Alas, alas, the Working Aristocracy, admonished by Trades-unions,

Chartist conflagrations, above all by their own shrewd sense kept in

perpetual communion with the fact of things, will assuredly reform

themselves, and a working world will still be possible:--but the fate

of the Idle Aristocracy, as one reads its horoscope hitherto in

Corn-Laws and suchlike, is an abyss that fills one with despair. Yes,

my rosy fox-hunting brothers, a terrible _Hippocratic look_ reveals

itself (God knows, not to my joy) through those fresh buxom

countenances of yours. Through your Corn-Law Majorities,

Sliding-Scales, Protecting-Duties, Bribery-Elections, and triumphant

Kentish-fire, a thinking eye discerns ghastly images of ruin, too

ghastly for words; a handwriting as of Mene, Mene. Men and brothers,

on your Sliding-scale you seem sliding, and to have slid,--you little

know whither! Good God! did not a French Donothing Aristocracy, hardly

above half a century ago, declare in like manner, and in its

featherhead believe in like manner, "We cannot exist, and continue to

dress and parade ourselves, on the just rent of the soil of France;

but we must have farther payment than rent of the soil, we must be

exempted from taxes too,"--we must have a Corn-Law to extend our rent?

This was in 1789: in four years more--Did you look into the Tanneries

of Meudon, and the long-naked making for themselves breeches of human

skins! May the merciful Heavens avert the omen; may we be wiser, that

so we be less wretched.

* * * * *

A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on

precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has been crumbling.

Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr withal. Is there a man who

pretends to live luxuriously housed up; screened from all work, from

want, danger, hardship, the victory over which is what we name

work--he himself to sit serene, amid down-bolsters and appliances, and

have all his work and battling done by other men? And such man calls

himself a _noble_-man? His fathers worked for him, he says; or

successfully gambled for him: here _he_ sits; professes, not in sorrow

but in pride, that he and his have done no work, time out of mind. It

is the law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe,

that he, alone of recorded men, shall have no task laid on him, except

that of eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging himself out of

window. Once more I will say, there was no stranger spectacle ever

shown under this Sun. A veritable fact in our England of the

Nineteenth Century. His victuals he does eat: but as for keeping in

the inside of the window,--have not his friends, like me, enough to

do? Truly, looking at his Corn-Laws, Game-Laws, Chandos-Clauses,

Bribery-Elections and much else, you do shudder over the tumbling and

plunging he makes, held back by the lapels and coatskirts; only a thin

fence of window-glass before him,--and in the street mere horrid iron

spikes! My sick brother, as in hospital-maladies men do, thou dreamest

of Paradises and Eldorados, which are far from thee. 'Cannot I do what

I like with my own?' Gracious Heaven, my brother, this that thou seest

with those sick eyes is no firm Eldorado, and Corn-Law Paradise of

Donothings, but a dream of thy own fevered brain. It is a

glass-window, I tell thee, so many stories from the street; where are

iron spikes and the law of gravitation!

What is the meaning of nobleness, if this be 'noble'? In a valiant

suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us,

did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he who stands in the van

of men; fronting the peril which frightens back all others; which, if

it be not vanquished, will devour the others. Every noble crown is,

and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns. The Pagan Hercules,

why was he accounted a hero? Because he had slain Nemean Lions,

cleansed Augean Stables, undergone Twelve Labours only not too heavy

for a god. In modern, as in ancient and all societies, the

Aristocracy, they that assume the functions of an Aristocracy, doing

them or not, have taken the post of honour; which is the post of

difficulty, the post of danger,--of death, if the difficulty be not

overcome. _Il faut payer de sa vie._ Why was our life given us, if not

that we should manfully give it? Descend, O Donothing Pomp; quit thy

down-cushions; expose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to

cure it! The Czar of Russia became a dusty toiling shipwright; worked

with his axe in the Docks of Saardam; and his aim was small to thine.

Descend thou: undertake this horrid 'living chaos of Ignorance and

Hunger' weltering round thy feet; say, "I will heal it, or behold I

will die foremost in it." Such is verily the law. Everywhere and

everywhen a man has to '_pay_ with his life;' to do his work, as a

soldier does, at the expense of life. In no Piepowder earthly Court

can you sue an Aristocracy to do its work, at this moment: but in the

Higher Court, which even _it_ calls 'Court of Honour,' and which is

the Court of Necessity withal, and the eternal Court of the Universe,

in which all Fact comes to plead, and every Human Soul is an

apparitor,--the Aristocracy is answerable, and even now answering,

_there_.

* * * * *

Parchments? Parchments are venerable: but they ought at all times to

represent, as near as they by possibility can, the writing of the

Adamant Tablets; otherwise they are not so venerable! Benedict the Jew

in vain pleaded parchments; his usuries were too many. The King said,

"Go to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt pay just debt; down with

thy dust, or observe this tooth-forceps!" Nature, a far juster

Sovereign, has far terribler forceps. Aristocracies, actual and

imaginary, reach a time when parchment pleading does not avail them.

"Go to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt pay due debt!" shouts the

Universe to them, in an emphatic manner. They refuse to pay,

confidently pleading parchment: their best grinder-tooth, with

horrible agony, goes out of their jaw. Wilt thou pay now? A second

grinder, again in horrible agony, goes: a second, and a third, and if

need be, all the teeth and grinders, and the life itself with

them;--and _then_ there is free payment, and an anatomist-subject into

the bargain!

Reform Bills, Corn-Law Abrogation Bills, and then Land-Tax Bill,

Property-Tax Bill, and still dimmer list of _etceteras_; grinder after

grinder:--my lords and gentlemen, it were better for you to arise and

begin doing your work, than sit there and plead parchments!

* * * * *

We write no Chapter on the Corn-Laws, in this place; the Corn-Laws are

too mad to have a Chapter. There is a certain immorality, when there

is not a necessity, in speaking about things finished; in chopping

into small pieces the already slashed and slain. When the brains are

out, why does not a Solecism die? It is at its own peril if it refuse

to die; it ought to make all conceivable haste to die, and get itself

buried! The trade of Anti-Corn-Law Lecturer in these days, still an

indispensable, is a highly tragic one.

The Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go: would we were all as sure of

the Millennium as they are of going! They go swiftly in these present

months; with an increase of velocity, an ever-deepening,

ever-widening sweep of momentum, truly notable. It is at the

Aristocracy's own damage and peril, still more than at any other's

whatsoever, that the Aristocracy maintains them;--at a damage, say

only, as above computed, of a 'hundred thousand pounds an hour'! The

Corn-Laws keep all the air hot: fostered by their fever-warmth, much

that is evil, but much also, how much that is good and indispensable,

is rapidly coming to life among us!

CHAPTER IX.

WORKING ARISTOCRACY.

A poor Working Mammonism getting itself 'strangled in the

partridge-nets of an Unworking Dilettantism,' and bellowing

dreadfully, and already black in the face, is surely a disastrous

spectacle! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at bottom all

pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No better;--if not

this, then something other equally disastrous, if not still more

disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to become human again, and

rational; they have, on the whole, to cease to be Mammonisms, were it

even on compulsion, and pressure of the hemp round their neck!--My

friends of the Working Aristocracy, there are now a great many things

which you also, in your extreme need, will have to consider.

* * * * *

The Continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our machinery,

beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out

of this market and then out of that!' Sad news indeed; but

irremediable;--by no means the saddest news. The saddest news is, that

we should find our National Existence, as I sometimes hear it said,

depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper

than any other People. A most narrow stand for a great Nation to base

itself on! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abrogations

conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly

down from it, and said: "This is our minimum of cotton-prices. We care

not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem

so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with

cotton-fuzz, your hearts with copperas-fumes, with rage and mutiny;

become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!"--I admire

a Nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other

Nations, to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to

_under_sell them; we will be content to _equal_-sell them; to be happy

selling equally with them! I do not see the use of underselling them.

Cotton-cloth is already two-pence a yard or lower; and yet bare backs

were never more numerous among us. Let inventive men cease to spend

their existence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper;

and try to invent, a little, how cotton at its present cheapness could

be somewhat justlier divided among us. Let inventive men consider,

Whether the Secret of this Universe, and of Man's Life there, does,

after all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is

One God, just, supreme, almighty: but is Mammon the name of him?--With

a Hell which means 'Failing to make money,' I do not think there is

any Heaven possible that would suit one well; nor so much as an Earth

that can be habitable long! In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of

Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the

hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached; or

altogether the shabbiest. Even with Dilettante partridge-nets, and at

a horrible expenditure of pain, who shall regret to see the entirely

transient, and at best somewhat despicable life strangled out of _it_?

At the best, as we say, a somewhat despicable, unvenerable thing, this

same 'Laissez-faire;' and now, at the _worst_, fast growing an

altogether detestable one!

"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with our

agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?" cry many.--Ay,

what? Many things can be done with them, a hundred things, and a

thousand things,--had we once got a soul, and begun to try. This one

thing, of doing for them by 'underselling all people,' and filling our

own bursten pockets and appetites by the road; and turning over all

care for any 'population,' or human or divine consideration except

cash only, to the winds, with a "Laissez-faire" and the rest of it:

this is evidently not the thing. Farthing cheaper per yard? No great

Nation can stand on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher

and higher; balancing itself on its great-toe! Can England not subsist

without being _above_ all people in working? England never

deliberately purposed such a thing. If England work better than all

people, it shall be well. England, like an honest worker, will work as

well as she can; and hope the gods may allow her to live on that

basis. Laissez-faire and much else being once well dead, how many

'impossibles' will become possible! They are impossible, as

cotton-cloth at two-pence an ell was--till men set about making it.

The inventive genius of great England will not forever sit patient

with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers

whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a

Beaver's, or a Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a _Man's_ genius, I

hope, with a God over him!

Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand,--one begins to be weary of all that.

Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of

applause:--it is the Gospel of Despair! Man _is_ a Patent-Digester,

then: only give him Free Trade, Free digesting-room; and each of us

digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to Fate! My unhappy

brethren of the Working Mammonism, my unhappier brethren of the Idle

Dilettantism, no world was ever held together in that way for long. A

world of mere Patent-Digesters will soon have nothing to digest: such

world ends, and by Law of Nature must end, in 'over-population;' in

howling universal famine, 'impossibility,' and suicidal madness, as of

endless dog-kennels run rabid. Supply-and-demand shall do its full

part, and Free Trade shall be free as air;--thou of the shotbelts, see

thou forbid it not, with those paltry, _worse_ than Mammonish

swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are seen to be

swindleries for all thy canting, which in times like ours are very

scandalous to see! And Trade never so well freed, and all Tariffs

settled or abolished, and Supply-and-demand in full operation,--let us

all know that we have yet done nothing; that we have merely cleared

the ground for doing.

