The Project Gutenberg EBook of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle

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Title: Past and Present

Author: Thomas Carlyle

Release Date: September 27, 2004 [EBook #13534]

Language: English

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Produced by Jake Jaqua




PAST AND PRESENT
            By Thomas Carlyle

Appreciation by Ralph Waldo Emerson


First published 1843



THOMAS CARLYLE, born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, the son of a
stonemason.  Educated at Edinburgh University.  Schoolmaster for
a short time, but decided on a literary career, visiting Paris
and London.  Retired in 1828 to Dumfriesshire to write.  In 1834
moved to Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and died there in 1881.





INTRODUCTION
  Being an appreciation from "The Dial" (July 1843)
            by Ralph Waldo Emerson


Here is Carlyle's new poem, his _Iliad_ of English woes, to
follow his poem on France, entitled the _History of the French
Revolution._  In its first aspect it is a political tract, and
since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with
it.  It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men,
groups and disposes them with a master's mind, and, with a heart
full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his
brothers.  Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the
dreadful political signs in England for the last few years,  has
conversed much on these topics with such wisemen of all ranks and
parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until, such daily and
nightly meditation has grown into a great connection, if not a
system of thoughts;  and the topic of English politics becomes
the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking,
recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels,
and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility.  It is a
brave and just book, and not a semblance.  "No new truth," say
the critics on all sides.  Is it so?  Truth is very old, but the
merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their
right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount,
whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details
into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality
than  any other.  The book makes great approaches to true
contemporary history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to
daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and
European system.  It is such an appeal to the conscience and
honour of England as cannot be forgotten, or be feigned to be
forgotten.  It has the merit which belongs to every honest book,
that it was self-examining before it was eloquent, and so hits
all other men, and, as the country people say of good preaching,
"comes bounce down into every pew."  Every reader shall carry
away something.  The scholar shall read and write, the farmer and
mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget the book
when they resume their labour.

Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers, a believer
in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity
of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in
good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the
people, and the remedy in honesty and insight.  Like every work
of genius, its great value is in telling such simple truths.  As
we recall the topics, we are struck with force given to the plain
truths;  the picture of the English nation all sitting enchanted,
the poor, enchanted so that they cannot work, the rich, enchanted
so that they cannot enjoy, and are rich in vain;  the exposure of
the progress of fraud into all arts and social activities;  the
proposition that the labourer must have a greater share in his
earnings;  that the principle of permanence shall be admitted
into all contracts of mutual service;  that the state shall
provide at least schoolmaster's education for all the citizens;
the exhortation to the workman that he shall respect the work and
not the wages;  to the scholar that he shall be there for light;
to the idle, that no man shall sit idle;  the picture of Abbot
Samson, the true governor, who "is not there to expect reason and
nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason
and nobleness;"  the assumption throughout the book, that a new
chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labour, is replacing
the old nobilities.   These things strike us with a force which
reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters,
and of no modern book.  Truly in these things is great reward.
It is not by sitting so at a grand distance and calling the human
race _larvae,_ that men are to be helped, nor by helping the
depraved after their own foolish fashion;  but by doing
unweariedly the particular work we were born to do.  Let no man
think himself absolved because he does a generous action and
befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so holds his
property that a benefit goes from it to all.  A man's diet should
be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is so
private a good.  His house should be better, because that is for
the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of
the traveler.  But his speech is a perpetual and public
instrument;  let that always side with the race and yield neither
a lie nor a sneer.  His manners,--let them be hospitable and
civilising, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught
anything better in canvas or stone;  and his acts should be
representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in
his having, and poor in his want.

It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the
contemporary practical questions;  not because he then has all
men for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of
the problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe
fruits.  The task is superhuman;  and the poet knows well that a
little time will do more than the most puissant genius.  Time
stills the loud noise of opinions, sinks the small, raises the
great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect
harmony to all eyes;  but the truth of the present hour, except
in particulars and single relations, is unattainable.  Each man
can very well know his own part of duty, if he will;  but to
bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature, surmounts the
powers of art.  The most elaborate history of today will have the
oddest dislocated look in the next generation.  The historian of
today is yet three ages off.  The poet cannot descend into the
turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts.  Hence that
necessity of isolation which genius has always felt.  He must
stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.

But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the
sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher
than Literary inspiration may succour him.  It is a costly proof
of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should
take his reputation in his hand and should descend into the ring;
and he has added to his love whatever honour his opinions may
forfeit.  To atone for this departure from the vows of the
scholar and his eternal duties to this secular charity, we have
at least this gain, that here is a message which those to whom it
was addressed cannot choose but hear.  Though they die, they must
listen.  It is plain that whether by hope or by fear, or were it
only by delight in this panorama of brilliant images; all the
great classes of English society must read, even those whose
existence it proscribes.  Poor Queen Victoria--poor Sir Robert
Peel--poor Primate and Bishops--poor Dukes and Lords!  There is
no help in place or pride or in looking another way;  a grain of
wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm,
which no curtains or shutters will keep out.  Here is a book
which will be read, no thanks to anybody but itself.  What pains,
what hopes, what vows, shall come of the reading!  Here is a book
as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lordship
and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism
tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air, with
merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is punishable by
statute.  The wit has eluded all official zeal;  and yet these
dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this darning sword of Cherubim
waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon, and shows to
the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts.  Worst of all
for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all
sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane
conservatism, and impressing the reader with the conviction that
the satirist himself has the truest love for everything old and
excellent in English land and institutions, and a genuine respect
for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes.

We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of
this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the
talent displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special
criticism in the wrong.  And we may easily fail in expressing the
general objection which we feel.  It appears to us as a certain
disproportion in the picture, caused by the obtrusion of the
whims of the painter.  In this work, as in his former labours,
Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant.  His humours are
  expressed with so much force of constitution that his
fancies are more attractive and more credible than the sanity of
duller men.  But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies
whilst it stimulated.

It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the
picture.  It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in
lurid   storm lights.  Every object attitudinises, to the very
mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this
wonderful humorist;  and instead of the common earth and sky, we
have a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day.  A crisis has always
arrived which requires a _deus ex machina._  One can hardly
credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world
always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us--as
of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to
begin again and try to do a little business.  It was perhaps
inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and
imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis
and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should
appear, producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the
excess of value attributed to circumstances.  But the splendour
of wit cannot out--dazzle the calm daylight, which always shows
every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work
out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such
glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this.  Each age has
its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young
people;  its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself;
and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with
pride or with regret (according as he was practical or poetic),
that he had none.  But after a short time, down go its follies
and weakness and the memory of them;  its virtues alone remain,
and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful
superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in
the horizon with mist and colour.  The revelation of Reason is
this of the un-changeableness of the fate of humanity under all
its subjective aspects;  that to the cowering it always cowers,
to the daring it opens great avenues.  The ancients are only
venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial;
as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot
reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?

