CHAPTER XVII.

THE BEGINNINGS.

What a singular shape of a Man, shape of a Time, have we in this Abbot

Samson and his history; how strangely do modes, creeds, formularies,

and the date and place of a man's birth, modify the figure of the man!

Formulas too, as we call them, have a _reality_ in Human Life. They

are real as the very _skin_ and _muscular tissue_ of a Man's Life; and

a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they have _vitality_

withal, and are a _living_ skin and tissue to him! No man, or man's

life, can go abroad and do business in the world without skin and

tissues. No; first of all, these have to fashion themselves,--as

indeed they spontaneously and inevitably do. Foam itself, and this is

worth thinking of, can harden into oyster-shell; all living objects do

by necessity form to themselves a skin.

And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become _dead_; as all Formulas,

in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do! When the poor

man's integuments, no longer nourished from within, become dead skin,

mere adscititious leather and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker,

uglier and uglier; till no _heart_ any longer can be felt beating

through them, so thick, callous, calcified are they; and all over it

has now grown mere calcified oyster-shell, or were it polished

mother-of-pearl, inwards almost to the very heart of the poor

man:--yes then, you may say, his usefulness once more is quite

obstructed; once more, he cannot go abroad and do business in the

world; it is time that _he_ take to bed, and prepare for departure,

which cannot now be distant!

_Ubi homines sunt modi sunt._ Habit is the deepest law of human

nature. It is our supreme strength; if also, in certain circumstances,

our miserablest weakness.--From Stoke to Stowe is as yet a field, all

pathless, untrodden: from Stoke where I live, to Stowe where I have to

make my merchandises, perform my businesses, consult my heavenly

oracles, there is as yet no path or human footprint; and I, impelled

by such necessities, must nevertheless undertake the journey. Let me

go once, scanning my way with any earnestness of outlook, and

successfully arriving, my footprints are an invitation to me a second

time to go by the same way. It is easier than any other way: the

industry of 'scanning' lies already invested in it for me; I can go

this time with less of scanning, or without scanning at all. Nay the

very sight of my footprints, what a comfort for me; and in a degree,

for all my brethren of mankind! The footprints are trodden and

retrodden; the path wears ever broader, smoother, into a broad

highway, where even wheels can run; and many travel it;--till--till

the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality (as towns have been

known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly oracle, or real business

any longer exist for one there: then why should anybody travel the

way?--Habit is our primal, fundamental law; Habit and Imitation, there

is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of

all Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learning,

in this world.

Yes, the wise man too speaks, and acts, in Formulas; all men do so.

And in general, the more completely cased with Formulas a man may be,

the safer, happier is it for him. Thou who, in an All of rotten

Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare, having indignantly shaken off

the superannuated rags and unsound callosities of Formulas,--consider

how thou too art still clothed! This English Nationality, whatsoever

from uncounted ages is genuine and a fact among thy native People, in

their words and ways: all this, has it not made for thee a skin or

second-skin, adhesive actually as thy natural skin? This thou hast not

stript off, this thou wilt never strip off: the humour that thy mother

gave thee has to show itself through this. A common, or it may be an

uncommon Englishman thou art: but, good Heavens, what sort of Arab,

Chinaman, Jew-Clothesman, Turk, Hindoo, African Mandingo, wouldst thou

have been, _thou_ with those mother-qualities of thine!

It strikes me dumb to look over the long series of faces, such as any

full Church, Courthouse, London-Tavern Meeting, or miscellany of men

will show them. Some score or two of years ago, all these were little

red-coloured pulpy infants; each of them capable of being kneaded,

baked into any social form you chose: yet see now how they are fixed

and hardened,--into artisans, artists, clergy, gentry, learned

serjeants, unlearned dandies, and can and shall now be nothing else

henceforth!

Mark on that nose the colour left by too copious port and viands; to

which the profuse cravat with exorbitant breastpin, and the fixed,

forward, and as it were menacing glance of the eyes correspond. That

is a 'Man of Business;' prosperous manufacturer, house-contractor,

engineer, law-manager; his eye, nose, cravat have, in such work and

fortune, got such a character: deny him not thy praise, thy pity. Pity

him too, the Hard-handed, with bony brow, rudely-combed hair, eyes

looking out as in labour, in difficulty and uncertainty; rude mouth,

the lips coarse, loose, as in hard toil and lifelong fatigue they

have got the habit of hanging:--hast thou seen aught more touching

than the rude intelligence, so cramped, yet energetic, unsubduable,

true, which looks out of that marred visage? Alas, and his poor wife,

with her own hands, washed that cotton neck-cloth for him, buttoned

that coarse shirt, sent him forth creditably trimmed as she could. In

such imprisonment lives he, for his part; man cannot now deliver him:

the red pulpy infant has been baked and fashioned _so_.

Or what kind of baking was it that this other brother mortal got,

which has baked him into the genus Dandy? Elegant Vacuum; serenely

looking down upon all Plenums and Entities as low and poor to his

serene Chimeraship and _Non_entity laboriously attained! Heroic

Vacuum; inexpugnable, while purse and present condition of society

hold out; curable by no hellebore. The doom of Fate was, Be thou a

Dandy! Have thy eye-glasses, opera-glasses, thy Long-Acre cabs with

white-breeched tiger, thy yawning impassivities, pococurantisms; _fix_

thyself in Dandyhood, undeliverable; it is thy doom.

And all these, we say, were red-coloured infants; of the same pulp and

stuff, few years ago; now irretrievably shaped and kneaded as we see!

Formulas? There is no mortal extant, out of the depths of Bedlam, but

lives all skinned, thatched, covered over with Formulas; and is, as it

were, held in from delirium and the Inane by his Formulas! They are

withal the most beneficent, indispensable of human equipments: blessed

he who has a skin and tissues, so it be a living one, and the

heart-pulse everywhere discernible through it. Monachism, Feudalism,

with a real King Plantagenet, with real Abbots Samson, and their other

living realities, how blessed!--

Not without a mournful interest have we surveyed that authentic image

of a Time now wholly swallowed. Mournful reflections crowd on us;--and

yet consolatory. How many brave men have lived before Agamemnon! Here

is a brave governor Samson, a man fearing God, and fearing nothing

else; of whom as First Lord of the Treasury, as King, Chief Editor,

High Priest, we could be so glad and proud; of whom nevertheless Fame

has altogether forgotten to make mention! The faint image of him,

revived in this hour, is found in the gossip of one poor Monk, and in

Nature nowhere else. Oblivion had so nigh swallowed him altogether,

even to the echo of his ever having existed. What regiments and hosts

and generations of such has Oblivion already swallowed! Their crumbled

dust makes up the soil our life-fruit grows on. Said I not, as my old

Norse Fathers taught me, The Life-tree Igdrasil, which waves round

thee in this hour, whereof thou in this hour art portion, has its

roots down deep in the oldest Death-Kingdoms; and grows; the Three

Nornas, or _Times_, Past, Present, Future, watering it from the Sacred

Well!

For example, who taught thee to _speak_? From the day when two

hairy-naked or fig-leaved Human Figures began, as uncomfortable

dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but to impart themselves to one

another; and endeavoured, with gaspings, gesturings, with unsyllabled

cries, with painful pantomime and interjections, in a very

unsuccessful manner,--up to the writing of this present copyright

Book, which also is not very successful! Between that day and this, I

say, there has been a pretty space of time; a pretty spell of work,

which _somebody_ has done! Thinkest thou there were no poets till Dan

Chaucer? No heart burning with a thought, which it could not hold, and

had no word for; and needed to shape and coin a word for,--what thou

callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there

was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new

metaphor, and bold questionable originality. 'Thy very ATTENTION, does

it not mean an _attentio_, a STRETCHING-TO?' Fancy that act of the

mind, which all were conscious of, which none had yet named,--when

this new 'poet' first felt bound and driven to name it! His

questionable originality, and new glowing metaphor, was found

adoptable, intelligible; and remains our name for it to this day.

Literature:--and look at Paul's Cathedral, and the Masonries and

Worships and Quasi-Worships that are there; not to speak of

Westminster Hall and its wigs! Men had not a hammer to begin with, not

a syllabled articulation: they had it all to make;--and they have made

it. What thousand thousand articulate, semi-articulate,

earnest-stammering _Prayers_ ascending up to Heaven, from hut and

cell, in many lands, in many centuries, from the fervent kindled souls

of innumerable men, each struggling to pour itself forth incompletely,

as it might, before the incompletest _Liturgy_ could be compiled! The

Liturgy, or adoptable and generally adopted Set of Prayers and

Prayer-Method, was what we can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select

Beauties' well edited (by [OE]cumenic Councils and other

Useful-Knowledge Societies) from that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers

already extant and accumulated, good and bad. The good were found

adoptable by men; were gradually got together, well-edited,

accredited: the bad, found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually

forgotten, disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The

first man who, looking with opened soul on this august Heaven and

Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Universe and

suchlike, the essence of which remains for ever Unnameable; he who

first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awestruck, in silence as is

likeliest,--he, driven by inner necessity, the 'audacious original'

that he was, had done a thing, too, which all thoughtful hearts saw

straightway to be an expressive, altogether adoptable thing! To bow

the knee was ever since the attitude of supplication. Earlier than any

spoken Prayers, _Litanias_, or _Leitourgias_; the beginning of all

Worship,--which needed but a beginning, so rational was it. What a

poet he! Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal. The

wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances, from

whom as from a Nile-source all _Forms of Worship_ flow:--such a

Nile-river (somewhat muddy and malarious now!) of Forms of Worship

sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism, Rotatory

Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and perhaps lower!

Things rise, I say, in that way. The _Iliad_ Poem, and indeed most

other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the Liturgy did.

The great _Iliad_ in Greece, and the small _Robin Hood's Garland_ in

England, are each, as I understand, the well-edited 'Select Beauties'

of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of Heroic Ballads in their

respective centuries and countries. Think what strumming of the

seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing of the less heroic

fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and English wayside Public

Houses; and beating of the studious Poetic brain, and gasping here too

in the semi-articulate windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a

Divine Achilles, the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pindar,

could be adequately sung! Honour to you, ye nameless great and

greatest ones, ye long-forgotten brave!