Yes, were the Corn-Laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing yet ended;

there is only room made for all manner of things beginning. The

Corn-Laws gone, and Trade made free, it is as good as certain this

paralysis of industry will pass away. We shall have another period of

commercial enterprise, of victory and prosperity; during which, it is

likely, much money will again be made, and all the people may, by the

extant methods, still for a space of years, be kept alive and

physically fed. The strangling band of Famine will be loosened from

our necks; we shall have room again to breathe; time to bethink

ourselves, to repent and consider! A precious and thrice-precious

space of years; wherein to struggle as for life in reforming our foul

ways; in alleviating, instructing, regulating our people; seeking, as

for life, that something like spiritual food be imparted them, some

real governance and guidance be provided them! It will be a priceless

time. For our new period or paroxysm of commercial prosperity will and

can, on the old methods of 'Competition and Devil take the hindmost,'

prove but a paroxysm: a new paroxysm,--likely enough, if we do not use

it better, to be our _last_. In this, of itself, is no salvation. If

our Trade in twenty years, 'flourishing' as never Trade flourished,

could double itself; yet then also, by the old Laissez-faire method,

our Population is doubled: we shall then be as we are, only twice as

many of us, twice and ten times as unmanageable!

* * * * *

All this dire misery, therefore; all this of our poor Workhouse

Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms, and

the general downbreak of Laissez-faire in these days,--may we not

regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of Nature, saying to us:

"Behold! Supply-and-demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment

is not the sole nexus of man with man,--how far from it! Deep, far

deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man's

Life itself: these also, if you will continue to do work, you shall

now learn and obey. He that will learn them, behold Nature is on his

side, he shall yet work and prosper with noble rewards. He that will

not learn them, Nature is against him, he shall not be able to do work

in Nature's empire,--not in hers. Perpetual mutiny, contention,

hatred, isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all

men discern that the thing which he attains, however golden it look or

be, is not success, but the want of success."

Supply-and-demand,--alas! For what noble work was there ever yet any

audible 'demand' in that poor sense? The man of Macedonia, speaking in

vision to an Apostle Paul, "Come over and help us," did not specify

what rate of wages he would give! Or was the Christian Religion itself

accomplished by Prize-Essays, Bridgwater Bequests, and a 'minimum of

Four thousand five hundred a year'? No demand that I heard of was made

then, audible in any Labour-market, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or

other the like emporium and hiring establishment; silent were all

these from any whisper of such demand;--powerless were all these to

'supply' it, had the demand been in thunder and earthquake, with gold

Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the reward. Ah me, into what

waste latitudes, in this Time-Voyage, have we wandered; like

adventurous Sindbads;--where the men go about as if by galvanism, with

meaningless glaring eyes, and have no soul, but only a beaver-faculty

and stomach! The haggard despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine

operatives, Chandos Farm-labourers, in these days, is painful to

behold; but not so painful, hideous to the inner sense, as that

brutish godforgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy and Life-theory,

which we hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses,

spouting-clubs, leading-articles, pulpits and platforms, everywhere as

the Ultimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of Man's Life, from the

throats and pens and thoughts of all-but all men!--

Enlightened Philosophies, like Moliere Doctors, will tell you:

"Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and suchlike: yes, all that

was true enough for old stupid times; all that used to be true: but we

have changed all that, _nous avons change tout cela_!" Well; if the

heart be got round now into the right side, and the liver to the left;

if man have no heroism in him deeper than the wish to eat, and in his

soul there dwell now no Infinite of Hope and Awe, and no divine

Silence can become imperative because it is not Sinai Thunder, and no

tie will bind if it be not that of Tyburn gallows-ropes,--then verily

you have changed all that; and for it, and for you, and for me, behold

the Abyss and nameless Annihilation is ready. So scandalous a beggarly

Universe deserves indeed nothing else; I cannot say I would save it

from Annihilation. Vacuum, and the serene Blue, will be much

handsomer; easier too for all of us. I, for one, decline living as a

Patent-Digester. Patent-Digester, Spinning-Mule, Mayfair

Clothes-Horse: many thanks, but your Chaosships will have the goodness

to excuse me!

CHAPTER X.

PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT.

One thing I do know: Never, on this Earth, was the relation of man to

man long carried on by Cash-payment alone. If, at any time, a

philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition and Supply-and-demand, start

up as the exponent of human relations, expect that it will soon end.

Such philosophies will arise: for man's philosophies are usually the

'supplement of his practice;' some ornamental Logic-varnish, some

outer skin of Articulate Intelligence, with which he strives to render

his dumb Instinctive Doings presentable when they are done. Such

philosophies will arise; be preached as Mammon-Gospels, the ultimate

Evangel of the World; be believed, with what is called belief, with

much superficial bluster, and a kind of shallow satisfaction real in

its way:--but they are ominous gospels! They are the sure, and even

swift, forerunner of great changes. Expect that the old System of

Society is done, is dying and fallen into dotage, when it begins to

rave in that fashion. Most Systems that I have watched the death of,

for the last three thousand years, have gone just so. The Ideal, the

True and Noble that was in them having faded out, and nothing now

remaining but naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness, they cannot live;

they are bound and inexorably ordained by the oldest Destinies,

Mothers of the Universe, to die. Curious enough: they thereupon,

as I have pretty generally noticed, devise some light comfortable

kind of 'wine-and-walnuts philosophy' for themselves, this

of Supply-and-demand or another; and keep saying, during hours

of mastication and rumination, which they call hours of

meditation: "Soul, take thy ease; it is all _well_ that thou art a

vulture-soul;"--and pangs of dissolution come upon them, oftenest

before they are aware!

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the

union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his

deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the

end of the world. I invite his Grace of Castle-Rackrent to reflect on

this;--does he think that a Land Aristocracy when it becomes a Land

Auctioneership can have long to live? Or that Sliding-scales will

increase the vital stamina of it? The indomitable Plugson too, of the

respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot,

is invited to reflect on this; for to him also it will be new, perhaps

even newer. Book-keeping by double entry is admirable, and records

several things in an exact manner. But the Mother-Destinies also keep

their Tablets; in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a recording;

and things, as my Moslem friends say, are 'written on the iron leaf.'

Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally: did you

never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson droning to you,

glance into your New Testament, and the cash-account stated four times

over, by a kind of quadruple entry,--in the Four Gospels there? I

consider that a cash-account, and balance-statement of work done and

wages paid, worth attending to. Precisely _such_, though on a smaller

scale, go on at all moments under this Sun; and the statement and

balance of them in the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's

Chancery are discrepant exceedingly;--which ought really to teach, and

to have long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of

Undershot, much more an unattackable _un_common-sense Grace of

Rackrent, a thing or two!--In brief, we shall have to dismiss the

Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place: we shall have to know, on

the threshold, that either there is some infinitely deeper Gospel,

subsidiary, explanatory and daily and hourly corrective, to the Cash

one; or else that the Cash one itself and all others are fast

travelling!

* * * * *

For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them; to have some

Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body unputrefied.

And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what

ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness;

will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said

ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree

divine!--Oh, if you could dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a

Spirit-god in his place! One way or other, he must and will have to be

dethroned.

Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with steel

murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than Working, take it

how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in religious Abbot Samson's days,

see what a Feudalism there had grown,--a 'glorious Chivalry,' much

besung down to the present day. Was not that one of the 'impossiblest'

things? Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with

clenched teeth, and hell-fire eyes, hacking one another's flesh;

converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into

nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did

a Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything that was not hideous,

scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth considering by and

by.

I remark, for the present, only two things: first, that the Fighting

itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting without cause, but

more or less with cause. Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best

of all definable as a born soldier; his life 'a battle and a march,'

under the right General. It is forever indispensable for a man to

fight: now with Necessity, with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles,

Bogs, tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton;--now also with the

hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in

the head of my poor fellow man; make him claim over me rights which

are not his. All Fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty

conflict of strengths, each thinking itself the strongest, or, in

other words, the justest;--of Mights which do in the long-run, and

forever will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights. In

conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies off

into dust: this process ended, appears the imperishable, the true and

exact.

And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful

operations, a noble devout-hearted Chevalier will comport himself, and

an ignoble godless Bucanier and Chactaw Indian. Victory is the aim of

each. But deep in the heart of the noble man it lies forever legible,

that as an Invisible Just God made him, so will and must God's Justice

and this only, were it never so invisible, ultimately prosper in all

controversies and enterprises and battles whatsoever. What an

Influence; ever-present,--like a Soul in the rudest Caliban of a body;

like a ray of Heaven, and illuminative creative _Fiat-Lux_, in the

wastest terrestrial Chaos! Blessed divine Influence, traceable even in

the horror of Battlefields and garments rolled in blood: how it

ennobles even the Battlefield; and, in place of a Chactaw Massacre,

makes it a Field of Honour! A Battlefield too is great. Considered

well, it is a kind of Quintessence of Labour; Labour distilled into

its utmost concentration; the significance of years of it compressed

into an hour. Here too thou shalt be strong, and not in muscle only,

if thou wouldst prevail. Here too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble

of soul; thou shalt dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease

or life; in rage, thou shalt remember mercy, justice;--thou shalt be a

Knight and not a Chactaw, if thou wouldst prevail! It is the rule of

all battles, against hallucinating fellow Men, against unkempt Cotton,

or whatsoever battles they may be, which a man in this world has to

fight.

Howel Davies dyes the West-Indian Seas with blood, piles his decks

with plunder; approves himself the expertest Seaman, the daringest

Seafighter: but he gains no lasting victory, lasting victory is not

possible for him. Not, had he fleets larger than the combined British

Navy all united with him in bucaniering. He, once for all, cannot

prosper in his duel. He strikes down his man: yes; but his man, or his

man's representative, has no notion to lie struck down; neither,

though slain ten times, will he keep so lying;--nor has the Universe

any notion to keep him so lying! On the contrary, the Universe and he

have, at all moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and

desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, to St.

Helena; the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The

Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men: but what

profits it? He has one enemy never to be struck down; nay two enemies:

Mankind and the Maker of Men. On the great scale or on the small, in

fighting of men or fighting of difficulties, I will not embark my

venture with Howel Davies: it is not the Bucanier, it is the Hero only

that can gain victory, that can do more than _seem_ to succeed. These

things will deserve meditating; for they apply to all battle and

soldiership, all struggle and effort whatsoever in this Fight of Life.