And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing
dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over-
colouring of the picture;  and we at this distance are not so far
removed from any of the specific evils, and are deeply
participant in too many, not to share the gloom and thank the
love and the courage of the counselor.  This book is full of
humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr.
Carlyle's works than the attitude of the writer.  He has the
dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and
never deviates from his sphere;  a continuer of the great line of
scholars, and sustains their office in the highest credit and
honour.  If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this
unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for
its occasion.  One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of
criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close.
Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye oft
from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.

As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main
one that he never wrote one dull line.  How well-read, how
adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing;  with his
expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he
entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of
straw from the cell,--and the respectable Sauerteig, or
Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveler, says what
is put into his mouth, and disappears.  That morbid temperament
has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character;  a luxury to
many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south-wind
with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over
the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of
reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were
possible on the part of the humorist.  Yet it must not be
forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes
with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,--in all this
glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet
ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the
crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level
tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game.
He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a
serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the
ear for which it is meant.  He does not dodge the question, but
gives sincerity where it is due.

One word more respecting this remarkable style.  We have in
literature few specimens of magnificence.  Plato is the purple
ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains.
Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though
deficient in depth.  Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has
entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and
wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of
these times--the indubitable champion of England.  Carlyle is the
first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of
details, into style.  We have been civilising very fast, building
London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New
Holland and Oregon--and it has not appeared in literature;  there
has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books.
Carlyle's style is the first emergence of all this wealth and
labour with which the world has gone with child so long.  London
and Europe, tunneled, graded corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and
East and West Indies for dependencies, and America, with the
Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in
literature.  This is the first invasion and conquest.  How like
an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the
continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a
symbol which was never a symbol before.  This is the first
experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned
to so great an achievement.  It will be done again and again,
sharper, simpler;  but fortunate is he who did it first, though
never so giant-like and fabulous.  This grandiose character
pervades his wit and his imagination.  We have never had anything
in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle.  He
"shakes with his mountain mirth."  It is like the laughter of the
Genii in the horizon.  These jokes shake down Parliament-house
and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo
the dangerous peals.  The other particular of magnificence is in
his rhymes.  Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his
frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre.  Yet he is full
of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but
in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music.
Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with
meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to
return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now
as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the
horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Life of Schiller (Lond. Mag., 1823-4), 1825, 1845.  (Supplement
published in the People's Edition, 1873)  Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship, 1824.  Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry
(from the French of Legendre), 1824.  German Romance, 1827.
Sartor Resartus (Fraser's Mag., 1833-4), 1835 (Boston) 1838.
French Revolution, 1837,1839.  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,
1839, 1840, 1847, 1857.  (In these were reprinted Articles from
Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review, Foreign Quarterly Review,
Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, New Monthly Magazine,
London and Westminster Review, Keepsake, Proceedings of the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Times.)  Chartism, 1840.
Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841.  Past and
Present, 1843.  Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches;  with
Elucidations, 1845.  Thirty-five Unpublished Letters of Oliver
Cromwell, 1847 (Fraser).  Original Discourses on the Negro
Question (Fraser, 1849), 1853.  Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850.  Life
of John Sterling, 1851.  History of Friedrich II. of Prussia,
1858-65.  Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, 1866.  Shooting
Niagara; and After? 1867 (from Macmillan).  The Early Kings of
Norway;  also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox, 1875.

There were also contributions to Brewster's Edinburgh
Encyclopaedia, vols. xiv. xv., and xvi.;  to New Edinburgh
Review, 1821, 1822;  Fraser's Magazine, 1830, 1831;  The Times,
19 June, 1844 (Mazzini);  28 November, 1876;  5 May, 1877;
Examiner, 1848;  Spectator 1848.

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

Reminiscences (ed. J.A. Froude), 1881;  (ed. C.E. Norton, 1887,
and preprinted in Everyman's Library;  1932, with an added
article on Professor John Wilson--"Christopher North")
Reminiscences of my Irish journey in 1849, 1882.  Last Words of
Thomas Carlyle, 1882 (ed. by J.C.A.)  Last Words of Thomas
Carlyle, 1892.  Rescued Essays (ed. P. Newberry) 1892.
Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reign of
James I. and Charles I. (ed. A. Carlyle), 1898.

Sir Leslie Stephen's article on Carlyle in the Dictionary of
National Biography gives a list of his occasional writings which
have never been collected or reprinted.



Contents

Book I--Proem

I. Midas.
II. The Sphinx
III. Manchester Insurrection
IV. Morrison's Pill
V. Aristocracy of Talent
VI. Hero-Worship


Book II--The Ancient Monk

I. Jocelin of Brakelond
II. St. Edmundsbury
III. Landlord Edmund
IV. Abbot Hugo
V. Twelfth Century
VI. Monk Samson
VII. The Canvassing
VIII. The Election
IX. Abbot Samson
X. Government
XI. The Abbot's Ways
XII. The Abbot's Troubles
XIII. In Parliament
XIV. Henry of Essex
XV.  Practical-Devotional
XVI St. Edmund
XVII  The Beginnings


Book III--The Modern Worker

I. Phenomena,
II. Gospel of Mammonism
III. Gospel of Dilettantism
XV. Happy
V. The English
VI. Two Centuries
VII. Over-Production
VIII. Unworking Aristocracy
IX. Working Aristocracy
X. Plugson of Undershot
XI. Labour
XII  Reward
XIII. Democracy
XIV  Sir Jabesh Windbag
XV. Morrison Again

Book IV--Horoscope

I. Aristocracies
II. Bribery Committee
III. The One Institution
IV Captains of Industry
V. Permanence
VI. The Landed
VII. The Gifted
VIII  The Didactic

Summary




Book I--Proem


Chapter I

Midas


The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the
course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on
in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most
ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this
world.  England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce,
supply for human want in every kind;  yet England is dying of
inanition.  With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and
grows;  waving with yellow harvests;  thick-studded with
workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of
workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the
willingest our Earth ever had;  these men are here;  the work
they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant,
exuberant on every hand of us:  and behold, some baleful fiat as
of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers,
ye master-workers, ye master-idlers;  none of you can touch it,
no man of you shall be the better for it;  this is enchanted
fruit!"  On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest
shape;  but on the rich masterworkers too it falls;  neither can
the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape,
but all are like to be brought low with it, and made 'poor'
enough, in the money-sense or a far fataller one.