Nor was the Statute _De Tallagio non concedendo_, nor any Statute,

Law-method, Lawyer's-wig, much less were the Statute-Book and Four

Courts, with Coke upon Lyttelton and Three Estates of Parliament in

the rear of them, got together without human labour,--mostly forgotten

now! From the time of Cain's slaying Abel by swift head-breakage, to

this time of killing your man in Chancery by inches, and slow

heart-break for forty years,--there too is an interval! Venerable

Justice herself began by Wild-Justice; all Law is as a tamed

furrowfield, slowly worked out, and rendered arable, from the waste

jungle of Club-Law. Valiant Wisdom tilling and draining; escorted by

owl-eyed Pedantry, by owlish and vulturish and many other forms of

Folly;--the valiant husbandman assiduously tilling; the blind greedy

enemy _too_ assiduously sowing tares! It is because there is yet in

venerable wigged Justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of wiggeries

and folly, that men have not cast her into the River; that she still

sits there, like Dryden's Head in the _Battle of the Books_,--a huge

helmet, a huge mountain of greased parchment, of unclean horsehair,

first striking the eye; and then in the innermost corner, visible at

last, in size as a hazelnut, a real fraction of God's Justice, perhaps

not yet unattainable to some, surely still indispensable to all;--and

men know not what to do with her! Lawyers were not all pedants,

voluminous voracious persons; Lawyers too were poets, were heroes,--or

their Law had been past the Nore long before this time. Their Owlisms,

Vulturisms, to an incredible extent, will disappear by and by, their

Heroisms only remaining, and the helmet be reduced to something like

the size of the head, we hope!--

It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed,

articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of

forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,--honour to

them; they, in _spite_ of the idle and the dastard. This English

Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and

noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of

English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were

Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the

number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors,

which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real

conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and

their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that

ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut

a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in

England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England. I tell thee,

they had not a hammer to begin with; and yet Wren built St. Paul's:

not an articulated syllable; and yet there have come English

Literatures, Elizabethan Literatures, Satanic-School, Cockney-School,

and other Literatures;--once more, as in the old time of the

_Leitourgia_, a most waste imbroglio, and world-wide jungle and

jumble; waiting terribly to be 'well-edited' and 'well-burnt'! Arachne

started with forefinger and thumb, and had not even a distaff; yet

thou seest Manchester, and Cotton Cloth, which will shelter naked

backs, at twopence an ell.

Work? The quantity of done and forgotten work that lies silent under

my feet in this world, and escorts and attends me, and supports and

keeps me alive, wheresoever I walk or stand, whatsoever I think or do,

gives rise to reflections! Is it not enough, at any rate, to strike

the thing called 'Fame' into total silence for a wise man? For fools

and unreflective persons, she is and will be very noisy, this 'Fame,'

and talks of her 'immortals' and so forth: but if you will consider

it, what is she? Abbot Samson was not nothing because nobody _said_

anything of him. Or thinkest thou, the Right Honourable Sir Jabesh

Windbag can be made something by Parliamentary Majorities and Leading

Articles? Her 'immortals'! Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame

recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles.

She manages to recollect a Shakspeare or so; and prates, considerably

like a goose, about him;--and in the rear of that, onwards to the

birth of Theuth, to Hengst's Invasion, and the bosom of Eternity, it

was all blank; and the respectable Teutonic Languages, Teutonic

Practices, Existences, all came of their own accord, as the grass

springs, as the trees grow; no Poet, no work from the inspired heart

of a Man needed there; and Fame has not an articulate word to say

about it! Or ask her, What, with all conceivable appliances and

mnemonics, including apotheosis and human sacrifices among the number,

she carries in her head with regard to a Wodan, even a Moses, or other

such? She begins to be uncertain as to what they were, whether spirits

or men of mould,--gods, charlatans; begins sometimes to have a

misgiving that they were mere symbols, ideas of the mind; perhaps

nonentities and Letters of the Alphabet! She is the noisiest,

inarticulately babbling, hissing, screaming, foolishest, unmusicalest

of fowls that fly; and needs no 'trumpet,' I think, but her own

enormous goose-throat,--measuring several degrees of celestial

latitude, so to speak. Her 'wings,' in these days, have grown far

swifter than ever; but her goose-throat hitherto seems only larger,

louder and foolisher than ever. _She_ is transitory, futile, a

goose-goddess:--if she were not transitory, what would become of us!

It is a chief comfort that she forgets us all; all, even to the very

Wodans; and grows to consider us, at last, as probably nonentities and

Letters of the Alphabet.

Yes, a noble Abbot Samson resigns himself to Oblivion too; feels _it_

no hardship, but a comfort; counts it as a still resting-place, from

much sick fret and fever and stupidity, which in the night-watches

often made his strong heart sigh. Your most sweet voices, making one

enormous goose-voice, O Bobus and Company, how can they be a guidance

for any Son of Adam? In _silence_ of you and the like of you, the

'small still voices' will speak to him better; in which does lie

guidance.

My friend, all speech and rumour is short-lived, foolish, untrue.

Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as

the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself. Stand thou by that;

and let 'Fame' and the rest of it go prating.

'Heard are the Voices,

Heard are the Sages,

The Worlds and the Ages:

"Choose well; your choice is

Brief and yet endless.

Here eyes do regard you,

In Eternity's stillness;

Here is all fulness,

Ye brave, to reward you;

Work, and despair not."'

_Goethe._

BOOK III.

THE MODERN WORKER.

CHAPTER I.

PHENOMENA.

But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in St.

Edmund, no longer see the figure of him 'on the rim of the sky,'

minatory or confirmatory! God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an

eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Philosophies,

sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak

considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime.

It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have forgotten

God;'--in the most modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we

have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it _is not_. We have

quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance of things, and

opened them only to the Shows and Shams of things. We quietly

believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great unintelligible

Perhaps; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive

Cattlefold and Workhouse, with most extensive Kitchen-ranges,

Dining-tables,--whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the Truth

of this Universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it, the

pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical

man.

There is no longer any God for us! God's Laws are become a

Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency: the Heavens

overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper; a butt for

Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities

at:--in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the _soul_ out of

him; and now, after the due period,--begins to find the want of it!

This is verily the plague-spot; centre of the universal Social

Gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him

that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot,

with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under

which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the

focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of

diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there

is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt.

Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French

Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul

elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in new force

and desperateness next hour.

For actually this is _not_ the real fact of the world; the world is

not made so, but otherwise!--Truly, any Society setting out from this

No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two. The _Un_veracities,

escorted, each Unveracity of them by its corresponding Misery and

Penalty; the Phantasms, and Fatuities, and ten-years Corn-Law

Debatings, that shall walk the Earth at noonday,--must needs be

numerous! The Universe _being_ intrinsically a Perhaps, being too

probably an 'infinite Humbug,' why should any minor Humbug astonish

us? It is all according to the order of Nature; and Phantasms riding

with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence,

astonish nobody. Enchanted St. Ives' Workhouses and Joe-Manton

Aristocracies; giant Working Mammonism near strangled in the

partridge-nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism,--this, in all its

branches, in its thousand-thousand modes and figures, is a sight

familiar to us.

* * * * *

The Popish Religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these years;

and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with at present.

"_Elle a trois cents ans dans le ventre_," counts M. Jouffroy; "_c'est

pourquoi je la respecte!_"--The old Pope of Rome, finding it laborious

to kneel so long while they cart him through the streets to bless the

people on _Corpus-Christi_ Day, complains of rheumatism; whereupon his

Cardinals consult;--construct him, after some study, a stuffed cloaked

figure, of iron and wood, with wool or baked hair; and place it in a

kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure; to this stuffed

rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by the aid of

cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread hands: the rump with

its cloaks kneels, the Pope looks, and holds his hands spread; and so

the two in concert bless the Roman population on _Corpus-Christi_ Day,

as well as they can.

I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-iron back,

with the flesh head and hands; and endeavoured to calculate his

horoscope. I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened

God's daylight, or painted himself in the human retina, for these

several thousand years. Nay, since Chaos first shivered, and

'sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft of sunlight shot

through it, what stranger product was there of Nature and Art working

together? Here is a Supreme Priest who believes God to be--What, in

the name of God, _does_ he believe God to be?--and discerns that all

worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts,

Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron

rumps, artistically spread out,--to save the ignorant from worse.

O reader, I say not who are Belial's elect. This poor amphibious Pope

too gives loaves to the Poor; has in him more good latent than he is

himself aware of. His poor Jesuits, in the late Italian Cholera, were,

with a few German Doctors, the only creatures whom dastard terror had

not driven mad: they descended fearless into all gulfs and bedlams;

watched over the pillow of the dying, with help, with counsel and

hope; shone as luminous fixed stars, when all else had gone out in

chaotic night: honour to them! This poor Pope,--who knows what good is

in him? In a Time otherwise too prone to forget, he keeps up the

mournfulest ghastly memorial of the Highest, Blessedest, which once

was; which, in new fit forms, will again partly have to be. Is he not

as a perpetual death's-head and cross-bones, with their _Resurgam_, on

the grave of a Universal Heroism,--grave of a Christianity? Such

Noblenesses, purchased by the world's best heart's-blood, must not be

lost; we cannot afford to lose them, in what confusions soever. To all

of us the day will come, to a few of us it has already come, when no

mortal, with his heart yearning for a 'Divine Humility,' or other

'Highest form of Valour,' will need to look for it in death's-heads,

but will see it round him in here and there a beautiful living head.

Besides, there is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the Scenic

Theory of Worship, a frankness which I rather honour. Not half and

half, but with undivided heart does _he_ set about worshipping by

stage-machinery; as if there were now, and could again be, in Nature

no other. He will ask you, What other? Under this my Gregorian Chant,

and beautiful wax-light Phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an

Abyss, of Black Doubt, Scepticism, nay Sansculottic Jacobinism; an

Orcus that has no bottom. Think of that. 'Groby Pool _is_ thatched

with pancakes,'--as Jeannie Deans's Innkeeper defied it to be! The

Bottomless of Scepticism, Atheism, Jacobinism, behold, it is thatched

over, hidden from your despair, by stage-properties judiciously

arranged. This stuffed rump of mine saves not me only from rheumatism,

but you also from what other _isms_! In this your Life-pilgrimage

Nowhither, a fine Squallacci marching-music, and Gregorian Chant,

accompanies you, and the hollow Night of Orcus is well hid!