It is a poor Gospel, Cash-Gospel or whatever name it have, that does

not, with clear tone, uncontradictable, carrying conviction to all

hearts, forever keep men in mind of these things.

Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a great

degree, forgotten them;--as, alas, all the world has; as, alas, our

very Dukes and Soul-Overseers have, whose special trade it was to

remember them! Hence these tears.--Plugson, who has indomitably spun

Cotton merely to gain thousands of pounds, I have to call as yet a

Bucanier and Chactaw; till there come something better, still more

indomitable from him. His hundred Thousand-pound Notes, if there be

nothing other, are to me but as the hundred Scalps in a Chactaw

wigwam. The blind Plugson: he was a Captain of Industry, born member

of the Ultimate genuine Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have

known it! These thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were

a regiment whom he had enlisted, man by man; to make war on a very

genuine enemy: Bareness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which

will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here is a

most genuine enemy; over whom all creatures will wish him victory. He

enlisted his thousand men; said to them, "Come, brothers, let us have

a dash at Cotton!" They follow with cheerful shout; they gain such a

victory over Cotton as the Earth has to admire and clap hands at: but,

alas, it is yet only of the Bucanier or Chactaw sort,--as good as no

victory! Foolish Plugson of St. Dolly Undershot: does he hope to

become illustrious by hanging up the scalps in his wigwam, the hundred

thousands at his banker's, and saying, Behold my scalps? Why, Plugson,

even thy own host is all in mutiny: Cotton is conquered; but the 'bare

backs'--are worse covered than ever! Indomitable Plugson, thou must

cease to be a Chactaw; thou and others; thou thyself, if no other!

Did William the Norman Bastard, or any of his Taillefers,

_Ironcutters_, manage so? Ironcutter, at the end of the campaign, did

not turn-off his thousand fighters, but said to them: "Noble fighters,

this is the land we have gained; be I Lord in it,--what we will call

_Law-ward_, maintainer and _keeper_ of Heaven's _Laws_: be I

_Law-ward_, or in brief orthoepy _Lord_ in it, and be ye Loyal Men

around me in it; and we will stand by one another, as soldiers round a

captain, for again we shall have need of one another!" Plugson,

bucanier-like, says to them: "Noble spinners, this is the Hundred

Thousand we have gained, wherein I mean to dwell and plant vineyards;

the hundred thousand is mine, the three and sixpence daily was yours:

adieu, noble spinners; drink my health with this groat each, which I

give you over and above!" The entirely unjust Captain of Industry, say

I; not Chevalier, but Bucanier! 'Commercial Law' does indeed acquit

him; asks, with wide eyes, What else? So too Howel Davies asks, Was it

not according to the strictest Bucanier Custom? Did I depart in any

jot or tittle from the Laws of the Bucaniers?

After all, money, as they say, is miraculous. Plugson wanted victory;

as Chevaliers and Bucaniers, and all men alike do. He found money

recognised, by the whole world with one assent, as the true symbol,

exact equivalent and synonym of victory;--and here we have him, a

grimbrowed, indomitable Bucanier, coming home to us with a 'victory,'

which the whole world is _ceasing_ to clap hands at! The whole world,

taught somewhat impressively, is beginning to recognise that such

victory is but half a victory; and that now, if it please the Powers,

we must--have the other half!

Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded, will

it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions, obscurations has

it brought in; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in

large masses of mankind! 'Protection of property,' of what is

'_mine_,' means with most men protection of money,--the thing which,

had I a thousand padlocks over it, is least of all _mine_; is, in a

manner, scarcely worth calling mine! The symbol shall be held sacred,

defended everywhere with tipstaves, ropes and gibbets; the thing

signified shall be composedly cast to the dogs. A human being who has

worked with human beings clears all scores with them, cuts himself

with triumphant completeness forever loose from them, by paying down

certain shillings and pounds. Was it not the wages I promised you?

There they are, to the last sixpence,--according to the Laws of the

Bucaniers!--Yes, indeed;--and, at such times, it becomes imperatively

necessary to ask all persons, bucaniers and others, Whether these same

respectable Laws of the Bucaniers are written on God's eternal Heavens

at all, on the inner Heart of Man at all; or on the respectable

Bucanier Logbook merely, for the convenience of bucaniering merely?

What a question;--whereat Westminster Hall shudders to its driest

parchment; and on the dead wigs each particular horsehair stands on

end!

The Laws of Laissez-faire, O Westminster, the laws of industrial

Captain and industrial Soldier, how much more of idle Captain and

industrial Soldier, will need to be remodelled, and modified, and

rectified in a hundred and a hundred ways,--and _not_ in the

Sliding-scale direction, but in the totally opposite one! With two

million industrial Soldiers already sitting in Bastilles, and five

million pining on potatoes, methinks Westminster cannot begin too

soon!--A man has other obligations laid on him, in God's Universe,

than the payment of cash: these also Westminster, if it will continue

to exist and have board-wages, must contrive to take some charge

of:--by Westminster or by another, they must and will be taken charge

of; be, with whatever difficulty, got articulated, got enforced, and

to a certain approximate extent put in practice. And, as I say, it

cannot be too soon! For Mammonism, left to itself, has become

Midas-eared; and with all its gold mountains, sits starving for want

of bread: and Dilettantism with its partridge-nets, in this extremely

earnest Universe of ours, is playing somewhat too high a game. 'A man

by the very look of him promises so much:' yes; and by the rent-roll

of him does he promise nothing?--

* * * * *

Alas, what a business will this be, which our Continental friends,

groping this long while somewhat absurdly about it and about it, call

'Organisation of Labour;'--which must be taken out of the hands of

absurd windy persons, and put into the hands of wise, laborious,

modest and valiant men, to begin with it straightway; to proceed with

it, and succeed in it more and more, if Europe, at any rate if

England, is to continue habitable much longer. Looking at the kind of

most noble Corn-Law Dukes or Practical _Duces_ we have, and also of

right reverend Soul-Overseers, Christian Spiritual _Duces_ 'on a

minimum of four thousand five hundred,' one's hopes are a little

chilled. Courage, nevertheless; there are many brave men in England!

My indomitable Plugson,--nay is there not even in thee some hope? Thou

art hitherto a Bucanier, as it was written and prescribed for thee by

an evil world: but in that grim brow, in that indomitable heart which

_can_ conquer Cotton, do there not perhaps lie other ten-times nobler

conquests?

CHAPTER XI

LABOUR.

For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were

he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always

hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is

there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, _is_ in

communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will

itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and

regulations, which are truth.

The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know

thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee;

thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy

business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual:

know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That

will be thy better plan.

It has been written, 'an endless significance lies in Work;' a man

perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair

seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man

himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert

thereby. Consider how, even, in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole

soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he

sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation,

Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of

the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free

valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink

murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed

glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison

is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed

flame!

Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless

Chaos, once set it _revolving_, grows round and ever rounder; ranges

itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is

no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted World. What would become of

the Earth, did she cease to revolve? In the poor old Earth, so long as

she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities disperse themselves;

all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked

on the Potter's wheel,--one of the venerablest objects; old as the

Prophet Ezechiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin

themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes.

And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to

make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking!

Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and

lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man

the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can

bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what

expensive colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a

botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling,

squint-cornered, amorphous botch,--a mere enamelled vessel of

dishonour! Let the idle think of this.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other

blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will

follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble

force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an

ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;--draining-off the sour

festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade;

making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with

its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the

stream and _its_ value be great or small! Labour is Life: from the

inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred

celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his

inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,--to all knowledge,

'self-knowledge' and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins.

Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou

to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly

thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the

rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in

schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices,

till we try it and fix it. 'Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by

Action alone.'

* * * * *

And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness

to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time?

All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim brute Powers of

Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such wrestle, there and elsewhere

not at all, thou wilt continually learn. Set down a brave Sir

Christopher in the middle of black ruined Stone-heaps, of foolish

unarchitectural Bishops, redtape Officials, idle Nell-Gwyn Defenders

of the Faith; and see whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral

out of all that, yea or no! Rough, rude, contradictory are all things

and persons, from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen, up to the idle

Nell-Gwyn Defenders, to blustering redtape Officials, foolish

unarchitectural Bishops. All these things and persons are there not

for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's; they are there for their

own sake mainly! Christopher will have to conquer and constrain all

these,--if he be able. All these are against him. Equitable Nature

herself, who carries her mathematics and architectonics not on the

face of her, but deep in the hidden heart of her,--Nature herself is

but partially for him; will be wholly against him, if he constrain her

not! His very money, where is it to come from? The pious munificence

of England lies far-scattered, distant, unable to speak, and say, "I

am here;"--must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious munificence,

and all help, is so silent, invisible like the gods; impediment,

contradictions manifold are so loud and near! O brave Sir Christopher,

trust thou in those notwithstanding, and front all these; understand

all these; by valiant patience, noble effort, insight, by

man's-strength, vanquish and compel all these,--and, on the whole,

strike down victoriously the last topstone of that Paul's Edifice; thy

monument for certain centuries, the stamp 'Great Man' impressed very

legibly on Portland-stone there!--

Yes, all manner of help, and pious response from Men or Nature, is

always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light, till it be

seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first 'impossible.'

In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie

diffused through Immensity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to

faith. Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy

tent; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous

moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a miraculous

Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to Heaven; and from the

kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind Localities and town and

country Parishes there never could, blessed dew-moisture to suffice

thee shall have fallen!

Work is of a religious nature:--work is of a _brave_ nature; which it

is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is as the swimmer's:

a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it

will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and

buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its

conqueror along. 'It is so,' says Goethe, 'with all things that man

undertakes in this world.'

Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,--Columbus, my hero, royalest

Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment this of thine, in the

waste deep waters; around thee mutinous discouraged souls, behind thee

disgrace and ruin, before thee the unpenetrated veil of Night.

Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from their deep bases

(ten miles deep, I am told), are not entirely there on thy behalf!

Meseems _they_ have other work than floating thee forward:--and the

huge Winds, that sweep from Ursa Major to the Tropics and Equators,

dancing their giant-waltz through the kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity,

they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small

shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle-skiff of thine! Thou art not

among articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art among

immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the world here.

Secret, far off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there lies a help

in them: see how thou wilt get at that. Patiently thou wilt wait till

the mad South-wester spend itself, saving thyself by dextrous science

of defence, the while: valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou

strike in, when the favouring East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny

of men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt

cheerily encourage: thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason,

weariness, weakness of others and thyself;--how much wilt thou swallow

down! There shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea,

which is but ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable; known to God only.