Of these successful skillful workers some two millions, it is now
counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons;  or have 'out-door
relief' flung over the wall to them,--the workhouse Bastille
being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder
by a stronger.*  They sit there, these many months now;  their
hope of deliverance as yet small.  In workhouses, pleasantly so
named, because work cannot be done in them.  Twelve hundred
thousand workers in England alone; their cunning right-hand
lamed, lying idle in their sorrowful bosom;  their hopes,
outlooks, share of this fair world, shut in by narrow walls.
They sit there, pent up, as in a kind of horrid enchantment;
glad to be imprisoned and enchanted, that they may not perish
starved.  The picturesque Tourist, in a sunny autumn day,
through this bounteous realm of England, describes the Union
Workhouse on his path.  'Passing by the Workhouse of St. Ives
in Huntingdonshire, on a bright day last autumn,' says the
picturesque Tourist, 'I saw sitting on wooden benches, in front
of their Bastille and within their ringwall and its railings,
some half-hundred or more of these men.  Tall robust figures,
young mostly or of middle age;  of honest countenance, many of
them thoughtful and even intelligent-looking men.  They sat
there, near by one another;  but in a kind of torpor, especially
in a silence, which was very striking.  In silence:  for, alas,
what word was to be said?  An Earth all lying round, crying, Come
and till me, come and reap me;--yet we here sit enchanted!  In
the eyes and brows of these men hung the gloomiest expression,
not of anger, but of grief and shame and manifold inarticulate
distress and weariness;  they returned my glance with a glance
that seemed to say, "Do not look at us.  We sit enchanted here,
we know not why.  The Sun shines and the Earth calls;  and, by
the governing Powers and Impotences of this England, we are
forbidden to obey.  It is impossible, they tell us!"  There was
something that reminded me of Dante's Hell in the look of all
this;  and I rode swiftly away.

---------
* The Return of Paupers for England and Wales, at Ladyday, 1842,
is, "In-door 221,687, Out-door 1,207,402, Total 1,429,089."--
(_Official Report_)
---------

So many hundred thousands sit in workhouses:  and other hundred
thousands have not yet got even workhouses;  and in thrifty
Scotland itself, in Glasgow or Edinburgh City, in their
dark lanes, hidden from all but the eye of God, and of rare
Benevolence the minister of God, there are scenes of woe and
destitution and desolation, such as, one may hope, the Sun never
saw before in the most barbarous regions where men dwelt.
Competent witnesses, the brave and humane Dr. Alison, who speaks
what he knows, whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands
becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us:
these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no
reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only
to the common state.  Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic
gangrene of this kind is Scotland suffering.  A Poor-law, any and
every Poor-law, it may be observed, is but a temporary measure;
an anodyne, not a remedy:  Rich and Poor, when once the naked
facts of their condition have come into collision, cannot long
subsist together on a mere Poor-law.  True enough:--and yet,
human beings cannot be left to die!  Scotland too, till something
better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a
byword among the nations.  O, what a waste is there;  of noble
and thrice-noble national virtues;  peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms;
valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,--which all the
metal of Potosi cannot purchase back;  to which the metal of
Potosi, and all you can buy with _it,_ is dross and dust!

Why dwell on this aspect of the matter?  It is too indisputable,
not doubtful now to any one.  Descend where you will into the
lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by
Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by
Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking,
the same sorrowful result discloses itself:  you have to admit
that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is
fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered,
there was literally never any parallel.  At Stockport Assizes,--
and this too has no reference to the present state of trade,
being of date prior to that,--a Mother and a Father are arraigned
and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to defraud
a 'burial-society' of some _31.8s._ due on the death of each
child:  they are arraigned, found guilty;  and the official
authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not
solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that
department of things.  This is in the autumn of 1841;  the crime
itself is of the previous year or season.  "Brutal savages,
degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of Newspapers;  hardly
lingering on this incident.  Yet it is an incident worth
lingering on;  the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism
being never so well admitted.  In the British land, a human
Mother and Father, of white skin and professing the Christian
religion, had done this thing;  they, with their Irishism and
necessity and savagery, had been driven to do it.  Such instances
are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view;  under
which lies a whole mountain region and land, not yet emerged.  A
human Mother and Father had said to themselves, What shall we do
to escape starvation?  We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar;
and help is far.--Yes, in the Ugolino Hungertower stern things
happen;  best-loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his Father's
knees!--The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint:  Our poor
little starveling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will
see only evil and not good in this world:  if he were out of
misery at once;  he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept
alive?  It is thought, and hinted;  at last it is done.  And now
Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little
starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?--
What an inquiry of ways and means!

In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old
Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and
said, 'The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own
children.'  The stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no
blacker gulf of wretchedness;  that was the ultimatum of degraded
god-punished man.  And we here, in modern England, exuberant with
supply of all kinds, besieged by nothing if it be not by
invisible Enchantments, are we reaching that?--How come these
things?  Wherefore are they, wherefore should they be?


Nor are they of the St. Ives workhouses, of the Glasgow lanes,
and Stockport cellars, the only unblessed among us.  This
successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as
yet made nobody rich;  it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet
to nobody.  We might ask, Which of us has it enriched?  We can
spend thousands where we once spent hundreds;  but can purchase
nothing good with them.  In Poor and Rich, instead of noble
thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury alternating with mean
scarcity and inability.  We have sumptuous garnitures for our
Life, but have forgotten to _live_ in the middle of them.  It is
an enchanted wealth;  no man of us can yet touch it.  The class
of men who feel that they are truly better off by means of it,
let them give us their name!

Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors,--with what
advantage they can report, and their Doctors can:  but in the
heart of them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what
increase of blessedness is there?  Are they better, beautifuller,
stronger, braver?  Are they even what they call 'happier?  Do
they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in
this God's Earth;  do more things and human faces look with
satisfaction on them?  Not so.  Human faces gloom discordantly,
disloyally on one another.  Things, if it be not mere cotton and
iron things, are growing disobedient to man.  The Master Worker
is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman;
clamours, in vain hitherto, for a very simple sort of 'Liberty:'
the liberty 'to buy where he finds it cheapest, to sell where he
finds it dearest.'  With guineas jingling in every pocket, he was
no whit richer;  but now, the very guineas threatening to vanish,
he feels that he is poor indeed.  Poor Master Worker!  And the
Master Unworker, is not he in a still fataller situation?
Pausing amid his game-preserves, with awful eye,--as he well may!
Coercing fifty-pound tenants;  coercing, bribing, cajoling;
doing what he likes with his own.  His mouth full of loud
futilities, and arguments to prove the excellence of his
Corn-law;*  and in his heart the blackest misgiving, a desperate
half-consciousness that his excellent Corn-law is indefensible,
that his loud arguments for it are of a kind to strike men too
literally _dumb._

-------------
[* Digital transcriber note:  The "corn-law" that Carlyle
repeatedly refers to was an English sliding-scale tariff on
grain, which kept the price of bread artificially inflated.]
-------------

To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth?  Who is it that
it blesses;  makes happier, wiser, beautifuller, in any way
better?  Who has got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for
him, like a true servant, not like a false mock-servant;  to do
him any real service whatsoever?  As yet no one.  We have more
riches than any Nation ever had before;  we have less good of
them than any Nation ever had before.  Our successful industry is
hitherto unsuccessful;  a strange success, if we stop here!  In
the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish;  with gold
walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied.
Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men, come to a pause;
stand fixed, and cannot farther.  Fatal paralysis spreading
inwards, from the extremities, in St. Ives workhouses, in
Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if towards the heart
itself.  Have we actually got enchanted, then;  accursed by
some god?--

Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians.  He got gold,
so that whatsoever he touched became gold,--and he, with his long
ears, was little the better for it.  Midas had misjudged the
celestial music-tones;  Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods:
the gods gave him his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also
were a good appendage to it.  What a truth in these old Fables!