Yes truly, few men that worship by the rotatory Calabash of the

Calmucks do it in half so great, frank or effectual a way. Drury-Lane,

it is said, and that is saying much, might learn from him in the

dressing of parts, in the arrangement of lights and shadows. He is the

greatest Play-actor that at present draws salary in this world. Poor

Pope; and I am told he is fast growing bankrupt too; and will, in a

measurable term of years (a great way _within_ the 'three hundred'),

not have a penny to make his pot boil! His old rheumatic back will

then get to rest; and himself and his stage-properties sleep well in

Chaos forevermore.

* * * * *

Or, alas, why go to Rome for Phantasms walking the streets? Phantasms,

ghosts, in this midnight hour, hold jubilee, and screech and jabber;

and the question rather were, What high Reality anywhere is yet awake?

Aristocracy has become Phantasm-Aristocracy, no longer able to _do_

its work, not in the least conscious that it has any work longer to

do. Unable, totally careless to _do_ its work; careful only to clamour

for the _wages_ of doing its work,--nay for higher, and _palpably_

undue wages, and Corn-Laws and _increase_ of rents; the old rate of

wages not being adequate now! In hydra-wrestle, giant '_Mill_ocracy'

so-called, a real giant, though as yet a blind one and but half-awake,

wrestles and wrings in choking nightmare, 'like to be strangled in

the partridge-nets of Phantasm-Aristocracy,' as we said, which fancies

itself still to be a giant. Wrestles, as under nightmare, till it do

awaken; and gasps and struggles thousandfold, we may say, in a truly

painful manner, through all fibres of our English Existence, in these

hours and years! Is our poor English Existence wholly becoming a

Nightmare; full of mere Phantasms?--

The Champion of England, cased in iron or tin, rides into Westminster

Hall, 'being lifted into his saddle with little assistance,' and there

asks, If in the four quarters of the world, under the cope of Heaven,

is any man or demon that dare question the right of this King? Under

the cope of Heaven no man makes intelligible answer,--as several men

ought already to have done. Does not this Champion too know the world;

that it is a huge Imposture, and bottomless Inanity, thatched over

with bright cloth and other ingenious tissues? Him let us leave there,

questioning all men and demons.

Him we have left to his destiny; but whom else have we found? From

this the highest apex of things, downwards through all strata and

breadths, how many fully awakened Realities have we fallen in

with:--alas, on the contrary, what troops and populations of

Phantasms, not God-Veracities but Devil-Falsities, down to the very

lowest stratum,--which now, by such superincumbent weight of

Unveracities, lies enchanted in St. Ives' Workhouses, broad enough,

helpless enough! You will walk in no public thoroughfare or remotest

byway of English Existence but you will meet a man, an interest of

men, that has given up hope in the Everlasting, True, and placed its

hope in the Temporary, half or wholly False. The Honourable Member

complains unmusically that there is 'devil's-dust' in Yorkshire cloth.

Yorkshire cloth,--why, the very Paper I now write on is made, it

seems, partly of plaster-lime well smoothed, and obstructs my writing!

You are lucky if you can find now any good Paper,--any work really

_done_; search where you will, from highest Phantasm apex to lowest

Enchanted basis.

Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now

perambulates London Streets; which my Friend Sauerteig regarded justly

as one of our English notabilities; "the topmost point as yet," said

he, "would it were your culminating and returning point, to which

English Puffery has been observed to reach!"--The Hatter in the Strand

of London, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts a

huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels; sends a man

to drive it through the streets; hoping to be saved _thereby_. He has

not attempted to _make_ better hats, as he was appointed by the

Universe to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very

probably have done; but his whole industry is turned to _persuade_ us

that he has made such! He too knows that the Quack has become God.

Laugh not at him, O reader; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be

comic; he is fast becoming tragic. To me this all-deafening blast of

Puffery, of poor Falsehood grown necessitous, of poor Heart-Atheism

fallen now into Enchanted Workhouses, sounds too surely like a

Doom's-blast! I have to say to myself in old dialect: "God's blessing

is not written on all this; His curse is written on all this!" Unless

perhaps the Universe _be_ a chimera;--some old totally deranged

eightday clock, dead as brass; which the Maker, if there ever was any

Maker, has long ceased to meddle with?--To my Friend Sauerteig this

poor seven-feet Hat-manufacturer, as the topstone of English Puffery,

was very notable.

Alas, that we natives note him little, that we view him as a thing of

course, is the very burden of the misery. We take it for granted, the

most rigorous of us, that all men who have made anything are expected

and entitled to make the loudest possible proclamation of it, and call

on a discerning public to reward them for it. Every man his own

trumpeter; that is, to a really alarming extent, the accepted rule.

Make loudest possible proclamation of your Hat: true proclamation if

that will do; if that will not do, then false proclamation,--to such

extent of falsity as will serve your purpose; as will not seem too

false to be credible!--I answer, once for all, that the fact is not

so. Nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and

hat-makings; Nature forbids all men to make such. There is not a man

or hat-maker born into the world but feels, or has felt, that he is

degrading himself if he speak of his excellencies and prowesses, and

supremacy in his craft: his inmost heart says to him, "Leave thy

friends to speak of these; if possible, thy enemies to speak of these;

but at all events, thy friends!" He feels that he is already a poor

braggart; fast hastening to be a falsity and speaker of the Untruth.

Nature's Laws, I must repeat, are eternal: her small still voice,

speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under terrible

penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart from the truth

without damage to himself; no one million of men; no Twenty-seven

Millions of men. Show me a Nation fallen everywhere into this course,

so that each expects it, permits it to others and himself, I will show

you a Nation travelling with one assent on the broad way. The broad

way, however many Banks of England, Cotton-Mills and Duke's Palaces it

may have. Not at happy Elysian fields, and everlasting crowns of

victory, earned by silent Valour, will this Nation arrive; but at

precipices, devouring gulfs, if it pause not. Nature has appointed

happy fields, victorious laurel-crowns; but only to the brave and

true: _Un_nature, what we call Chaos, holds nothing in it but

vacuities, devouring gulfs. What are Twenty-seven Millions, and their

unanimity? Believe them not: the Worlds and the Ages, God and Nature

and All Men say otherwise.

'Rhetoric all this?' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is Fact

all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in these days,

it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and will endure till the

Universe cease. It is forgotten now; and the first mention of it

puckers thy sweet countenance into a sneer: but it will be brought to

mind again,--unless indeed the Law of Gravitation chance to cease, and

men find that they _can_ walk on vacancy. Unanimity of the

Twenty-seven Millions will do nothing; walk not thou with them; fly

from them as for thy life. Twenty-seven Millions travelling on such

courses, with gold jingling in every pocket, with vivats heaven-high,

are incessantly advancing, let me again remind thee, towards the

_firm-land's end_,--towards the end and extinction of what

Faithfulness, Veracity, real Worth, was in their way of life. Their

noble ancestors have fashioned for them a 'life-road;'--in how many

thousand senses, this! There is not an old wise Proverb on their

tongue, an honest Principle articulated in their hearts into

utterance, a wise true method of doing and despatching any work or

commerce of men, but helps yet to carry them forward. Life is still

possible to them, because all is not yet Puffery, Falsity,

Mammon-worship and Unnature; because somewhat is yet Faithfulness,

Veracity and Valour. With a certain very considerable finite quantity

of Unveracity and Phantasm, social life is still possible; not with an

infinite quantity! Exceed your certain quantity, the seven-feet Hat,

and all things upwards to the very Champion cased in tin, begin to

reel and flounder,--in Manchester Insurrections, Chartisms,

Sliding-scales; the Law of Gravitation not forgetting to act. You

advance incessantly towards the land's end; you are, literally enough,

'consuming the way.' Step after step, Twenty-seven Million unconscious

men;--till you are _at_ the land's end; till there is not Faithfulness

enough among you any more: and the next step now is lifted _not_ over

land, but into air, over ocean-deeps and roaring abysses:--unless

perhaps the Law of Gravitation have forgotten to act?

Oh, it is frightful when a whole Nation, as our Fathers used to say,

has 'forgotten God;' has remembered only Mammon, and what Mammon leads

to! When your self-trumpeting Hatmaker is the emblem of almost all

makers, and workers, and men, that make anything,--from

soul-overseerships, body-overseerships, epic poems, acts of

parliament, to hats and shoe-blacking! Not one false man but does

uncountable mischief: how much, in a generation or two, will

Twenty-seven Millions, mostly false, manage to accumulate? The sum of

it, visible in every street, market-place, senate-house,

circulating-library, cathedral, cotton-mill, and union-workhouse,

fills one _not_ with a comic feeling!

CHAPTER II.

GOSPEL OF MAMMONISM.

Reader, even Christian Reader as thy title goes, hast thou any notion

of Heaven and Hell? I rather apprehend, not. Often as the words are on

our tongue, they have got a fabulous or semi-fabulous character for

most of us, and pass on like a kind of transient similitude, like a

sound signifying little.

Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that they

are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable; that they are an

everlasting highest fact! "No Lake of Sicilian or other sulphur burns

now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou? Well, and if there did not!

Believe that there does not; believe it if thou wilt, nay hold by it

as a real increase, a rise to higher stages, to wider horizons and

empires. All this has vanished, or has not vanished; believe as thou

wilt as to all this. But that an Infinite of Practical Importance,

speaking with strict arithmetical exactness, an _Infinite_, has

vanished or can vanish from the Life of any Man: this thou shalt not

believe! O brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it

not at any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, un-nameable?

Came it never, like the gleam of _preter_natural eternal Oceans, like

the voice of old Eternities, far-sounding through thy heart of hearts?

Never? Alas, it was not thy Liberalism, then; it was thy Animalism!