Thou shalt be a Great Man. Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of the World

Marine-service,--thou wilt have to be _greater_ than this tumultuous

unmeasured World here round thee is: thou, in thy strong soul, as with

wrestler's arms, shalt embrace it, harness it down; and make it bear

thee on,--to new Americas, or whither God wills!

CHAPTER XII.

REWARD.

'Religion,' I said; for, properly speaking, all true Work is Religion:

and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and dwell among the

Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me

it shall have no harbour. Admirable was that of the old Monks,

'_Laborare est Orare_, Work is Worship.'

Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but

ineradicable, forever-enduring Gospel: Work, and therein have

wellbeing. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven, lies there not, in the

innermost heart of thee, a Spirit of active Method, a Force for

Work;--and burns like a painfully-smouldering fire, giving thee no

rest till thou unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent Facts

around thee! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic,

regulated, arable; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou

findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly,

subdue him; make Order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of

Intelligence, Divinity and Thee! The thistle that grows in thy path,

dig it out, that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk,

may grow there instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its waste white

down, spin it, weave it; that, in place of idle litter, there may be

folded webs, and the naked skin of man be covered.

But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity,

Brute-mindedness,--yes, there, with or without Church-tithes and

Shovel-hat, with or without Talfourd-Mahon Copyrights, or were it with

mere dungeons and gibbets and crosses, attack it, I say; smite it

wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and it lives; but

smite, smite, in the name of God! The Highest God, as I understand it,

does audibly so command thee; still audibly, if thou have ears to

hear. He, even He, with his _un_spoken voice, awfuler than any Sinai

thunders or syllabled speech of Whirlwinds; for the Silence of deep

Eternities, of Worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak

to thee? The unborn Ages; the old Graves, with their long-mouldering

dust, the very tears that wetted it now all dry,--do not these speak

to thee, what ear hath not heard? The deep Death-kingdoms, the Stars

in their never-resting courses, all Space and all Time, proclaim it to

thee in continual silent admonition. Thou too, if ever man should,

shalt work while it is called Today. For the Night cometh, wherein no

man can work.

All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true

hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the

Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that

to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler

calculations, Newton meditations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all

acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms,--up to that 'Agony of bloody sweat,' which

all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not 'worship,' then

I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet

discovered under God's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life

of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow

Workmen there, in God's Eternity: surviving there, they alone

surviving: sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Bodyguard of the

Empire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human Memory they survive so long,

as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surviving; peopling, they

alone, the unmeasured solitudes of Time! To thee Heaven, though

severe, is _not_ unkind; Heaven is kind,--as a noble Mother; as that

Spartan Mother, saying while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my

son, or upon it!" Thou too shalt return _home_ in honour; to thy

far-distant Home, in honour; doubt it not,--if in the battle thou keep

thy shield! Thou, in the Eternities and deepest Death-kingdoms, art

not an alien; thou everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very

Spartans did not _complain_.

And who art thou that braggest of thy life of Idleness; complacently

showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous cushions; appliances for

folding of the hands to mere sleep? Looking up, looking down, around,

behind or before, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any

_idle_ hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. In the

Heavens, in the Earth, in the Waters under the Earth, is none like

unto thee. Thou art an original figure in this Creation; a denizen in

Mayfair alone, in this extraordinary Century or Half-Century alone!

One monster there is in the world: the idle man. What is his

'Religion'? That Nature is a Phantasm, where cunning beggary or

thievery may sometimes find good victual. That God is a lie; and that

Man and his Life are a lie.--Alas, alas, who of us _is_ there that can

say, I have worked? The faithfulest of us are unprofitable servants;

the faithfulest of us know that best. The faithfulest of us may say,

with sad and true old Samuel, "Much of my life has been trifled away!"

But he that has, and except 'on public occasions' professes to have,

no function but that of going idle in a graceful or graceless manner;

and of begetting sons to go idle; and to address Chief Spinners and

Diggers, who at least _are_ spinning and digging, "Ye scandalous

persons who produce too much"--My Corn-Law friends, on what imaginary

still richer Eldorados, and true iron-spikes with law of gravitation,

are ye rushing!

* * * * *

As to the Wages of Work there might innumerable things be said; there

will and must yet innumerable things be said and spoken, in St.

Stephen's and out of St. Stephen's; and gradually not a few things be

ascertained and written, on Law-parchment, concerning this very

matter:--'Fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work' is the most

unrefusable demand! Money-wages 'to the extent of keeping your worker

alive that he may work more;' these, unless you mean to dismiss him

straightway out of this world, are indispensable alike to the noblest

Worker and to the least noble!

One thing only I will say here, in special reference to the former

class, the noble and noblest; but throwing light on all the other

classes and their arrangements of this difficult matter: The 'wages'

of every noble Work do yet lie in Heaven or else Nowhere. Not in

Bank-of-England bills, in Owen's Labour-bank, or any the most improved

establishment of banking and money-changing, needest thou, heroic

soul, present thy account of earnings. Human banks and labour-banks

know thee not; or know thee after generations and centuries have

passed away, and thou art clean gone from 'rewarding,'--all manner of

bank-drafts, shop-tills, and Downing-street Exchequers lying very

invisible, so far from thee! Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any

reward? Was it thy aim and life-purpose to be filled with good things

for thy heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call

'happy,' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for thee

deliberately, No. The whole spiritual secret of the new epoch lies in

this, that thou canst answer for thyself, with thy whole clearness of

head and heart, deliberately, No!

My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away. Give it, I advise

thee;--thou dost not expect to _sell_ thy Life in an adequate manner?

What price, for example, would content thee? The just price of thy

Life to thee,--why, God's entire Creation to thyself, the whole

Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold:

that is the price which would content thee; that, and if thou wilt be

candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all; and for it thou wouldst

have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal;--or rather thou art a poor

_infinite_ mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, _seemest_ so

unreasonable! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life,

in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price

be Nothing: thou _hast_ then, in a certain sense, got All for it! The

heroic man,--and is not every man, God be thanked, a potential

hero?--has to do so, in all times and circumstances. In the most

heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he will have to say, as Burns

said proudly and humbly of his little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops

of Celestial Melody in an age when so much was unmelodious: "By

Heaven, they shall either be invaluable or of no value; I do not need

your guineas for them!" It is an element which should, and must, enter

deeply into all settlements of wages here below. They never will be

'satisfactory' otherwise; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they never

can! Money for my little piece of work 'to the extent that will allow

me to keep working;' yes, this,--unless you mean that I shall go my

ways _before_ the work is all taken out of me: but as to 'wages'--!--

On the whole, we do entirely agree with those old Monks, _Laborare

est Orare_. In a thousand senses, from one end of it to the other,

true Work _is_ Worship. He that works, whatsoever be his work, he

bodies forth the form of Things Unseen; a small Poet every Worker is.

The idea, were it but of his poor Delf Platter, how much more of his

Epic Poem, is as yet 'seen,' half-seen, only by himself; to all others

it is a thing unseen, impossible; to Nature herself it is a thing

unseen, a thing which never hitherto was;--very 'impossible,' for it

is as yet a No-thing! The Unseen Powers had need to watch over such a

man; he works in and for the Unseen. Alas, if he look to the Seen

Powers only, he may as well quit the business; his No-thing will never

rightly issue as a Thing, but as a Deceptivity, a Sham-thing,--which

it had better not do!

Thy No-thing of an Intended Poem, O Poet who hast looked merely to

reviewers, copyrights, booksellers, popularities, behold it has not

yet become a Thing; for the truth is not in it! Though printed,

hotpressed, reviewed, celebrated, sold to the twentieth edition: what

is all that? The Thing, in philosophical uncommercial language, is

still a No-thing, mostly semblance, and deception of the

sight;--benign Oblivion incessantly gnawing at it, impatient till

Chaos, to which it belongs, do reabsorb it!--

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never

come real visibility and speech. Thou must descend to the _Mothers_,

to the _Manes_, and Hercules-like long suffer and labour there,

wouldst thou emerge with victory into the sunlight. As in battle and

the shock of war,--for is not this a battle?--thou too shalt fear no

pain or death, shalt love no ease or life; the voice of festive

Lubberlands, the noise of greedy Acheron shall alike lie silent under

thy victorious feet. Thy work, like Dante's, shall 'make thee lean for

many years.' The world and its wages, its criticisms, counsels,

helps, impediments, shall be as a waste ocean-flood; the chaos through

which thou art to swim and sail. Not the waste waves and their weedy

gulf-streams, shalt thou take for guidance: thy star alone,--'_Se tu

segui tua stella!_' Thy star alone, now clear-beaming over Chaos, nay

now by fits gone out, disastrously eclipsed: this only shalt thou

strive to follow. O, it is a business, as I fancy, that of weltering

your way through Chaos and the murk of Hell! Green-eyed dragons

watching you, three-headed Cerberuses,--not without sympathy of

_their_ sort! "_Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno._" For in fine,

as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with sheer Madness, all

the way,--who is by no means pleasant company! You look fixedly into

Madness, and _her_ undiscovered, boundless, bottomless Night-empire;

that you may extort new Wisdom out of it, as an Eurydice from

Tartarus. The higher the Wisdom, the closer was its neighbourhood and

kindred with mere Insanity; literally so;--and thou wilt, with a

speechless feeling, observe how highest Wisdom, struggling up into

this world, has oftentimes carried such tinctures and adhesions of

Insanity still cleaving to it hither!

All Works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness sane;--truly

enough a religious operation; which cannot be carried on without

religion. You have not work otherwise; you have eye-service, greedy

grasping of wages, swift and ever swifter manufacture of semblances to

get hold of wages. Instead of better felt-hats to cover your head, you

have bigger lath-and-plaster hats set travelling the streets on

wheels. Instead of heavenly and earthly Guidance for the souls of men,

you have 'Black or White Surplice' Controversies, stuffed

hair-and-leather Popes;--terrestrial _Law-wards_, Lords and

Law-bringers, 'organising Labour' in these years, by passing

Corn-Laws. With all which, alas, this distracted Earth is now full,

nigh to bursting. Semblances most smooth to the touch and eye; most

accursed, nevertheless, to body and soul. Semblances, be they of

Sham-woven Cloth or of Dilettante Legislation, which are _not_ real

wool or substance, but Devil's-dust, accursed of God and man! No man

has worked, or can work, except religiously; not even the poor

day-labourer, the weaver of your coat, the sewer of your shoes. All

men, if they work not as in a Great Taskmaster's eye, will work wrong,

work unhappily for themselves and you.