Chapter II

The Sphinx


How true, for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who
sat by the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers,
which if they could not answer she destroyed them!  Such a Sphinx
is this Life of ours, to all men and societies of men.  Nature,
like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and
tenderness;  the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws
and the body of a lioness.  There is in her a celestial beauty,--
which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom;  but there is
also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal.
She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned;  one still
half-imprisoned,--the inarticulate, lovely still encased in the
inarticulate, chaotic.  How true!  And does she not propound her
riddles to us?  Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet
with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the meaning of this
Day?  What thou canst do Today;  wisely attempt to do?"  Nature,
Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand
unnameable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as
a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who
can discern her behests and do them;  a destroying fiend to them
who cannot.  Answer her riddle, it is well with thee.  Answer it
not, pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself;  the
solution for thee is a thing of teeth and claws;  Nature is a
dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring.  Thou
art not now her victorious bridegroom;  thou art her mangled
victim, scattered on the precipices, as a slave found treacherous,
recreant, ought to be and must.

With Nations it is as with individuals:  Can they rede the riddle
of Destiny?  This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning
of _its_ strange new Today?  Is there sense enough extant,
discoverable anywhere or anyhow, in our united twenty-seven
million heads to discern the same;  valour enough in our
twenty-seven million hearts to dare and do the bidding thereof?
It will be seen!--

The secret of gold Midas, which he with his long ears never could
discover, was, That he had offended the Supreme Powers;--that he
had parted company with the eternal inner Facts of this Universe,
and followed the transient outer Appearances thereof;  and so was
arrived _here._  Properly it is the secret of all unhappy men and
unhappy nations.  Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's
right truth would have made them free.  They have become
enchanted;  stagger spell-bound, reeling on the brink of huge
peril, because they were not wise enough.  They have forgotten
the right Inner True, and taken up with the Outer Sham-true.
They answer the Sphinx's question wrong.  Foolish men cannot
answer it aright!  Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for
eternal fact, and go astray more and more.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is
delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one, here below.
Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two,
some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death!
In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest
days, dwells and speaks a God.  The great soul of the world is
_just._  O brother, can it be needful now, at this late epoch of
experience, after eighteen centuries of Christian preaching for
one thing, to remind thee of such a fact;  which all manner of
Mahometans, old Pagan Romans, Jews, Scythians and heathen Greeks,
and indeed more or less all men that God made, have managed at
one time to see into;  nay which thou thyself, till 'redtape'
strangled the inner life of thee, hadst once some inkling of:
That there is justice here below;  and even, at bottom, that
there is nothing else but justice!  Forget that, thou hast
forgotten all.  Success will never more attend thee:  how can it
now?  Thou hast the whole Universe against thee.  No more
success:  mere sham-success, for a day and days;  rising ever
higher,--towards its Tarpeian Rock.  Alas, how, in thy soft-hung
Longacre vehicle, of polished leather to the bodily eye, of
redtape philosophy, of expediencies, clubroom moralities,
Parliamentary majorities to the mind's eye, thou beautifully
rollest:  but knowest thou whitherward?  It is towards the
_road's end._  Old use-and-wont;  established methods, habitudes,
once true and wise;  man's noblest tendency, his perseverance,
and man's ignoblest, his inertia;  whatsoever of noble and
ignoble Conservatism there is in men and Nations, strongest
always in the strongest men and Nations:  all this is as a road
to thee, paved smooth through the abyss,--till all this _end._
Till men's bitter necessities can endure thee no more.  Till
Nature's patience with thee is done;  and there is no road or
footing any farther, and the abyss yawns sheer--

Parliament and the Courts of Westminster are venerable to me;
how venerable;  grey with a thousand years of honourable age!
For a thousand years and more, Wisdom and faithful Valour,
struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most
sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up;  and they
are as we see.  For a thousand years, this English Nation has
found them useful or supportable;  they have served this English
Nation's want;  _been_ a road to it through the abyss of Time.
They are venerable, they are great and strong.  And yet it is
good to remember always that they are not the venerablest, nor
the greatest, nor the strongest!  Acts of Parliament are
venerable;  but if they correspond not with the writing on the
Adamant Tablet, what are they?  Properly their one element of
venerableness, of strength or greatness, is, that they at all
times correspond therewith as near as by human possibility they
can.  They are cherishing destruction in their bosom every hour
that they continue otherwise.

Alas, how many causes that can plead well for themselves in the
Courts of Westminster;  and yet in the general Court of the
Universe, and free Soul of Man, have no word to utter!
Honourable Gentlemen may find this worth considering, in times
like ours.  And truly, the din of triumphant Law-logic, and all
shaking of horse-hair wigs and learned-sergeant gowns having
comfortably ended, we shall do well to ask ourselves withal, What
says that high and highest Court to the verdict?  For it is the
Court of Courts, that same;  where the universal soul of Fact and
very Truth sits President;--and thitherward, more and more
swiftly, with a really terrible increase of swiftness, all causes
do in these days crowd for revisal,--for confirmation, for
modification, for reversal with costs.  Dost thou know that
Court;  hast thou had any Law-practice there?  What, didst thou
never enter;  never file any petition of redress, reclaimer,
disclaimer or demurrer, written as in thy heart's blood, for thy
own behoof or another's;  and silently await the issue?  Thou
knowest not such a Court?  Hast merely heard of it by faint
tradition as a thing that was or had been?  Of thee, I think, we
shall get little benefit.

For the gowns of learned-sergeants are good:  parchment records,
fixed forms, and poor terrestrial justice, with or without
horse-hair, what sane man will not reverence these?  And yet,
behold, the man is not sane but insane, who considers these alone
as venerable.  Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and
learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned
tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth,
cannot make unjust just.  The grand question still remains, Was
the judgment just?  If unjust, it will not and cannot get harbour
for itself, or continue to have footing in this Universe, which
was made by other than One Unjust.  Enforce it by never such
statuting, three readings, royal assents;  blow it to the four
winds with all manner of quilted trumpeters and pursuivants, in
the rear of them never so many gibbets and hangmen, it will not
stand, it cannot stand.  From all souls of men, from all ends of
Nature, from the Throne of God above, there are voices bidding
it:  Away, away!  Does it take no warning;  does it stand, strong
in its three readings, in its gibbets and artillery-parks?  The
more woe is to it, the frightfuller woe.  It will continue
standing, for its day, for its year, for its century, doing
evil all the while;  but it has One enemy who is Almighty:
dissolution, explosion, and the everlasting Laws of Nature
incessantly advance towards it;  and the deeper its rooting, more
obstinate its continuing, the deeper also and huger will its ruin
and overturn be.