The Infinite is more sure than any other fact. But only men can

discern it; mere building beavers, spinning arachnes, much more the

predatory vulturous and vulpine species, do not discern it well!--

'The word Hell,' says Sauerteig, 'is still frequently in use among the

English people: but I could not without difficulty ascertain what they

meant by it. Hell generally signifies the Infinite Terror, the thing a

man _is_ infinitely afraid of, and shudders and shrinks from,

struggling with his whole soul to escape from it. There is a Hell

therefore, if you will consider, which accompanies man, in all stages

of his history, and religious or other development: but the Hells of

men and Peoples differ notably. With Christians it is the infinite

terror of being found guilty before the Just Judge. With old Romans, I

conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably they

cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously, which was

their word for un_man_fully. And now what is it, if you pierce through

his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he calls his Worships and

so forth,--what is it that the modern English soul does, in very

truth, dread infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair? What

_is_ his Hell, after all these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what

is it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The

terror of "Not succeeding;" of not making money, fame, or some other

figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money! Is not that a

somewhat singular Hell?'

Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not 'succeed,' where

is the use of us? We had better never have been born. "Tremble

intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says: _there_ is the

black Bottomless of Terror; what Sauerteig calls the 'Hell of the

English'!--But indeed this Hell belongs naturally to the Gospel of

Mammonism, which also has its corresponding Heaven. For there _is_ one

Reality among so many Phantasms; about one thing we are entirely in

earnest: The making of money. Working Mammonism does divide the world

with idle game-preserving Dilettantism:--thank Heaven that there is

even a Mammonism, _any_thing we are in earnest about! Idleness is

worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you

will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless

hope in work, were it even work at making money.

True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-Gospel,

have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society; and go about

professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not

a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named

'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have

profoundly forgotten everywhere that _Cash-payment_ is not the sole

relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that _it_

absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving workers?"

answers the rich mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the

market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted

for? What have I to do with them more?"--Verily Mammon-worship is a

melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and

was questioned, "Where is thy brother?" he too made answer, "Am I my

brother's keeper?" Did I not pay my brother _his_ wages, the thing he

had merited from me?

O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, illustrious game-preserving Duke, is

there no way of 'killing' thy brother but Cain's rude way! 'A good man

by the very look of him, by his very presence with us as a fellow

wayfarer in this Life-pilgrimage, _promises_ so much:' woe to him if

he forget all such promises, if he never know that they were given!

To a deadened soul, seared with the brute Idolatry of Sense, to whom

going to Hell is equivalent to not making money, all 'promises,' and

moral duties, that cannot be pleaded for in Courts of Requests,

address themselves in vain. Money he can be ordered to pay, but

nothing more. I have not heard in all Past History, and expect not to

hear in all Future History, of any Society anywhere under God's Heaven

supporting itself on such Philosophy. The Universe is not made so; it

is made otherwise than so. The man or nation of men that thinks it is

made so, marches forward nothing doubting, step after step; but

marches--whither we know! In these last two centuries of Atheistic

Government (near two centuries now, since the blessed restoration of

his Sacred Majesty, and Defender of the Faith, Charles Second), I

reckon that we have pretty well exhausted what of 'firm earth' there

was for us to march on;--and are now, very ominously, shuddering,

reeling, and let us hope trying to recoil, on the cliff's edge!--

For out of this that we call Atheism come so many other _isms_ and

falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels!--A soul is not

like wind (_spiritus_, or breath) contained within a capsule; the

Almighty Maker is not like a Clockmaker that once, in old immemorial

ages, having _made_ his Horologe of a Universe, sits ever since and

sees it go! Not at all. Hence comes Atheism; come, as we say, many

other _isms_; and as the sum of all, comes Valetism, the _reverse_ of

Heroism; sad root of all woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man ever

saw the above-said wind-element enclosed within its capsule, and finds

it at bottom more deniable than conceivable; so too he finds, in spite

of Bridgwater Bequests, your Clockmaker Almighty an entirely

questionable affair, a deniable affair;--and accordingly denies it,

and along with it so much else. Alas, one knows not what and how much

else! For the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable, Godlike, present

everywhere in all that we see and work and suffer, is the essence of

all faith whatsoever; and that once denied, or still worse, asserted

with lips only, and out of bound prayerbooks only, what other thing

remains believable? That Cant well-ordered is marketable Cant; that

Heroism means gas-lighted Histrionism; that seen with 'clear eyes' (as

they call Valet-eyes), no man is a Hero, or ever was a Hero, but all

men are Valets and Varlets. The accursed practical quintessence of all

sorts of Unbelief! For if there be now no Hero, and the Histrio

himself begin to be seen into, what hope is there for the seed of Adam

here below? We are the doomed everlasting prey of the Quack; who, now

in this guise, now in that, is to filch us, to pluck and eat us, by

such modes as are convenient for him. For the modes and guises I care

little. The Quack once inevitable, let him come swiftly, let him pluck

and eat me;--swiftly, that I may at least have done with him; for in

his Quack-world I can have no wish to linger. Though he slay me, yet

will I _not_ trust in him. Though he conquer nations, and have all the

Flunkies of the Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well

that _he_ is an Inanity; that for him and his there is no continuance

appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas, the Atheist world,

from its utmost summits of Heaven and Westminster-Hall, downwards

through poor seven-feet Hats and 'Unveracities fallen hungry,' down to

the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of it, is very wretched.

One of Dr. Alison's Scotch facts struck us much.[26] A poor Irish

Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went

forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help

from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable

Establishment and then at that she was refused; referred from one to

the other, helped by none;--till she had exhausted them all; till her

strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died,

and infected her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons'

died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks

thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have

been _economy_ to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and

killed seventeen of you!--Very curious. The forlorn Irish Widow

applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am sinking,

bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone of your bone;

one God made us: ye must help me!" They answer, "No, impossible; thou

art no sister of ours." But she proves her sisterhood; her

typhus-fever kills _them_: they actually were her brothers, though

denying it! Had human creature ever to go lower for a proof?

For, as indeed was very natural in such case, all government of the

Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over to Supply-and-demand,

Laissez-faire and suchlike, and universally declared to be

'impossible.' "You are no sister of ours; what shadow of proof is

there? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our

money-safes to be _ours_, and you to have no business with them.

Depart! It is impossible!"--Nay, what wouldst thou thyself have us do?

cry indignant readers. Nothing, my friends,--till you have got a soul

for yourselves again. Till then all things are 'impossible.' Till then

I cannot even bid you buy, as the old Spartans would have done,

two-pence worth of powder and lead, and compendiously shoot to death

this poor Irish Widow: even that is 'impossible' for you. Nothing is

left but that she prove her sisterhood by dying, and infecting you

with typhus. Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof that

she _was_ flesh of your flesh; and perhaps some of the living may lay

it to heart.

* * * * *

'Impossible:' of a certain two-legged animal with feathers it is said,

if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he sits imprisoned, as

if girt with the iron ring of Fate; and will die there, though within

sight of victuals,--or sit in sick misery there, and be fatted to

death. The name of this poor two-legged animal is--Goose; and they

make of him, when well fattened, _Pate de foie gras_, much prized by

some!

FOOTNOTES:

[26] _Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland_, by

William Pulteney Alison, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1840.)

CHAPTER III.

GOSPEL OF DILETTANTISM.

But after all, the Gospel of Dilettantism, producing a Governing Class

who do not govern, nor understand in the least that they are bound or

expected to govern, is still mournfuler than that of Mammonism.

Mammonism, as we said, at least works; this goes idle. Mammonism has

seized some portion of the message of Nature to man; and seizing that,

and following it, will seize and appropriate more and more of Nature's

message: but Dilettantism has missed it wholly. 'Make money:' that

will mean withal, 'Do work in order to make money.' But, 'Go

gracefully idle in Mayfair,' what does or can that mean? An idle,

game-preserving and even corn-lawing Aristocracy, in such an England

as ours: has the world, if we take thought of it, ever seen such a

phenomenon till very lately? Can it long continue to see such?

Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice and

Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of our

affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-Law demonstrating itself

openly, for ten years or more, with 'arguments' to make the angels,

and some other classes of creatures, weep! For men are not ashamed to

rise in Parliament and elsewhere, and speak the things they do _not_

think. 'Expediency,' 'Necessities of Party,' &c. &c.! It is not known

that the Tongue of Man is a sacred organ; that Man himself is

definable in Philosophy as an 'Incarnate _Word_;' the Word not there,

you have no Man there either, but a Phantasm instead! In this way it

is that Absurdities may live long enough,--still walking, and talking

for themselves, years and decades after the brains are quite out! How

are 'the knaves and dastards' ever to be got 'arrested' at that

rate?--

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would

say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something

more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor

fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that

it may prick into me;--perhaps (this is the commonest) to be

topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the

better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human

faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like

faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest:

most kinds of dancing too; but the St. Vitus kind not at all! A

fashionable wit, _ach Himmel_! if you ask, Which, he or a

Death's-head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send _not_

him!"

Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere Action.

Action hangs, as it were, _dissolved_ in Speech, in Thought whereof

Speech is the Shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of

Speech in a man betokens the kind of Action you will get from him. Our

Speech, in these modern days, has become amazing. Johnson complained,

"Nobody speaks in earnest, Sir; there is no serious conversation." To

us all serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans,

Twelfth-Century Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has become

jargon, more or less insane. Cromwell was mad and a quack; Anselm,

Becket, Goethe, _ditto ditto_.

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant

than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A

tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and

having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of

Nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer semblances of it,

were fallen into sad conditions,--verging indeed towards a certain far

deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet

Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have

sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea

discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no

comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light

grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn;

and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a

bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed

to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly

he was a bore.

Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not

withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them,

were all 'changed into Apes;'[27] sitting on the trees there, grinning

now in the most _un_affected manner; gibbering and chattering very

genuine nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable

Humbug! The Universe has _become_ a Humbug to these Apes who thought

it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe,

every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness,

half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizened smoke-dried

visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking

out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the

wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered

Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it;

and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or

mew:--truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or

ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their

worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical

screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.

Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall-in with parties of this tribe?

Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Sale's _Koran_ (Introduction).