* * * * *

Industrial work, still under bondage to Mammon, the rational soul of

it not yet awakened, is a tragic spectacle. Men in the rapidest motion

and self-motion; restless, with convulsive energy, as if driven by

Galvanism, as if possessed by a Devil; tearing asunder mountains,--to

no purpose, for Mammonism is always Midas-eared! This is sad, on the

face of it. Yet courage: the beneficent Destinies, kind in their

sternness, are apprising us that this cannot continue. Labour is not a

devil, even while encased in Mammonism; Labour is ever an imprisoned

god, writhing unconsciously or consciously to escape out of Mammonism!

Plugson of Undershot, like Taillefer of Normandy, wants victory; how

much happier will even Plugson be to have a Chivalrous victory than a

Chactaw one! The unredeemed ugliness is that of a slothful People.

Show me a People energetically busy; heaving, struggling, all

shoulders at the wheel; their heart pulsing, every muscle swelling,

with man's energy and will;--I show you a People of whom great good is

already predicable; to whom all manner of good is yet certain, if

their energy endure. By very working, they will learn; they have,

Antaeus-like, their foot on Mother Fact: how can they but learn?

The vulgarest Plugson of a Master-Worker, who can command Workers,

and get work out of them, is already a considerable man. Blessed and

thrice-blessed symptoms I discern of Master-Workers who are not vulgar

men; who are Nobles, and begin to feel that they must act as such: all

speed to these, they are England's hope at present! But in this

Plugson himself, conscious of almost no nobleness whatever, how much

is there! Not without man's faculty, insight, courage, hard energy, is

this rugged figure. His words none of the wisest; but his actings

cannot be altogether foolish. Think, how were it, stoodst thou

suddenly in his shoes! He has to command a thousand men. And not

imaginary commanding; no, it is real, incessantly practical. The evil

passions of so many men (with the Devil in them, as in all of us) he

has to vanquish; by manifold force of speech and of silence, to

repress or evade. What a force of silence, to say nothing of the

others, is in Plugson! For these his thousand men he has to provide

raw-material, machinery, arrangement, houseroom; and ever at the

week's end, wages by due sale. No Civil-List, or Goulburn-Baring

Budget has he to fall back upon, for paying of his regiment; he has to

pick his supplies from the confused face of the whole Earth and

Contemporaneous History, by his dexterity alone. There will be dry

eyes if he fail to do it!--He exclaims, at present, 'black in the

face,' near strangled with Dilettante Legislation: "Let me have

elbow-room, throat-room, and I will not fail! No, I will spin yet, and

conquer like a giant: what 'sinews of war' lie in me, untold resources

towards the Conquest of this Planet, if instead of hanging me, you

husband them, and help me!"--My indomitable friend, it is _true_; and

thou shalt and must be helped.

This is not a man I would kill and strangle by Corn-Laws, even if I

could! No, I would fling my Corn-Laws and Shotbelts to the Devil; and

try to help this man. I would teach him, by noble precept and

law-precept, by noble example most of all, that Mammonism was not the

essence of his or of my station in God's Universe; but the

adscititious excrescence of it; the gross, terrene, godless embodiment

of it; which would have to become, more or less, a godlike one. By

noble _real_ legislation, by true _noble's_-work, by unwearied,

valiant, and were it wageless effort, in my Parliament and in my

Parish, I would aid, constrain, encourage him to effect more or less

this blessed change. I should know that it would have to be effected;

that unless it were in some measure effected, he and I and all of us,

I first and soonest of all, were doomed to perdition!--Effected it

will be; unless it were a Demon that made this Universe; which I, for

my own part, do at no moment, under no form, in the least believe.

May it please your Serene Highnesses, your Majesties, Lordships and

Law-wardships, the proper Epic of this world is not now 'Arms and the

Man;' how much less, 'Shirt-frills and the Man:' no, it is now 'Tools

and the Man:' that, henceforth to all time, is now our Epic;--and you,

first of all others, I think, were wise to take note of that!

CHAPTER XIII.

DEMOCRACY.

If the Serene Highnesses and Majesties do not take note of that, then,

as I perceive, _that_ will take note of itself! The time for levity,

insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting, in all kinds, is gone

by; it is a serious, grave time. Old long-vexed questions, not yet

solved in logical words or parliamentary laws, are fast solving

themselves in facts, somewhat unblessed to behold! This largest of

questions, this question of Work and Wages, which ought, had we heeded

Heaven's voice, to have begun two generations ago or more, cannot be

delayed longer without hearing Earth's voice. 'Labour' will verily

need to be somewhat 'organised,' as they say,--God knows with what

difficulty. Man will actually need to have his debts and earnings a

little better paid by man; which, let Parliaments speak of them or be

silent of them, are eternally his due from man, and cannot, without

penalty and at length not without death-penalty, be withheld. How much

ought to cease among us straightway; how much ought to begin

straightway, while the hours yet are!

Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to 'Cash;'

of quietly shutting-up the God's Temple, and gradually opening

wide-open the Mammon's Temple, with 'Laissez-faire, and Every man for

himself,'--have led us in these days! We have Upper, speaking Classes,

who indeed do 'speak' as never man spake before; the withered

flimsiness, the godless baseness and barrenness of whose Speech might

of itself indicate what kind of Doing and practical Governing went on

under it! For Speech is the gaseous element out of which most kinds of

Practice and Performance, especially all kinds of moral Performance,

condense themselves, and take shape; as the one is, so will the other

be. Descending, accordingly, into the Dumb Class in its Stockport

Cellars and Poor-Law Bastilles, have we not to announce that they also

are hitherto unexampled in the History of Adam's Posterity?

Life was never a May-game for men: in all times the lot of the dumb

millions born to toil was defaced with manifold sufferings,

injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable; not play at all,

but hard work that made the sinews sore and the heart sore. As

bond-slaves, _villani_, _bordarii_, _sochemanni_, nay indeed as dukes,

earls and kings, men were oftentimes made weary of their life; and had

to say, in the sweat of their brow and of their soul, Behold, it is

not sport, it is grim earnest, and our back can bear no more! Who

knows not what massacrings and harryings there have been; grinding,

long-continuing, unbearable injustices,--till the heart had to rise in

madness, and some "_Eu Sachsen, nimith euer sachses_, You Saxons, out

with your gully-knives, then!" You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial

'arrestment of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!--The

page of Dryasdust is heavy with such details.

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the

beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of

toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing

over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man

wretched; many men have died; all men must die,--the last exit of us

all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know

not why: to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary,

yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold-universal Laissez-faire:

it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead,

Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull!

This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made.

Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days?

The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.

Never before did I hear of an Irish Widow reduced to 'prove her

sisterhood by dying of typhus-fever and infecting seventeen

persons,'--saying in such undeniable way, "You _see_ I was your

sister!" Sisterhood, brotherhood, was often forgotten; but not till

the rise of these ultimate Mammon and Shotbelt Gospels did I ever see

it so expressly denied. If no pious Lord or _Law-ward_ would remember

it, always some pious Lady ('_Hlaf-dig_,' Benefactress,

'_Loaf-giveress_,' they say she is,--blessings on her beautiful

heart!) was there, with mild mother-voice and hand, to remember it;

some pious thoughtful _Elder_, what we now call 'Prester,' _Presbyter_

or 'Priest,' was there to put all men in mind of it, in the name of

the God who had made all.

Not even in Black Dahomey was it ever, I think, forgotten to the

typhus-fever length. Mungo Park, resourceless, had sunk down to die

under the Negro Village-Tree, a horrible White object in the eyes of

all. But in the poor Black Woman, and her daughter who stood aghast at

him, whose earthly wealth and funded capital consisted of one small

calabash of rice, there lived a heart richer than _Laissez-faire_:

they, with a royal munificence, boiled their rice for him; they sang

all night to him, spinning assiduous on their cotton distaffs, as he

lay to sleep: "Let us pity the poor white man; no mother has he to

fetch him milk, no sister to grind him corn!" Thou poor black Noble

One,--thou _Lady_ too: did not a God make thee too; was there not in

thee too something of a God!--

* * * * *

Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, has been greatly pitied by

Dryasdust and others. Gurth, with the brass collar round his neck,

tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call an

exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above him, with

the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at

least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home;

Gurth to me seems happy, in comparison with many a Lancashire and

Buckinghamshire man of these days, not born thrall of anybody! Gurth's

brass collar did not gall him: Cedric _deserved_ to be his master. The

pigs were Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his parings of them. Gurth

had the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related

indissolubly, though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellow-mortals

in this Earth. He had superiors, inferiors, equals.--Gurth is now

'emancipated' long since; has what we call 'Liberty.' Liberty, I am

told, is a divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the 'Liberty to die

by starvation' is not so divine!

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his

finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk

thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able

for; and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set

about doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honour,

'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if liberty be not that, I for one

have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to

leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and

keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices!

Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable

madman: his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every

wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper

way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him

to go a little righter. O, if thou really art my _Senior_, Seigneur,

my _Elder_, Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very deed my _Wiser_,

may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to

command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I

conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never

such brass collars, whips and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over

precipices! That I have been called, by all the Newspapers, a 'free

man' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and

wreck. O that the Newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or

what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not

death, but life!--Liberty requires new definitions.

A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly, of Baseness,

Stupidity, Poltroonery and all that brood of things, dwells deep in

some men: still deeper in others an _un_conscious abhorrence and

intolerance, clothed moreover by the beneficent Supreme Powers in what

stout appetites, energies, egoisms so-called, are suitable to

it;--these latter are your Conquerors, Romans, Normans, Russians,

Indo-English; Founders of what we call Aristocracies. Which indeed

have they not the most 'divine right' to found;--being themselves very

truly [Greek: Aristoi], Bravest, Best; and conquering generally a

confused rabble of Worst, or at lowest, clearly enough, of Worse? I

think their divine right, tried, with affirmatory verdict, in the

greatest Law-Court known to me, was good! A class of men who are

dreadfully exclaimed against by Dryasdust; of whom nevertheless

beneficent Nature has oftentimes had need; and may, alas, again have

need.

When, across the hundredfold poor scepticisms, trivialisms, and

constitutional cobwebberies of Dryasdust, you catch any glimpse of a

William the Conqueror, a Tancred of Hauteville or suchlike,--do you

not discern veritably some rude outline of a true God-made King; whom

not the Champion of England cased in tin, but all Nature and the

Universe were calling to the throne? It is absolutely necessary that

he get thither. Nature does not mean her poor Saxon children to

perish, of obesity, stupor or other malady, as yet: a stern Ruler and

Line of Rulers therefore is called in,--a stern but most beneficent

_perpetual House-Surgeon_ is by Nature herself called in, and even the

appropriate _fees_ are provided for him! Dryasdust talks lamentably

about Hereward and the Fen Counties; fate of Earl Waltheof; Yorkshire

and the North reduced to ashes: all which is undoubtedly lamentable.