In this God's-world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad
foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and
judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think
that there is therefore no justice?  It is what the fool hath
said in his heart.  It is what the wise, in all times, were wise
because they denied, and knew forever not to be.  I tell thee
again, there is nothing else but justice.  One strong thing I
find here below:  the just thing, the true thing.  My friend, if
thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in
support of an unjust thing;  and infinite bonfires visibly
waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long for thy victory on
behalf of it,--I would advise thee to call halt, to fling down
thy baton, and say, "In God's name, No!"  Thy 'success?'  Poor
devil, what will thy success amount to?  If the thing is unjust,
thou hast not succeeded;  no, not though bonfires blazed
from North to South, and bells rang, and editors wrote
leading-articles, and the just thing lay trampled out of sight,
to all mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing.  Success?
In few years, thou wilt be dead and dark,--all cold, eyeless,
deaf;  no blaze of bonfires, ding-dong of bells or leading-articles
visible or audible to thee again at all forever:  What kind of
success is that!--

It is true all goes by approximation in this world;  with any not
insupportable approximation we must be patient.  There is a noble
Conservatism as well as an ignoble.  Would to Heaven, for the
sake of Conservatism itself, the noble alone were left, and the
ignoble, by some kind severe hand, were ruthlessly lopped away,
forbidden ever more to skew itself!  For it is the right and
noble alone that will have victory in this struggle;  the rest is
wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of
the victory.  Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness,
and of that only, is all this confusion tending.  We already know
whither it is all tending;  what will have victory, what will
have none!  The Heaviest will reach the centre.  The Heaviest,
sinking through complex fluctuating media and vortices, has its
deflexions, its obstructions, nay at times its resiliences, its
reboundings;  whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating,
"See, your Heaviest ascends!"--but at all moments it is moving
centreward, fast as is convenient for it;  sinking, sinking; and,
by laws older than the World, old as the Maker's first Plan of
the World, it has to arrive there.

Await the issue.  In all battles, if you await the issue, each
fighter has prospered according to his right.  His right and his
might, at the close of the account, were one and the same.  He
has fought with all his might, and in exact proportion to all his
right he has prevailed.  His very death is no victory over him.
He dies indeed;  but his work lives, very truly lives.  A heroic
Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his
Scotland become, one day, a part of England:  but he does hinder
that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part of it;
commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and
Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of
brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of
slave and master.  If the union with England be in fact one of
Scotland's chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was
not the chief curse.  Scotland is not Ireland:  no, because brave
men rose there, and said, "Behold, ye must not tread us down like
slaves;  and ye shall not,--and cannot!"  Fight on, thou brave
true heart, and falter not, through dark fortune and through
bright.  The cause thou fightest for, so far as it is true, no
farther, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory.  The
falsehood alone of it will be conquered, will be abolished, as it
ought to be:  but the truth of it is part of Nature's own Laws,
cooperates with the World's eternal Tendencies, and cannot
be conquered.

The _dust_ of controversy, what is it but the _falsehood_ flying
off from all manner of conflicting true forces, and making such a
loud dust-whirlwind,--that so the truths alone may remain, and
embrace brother-like in some true resulting-force!  It is ever
so.  Savage fighting Heptarchies:  their fighting is an
ascertainment, who has the right to rule over whom;  that out of
such waste-bickering Saxondom a peacefully cooperating England
may arise.  Seek through this Universe;  if with other than owl's
eyes, thou wilt find nothing nourished there, nothing kept in
life, but what has right to nourishment and life.  The rest, look
at it with other than owl's eyes, is not living;  is all dying,
all as good as dead!  Justice was ordained from the foundations
of the world;  and will last with the world and longer.


From which I infer that the inner sphere of Fact, in this present
England as elsewhere, differs infinitely from the outer sphere
and spheres of Semblance.  That the Temporary, here as elsewhere,
is too apt to carry it over the Eternal.  That he who dwells in
the temporary Semblances, and does not penetrate into the eternal
Substance, will _not_ answer the Sphinx-riddle of Today, or of
any Day.  For the substance alone is substantial;  that is the
law of Fact:  if you discover not that, Fact, who already knows
it, will let you also know it by and by!

What is justice? that, on the whole, is the question of the
Sphinx to us. The law of Fact is, that justice must and will be
done.  The sooner the better;  for the Time grows stringent,
frightfully pressing!  "What is justice?" ask many, to whom cruel
Fact alone will be able to prove responsive.  It is like jesting
Pilate asking, What is Truth?  Jesting Pilate had not the
smallest chance to ascertain what was Truth.  He could not have
known it, had a god shewn it to him.  Thick serene opacity,
thicker than amaurosis, veiled those smiling eyes of his to
Truth;  the inner _retina_ of them was gone paralytic, dead.  He
looked at Truth;  and discerned her not, there where she stood.
"What is justice?"  The clothed embodied justice that sits in
Westminster Hall, with penalties, parchments, tipstaves, is very
visible.  But the unembodied justice, whereof that other is
either an emblem, or else is a fearful indescribability, is not
so visible!  For the unembodied Justice is of Heaven;  a Spirit,
and Divinity of Heaven,--invisible to all but the noble and pure
of soul.  The impure ignoble gaze with eyes, and she is not
there.  They will prove it to you by logic, by endless Hansard
Debatings, by bursts of Parliamentary eloquence.  It is not
consolatory to behold!  For properly, as many men as there are in
a Nation who _can_ withal see Heaven's invisible Justice, and
know it to be on Earth also omnipotent, so many men are there who
stand between a Nation and perdition.  So many, and no more.
Heavy-laden England, how many hast thou in this hour?  The
Supreme Power sends new and ever new, all _born_ at least with
hearts of flesh and not of stone;--and heavy Misery itself, once
heavy enough, will prove didactic!--




Chapter III

Manchester Insurrection


Blusterowski, Colacorde, and other Editorial prophets of the
Continental Democratic Movement, have in their leading-articles
shewn themselves disposed to vilipend the late Manchester
Insurrection, as evincing in the rioters an extreme backwardness
to battle;  nay as betokening, in the English People itself,
perhaps a want of the proper animal-courage indispensable in
these ages.  A million hungry operative men started up, in utmost
paroxysm of desperate protest against their lot;  and, ask
Colacorde and company, How many shots were fired?  Very few in
comparison!  Certain hundreds of drilled soldiers sufficed to
suppress this million-headed hydra's and tread it down, without
the smallest appeasement or hope of such, into its subterranean
settlements again, there to reconsider itself.  Compared
with our revolts in Lyons, in Warsaw and elsewhere, to say
nothing of incomparable Paris City past or present, what a
lamblike Insurrection!--

The present Editor is not here, with his readers, to vindicate
the character of Insurrections;  nor does it matter to us whether
Blusterowski and the rest may think the English a courageous
people or not courageous.  In passing, however, let us mention
that, to our view, this was not an unsuccessful Insurrection;
that as Insurrections go, we have not heard lately of any that
succeeded so well.