CHAPTER IV.

HAPPY.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble:

be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner too,

all dignity is painful; a life of ease is not for any man, nor for

any god. The life of all gods figures itself to us as a Sublime

Sadness,--earnestness of Infinite Battle against Infinite Labour. Our

highest religion is named the 'Worship of Sorrow.' For the son of man

there is no noble crown, well worn or even ill worn, but is a crown of

thorns!--These things, in spoken words, or still better, in felt

instincts alive in every heart, were once well known.

Does not the whole wretchedness, the whole _Atheism_ as I call it, of

man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that

unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be what he calls

'happy'? Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his

head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and

divine laws ought to be 'happy.' His wishes, the pitifulest

whipster's, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest

whipster's, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment,

impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be

happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people

clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things?

We construct our theory of Human Duties, not on any

Greatest-Nobleness Principle, never so mistaken; no, but on a

Greatest-Happiness Principle. 'The word _Soul_ with us, as in some

Slavonic dialects, seems to be synonymous with _Stomach_.' We plead

and speak, in our Parliaments and elsewhere, not as from the Soul, but

from the Stomach;--wherefore indeed our pleadings are so slow to

profit. We plead not for God's Justice; we are not ashamed to stand

clamouring and pleading for our own 'interests,' our own rents and

trade-profits; we say, They are the 'interests' of so many; there is

such an intense desire in us for them! We demand Free-Trade, with much

just vociferation and benevolence, That the poorer classes, who are

terribly ill-off at present, may have cheaper New-Orleans bacon. Men

ask on Free-trade platforms, How can the indomitable spirit of

Englishmen be kept up without plenty of bacon? We shall become a

ruined Nation!--Surely, my friends, plenty of bacon is good and

indispensable: but, I doubt, you will never get even bacon by aiming

only at that. You are men, not animals of prey, well-used or ill-used!

Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast becoming a rather

unhappy one.--What if we should cease babbling about 'happiness,' and

leave _it_ resting on its own basis, as it used to do!

A gifted Byron rises in his wrath; and feeling too surely that he for

his part is not 'happy,' declares the same in very violent language,

as a piece of news that may be interesting. It evidently has surprised

him much. One dislikes to see a man and poet reduced to proclaim on

the streets such tidings: but on the whole, as matters go, that is not

the most dislikable. Byron speaks the _truth_ in this matter. Byron's

large audience indicates how true it is felt to be.

'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou

art happy or not! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all Tomorrows

become Yesterdays; and then there is no question whatever of the

'happiness,' but quite another question. Nay, thou hast such a sacred

pity left at least for thyself, thy very pains, once gone over into

Yesterday, become joys to thee. Besides, thou knowest not what

heavenly blessedness and indispensable sanative virtue was in them;

thou shalt only know it after many days, when thou art wiser!--A

benevolent old Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen

sick by gourmandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's

judgment, been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals

continued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to take

a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appetite," said he,

objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos; "I have no appetite; I

can't eat!"--"My dear fellow," answered the Doctor in mildest tone,

"it isn't of the slightest consequence;"--and continued his

philosophical discoursings with us!

Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron

Misanthrope? The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern

parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm by indubitable symptoms

of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even the

partition-wall! Ever at a certain hour, with preternatural gnarring,

growling and screeching, which attended as running bass, there began,

in a horrid, semi-articulate, unearthly voice, this song: "Once I was

hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_erable! Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r,

whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_erable!"--Rest,

rest, perturbed spirit;--or indeed, as the good old Doctor said: My

dear fellow, it isn't of the slightest consequence! But no; the

perturbed spirit could not rest; and to the neighbours, fretted,

affrighted, or at least insufferably bored by him, it _was_ of such

consequence that they had to go and examine in his haunted chamber.

In his haunted chamber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an

unfortunate--Imitator of Byron? No, is an unfortunate rusty Meat-jack,

gnarring and creaking with rust and work; and this, in Scottish

dialect, is _its_ Byronian musical Life-philosophy, sung according to

ability!

* * * * *

Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for his

'happiness,'--pothering, and were it ballot-boxing, poem-making, or in

what way soever fussing and exerting himself,--he is not the man that

will help us to 'get our knaves and dastards arrested'! No; he rather

is on the way to increase the number,--by at least one unit and his

tail! Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to

the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. 'Happiness our

being's end and aim,' all that very paltry speculation is at bottom,

if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world.

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much

about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I can't eat!"

but "I can't work!" that was the burden of all wise complaining among

men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot

work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the

day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the

night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our

happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished; vanished, clean

gone; a thing that has been: 'not of the slightest consequence'

whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of

Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with

Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack

with hard labour and rust! But our work,--behold that is not

abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the

want of it remains;--for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and

that is now the sole question with us forevermore! Brief brawling Day,

with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone;

and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences

and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness,

unhappiness: all that was but the _wages_ thou hadst; thou hast spent

all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin of it remains

with thee, it is all spent, eaten: and now thy work, where is thy

work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy work!

* * * * *

Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and even much of a

blockhead withal, he would cease criticising his victuals to such

extent; and criticise himself rather, what he does with his victuals!

CHAPTER V.

THE ENGLISH.

And yet, with all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth of practical

sense in thee, great England! A depth of sense, of justice, and

courage; in which, under all emergencies and world-bewilderments, and

under this most complex of emergencies we now live in, there is still

hope, there is still assurance!

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not

describe them. Like the old Romans, and some few others, _their_ Epic

Poem is written on the Earth's surface: England her Mark! It is

complained that they have no artists: one Shakspeare indeed; but for

Raphael only a Reynolds; for Mozart nothing but a Mr. Bishop: not a

picture, not a song. And yet they did produce one Shakspeare: consider

how the element of Shakspearean melody does lie imprisoned in their

nature; reduced to unfold itself in mere Cotton-mills, Constitutional

Governments, and suchlike;--all the more interesting when it does

become visible, as even in such unexpected shapes it succeeds in

doing! Goethe spoke of the Horse, how impressive, almost affecting it

was that an animal of such qualities should stand obstructed so; its

speech nothing but an inarticulate neighing, its handiness mere

_hoof_iness, the fingers all constricted, tied together, the

finger-nails coagulated into a mere hoof, shod with iron. The more

significant, thinks he, are those eye-flashings of the generous noble

quadruped; those prancings, curvings of the neck clothed with thunder.

A Dog of Knowledge has free utterance; but the Warhorse is almost

mute, very far from free! It is even so. Truly, your freest utterances

are not by any means always the best: they are the worst rather; the

feeblest, trivialest; their meaning prompt, but small, ephemeral.

Commend me to the silent English, to the silent Romans. Nay the

silent Russians, too, I believe to be worth something: are they

not even now drilling, under much obloquy, an immense semi-barbarous

half-world from Finland to Kamtschatka, into rule, subordination,

civilisation,--really in an old Roman fashion; speaking no word about

it; quietly hearing all manner of vituperative Able Editors speak!

While your ever-talking, ever-gesticulating French, for example, what

are they at this moment drilling?--Nay of all animals, the freest of

utterance, I should judge, is the genus _Simia_: go into the Indian

woods, say all Travellers, and look what a brisk, adroit, unresting

Ape-population it is!

* * * * *

The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the

man; how much more the done Work. Whatsoever of morality and of

intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness, of method,

insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of Strength the man

had in him will lie written in the Work he does. To work: why, it is

to try himself against Nature, and her everlasting unerring Laws;

these will tell a true verdict as to the man. So much of virtue and of

faculty did _we_ find in him; so much and no more! He had such

capacity of harmonising himself with _me_ and my unalterable

ever-veracious Laws; of cooeperating and working as _I_ bade him;--and

has prospered, and has not prospered, as you see!--Working as great

Nature bade him: does not that mean virtue of a kind; nay of all

kinds? Cotton can be spun and sold, Lancashire operatives can be got

to spin it, and at length one has the woven webs and sells them, by

following Nature's regulations in that matter: by not following

Nature's regulations, you have them not. You have them not;--there is

no Cotton-web to sell: Nature finds a bill against you; your

'Strength' is not Strength, but Futility! Let faculty be honoured, so

far as it is faculty. A man that can succeed in working is to me

always a man.

How one loves to see the burly figure of him, this thick-skinned,

seemingly opaque, perhaps sulky, almost stupid Man of Practice, pitted

against some light adroit Man of Theory, all equipt with clear logic,

and able anywhere to give you Why for Wherefore! The adroit Man of

Theory, so light of movement, clear of utterance, with his bow

full-bent and quiver full of arrow-arguments,--surely he will strike

down the game, transfix everywhere the heart of the matter; triumph

everywhere, as he proves that he shall and must do? To your

astonishment, it turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-browed,

thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic utterance, in silence

mainly, with here and there a low grunt or growl, has in him what

transcends all logic-utterance: a Congruity with the Unuttered. The

Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or outer skin, is

his or is not his: but the Doable, which reaches down to the World's

centre, you find him there!

The rugged Brindley has little to say for himself; the rugged

Brindley, when difficulties accumulate on him, retires silent,

'generally to his bed;' retires 'sometimes for three days together to

his bed, that he may be in perfect privacy there,' and ascertain in

his rough head how the difficulties can be overcome. The ineloquent

Brindley, behold he _has_ chained seas together; his ships do visibly

float over valleys, invisibly through the hearts of mountains; the

Mersey and the Thames, the Humber and the Severn have shaken hands:

Nature most audibly answers, Yea! The Man of Theory twangs his

full-bent bow: Nature's Fact ought to fall stricken, but does not: his

logic-arrow glances from it as from a scaly dragon, and the obstinate

Fact keeps walking its way. How singular! At bottom, you will have to

grapple closer with the dragon; take it home to you, by real faculty,

not by seeming faculty; try whether you are stronger, or it is

stronger. Close with it, wrestle it: sheer obstinate toughness of

muscle; but much more, what we call toughness of heart, which will

mean persistence hopeful and even desperate, unsubduable patience,

composed candid openness, clearness of mind: all this shall be

'strength' in wrestling your dragon; the whole man's real strength is

in this work, we shall get the measure of him here.