But even Dryasdust apprises me of one fact: 'A child, in this

William's reign, might have carried a purse of gold from end to end of

England.' My erudite friend, it is a fact which outweighs a thousand!

Sweep away thy constitutional, sentimental and other cobwebberies;

look eye to eye, if thou still have any eye, in the face of this big

burly William Bastard: thou wilt see a fellow of most flashing

discernment, of most strong lion-heart;--in whom, as it were, within a

frame of oak and iron, the gods have planted the soul of 'a man of

genius'! Dost thou call that nothing? I call it an immense

thing!--Rage enough was in this Willelmus Conquaestor, rage enough for

his occasions;--and yet the essential element of him, as of all such

men, is not scorching _fire_, but shining illuminative _light_. Fire

and light are strangely interchangeable; nay, at bottom, I have found

them different forms of the same most godlike 'elementary substance'

in our world: a thing worth stating in these days. The essential

element of this Conquaestor is, first of all, the most sun-eyed

perception of what _is_ really what on this God's-Earth;--which, thou

wilt find, does mean at bottom 'Justice,' and 'Virtues' not a few:

_Conformity_ to what the Maker has seen good to make; that, I suppose,

will mean Justice and a Virtue or two?--

Dost thou think Willelmus Conquaestor would have tolerated ten

years' jargon, one hour's jargon, on the propriety of killing

Cotton-manufactures by partridge Corn-Laws? I fancy, this was not the

man to knock out of his night's-rest with nothing but a noisy

bedlamism in your mouth! "Assist us still better to bush the

partridges; strangle Plugson who spins the shirts?"--"_Par la

Splendeur de Dieu!_"----Dost thou think Willelmus Conquaestor, in this

new time, with Steamengine Captains of Industry on one hand of him,

and Joe-Manton Captains of Idleness on the other, would have doubted

which _was_ really the Best; which did deserve strangling, and which

not?

I have a certain indestructible regard for Willelmus Conquaestor. A

resident House-Surgeon, provided by Nature for her beloved English

People, and even furnished with the requisite fees, as I said; for he

by no means felt himself doing Nature's work, this Willelmus, but his

own work exclusively! And his own work withal it was; informed '_par

la Splendeur de Dieu_.'--I say, it is necessary to get the work out of

such a man, however harsh that be! When a world, not yet doomed for

death, is rushing down to ever-deeper Baseness and Confusion, it is a

dire necessity of Nature's to bring in her Aristocracies, her Best,

even by forcible methods. When their descendants or representatives

cease entirely to _be_ the Best, Nature's poor world will very soon

rush down again to Baseness; and it becomes a dire necessity of

Nature's to cast them out. Hence French Revolutions, Five-point

Charters, Democracies, and a mournful list of _Etceteras_, in these

our afflicted times.

To what extent Democracy has now reached, how it advances irresistible

with ominous, ever-increasing speed, he that will open his eyes on any

province of human affairs may discern. Democracy is everywhere the

inexorable demand of these ages, swiftly fulfilling itself. From the

thunder of Napoleon battles, to the jabbering of Open-vestry in St.

Mary Axe, all things announce Democracy. A distinguished man, whom

some of my readers will hear again with pleasure, thus writes to me

what in these days he notes from the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, where

our London fashions seem to be in full vogue. Let us hear the Herr

Teufelsdroeckh again, were it but the smallest word!

'Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you,

and contented putting-up with the want of them,--alas, thou too, _mein

Lieber_, seest well how close it is of kin to _Atheism_, and other sad

_Isms_: he who discovers no God whatever, how shall he discover

Heroes, the visible Temples of God?--Strange enough meanwhile

it is, to observe with what thoughtlessness, here in our rigidly

Conservative Country, men rush into Democracy with full cry. Beyond

doubt, his Excellenz the Titular-Herr Ritter Kauderwaelsch von

Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, he our distinguished Conservative Premier

himself, and all but the thicker-headed of his Party, discern

Democracy to be inevitable as death, and are even desperate of

delaying it much!

'You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce

itself: the very Tailor has become, if not properly Sansculottic,

which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor unconsciously symbolising,

and prophesying with his scissors, the reign of Equality. What now is

our fashionable coat? A thing of superfinest texture, of deeply

meditated cut; with Malines-lace cuffs; quilted with gold; so that a

man can carry, without difficulty, an estate of land on his back?

_Keineswegs_, By no manner of means! The Sumptuary Laws have fallen

into such a state of desuetude as was never before seen. Our

fashionable coat is an amphibium between barn-sack and drayman's

doublet. The cloth of it is studiously coarse; the colour a speckled

soot-black or rust-brown gray; the nearest approach to a Peasant's.

And for shape,--thou shouldst see it! The last consummation of the

year now passing over us is definable as Three Bags; a big bag for the

body, two small bags for the arms, and by way of collar a hem! The

first Antique Cheruscan who, of felt-cloth or bear's-hide, with bone

or metal needle, set about making himself a coat, before Tailors had

yet awakened out of Nothing,--did not he make it even so? A loose wide

poke for body, with two holes to let out the arms; this was his

original coat: to which holes it was soon visible that two small loose

pokes, or sleeves, easily appended, would be an improvement.

'Thus has the Tailor-art, so to speak, overset itself, like most other

things; changed its centre-of-gravity; whirled suddenly over from

zenith to nadir. Your Stulz, with huge somerset, vaults from his high

shopboard down to the depths of primal savagery,--carrying much along

with him! For I will invite thee to reflect that the Tailor, as

topmost ultimate froth of Human Society, is indeed swift-passing,

evanescent, slippery to decipher; yet significant of much, nay of all.

Topmost evanescent froth, he is churned-up from the very lees, and

from all intermediate regions of the liquor. The general outcome he,

visible to the eye, of what men aimed to do, and were obliged and

enabled to do, in this one public department of symbolising themselves

to each other by covering of their skins. A smack of all Human Life

lies in the Tailor: its wild struggles towards beauty, dignity,

freedom, victory; and how, hemmed-in by Sedan and Huddersfield, by

Nescience, Dulness, Prurience, and other sad necessities and laws of

Nature, it has attained just to this: Gray savagery of Three Sacks

with a hem!

'When the very Tailor verges towards Sansculottism, is it not ominous?

The last Divinity of poor mankind dethroning himself; sinking _his_

taper too, flame downmost, like the Genius of Sleep or of Death;

admonitory that Tailor time shall be no more!--For, little as one

could advise Sumptuary Laws at the present epoch, yet nothing is

clearer than that where ranks do actually exist, strict division of

costumes will also be enforced; that if we ever have a new Hierarchy

and Aristocracy, acknowledged veritably as such, for which I daily

pray Heaven, the Tailor will reawaken; and be, by volunteering and

appointment, consciously and unconsciously, a safeguard of that

same.'--Certain farther observations, from the same invaluable pen, on

our never-ending changes of mode, our 'perpetual nomadic and even

ape-like appetite for change and mere change' in all the equipments of

our existence, and the 'fatal revolutionary character' thereby

manifested, we suppress for the present. It may be admitted that

Democracy, in all meanings of the word, is in full career;

irresistible by any Ritter Kauderwaelsch or other Son of Adam, as times

go. 'Liberty' is a thing men are determined to have.

* * * * *

But truly, as I had to remark in the mean while, 'the liberty of not

being oppressed by your fellow man' is an indispensable, yet one of

the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty. No man

oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without

reason shown. True; from all men thou art emancipated: but from

Thyself and from the Devil--? No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee

come or go: but thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetites

for Money, Windsor Georges and suchlike? No man oppresses thee, O free

and independent Franchiser: but does not this stupid Porter-pot

oppress thee? No Son of Adam can bid thee come or go; but this absurd

Pot of Heavy-wet, this can and does! Thou art the thrall not of Cedric

the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites and this scoured dish of

liquor. And thou pratest of thy 'liberty'? Thou entire blockhead!

Heavy-wet and gin: alas, these are not the only kinds of thraldom.

Thou who walkest in a vain show, looking out with ornamental

dilettante sniff and serene supremacy at all Life and all Death; and

amblest jauntily; perking up thy poor talk into crotchets, thy poor

conduct into fatuous somnambulisms;--and _art_ as an 'enchanted Ape'

under God's sky, where thou mightest have been a man, had proper

Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and Constables with cat-o'-nine tails,

been vouchsafed thee; dost thou call that 'liberty'? Or your

unreposing Mammon-worshipper again, driven, as if by Galvanisms, by

Devils and Fixed-Ideas, who rises early and sits late, chasing the

impossible; straining every faculty to 'fill himself with the east

wind,'--how merciful were it, could you, by mild persuasion, or by the

severest tyranny so-called, check him in his mad path, and turn him

into a wiser one! All painful tyranny, in that case again, were but

mild 'surgery;' the pain of it cheap, as health and life, instead of

galvanism and fixed-idea, are cheap at any price.

Sure enough, of all paths a man could strike into, there _is_, at any

given moment, a _best path_ for every man; a thing which, here and

now, it were of all things _wisest_ for him to do;--which could he be

but led or driven to do, he were then doing 'like a man,' as we phrase

it; all men and gods agreeing with him, the whole Universe virtually

exclaiming Well-done to him! His success, in such case, were complete;

his felicity a maximum. This path, to find this path and walk in it,

is the one thing needful for him. Whatsoever forwards him in that, let

it come to him even in the shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty:

whatsoever hinders him, were it wardmotes, open-vestries, pollbooths,

tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery.

The notion that a man's liberty consists in giving his vote at

election-hustings, and saying, "Behold, now I too have my

twenty-thousandth part of a Talker in our National Palaver; will not

all the gods be good to me?"--is one of the pleasantest! Nature

nevertheless is kind at present; and puts it into the heads of many,

almost of all. The liberty especially which has to purchase itself by

social isolation, and each man standing separate from the other,

having 'no business with him' but a cash-account: this is such a

liberty as the Earth seldom saw;--as the Earth will not long put up

with, recommend it how you may. This liberty turns out, before it have

long continued in action, with all men flinging up their caps round

it, to be, for the Working Millions a liberty to die by want of food;

for the Idle Thousands and Units, alas, a still more fatal liberty to

live in want of work; to have no earnest duty to do in this

God's-World any more. What becomes of a man in such predicament?