A million of hungry operative men, as Blusterowski says, rose
all up, came all out into the streets, and--stood there.  What
other could they do?  Their wrongs and griefs were bitter,
insupportable, their rage against the same was just:  but who are
they that cause these wrongs, who that will honestly make effort
to redress them?  Our enemies are we know not who or what;  our
friends are we know not where!  How shall we attack any one,
shoot or be shot by any one?  O, if the accursed invisible
Nightmare, that is crushing out the life of us and ours, would
take a shape;  approach us like the Hyrcanian tiger, the Behemoth
of Chaos, the Archfiend himself;  in any shape that we could see,
and fasten on!--A man can have himself shot with cheerfulness;
but it needs first that he see clearly for what.  Shew him the
divine face of justice, then the diabolic monster which is
eclipsing that:  he will fly at the throat of such monster, never
so monstrous, and need no bidding to do it.  Woolwich grapeshot
will sweep clear all streets, blast into invisibility so many
thousand men:  but if your Woolwich grapeshot be but eclipsing
Divine justice, and the God's-radiance itself gleam recognisable
athwart such grapeshot,--then, yes then is the time come for
fighting and attacking.  All artillery-parks have become weak,
and are about to dissipate:  in the God's-thunder, their poor
thunder slackens, ceases;  finding that it is, in all senses of
the term, a _brute_ one!--

That the Manchester Insurrection stood still, on the streets,
with an indisposition to fire and bloodshed, was wisdom for it
even as an Insurrection.  Insurrection, never so necessary, is a
most sad necessity;  and governors who wait for that to instruct
them, are surely getting into the fatallest courses,--proving
themselves Sons of Nox and Chaos, of blind Cowardice, not of
seeing Valour!  How can there be any remedy in insurrection?  It
is a mere announcement of the disease,--visible now even to Sons
of Night.  Insurrection usually 'gains' little;  usually wastes
how much!  One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the
rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each
other, by violence done;  which is always sure to be injustice
done, for violence does even justice unjustly.

Who shall compute the waste and loss, the obstruction of every
sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by Peterloo
alone!  Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut down,--the number
of the slain and maimed is very countable:  but the treasury of
rage, burning hidden or visible in all hearts ever since, more or
less perverting the effort and aim of all hearts ever since, is
of unknown extent.  "How ye came among us, in your cruel armed
blindness, ye unspeakable County Yeomanry, sabres flourishing,
hoofs prancing, and slashed us down at your brute pleasure;
deaf, blind to all _our_ claims and woes and wrongs;  of quick
sight and sense to your own claims only!  There lie poor sallow
workworn weavers, and complain no more now;  women themselves are
slashed and sabred, howling terror fills the air;  and ye ride
prosperous, very victorious,--ye unspeakable:  give us sabres
too, and then come-on a little!"  Such are Peterloos.  In
all hearts that witnessed Peterloo, stands written, as in
fire-characters, or smoke-characters prompt to become fire again,
a legible balance-account of grim vengeance;  very unjustly
balanced, much exaggerated, as is the way with such accounts;
but payable readily at sight, in full with compound interest!
Such things should be avoided as the very pestilence.  For men's
hearts ought not to be set against one another;  but set _with_
one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.  Men's souls
ought to be left to see clearly;  not jaundiced, blinded, twisted
all awry, by revenge, mutual abhorrence, and the like.  An
Insurrection that can announce the disease, and then retire with
no such balance-account opened anywhere, has attained the highest
success possible for it.

And this was what these poor Manchester operatives, with all the
darkness that was in them and round them, did manage to perform.
They put their huge inarticulate question, "What do you mean to
do with us?" in a manner audible to every reflective soul in this
kingdom;  exciting deep pity in all good men, deep anxiety in all
men whatever;  and no conflagration or outburst of madness came
to cloud that feeling anywhere, but everywhere it operates
unclouded.  All England heard the question:  it is the first
practical form of our Sphinx-riddle.  England will answer it;
or, on the whole, England will perish;--one does not yet expect
the latter result!

For the rest, that the Manchester Insurrection could yet discern
no radiance of Heaven on any side of its horizon;  but feared
that all lights, of the O'Connor or other sorts, hitherto
kindled, were but deceptive fish-oil transparencies, or bog
will-o'-wisp lights, and no dayspring from on high:  for this
also we will honour the poor Manchester Insurrection, and augur
well of it.  A deep unspoken sense lies in these strong men,--
inconsiderable, almost stupid, as all they can articulate of it
is.  Amid all violent stupidity of speech, a right noble instinct
of what is doable and what is not doable never forsakes them:
the strong inarticulate men and workers, whom _Fact_ patronises;
of whom, in all difficulty and work whatsoever, there is good
augury!  This work too is to be done:  Governors and Governing
Classes that _can_ articulate and utter, in any measure, what the
law of Fact and Justice is, may calculate that here is a Governed
Class who will listen.

And truly this first practical form of the Sphinx-question,
inarticulately and so audibly put there, is one of the most
impressive ever asked in the world.  "Behold us here, so many
thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every
hour.  We are right willing and able to work;  and on the Planet
Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many.
We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work;  to try to lead us,
--by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of Time?
Or if you declare that you cannot lead us?  And expect that we
are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of
starvation?  What is it you expect of us?  What is it you mean to
do with us?"  This question, I say, has been put in the hearing
of all Britain;  and will be again put, and ever again, till some
answer be given it.

Unhappy Workers, unhappier Idlers, unhappy men and women of this
actual England!  We are yet very far from an answer, and there
will be no existence for us without finding one.  "A fair
day's-wages for a fair day's-work:"  it is as just a demand as
Governed men ever made of Governing.  It is the everlasting
right of man.  Indisputable as Gospels, as arithmetical
multiplication-tables:  it must and will have itself fulfilled;
--and yet, in these times of ours, with what enormous difficulty,
next-door to impossibility!  For the times are really strange;
of a complexity intricate with all the new width of the
ever-widening world;  times here of half-frantic velocity of
impetus, there of the deadest-looking stillness and paralysis;
times definable as shewing two qualities, Dilettantism and
Mammonism;--most intricate obstructed times!  Nay, if there
were not a Heaven's radiance of justice, prophetic, clearly
of Heaven, discernible behind all these confused worldwide
entanglements, of Landlord interests, Manufacturing interests,
Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other interests,
expediencies, vested interests, established possessions,
inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms,--it would
seem to everyone a flat impossibility, which all wise men
might as well at once abandon.  If you do not know eternal
justice from momentary Expediency, and understand in your
heart of hearts how justice, radiant, beneficent, as the
all-victorious Light-element, is also in essence, if need be,
an all-victorious _Fire_-element, and melts all manner of vested
interests, and the hardest iron cannon, as if they were soft wax,
and does ever in the long-run rule and reign, and allows nothing
else to rule and reign,--you also would talk of impossibility!
But it is only difficult, it is not impossible.  Possible?  It
is, with whatever difficulty, very clearly inevitable.

Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man;
alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on
it, was that ever realised?  The day's-wages of John Milton's
day's-work, named _Paradise Lost_ and _Milton's Works,_ were Ten
Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death
on the gallows.  Consider that:  it is no rhetorical flourish;
it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,--emblematic, quietly
documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history
began.  Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming;  undertook a
Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean
Hydracoil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its
thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads;  and he
did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have
heard of;  and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good
many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in
comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from
it;--and his wages, as I understand, were burial under the
gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his head on the gable of
Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed cursing and
ridicule from all manner of men.  His dust lies under the
Edgeware Road, near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour;  and his
memory is--Nay, what matters what his memory is?  His memory, at
bottom, is or yet shall be as that of a god:  a terror and horror
to all quacks and cowards and insincere persons;  an everlasting
encouragement, new memento, battleword, and pledge of victory to
all the brave.  It is the natural course and history of the
Godlike, in every place, in every time.  What god ever carried it
with the Tenpound Franchisers;  in Open Vestry, or with any
Sanhedrim of considerable standing?  When was a god found
agreeable to everybody?  The regular way is to hang, kill,
crucify your gods, and execrate and trample them under your
stupid hoofs for a century or two;  till you discover that they
are gods,--and then take to braying over them, still in a very
long-eared manner!--So speaks the sarcastic man;  in his wild
way, very mournful truths.

Day's-wages for day's-work? continues he:  The Progress of Human
Society consists even in this same.  The better and better
apportioning of wages to work.  Give me this, you have given me
all.  Pay to every man accurately what he has worked for, what he
has earned and done and deserved,--to this man broad lands and
honours, to that man high gibbets and treadmills:  what more have
I to ask?  Heaven's Kingdom, which we daily pray for, _has_ come;
God's will is done on Earth even as it is in Heaven!  This _is_
the radiance of celestial justice;  in the light or in the fire
of which all impediments, vested interests, and iron cannon, are
more and more melting like wax, and disappearing from
the pathways of men.  A thing ever struggling forward;
irrepressible, advancing inevitable;  perfecting itself, all
days, more and more,--never to be _perfect_ till that general
Doomsday, the ultimate Consummation, and Last of earthly Days.

True, as to 'perfection' and so forth, answer we;  true enough!
And yet withal we have to remark, that imperfect Human Society
holds itself together, and finds place under the Sun, in virtue
simply of some _approximation_ to perfection being actually made
and put in practice.  We remark farther, that there are
supportable approximations, and then likewise insupportable.
With some, almost with any, supportable approximation men are
apt, perhaps too apt, to rest indolently patient, and say, It
will do.  Thus these poor Manchester manual workers mean only, by
day's-wages for day's-work, certain coins of money adequate to
keep them living;--in return for their work, such modicum of
food, clothes and fuel as will enable them to continue their work
itself!  They as yet clamour for no more;  the rest, still
inarticulate, cannot yet shape itself into a demand at all, and
only lies in them as a dumb wish;  perhaps only, still more
inarticulate, as a dumb, altogether unconscious want.  _This_ is
the supportable approximation they would rest patient with, That
by their work they might be kept alive to work more!--_This_ once
grown unattainable, I think, your approximation may consider
itself to have reached the insupportable stage;  and may prepare,
with whatever difficulty, reluctance and astonishment, for one of
two things, for changing or perishing!  With the millions no
longer able to live, how can the units keep living?  It is too
clear the Nation itself is on the way to suicidal death.

Shall we say then, The world has retrograded in its talent of
apportioning wages to work, in late days?  The world had always a
talent of that sort, better or worse.  Time was when the mere
_hand_worker needed not announce his claim to the world by
Manchester Insurrections!--The world, with its Wealth of Nations,
Supply-and-demand and such like, has of late days been terribly
inattentive to that question of work and wages.  We will not say,
the poor world has retrograded even here:  we will say rather,
the world has been rushing on with such fiery animation to get
work and ever more work done, it has had no time to think of
dividing the wages; and has merely left them to be scrambled for
by the Law of the Stronger, law of Supply-and-demand, law of
Laissez-faire, and other idle Laws and Un-laws,--saying, in its
dire haste to get the work done, That is well enough!

And now the world will have to pause a little, and take up that
other side of the problem, and in right earnest strive for some
solution of that.  For it has become pressing.  What is the use
of your spun shirts?  They hang there by the million unsaleable;
and here, by the million, are diligent bare backs that can get no
hold of them.  Shirts are useful for covering human backs;
useless otherwise, an unbearable mockery otherwise.  You have
fallen terribly behind with that side of the problem!  Manchester
Insurrections, French Revolutions, and thousandfold phenomena
great and small, announce loudly that you must bring it forward a
little again.  Never till now, in the history of an Earth which
to this hour nowhere refuses to grow corn if you will plough it,
to yield shirts if you will spin and weave in it, did the mere
manual two-handed worker (however it might fare with other
workers) cry in vain for such "wages" as _he_ means by "fair
wages," namely food and warmth!  The Godlike could not and cannot
be paid;  but the Earthly always could.  Gurth, a mere swineherd,
born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the wood, and did
get some parings of the pork.  Why, the four-footed worker has
already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for!  How
often must I remind you?  There is not a horse in England, able
and willing to work, but _has_ due food and lodging;  and goes
about sleek-coated, satisfied in heart.  And you say, It is
impossible.  Brothers, I answer, if for you it be impossible,
what is to become of you?  It is impossible for us to believe it
to be impossible.  The human brain, looking at these sleek
English horses, refuses to believe in such impossibility for
English men.  Do you depart quickly;  clear the ways soon, lest
worse befall.  We for our share do purpose, with full view of the
enormous difficulty, with total disbelief in the impossibility,
to endeavour while life is in us, and to die endeavouring, we and
our sons, till we attain it or have all died and ended.

Such a Platitude of a World, in which all working horses could be
well fed, and innumerable working men should die starved, were it
not best to end it;  to have done with it, and restore it once
for all to the _Jotuns,_ Mud-giants, Frost-giants and Chaotic
Brute-gods of the Beginning?  For the old Anarchic Brute-gods it
may be well enough, but it is a Platitude which Men should be
above countenancing by their presence in it.  We pray you, let
the word _impossible_ disappear from your vocabulary in this
matter.  It is of awful omen;  to all of us, and to yourselves
first of all.




Chapter IV

Morrison's Pill


What is to be done, what would you have us do? asks many a one,
with a tone of impatience, almost of reproach;  and then, if you
mention some one thing, some two things, twenty things that might
be done, turns round with a satirical tehee, and, "These are your
remedies!"  The state of mind indicated by such question, and
such rejoinder, is worth reflecting on.