Of all the Nations in the world at present the English are the

stupidest in speech, the wisest in action. As good as a 'dumb' Nation,

I say, who cannot speak, and have never yet spoken,--spite of the

Shakspeares and Miltons who show us what possibilities there are!--O

Mr. Bull, I look in that surly face of thine with a mixture of pity

and laughter, yet also with wonder and veneration. Thou complainest

not, my illustrious friend; and yet I believe the heart of thee is

full of sorrow, of unspoken sadness, seriousness,--profound melancholy

(as some have said) the basis of thy being. Unconsciously, for thou

speakest of nothing, this great Universe is great to thee. Not by

levity of floating, but by stubborn force of swimming, shalt thou make

thy way. The Fates sing of thee that thou shalt many times be thought

an ass and a dull ox, and shalt with a godlike indifference believe

it. My friend,--and it is all untrue, nothing ever falser in point of

fact! Thou art of those great ones whose greatness the small passer-by

does not discern. Thy very stupidity is wiser than their wisdom. A

grand _vis inertiae_ is in thee; how many grand qualities unknown to

small men! Nature alone knows thee, acknowledges the bulk and strength

of thee: thy Epic, unsung in words, is written in huge characters on

the face of this Planet,--sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets

and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New Hollands; legible throughout

the Solar System!

But the dumb Russians too, as I said, they, drilling all wild Asia and

wild Europe into military rank and file, a terrible yet hitherto a

prospering enterprise, are still dumber. The old Romans also could not

_speak_, for many centuries:--not till the world was theirs; and so

many speaking Greekdoms, their logic-arrows all spent, had been

absorbed and abolished. The logic-arrows, how they glanced futile from

obdurate thick-skinned Facts; Facts to be wrestled down only by the

real vigour of Roman thews!--As for me, I honour, in these

loud-babbling days, all the Silent rather. A grand Silence that of

Romans;--nay the grandest of all, is it not that of the gods! Even

Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in

comparison! The 'talent of silence' is our fundamental one. Great

honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad; not a

jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters and forms

merely. But still greater honour, if his Epic be a mighty Empire

slowly built together, a mighty Series of Heroic Deeds,--a mighty

Conquest over Chaos; _which_ Epic the 'Eternal Melodies' have, and

must have, informed and dwelt in, as it sung itself! There is no

mistaking that latter Epic. Deeds are greater than Words. Deeds have

such a life, mute but undeniable, and grow as living trees and

fruit-trees do; they people the vacuity of Time, and make it green and

worthy. Why should the oak prove logically that it ought to grow, and

will grow? Plant it, try it; what gifts of diligent judicious

assimilation and secretion it has, of progress and resistance, of

_force_ to grow, will then declare themselves. My much-honoured,

illustrious, extremely inarticulate Mr. Bull!--

Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter,--oftentimes the force of

dullness can no farther go. You stand silent, incredulous, as over a

platitude that borders on the Infinite. The man's Churchisms,

Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philosophies,

Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in this world. Fate's prophecy

is fulfilled; you call the man an ox and an ass. But set him once to

work,--respectable man! His spoken sense is next to nothing,

nine-tenths of it palpable _non_sense: but his unspoken sense, his

inner silent feeling of what is true, what does agree with fact, what

is doable and what is not doable,--this seeks its fellow in the world.

A terrible worker; irresistible against marshes, mountains,

impediments, disorder, incivilisation; everywhere vanquishing

disorder, leaving it behind him as method and order. He 'retires to

his bed three days,' and considers!

Nay withal, stupid as he is, our dear John,--ever, after infinite

tumblings, and spoken platitudes innumerable from barrel-heads and

parliament-benches, he does settle down somewhere about the just

conclusion; you are certain that his jumblings and tumblings will end,

after years or centuries, in the stable equilibrium. Stable

equilibrium, I say; centre-of-gravity lowest;--not the unstable, with

centre-of-gravity highest, as I have known it done by quicker people!

For indeed, do but jumble and tumble sufficiently, you avoid that

worst fault, of settling with your centre-of-gravity highest; your

centre-of-gravity is certain to come lowest, and to stay there. If

slowness, what we in our impatience call 'stupidity,' be the price of

stable equilibrium over unstable, shall we grudge a little slowness?

Not the least admirable quality of Bull is, after all, that of

remaining insensible to logic; holding out for considerable periods,

ten years or more, as in this of the Corn-Laws, after all arguments

and shadow of arguments have faded away from him, till the very

urchins on the street titter at the arguments he brings.

Logic,--[Greek: Logike], the 'Art of Speech,'--does indeed speak so

and so; clear enough: nevertheless Bull still shakes his head; will

see whether nothing else _illogical_, not yet 'spoken,' not yet able

to be 'spoken,' do not lie in the business, as there so often

does!--My firm belief is, that, finding himself now enchanted,

hand-shackled, foot-shackled, in Poor-Law Bastilles and elsewhere, he

will retire three days to his bed, and _arrive_ at a conclusion or

two! His three-years 'total stagnation of trade,' alas, is not that a

painful enough 'lying in bed to consider himself'? Poor Bull!

Bull is a born Conservative; for this too I inexpressibly honour him.

All great Peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties;

patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of

the greatness that is in LAW, in Custom once solemnly established, and

now long recognised as just and final.--True, O Radical Reformer,

there is no Custom that can, properly speaking, be final; none. And

yet thou seest _Customs_ which, in all civilised countries, are

accounted final; nay, under the Old-Roman name of _Mores_, are

accounted _Morality_, Virtue, Laws of God Himself. Such, I assure

thee, not a few of them are; such almost all of them once were. And

greatly do I respect the solid character,--a blockhead, thou wilt say;

yes, but a well-conditioned blockhead, and the best-conditioned,--who

esteems all 'Customs once solemnly acknowledged' to be ultimate,

divine, and the rule for a man to walk by, nothing doubting, not

inquiring farther. What a time of it had we, were all men's life and

trade still, in all parts of it, a problem, a hypothetic seeking, to

be settled by painful Logics and Baconian Inductions! The Clerk in

Eastcheap cannot spend the day in verifying his Ready-Reckoner; he

must take it as verified, true and indisputable; or his Book-keeping

by Double Entry will stand still. "Where is your Posted Ledger?" asks

the Master at night.--"Sir," answers the other, "I was verifying my

Ready-Reckoner, and find some errors. The Ledger is--!"--Fancy such a

thing!

True, all turns on your Ready-Reckoner being moderately

correct,--being _not_ insupportably incorrect! A Ready-Reckoner which

has led to distinct entries in your Ledger such as these: '_Creditor_

an English People by fifteen hundred years of good Labour; and

_Debtor_ to lodging in enchanted Poor-Law Bastilles: _Creditor_ by

conquering the largest Empire the Sun ever saw; and _Debtor_ to

Donothingism and "Impossible" written on all departments of the

government thereof: _Creditor_ by mountains of gold ingots earned; and

_Debtor_ to No Bread purchasable by them:'--_such_ Ready-Reckoner,

methinks, is beginning to be suspect; nay is ceasing, and has ceased,

to be suspect! Such Ready-Reckoner is a Solecism in Eastcheap; and

must, whatever be the press of business, and will and shall be

rectified a little. Business can go on no longer with _it_. The most

Conservative English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of

Peoples, is driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things

'spoken,' and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only

felt and very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their

Life, as it is, has ceased to be longer possible for them.

Urge not this noble silent People; rouse not the Berserkir rage that

lies in them! Do you know their Cromwells, Hampdens, their Pyms and

Bradshaws? Men very peaceable, but men that can be made very terrible!

Men who, like their old Teutsch Fathers in Agrippa's days, 'have a

soul that despises death;' to whom 'death,' compared with falsehoods

and injustices, is light;--'in whom there is a rage unconquerable by

the immortal gods!' Before this, the English People have taken very

preternatural-looking Spectres by the beard; saying virtually: "And if

thou _wert_ 'preternatural'? Thou with thy 'divine-rights' grown

diabolic-wrongs? Thou,--not even 'natural;' decapitable; totally

extinguishable!"--Yes, just so godlike as this People's patience was,

even so godlike will and must its impatience be. Away, ye scandalous

Practical Solecisms, children actually of the Prince of Darkness; ye

have near broken our hearts; we can and will endure you no longer.

Begone, we say; depart, while the play is good! By the Most High God,

whose sons and born, missionaries true men are, ye shall not continue

here! You and we have become incompatible; can inhabit one house no

longer. Either you must go, or we. Are ye ambitious to try _which_ it

shall be?

O my Conservative friends, who still specially name and struggle to

approve yourselves 'Conservative,' would to Heaven I could persuade

you of this world-old fact, than which Fate is not surer, That Truth

and Justice alone are _capable_ of being 'conserved' and preserved!

The thing which is unjust, which is _not_ according to God's Law, will

you, in a God's Universe, try to conserve that? It is so old, say you?

Yes, and the hotter haste ought _you_, of all others, to be in, to let

it grow no older! If but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimate

to you that it is not fair,--hasten, for the sake of Conservatism

itself, to probe it rigorously, to cast it forth at once and forever

if guilty. How will or can you preserve _it_, the thing that is not

fair? 'Impossibility' a thousandfold is marked on that. And ye call

yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies:--ought not honour and

nobleness of mind, if they had departed from all the Earth elsewhere,

to find their last refuge with you? Ye unfortunate!

The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the tree

itself. Old? Yes, it is too old. Many a weary winter has it swung and

creaked there, and gnawed and fretted, with its dead wood, the organic

substance and still living fibre of this good tree; many a long summer

has its ugly naked brown defaced the fair green umbrage; every day it

has done mischief, and that only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if

for nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut _it_

away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead

root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron

spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living

substance;--nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial

crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro,

and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron spike would.

If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another bold

figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand pounds an hour

allow those Corn-Laws to continue! Potosi and Golconda put together

would not purchase my assent to them. Do you count what treasuries of

bitter indignation they are laying up for you in every just English

heart? Do you know what questions, not as to Corn-prices and

Sliding-scales alone, they are _forcing_ every reflective Englishman

to ask himself? Questions insoluble, or hitherto unsolved; deeper

than any of our Logic-plummets hitherto will sound: questions deep

enough,--which it were better that we did not name even in thought!