Earth's Laws are silent; and Heaven's speak in a voice which is not

heard. No work, and the ineradicable need of work, give rise to new

very wondrous life-philosophies, new very wondrous life-practices!

Dilettantism, Pococurantism, Beau-Brummelism, with perhaps an

occasional, half-mad, protesting burst of Byronism, establish

themselves: at the end of a certain period,--if you go back to 'the

Dead Sea,' there is, say our Moslem friends, a very strange

'Sabbath-day' transacting itself there!--Brethren, we know but

imperfectly yet, after ages of Constitutional Government, what Liberty

and Slavery are.

Democracy, the chase of Liberty in that direction, shall go its full

course; unrestrainable by him of Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, or any of

_his_ household. The Toiling Millions of Mankind, in most vital need

and passionate instinctive desire of Guidance, shall cast away

False-Guidance; and hope, for an hour, that No-Guidance will suffice

them: but it can be for an hour only. The smallest item of human

Slavery is the oppression of man by his Mock-Superiors; the

palpablest, but I say at bottom the smallest. Let him shake-off such

oppression, trample it indignantly under his feet; I blame him not, I

pity and commend him. But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well

shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding

government by your Real-Superiors! Alas, how shall we ever learn the

solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering,

godforgetting unfortunates as we are? It is a work for centuries; to

be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions;

who knows if not by conflagration and despair! It is a lesson

inclusive of all other lessons; the hardest of all lessons to learn.

One thing I do know: Those Apes, chattering on the branches by the

Dead Sea, never got it learned; but chatter there to this day. To them

no Moses need come a second time; a thousand Moseses would be but so

many painted Phantasms, interesting Fellow-Apes of new strange

aspect,--whom they would 'invite to dinner,' be glad to meet with in

lion-soirees. To them the voice of Prophecy, of heavenly monition, is

quite ended. They chatter there, all Heaven shut to them, to the end

of the world. The unfortunates! Oh, what is dying of hunger, with

honest tools in your hand, with a manful purpose in your heart, and

much real labour lying round you done, in comparison? You honestly

quit your tools; quit a most muddy confused coil of sore work, short

rations, of sorrows, dispiritments and contradictions, having now

honestly done with it all;--and await, not entirely in a distracted

manner, what the Supreme Powers, and the Silences and the Eternities

may have to say to you.

A second thing I know: This lesson will have to be learned,--under

penalties! England will either learn it, or England also will cease to

exist among Nations. England will either learn to reverence its

Heroes, and discriminate them from its Sham-Heroes and Valets and

gaslighted Histrios; and to prize them as the audible God's-voice,

amid all inane jargons and temporary market-cries, and say to them

with heart-loyalty, "Be ye King and Priest, and Gospel and Guidance

for us:" or else England will continue to worship new and ever-new

forms of Quackhood,--and so, with what resiliences and reboundings

matters little, go down to the Father of Quacks! Can I dread such

things of England? Wretched, thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why

will ye worship lies, and 'Stuffed Clothes-suits created by the

ninth-parts of men'! It is not your purses that suffer; your

farm-rents, your commerces, your mill-revenues, loud as ye lament over

these; no, it is not these alone, but a far deeper than these: it is

your souls that lie dead, crushed down under despicable Nightmares,

Atheisms, Brain-fumes; and are not souls at all, but mere succedanea

for _salt_ to keep your bodies and their appetites from putrefying!

Your cotton-spinning and thrice-miraculous mechanism, what is this

too, by itself, but a larger kind of Animalism? Spiders can spin,

Beavers can build and show contrivance; the Ant lays-up accumulation

of capital, and has, for aught I know, a Bank of Antland. If there is

no soul in man higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the

cloud-rack and spinning sea-sand; then I say, man is but an animal, a

more cunning kind of brute: he has no soul, but only a succedaneum for

salt. Whereupon, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts that perish,

he ought to admit it, I think;--and also straightway universally to

kill himself; and so, in a manlike manner at least _end_, and wave

these brute-worlds _his_ dignified farewell!--

CHAPTER XIV.

SIR JABESH WINDBAG.

Oliver Cromwell, whose body they hung on their Tyburn gallows because

he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this country,

remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have had here for

the last five centuries or so. For the last five centuries, there has

been no Governor among us with anything like similar talent; and for

the last two centuries, no Governor, we may say, with the possibility

of similar talent,--with an idea in the heart of him capable of

inspiring similar talent, capable of co-existing therewith. When you

consider that Oliver believed in a God, the difference between

Oliver's position and that of any subsequent Governor of this Country

becomes, the more you reflect on it, the more immeasurable!

Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a balloted soldier

strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life; comports himself

there like a man who carried his own life in his hand; like a man

whose Great Commander's eye was always on him. Not without results.

Oliver, well-advanced in years, finds now, by Destiny and his own

Deservings, or as he himself better phrased it, by wondrous successive

'Births of Providence,' the Government of England put into his hands.

In senate-house and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private

and in public, this man has proved himself a man: England and the

voice of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments,

speaking to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way

of solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what

informally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no asserting, That he,

Oliver, was the Ablest Man of England, the King of England; that he,

Oliver, would undertake governing England. His way of making this same

'assertion,' the one way he had of making it, has given rise to

immense criticism: but the assertion itself, in what way soever

'made,' is it not somewhat of a solemn one, somewhat of a tremendous

one!

And now do but contrast this Oliver with my right honourable friend

Sir Jabesh Windbag, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Viscount Mealymouth,

Earl of Windlestraw, or what other Cagliostro, Cagliostrino,

Cagliostraccio, the course of Fortune and Parliamentary Majorities has

constitutionally guided to that dignity, any time during these last

sorrowful hundred-and-fifty years! Windbag, weak in the faith of a

God, which he believes only at Church on Sundays, if even then; strong

only in the faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes; that

Force of Public Opinion, as he calls it, is the primal Necessity of

Things, and highest God we have:--Windbag, if we will consider him,

has a problem set before him which may be ranged in the impossible

class. He is a Columbus minded to sail to the indistinct country of

Nowhere, to the indistinct country of Whitherward, by the _friendship_

of those same waste-tumbling Water-Alps and howling waltz of All the

Winds; not by conquest of them and in spite of them, but by friendship

of them, when once _they_ have made-up their mind! He is the most

original Columbus I ever saw. Nay, his problem is not an impossible

one: he will infallibly _arrive_ at that same country of Nowhere; his

indistinct Whitherward will be a _Thither_ward! In the Ocean Abysses

and Locker of Davy Jones, there certainly enough do he and _his_

ship's company, and all their cargo and navigatings, at last find

lodgment.

Oliver knew that his America lay There, Westward Ho;--and it was not

entirely by _friendship_ of the Water-Alps, and yeasty insane

Froth-Oceans, that he meant to get thither! He sailed accordingly; had

compass-card, and Rules of Navigation,--older and greater than these

Froth-Oceans, old as the Eternal God! Or again, do but think of this.

Windbag in these his probable five years of office has to prosper and

get Paragraphs: the Paragraphs of these five years must be his

salvation, or he is a lost man; redemption nowhere in the Worlds or in

the Times discoverable for him. Oliver too would like his Paragraphs;

successes, popularities in these five years are not undesirable to

him: but mark, I say, this enormous circumstance: _after_ these five

years are gone and done, comes an Eternity for Oliver! Oliver has to

appear before the Most High Judge: the utmost flow of Paragraphs, the

utmost ebb of them, is now, in strictest arithmetic, verily no matter

at all; its exact value _zero_; an account altogether erased!

Enormous;--which a man, in these days, hardly fancies with an effort!

Oliver's Paragraphs are all done, his battles, division-lists,

successes all summed: and now in that awful unerring Court of Review,

the real question first rises, Whether he has succeeded at all;

whether he has not been defeated miserably forevermore? Let him come

with world-wide _Io-Paeans_, these avail him not. Let him come covered

over with the world's execrations, gashed with ignominious

death-wounds, the gallows-rope about his neck: what avails that? The

word is, Come thou brave and faithful; the word is, Depart thou quack

and accursed!

O Windbag, my right honourable friend, in very truth I pity thee. I

say, these Paragraphs, and low or loud votings of thy poor

fellow-blockheads of mankind, will never guide thee in any enterprise

at all. Govern a country on such guidance? Thou canst not make a pair

of shoes, sell a pennyworth of tape, on such. No, thy shoes are vamped

up falsely to meet the market; behold, the leather only _seemed_ to be

tanned; thy shoes melt under me to rubbishy pulp, and are not

veritable mud-defying shoes, but plausible vendible similitudes of

shoes,--thou unfortunate, and I! O my right honourable friend, when

the Paragraphs flowed in, who was like Sir Jabesh? On the swelling

tide he mounted; higher, higher, triumphant, heaven-high. But the

Paragraphs again ebbed out, as unwise Paragraphs needs must: Sir

Jabesh lies stranded, sunk and forever sinking in ignominious ooze;

the Mud-nymphs, and ever-deepening bottomless Oblivion, his portion to

eternal time. 'Posterity?' Thou appealest to Posterity, thou? My right

honourable friend, what will Posterity do for thee! The voting of

Posterity, were it continued through centuries in thy favour, will be

quite inaudible, extra-forensic, without any effect whatever.

Posterity can do simply nothing for a man; nor even seem to do much if

the man be not brainsick. Besides, to tell the truth, the bets are a

thousand to one, Posterity will not hear of thee, my right honourable

friend! Posterity, I have found, has generally his own Windbags

sufficiently trumpeted in all market-places, and no leisure to attend

to ours. Posterity, which has made of Norse Odin a similitude, and of

Norman William a brute monster, what will or can it make of English

Jabesh? O Heavens, 'Posterity!'--

"These poor persecuted Scotch Covenanters," said I to my inquiring

Frenchman, in such stinted French as stood at command, "_ils s'en

appelaient a_"--"_A la Posterite_," interrupted he, helping me

out.--"_Ah, Monsieur, non, mille fois non!_ They appealed to the

Eternal God; not to Posterity at all! _C'etait different._"

CHAPTER XV.

MORRISON AGAIN.

Nevertheless, O Advanced-Liberal, one cannot promise thee any 'New

Religion,' for some time; to say truth, I do not think we have the

smallest chance of any! Will the candid reader, by way of closing this

Book Third, listen to a few transient remarks on that subject?

