeperating 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 shown 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
_un_embodied 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,--_in_visible
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 shown
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, 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? Oh, 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. Show 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 fatalest 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 work-worn 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 showing 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 world-wide 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
every one 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 Hydra-coil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through
its thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quack-heads; 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
Edgware 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
_in_supportable 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 suchlike, 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
_Joetuns_, 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 Street 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, Free-trade, 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-barrelled 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 flunky 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
balefulest, 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 realising 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-barrelled 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
worthships 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 Flunkies, where no Hero-King _can_ reign: that is what we aim at!
We, for our share, will put away all Flunkyism, 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,--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 that arrestment,--"_je 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 lacquered 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 flunky world, make, each of us, _one_
non-flunky, 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 mixture 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.'[2]
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 it in 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!
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Tennyson's _Poems_ (Ulysses).
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 art 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, 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,[3] 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!
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 paviors 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, Boswells 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-witted 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 _in_human
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 as 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-cilities, 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 marvellous 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, furrow-fields 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 steel-cap 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?
FOOTNOTES:
[3] _Chronica_ Jocelini de Brakelonda, _de rebus gestis Samsonis
Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi nunc primum typis mandata, curante
Johanne Gage Rokewood._ (Camden Society, London, 1840)