You are forcing us to think of them, to begin uttering them. The

utterance of them is begun; and where will it be ended, think you?

When two millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five

millions, as is insolently said, 'rejoice in potatoes,' there are

various things that must be begun, let them end where they can.

CHAPTER VI.

TWO CENTURIES.

The Settlement effected by our 'Healing Parliament' in the Year of

Grace 1660, though accomplished under universal acclamations from the

four corners of the British Dominions, turns out to have been one of

the mournfulest that ever took place in this land of ours. It called

and thought itself a Settlement of brightest hope and fulfilment,

bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels and bonfires could make

it: and we find it now, on looking back on it with the insight which

trial has yielded, a Settlement as of despair. Considered well, it was

a Settlement to govern henceforth without God, with only some decent

Pretence of God.

Governing by the Christian Law of God had been found a thing of

battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult thing:

wherefore let us now abandon it, and govern only by so much of God's

Christian Law as--as may prove quiet and convenient for us. What is

the end of Government? To guide men in the way wherein they should go:

towards their true good in this life, the portal of infinite good in a

life to come? To guide men in such way, and ourselves in such way, as

the Maker of men, whose eye is upon us, will sanction at the Great

Day?--Or alas, perhaps at bottom _is_ there no Great Day, no sure

outlook of any life to come; but only this poor life, and what of

taxes, felicities, Nell-Gwyns and entertainments we can manage to

muster here? In that case, the end of Government will be, To suppress

all noise and disturbance, whether of Puritan preaching, Cameronian

psalm-singing, thieves'-riot, murder, arson, or what noise soever,

and--be careful that supplies do not fail! A very notable conclusion,

if we will think of it, and not without an abundance of fruits for us.

Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn gallows, as the type of

Puritanism found futile, inexecutable, execrable,--yes, that

gallows-tree has been a fingerpost into very strange country indeed.

Let earnest Puritanism die; let decent Formalism, whatsoever cant it

be or grow to, live! We have had a pleasant journey in that direction;

and are--arriving at our inn?

To support the Four Pleas of the Crown, and keep Taxes coming in: in

very sad seriousness, has not this been, ever since, even in the best

times, almost the one admitted end and aim of Government? Religion,

Christian Church, Moral Duty; the fact that man had a soul at all;

that in man's life there was any eternal truth or justice at all,--has

been as good as left quietly out of sight. Church indeed,--alas, the

endless talk and struggle we have had of High-Church, Low-Church,

Church-Extension, Church-in-Danger: we invite the Christian reader to

think whether it has not been a too miserable screech-owl phantasm of

talk and struggle, as for a 'Church,'--which one had rather not define

at present!

But now in these godless two centuries, looking at England and her

efforts and doings, if we ask, What of England's doings the Law of

Nature had accepted, Nature's King had actually furthered and

pronounced to have truth in them,--where is our answer? Neither the

'Church' of Hurd and Warburton, nor the Anti-Church of Hume and

Paine; not in any shape the Spiritualism of England: all this is

already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it is; a thing that

Nature does _not_ own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a

_reminiscence_ of things noble and divine; on the other is but acrid

Candour, with a _prophecy_ of things brutal, infernal. Hurd and

Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body

of true-seeing men looks thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume

Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality

and the like, is also in these days declaring itself nought, unable to

keep the world from taking fire.

The theories and speculations of both these parties, and, we may say,

of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be things which the

Eternal Veracity did not accept; things superficial, ephemeral, which

already a near Posterity, finding them already dead and brown-leafed,

is about to suppress and forget. The Spiritualism of England, for

those godless years, is, as it were, all forgettable. Much has been

written: but the perennial Scriptures of Mankind have had small

accession: from all English Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather

binding or in paper wrappage, how many verses have been added to

these? Our most melodious Singers have sung as from the throat

outwards: from the inner Heart of Man, from the great Heart of Nature,

through no Pope or Philips, has there come any tone. The Oracles have

been dumb. In brief, the Spoken Word of England has not been true. The

Spoken Word of England turns out to have been trivial; of short

endurance; not valuable, not available as a Word, except for the

passing day. It has been accordant with transitory Semblance;

discordant with eternal Fact. It has been unfortunately not a Word,

but a Cant; a helpless involuntary Cant, nay too often a cunning

voluntary one: either way, a very mournful Cant; the Voice not of

Nature and Fact, but of something other than these.

With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars, controversies,

with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections,--it is her Practical

Material Work alone that England has to show for herself! This, and

hitherto almost nothing more; yet actually this. The grim inarticulate

veracity of the English People, unable to speak its meaning in words,

has turned itself silently on things; and the dark powers of Material

Nature have answered, "Yes, this at least is true, this is not false!"

So answers Nature. "Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have

become Cotton-trees; and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven

shirts,--hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to be distributed,

capable to cover the bare backs of my children of men. Mountains, old

as the Creation, I have permitted to be bored through; bituminous

fuel-stores, the wreck of forests that were green a million years

ago,--I have opened them from my secret rock-chambers, and they are

yours, ye English. Your huge fleets, steamships, do sail the sea; huge

Indias do obey you; from huge _New_ Englands and Antipodal Australias

comes profit and traffic to this Old England of mine!" So answers

Nature. The Practical Labour of England is _not_ a chimerical

Triviality: it is a Fact, acknowledged by all the Worlds; which no man

and no demon will contradict. It is, very audibly, though very

inarticulately as yet, the one God's Voice we have heard in these two

atheistic centuries.

* * * * *

And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and impediments

all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet intelligible to no man!

How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it not to be the Voice of God to

us, but regard it merely as a Voice of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And

have a Hell in England,--the Hell of not making money. And coldly see

the all-conquering valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million,

in their Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law;--mumbling to

ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand,

Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man: Free-trade, Competition, and

Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel yet preached!

As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour; as if godlike Labour and

brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A serious, most earnest

Mammonism grown Midas-eared; an unserious Dilettantism, earnest about

nothing, grinning with inarticulate incredulous incredible jargon

about all things, as the _enchanted_ Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea! It

is mournful enough, for the present hour; were there not an endless

hope in it withal. Giant Labour, truest emblem there is of God

the World-Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker; noble Labour,

which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest

throne,--staggering hitherto like a blind irrational giant, hardly

allowed to have his common place on the street-pavements; idle

Dilettantism. Dead-Sea Apism crying out, "Down with him; he is

dangerous!"

Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a _soul_ in the body

of him, and take his place on the throne of things,--leaving his

Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of said

throne.

CHAPTER VII.

OVER-PRODUCTION.

But what will reflective readers say of a Governing Class, such as

ours, addressing its Workers with an indictment of 'Over-production'!

Over-production: runs it not so? "Ye miscellaneous, ignoble

manufacturing individuals, ye have produced too much! We accuse you of

making above two-hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of

mankind. Your trousers too, which you have made, of fustian, of

cassimere, of Scotch-plaid, of jane, nankeen and woollen broadcloth,

are they not manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the

human foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with--Nay, what say we

hats or shoes? You produce gold-watches, jewelries, silver-forks, and

epergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed sofas--Heavens, the

Commercial Bazaar and multitudinous Howel-and-Jameses cannot contain

you. You have produced, produced;--he that seeks your indictment, let

him look around. Millions of shirts, and empty pairs of breeches, hang

there in judgment against you. We accuse you of over-producing: you

are criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes and

commodities, in a frightful over-abundance. And now there is a glut,

and your operatives cannot be fed!"

Never surely, against an earnest Working Mammonism was there brought,

by Game-preserving aristocratic Dilettantism, a stranger accusation,

since this world began. My lords and gentlemen,--why, it was _you_

that were appointed, by the fact and by the theory of your position

on the Earth, to 'make and administer Laws,'--that is to say, in a

world such as ours, to guard against 'gluts;' against honest

operatives, who had done their work, remaining unfed! I say, _you_

were appointed to preside over the Distribution and Apportionment of

the Wages of Work done; and to see well that there went no labourer

without his hire, were it of money-coins, were it of hemp

gallows-ropes: that function was yours, and from immemorial time has

been; yours, and as yet no other's. These poor shirt-spinners have

forgotten much, which by the virtual unwritten law of their position

they should have remembered: but by any written recognised law of

their position, what have they forgotten? They were set to make

shirts. The Community with all its voices commanded them, saying,

"Make shirts;"--and there the shirts are! Too many shirts? Well, that

is a novelty, in this intemperate Earth, with its nine-hundred

millions of bare backs! But the Community commanded you, saying, "See

that the shirts are well apportioned, that our Human Laws be emblem of

God's Laws;"--and where is the apportionment? Two million shirtless or

ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in Workhouse Bastilles, five million

more (according to some) in Ugolino Hunger-cellars; and for remedy,

you say,--what say you?--"Raise _our_ rents!" I have not in my time

heard any stranger speech, not even on the Shores of the Dead Sea. You

continue addressing those poor shirt-spinners and over-producers in

really a _too_ triumphant manner!

"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse _us_ of over-production?

We take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced

nothing at all. Not from us proceeds this frightful overplus of

shirts. In the wide domains of created Nature circulates no shirt or

thing of our producing. Certain fox-brushes nailed upon our

stable-door, the fruit of fair audacity at Melton Mowbray; these we

have produced, and they are openly nailed up there. He that accuses us

of producing, let him show himself, let him name what and when. We are

innocent of producing;--ye ungrateful, what mountains of things have

we not, on the contrary, had to 'consume' and make away with!

Mountains of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever edible or

wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if we had the talent

of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of divine faculty to eat? Ye

ungrateful!--and did you not grow under the shadow of our wings? Are

not your filthy mills built on these fields of ours; on this soil of

England, which belongs to--whom think you? And we shall not offer you

our own wheat at the price that pleases us, but that partly pleases

you? A precious notion! What would become of you, if we chose, at any

time, to decide on growing no wheat more?"