Candid readers have not lately met with any man who had less notion to

interfere with their Thirty-Nine or other Church-Articles; wherewith,

very helplessly as is like, they may have struggled to form for

themselves some not inconceivable hypothesis about this Universe, and

their own Existence there. Superstition, my friend, is far from me;

Fanaticism, for any _Fanum_ likely to arise soon on this Earth, is

far. A man's Church-Articles are surely articles of price to him; and

in these times one has to be tolerant of many strange 'Articles,' and

of many still stranger 'No-articles,' which go about placarding

themselves in a very distracted manner,--the numerous long

placard-poles, and questionable infirm paste-pots, interfering with

one's peaceable thoroughfare sometimes!

Fancy a man, moreover, recommending his fellow men to believe in God,

that so Chartism might abate, and the Manchester Operatives be got to

spin peaceably! The idea is more distracted than any placard-pole seen

hitherto in a public thoroughfare of men! My friend, if thou ever do

come to believe in God, thou wilt find all Chartism, Manchester riot,

Parliamentary incompetence, Ministries of Windbag, and the wildest

Social Dissolutions, and the burning-up of this entire Planet, a most

small matter in comparison. Brother, this Planet, I find, is but an

inconsiderable sand-grain in the continents of Being: this Planet's

poor temporary interests, thy interests and my interests there, when I

look fixedly into that eternal Light-Sea and Flame-Sea with _its_

eternal interests, dwindle literally into Nothing; my speech of it

is--silence for the while. I will as soon think of making Galaxies and

Star-Systems to guide little herring-vessels by, as of preaching

Religion that the Constable may continue possible. O my

Advanced-Liberal friend, this new second progress, of proceeding 'to

invent God,' is a very strange one! Jacobinism unfolded into

Saint-Simonism bodes innumerable blessed things; but the thing itself

might draw tears from a Stoic!--As for me, some twelve or thirteen New

Religions, heavy Packets, most of them unfranked, having arrived here

from various parts of the world, in a space of six calendar months, I

have instructed my invaluable friend the Stamped Postman to introduce

no more of them, if the charge exceed one penny.

* * * * *

Henry of Essex, duelling in that Thames Island, 'near to Reading

Abbey,' had a religion. But was it in virtue of his seeing armed

Phantasms of St. Edmund 'on the rim of the horizon,' looking minatory

on him? Had that, intrinsically, anything to do with his religion at

all? Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience

of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of

men;--which Inner Light shone here 'through such intellectual and

other media' as there were; producing 'Phantasms,' Kircherean

Visual-Spectra, according to circumstances! It is so with all men. The

clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the _less_ turbid media,

the _fewer_ Phantasms it may produce,--the gladder surely shall I be,

and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader,

Advanced-Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all

religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same

Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining;--which

certainly the 'Phantasms' and the 'turbid media' were not essential

for! All religion was here to remind us, better or worse, of what we

already know better or worse, of the quite _infinite_ difference there

is between a Good man and a Bad; to bid us love infinitely the one,

abhor and avoid infinitely the other,--strive infinitely to _be_ the

one, and not to be the other. 'All religion issues in due Practical

Hero-worship.' He that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a

religion; he that has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a succedaneum for

salt, will never find any religion, though you rose from the dead to

preach him one.

But indeed, when men and reformers ask for 'a religion,' it is

analogous to their asking, 'What would you have us to do?' and

suchlike. They fancy that their religion too shall be a kind of

Morrison's Pill, which they have only to swallow once, and all will be

well. Resolutely once gulp-down your Religion, your Morrison's Pill,

you have it all plain sailing now: you can follow your affairs, your

no-affairs, go along money-hunting, pleasure-hunting, dilettanteing,

dangling, and miming and chattering like a Dead-Sea Ape: your

Morrison will do your business for you. Men's notions are very

strange!--Brother, I say there is not, was not, nor will ever be, in

the wide circle of Nature, any Pill or Religion of that character. Man

cannot afford thee such; for the very gods it is impossible. I advise

thee to renounce Morrison; once for all, quit hope of the Universal

Pill. For body, for soul, for individual or society, there has not any

such article been made. _Non extat._ In Created Nature it is not, was

not, will not be. In the void imbroglios of Chaos only, and realms of

Bedlam, does some shadow of it hover, to bewilder and bemock the poor

inhabitants _there_.

Rituals, Liturgies, Creeds, Hierarchies: all this is not religion; all

this, were it dead as Odinism, as Fetishism, does not kill religion at

all! It is Stupidity alone, with never so many rituals, that kills

religion. Is not this still a World? Spinning Cotton under Arkwright

and Adam Smith; founding Cities by the Fountain of Juturna, on the

Janiculum Mount; tilling Canaan under Prophet Samuel and Psalmist

David, man is ever man; the missionary of Unseen Powers; and great and

victorious, while he continues true to his mission; mean, miserable,

foiled, and at last annihilated and trodden out of sight and memory,

when he proves untrue. Brother, thou art a Man, I think; thou art not

a mere building Beaver, or two-legged Cotton-Spider; thou hast verily

a Soul in thee, asphyxied or otherwise! Sooty Manchester,--it too is

built on the infinite Abysses; overspanned by the skyey Firmaments;

and there is birth in it, and death in it;--and it is every whit as

wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic

City. Go or stand, in what time, in what place we will, are there not

Immensities, Eternities over us, around us, in us:

'Solemn before us,

Veiled, the dark Portal,

Goal of all mortal:--

Stars silent rest o'er us,

Graves under us silent!'

Between _these_ two great Silences, the hum of all our spinning

cylinders, Trades-Unions, Anti-Corn-Law Leagues and Carlton Clubs

goes on. Stupidity itself ought to pause a little and consider that. I

tell thee, through all thy Ledgers, Supply-and-demand Philosophies,

and daily most modern melancholy Business and Cant, there does shine

the presence of a Primeval Unspeakable; and thou wert wise to

recognise, not with lips only, that same!

The Maker's Laws, whether they are promulgated in Sinai Thunder, to

the ear or imagination, or quite otherwise promulgated, are the Laws

of God; transcendent, everlasting, imperatively demanding obedience

from all men. This, without any thunder, or with never so much

thunder, thou, if there be any soul left in thee, canst know of a

truth. The Universe, I say, is made by Law; the great Soul of the

World is just and not unjust. Look thou, if thou have eyes or soul

left, into this great shoreless Incomprehensible: in the heart of its

tumultuous Appearances, Embroilments, and mad Time-vortexes, is there

not, silent, eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful; sole Reality and

ultimate controlling Power of the whole? This is not a figure of

speech; this is a fact. The fact of Gravitation known to all animals,

is not surer than this inner Fact, which may be known to all men. He

who knows this, it will sink, silent, awful, unspeakable, into his

heart. He will say with Faust: "Who _dare_ name Him?" Most rituals or

'namings' he will fall in with at present, are like to be

'namings'--which shall be nameless! In silence, in the Eternal Temple,

let him worship, if there be no fit word: Such knowledge, the crown of

his whole spiritual being, the life of his life, let him keep and

sacredly walk by. He has a religion. Hourly and daily, for himself and

for the whole world, a faithful, unspoken, but not ineffectual prayer

rises, "Thy will be done." His whole work on Earth is an emblematic

spoken or acted prayer, Be the will of God done on Earth,--not the

Devil's will, or any of the Devil's servants' wills! He has a

religion, this man; an everlasting Load-star that beams the brighter

in the Heavens, the darker here on Earth grows the night around him.

Thou, if thou know not this, what are all rituals, liturgies,

mythologies, mass-chantings, turnings of the rotatory calabash? They

are as nothing; in a good many respects they are as _less_. Divorced

from this, getting half-divorced from this, they are a thing to fill

one with a kind of horror; with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear.

The most tragical thing a human eye can look on. It was said to the

Prophet, "Behold, I will show thee worse things than these: women

weeping to Thammuz." That was the acme of the Prophet's vision,--then

as now.

Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder: I know more or less the

history of these; the rise, progress, decline and fall of these. Can

thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries

of years, make God's Laws more godlike to me? Brother, No. Perhaps I

am grown to be a man now; and do not need the thunder and the terror

any longer! Perhaps I am above being frightened; perhaps it is not

Fear, but Reverence alone, that shall now lead me!--Revelations,

Inspirations? Yes: and thy own god-created Soul; dost thou not call

that a 'revelation'? Who made Thee? Where didst Thou come from? The

Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied

mute, speaks with that tongue of thine! _Thou_ art the latest Birth of

Nature; it is 'the Inspiration of the Almighty' that giveth _thee_

understanding! My brother, my brother!--

Under baleful Atheisms, Mammonisms, Joe-Manton Dilettantisms, with

their appropriate Cants and Idolisms, and whatsoever scandalous

rubbish obscures and all but extinguishes the soul of man,--religion

now is; its Laws, written if not on stone tables, yet on the Azure of

Infinitude, in the inner heart of God's Creation, certain as Life,

certain as Death! I say the Laws are there, and thou shalt not disobey

them. It were better for thee not. Better a hundred deaths than yes.

Terrible 'penalties,' withal, if thou still need 'penalties,' are

there for disobeying. Dost thou observe, O redtape Politician, that

fiery infernal Phenomenon, which men name French Revolution, sailing,

unlooked-for, unbidden; through thy inane Protocol Dominion:--farseen,

with splendour, not of Heaven? Ten centuries will see it. There were

Tanneries at Meudon for human skins. And Hell, very truly Hell, had

power over God's upper Earth for a season. The cruelest Portent that

has risen into created Space these ten centuries: let us hail it, with

awestruck repentant hearts, as the voice once more of a God, though of

one in wrath. Blessed be the God's-voice; for _it_ is true, and

Falsehoods have to cease before it! But for that same preternatural

quasi-infernal Portent, one could not know what to make of this

wretched world, in these days, at all. The deplorablest quack-ridden,

and now hunger-ridden, downtrodden Despicability and _Flebile

Ludibrium_, of redtape Protocols, rotatory Calabashes, Poor-Law

Bastilles: who is there that could think of _its_ being fated to

continue?--

Penalties enough, my brother! This penalty inclusive of all: Eternal

Death to thy own hapless Self, if thou heed no other. Eternal Death, I

say,--with many meanings old and new, of which let this single one

suffice us here: The eternal impossibility for thee to be aught but a

Chimera, and swift-vanishing deceptive Phantasm, in God's

Creation;--swift-vanishing, never to reappear: why should _it_

reappear! Thou hadst one chance, thou wilt never have another.

Everlasting ages will roll on, and no other be given thee. The

foolishest articulate-speaking soul now extant, may not he say to

himself: "A whole Eternity I waited to be born; and now I have a whole

Eternity waiting to see what I will do when born!" This is not

Theology, this is Arithmetic. And thou but half-discernest this; thou

but half-believest it? Alas, on the shores of the Dead Sea, on

Sabbath, there goes on a Tragedy!--