Yes, truly, _here_ is the ultimate rock-basis of all Corn-Laws;

whereon, at the bottom of much arguing, they rest, as securely as they

can: What would become of you, if we decided, some day, on growing no

more wheat at all? If we chose to grow only partridges henceforth, and

a modicum of wheat for our own uses? Cannot we do what we like with

our own?--Yes, indeed! For my share, if I could melt Gneiss Rock, and

create Law of Gravitation; if I could stride out to the Doggerbank,

some morning, and striking down my trident there into the mud-waves,

say, "Be land, be fields, meadows, mountains and fresh-rolling

streams!" by Heaven, I should incline to have the letting of _that_

land in perpetuity, and sell the wheat of it, or burn the wheat of it,

according to my own good judgment! My Corn-Lawing friends, you

affright me.

To the 'Millo-cracy' so-called, to the Working Aristocracy, steeped

too deep in mere ignoble Mammonism, and as yet all unconscious of its

noble destinies, as yet but an irrational or semi-rational giant,

struggling to awake some soul in itself,--the world will have much to

say, reproachfully, reprovingly, admonishingly. But to the Idle

Aristocracy, what will the world have to say? Things painful, and not

pleasant!

To the man who _works_, who attempts, in never so ungracious barbarous

a way, to get forward with some work, you will hasten out with

furtherances, with encouragements, corrections; you will say to him:

"Welcome; thou art ours; our care shall be of thee." To the Idler,

again, never so gracefully going idle, coming forward with never so

many parchments, you will not hasten out; you will sit still, and be

disinclined to rise. You will say to him: "Not welcome, O complex

Anomaly; would thou hadst stayed out of doors: for who of mortals

knows what to do with thee? Thy parchments: yes, they are old, of

venerable yellowness; and we too honour parchment, old-established

settlements, and venerable use-and-wont. Old parchments in very

truth:--yet on the whole, if thou wilt remark, they are young to the

Granite Rocks, to the Groundplan of God's Universe! We advise thee to

put up thy parchments; to go home to thy place, and make no needless

noise whatever. Our heart's wish is to save thee: yet there as thou

art, hapless Anomaly, with nothing but thy yellow parchments, noisy

futilities, and shotbelts and fox-brushes, who of gods or men can

avert dark Fate? Be counselled, ascertain if no work exist for thee on

God's Earth; if thou find no commanded-duty there but that of going

gracefully idle? Ask, inquire earnestly, with a half-frantic

earnestness; for the answer means Existence or Annihilation to thee.

We apprise thee of the world-old fact, becoming sternly disclosed

again in these days, That he who cannot work in this Universe cannot

get existed in it: had he parchments to thatch the face of the world,

these, combustible fallible sheepskin, cannot avail him. Home, thou

unfortunate; and let us have at least no noise from thee!"

Suppose the unfortunate Idle Aristocracy, as the unfortunate Working

one has done, were to 'retire three days to _its_ bed,' and consider

itself there, what o'clock it had become?--

How have we to regret not only that men have 'no religion,' but that

they have next to no reflection: and go about with heads full of mere

extraneous noises, with eyes wide-open but visionless,--for most part

in the somnambulist state!

CHAPTER VIII.

UNWORKING ARISTOCRACY.

It is well said, 'Land is the right basis of an Aristocracy;' whoever

possesses the Land, he, more emphatically than any other, is the

Governor, Viceking of the people on the Land. It is in these days as

it was in those of Henry Plantagenet and Abbot Samson; as it will in

all days be. The Land is _Mother_ of us all; nourishes, shelters,

gladdens, lovingly enriches us all; in how many ways, from our first

wakening to our last sleep on her blessed mother-bosom, does she, as

with blessed mother-arms, enfold us all!

The Hill I first saw the Sun rise over, when the Sun and I and all

things were yet in their auroral hour, who can divorce me from it?

Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots I have struck into

my Native Soil; no _tree_ that grows is rooted so. From noblest

Patriotism to humblest industrial Mechanism; from highest dying for

your country, to lowest quarrying and coal-boring for it, a Nation's

Life depends upon its Land. Again and again we have to say, there can

be no true Aristocracy but must possess the Land.

Men talk of 'selling' Land. Land, it is true, like Epic Poems and even

higher things, in such a trading world, has to be presented in the

market for what it will bring, and as we say be 'sold:' but the notion

of 'selling,' for certain bits of metal, the _Iliad_ of Homer, how

much more the _Land_ of the World-Creator, is a ridiculous

impossibility! We buy what is saleable of it; nothing more was ever

buyable. Who can or could sell it to us? Properly speaking, the Land

belongs to these two: To the Almighty God; and to all His Children of

Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on

it. No generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and

effort, sell Land on any other principle: it is not the property of

any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have

worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it.

Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of any country, is

properly worth nothing, except 'the labour bestowed on it.' This,

speaking even in the language of Eastcheap, is not correct. The rudest

space of country equal in extent to England, could a whole English

Nation, with all their habitudes, arrangements, skills, with

whatsoever they do carry within the skins of them and cannot be stript

of, suddenly take wing and alight on it,--would be worth a very

considerable thing! Swiftly, within year and day, this English Nation,

with its multiplex talents of ploughing, spinning, hammering, mining,

road-making and trafficking, would bring a handsome value out of such

a space of country. On the other hand, fancy what an English Nation,

once 'on the wing,' could have done with itself, had there been simply

no soil, not even an inarable one, to alight on? Vain all its talents

for ploughing, hammering, and whatever else; there is no Earth-room

for this Nation with its talents: this Nation will have to _keep_

hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to and fro; and perish

piecemeal; burying itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste

unfirmamented seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the

gift of God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very

considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker! The last stroke of labour

bestowed on it is not the making of its value, but only the

increasing thereof.

It is very strange, the degree to which these truisms are forgotten in

our days; how, in the ever-whirling chaos of Formulas, we have quietly

lost sight of Fact,--which it is so perilous not to keep forever in

sight. Fact, if we do not see it, will make us _feel_ it by and

by!--From much loud controversy, and Corn-Law debating there rises,

loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this very question

among others, Who made the Land of England? Who made it, this

respectable English Land, wheat-growing, metalliferous, carboniferous,

which will let readily hand over head for seventy millions or upwards,

as it here lies: who did make it?--"We!" answer the much-_consuming_

Aristocracy; "We!" as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton

Mowbray: "It is we that made it; or are the heirs, assigns and

representatives of those who did!"--My brothers, You? Everlasting

honour to you, then; and Corn-Laws as many as you will, till your own

deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of Human pity for our famine

bids you Hold! Ye are as gods, that can create soil. Soil-creating

gods there is no withstanding. They have the might to sell wheat at

what price they list; and the right, to all lengths, and

famine-lengths,--if they be pitiless infernal gods! Celestial gods, I

think, would stop short of the famine-price; but no infernal nor any

kind of god can be bidden stop!----Infatuated mortals, into what

questions are you driving every thinking man in England?

I say, you did _not_ make the Land of England; and, by the possession

of it, you _are_ bound to furnish guidance and governance to England!

That is the law of your position on this God's-Earth; an everlasting

act of Heaven's Parliament, not repealable in St. Stephen's or

elsewhere! True government and guidance; not no-government and

Laissez-faire; how much less, _mis_-government and Corn-Law! There is

not an imprisoned Worker looking out from these Bastilles but appeals,

very audibly in Heaven's High Courts, against you, and me, and

everyone who is not imprisoned, "Why am I here?" His appeal is audible

in Heaven; and will become audible enough on Earth too, if it remain

unheeded here. His appeal is against you, foremost of all; you stand

in the front-rank of the accused; you, by the very place you hold,

have first of all to answer him and Heaven!

* * * * *

What looks maddest, miserablest in these mad and miserable Corn-Laws

is independent altogether of their 'effect on wages,' their effect on

'increase of trade,' or any other such effect: it is the continual

maddening proof they protrude into the faces of all men, that our

Governing Class, called by God and Nature and the inflexible law of

Fact, either to do something towards governing, or to die and be

abolished,--have not yet learned even to sit still and do no mischief!

For no Anti-Corn-Law League yet asks more of them than this;--Nature

and Fact, very imperatively, asking so much more of them.

Anti-Corn-Law League asks not, Do something; but, Cease your

destructive misdoing, Do ye nothing!

Nature's message will have itself obeyed: messages of mere Free-Trade,

Anti-Corn-Law League and Laissez-faire, will then need small

obeying!--Ye fools, in name of Heaven, work, work, at the Ark of

Deliverance for yourselves and us, while hours are still granted you!

No: instead of working at the Ark, they say, "We cannot get our hands

kept rightly warm;" and _sit obstinately burning the planks_. No

madder spectacle at present exhibits itself under this Sun.

The Working Aristocracy; Mill-owners, Manufacturers, Commanders of

Working Men: alas, against them also much shall be brought in

accusation; much,--and the freest Trade in Corn, total abolition of

Tariffs, and uttermost 'Increase of Manufactures' and 'Prosperity of

Commerce,' will permanently mend no jot of it. The Working Aristocracy

must strike into a new path; must understand that money alone is _not_

the representative either of man's success in the world, or of man's

duties to man; and reform their own selves from top to bottom, if they

wish England reformed. England will not be habitable long, unreformed.

The Working Aristocracy--Yes, but on the threshold of all this, it is

again and again to be asked, What of the Idle Aristocracy? Again and

again, What shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the Owners of the

Soil of England; whose recognised function is that of handsomely

consuming the rents of England, shooting the partridges of England,

and as an agreeable amusement (if the purchase-money and other

conveniences serve), dilettante-ing in Parliament and Quarter-Sessions

for England? We will say mournfully, in the presence of Heaven and

Earth,--that we stand speechless, stupent, and know not what to say!

That a class of men entitled to live sumptuously on the marrow of the

earth; permitted simply, nay entreated, and as yet entreated in vain,

to do nothing at all in return, was never heretofore seen on the face

of this Planet. That such a class is transitory, exceptional, and,

unless Nature's Laws fall dead, cannot continue. That it has continued

now a moderate while; has, for the last fifty years, been rapidly

attaining its state of perfection. That it will have to find its

duties and do them; or else that it must and will cease to be seen on

the face of this Planet, which is a Working one, not an Idle one.