It seems to be taken for granted, by these interrogative
philosophers, that there is some 'thing,' or handful of 'things,'
which could be done;  some Act of Parliament, 'remedial measure
or the like, which could be passed, whereby the social malady
were fairly fronted, conquered, put an end to;  so that, with
your remedial measure in your pocket, you could then go on
triumphant, and be troubled no farther.  "You tell us the evil,"
cry such persons, as if justly aggrieved, "and do not tell us how
it is to be cured!"

How it is to be cured?  Brothers, I am sorry I have got
no Morrison's Pill for curing the maladies of Society.  It
were infinitely handier if we had a Morrison's Pill, Act of
Parliament, or remedial measure, which men could swallow, one
good time, and then go on in their old courses, cleared from all
miseries and mischiefs!  Unluckily we have none such;  unluckily
the Heavens themselves, in their rich pharmacopoeia, contain none
such.  There will no 'thing' be done that will cure you.  There
will a radical universal alteration of your regimen and way of
life take place;  there will a most agonising divorce between you
and your chimeras, luxuries and falsities, take place;  a most
toilsome, all but 'impossible' return to Nature, and her
veracities, and her integrities, take place:  that so the inner
fountains of life may again begin, like eternal Light-fountains,
to irradiate and purify your bloated, swollen, foul existence,
drawing nigh, as at present, to nameless death!  Either death or
else all this will take place.  Judge if, with such diagnosis,
any Morrison's Pill is like to be discoverable!

But the Life-fountain within you once again set flowing,
what innumerable 'things,' whole sets and classes and continents
of 'things,' year after year, and decade after decade, and
century after century, will then be doable and done!  Not
Emigration, Education, Corn-Law Abrogation, Sanitary Regulation,
Land Property-Tax;  not these alone, nor a thousand times as much
as these.  Good Heavens, there will then be light in the inner
heart of here and there a man, to discern what is just, what is
commanded by the Most High God, what _must_ be done, were it
never so 'impossible.'  Vain jargon in favour of the palpably
unjust will then abridge itself within limits.  Vain jargon, on
Hustings, in Parliaments or wherever else, when here and there a
man has vision for the essential God's-Truth of the things
jargoned of, will become very vain indeed.  The silence of here
and there such a man, how eloquent in answer to such jargon!
Such jargon, frightened at its own gaunt echo, will unspeakably
abate;  nay, for a while, may almost in a manner disappear,--the
wise answering it in silence, and even the simple taking cue from
them to hoot it down wherever heard.  It will be a blessed time;
and many 'things' will become doable,--and when the brains are
out, an absurdity will die!  Not easily again shall a Corn-Law
argue ten years for itself;  and still talk and argue, when
impartial persons have to say with a sigh that, for so long back,
they have heard no 'argument' advanced for it but such as might
make the angels and almost the very jackasses weep!--

Wholly a blessed time:  when jargon might abate, and here and
there some genuine speech begin.  When to the noble opened heart,
as to such heart they alone do, all noble things began to grow
visible;  and the difference between just and unjust, between
true and false, between work and sham-work, between speech and
jargon, was once more, what to our happier Fathers it used to be,
_infinite,_--as between a Heavenly thing and an Infernal:  the
one a thing which you were _not_ to do, which you were wise not
to attempt doing;  which it were better for you to have a
millstone tied round your neck, and be cast into the sea, than
concern yourself with doing!--Brothers, it will not be a
Morrison's Pill, or remedial measure, that will bring all this
about for us.


And yet, very literally, till, in some shape or other, it be
brought about, we remain cureless;  till it begin to be brought
about, the cure does not begin.  For Nature and Fact, not Redtape
and Semblance, are to this hour the basis of man's life;  and on
those, through never such strata of these, man and his life and
all his interests do, sooner or later, infallibly come to rest,--
and to be supported or be swallowed according as they agree with
those.  The question is asked of them, not, How do you agree with
Downing-streets and accredited Semblance? but, How do you agree
with God's Universe and the actual Reality of things?  This
Universe _has_ its Laws.  If we walk according to the Law, the
Law-Maker will befriend us;  if not, not.  Alas, by no Reform
Bill, Ballot-box, Five-point Charter, by no boxes or bills or
charters, can you perform this alchemy:  'Given a world of Knaves
to produce an Honesty from their united action!'  It is a
distillation, once for all, not possible.  You pass it through
alembic after alembic, it comes out still a Dishonesty, with a
new dress on it, a new colour to it.  'While we ourselves
continue valets, how can any hero come to govern us?'  We are
governed, very infallibly, by the 'sham-hero,'--whose name is
Quack, whose work and governance is Plausibility, and also is
Falsity and Fatuity;  to which Nature says, and must say when it
comes to _her_ to speak, eternally No!  Nations cease to be
befriended of the Law-Maker, when they walk _not_ according to
the Law.  The Sphinx-question remains unsolved by them, becomes
ever more insoluble.

If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis,
What is to be done? allow me to reply:  By thee, for the present,
almost nothing.  Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if
possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays,
egoisms, purblind dilettantisms;  and become, were it on the
infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul.  Thou shalt
descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a
_soul_ there;  till then there can be nothing done!  O brother,
we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us,
exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of
stone for living hearts of flesh.  Then shall we discern, not one
thing, but, in clearer or dimmer sequence, a whole endless host
of things that can be done.  _Do_ the first of these;  do it;
the second will already have become clearer, doabler;  the
second, third and three-thousandth will then have begun to be
possible for us.  Not any universal Morrison's Pill shall we
then, either as swallowers or as venders, ask after at all;  but
a far different sort of remedies:  Quacks shall no more have
dominion over us, but true Heroes and Healers!


Will not that be a thing worthy of 'doing;'  to deliver ourselves
from quacks, sham-heroes;  to deliver the whole world more and
more from such?  They are the one bane of the world.  Once clear
the world of them, it ceases to be a Devil's-world, in all fibres
of it wretched, accursed;  and begins to be a God's-world,
blessed, and working hourly towards blessedness.  Thou for one
wilt not again vote for any quack, do honour to any edge-gilt
vacuity in man's shape:  cant shall be known to thee by the sound
of it;--thou wilt fly from cant with a shudder never felt before;
as from the opened litany of Sorcerers' Sabbaths, the true Devil-
worship of this age, more horrible than any other blasphemy,
profanity or genuine blackguardism elsewhere audible among men.
It is alarming to witness,--in its present completed state!  And
Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and
under of the selfsame substance;  convertible personages:  turn
up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he
himself can become a quack;  there is in him the due prurient
insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for
truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds, are made.

Alas, it is not to the hero, it is to the sham-hero that, of
right and necessity, the valet-world belongs.  'What is to be
done?'  The reader sees whether it is like to be the seeking and
swallowing of some 'remedial measure!'




Chapter V

Aristocracy of Talent


When an individual is miserable, what does it most of all behove
him to do?  To complain of this man or of that, of this thing or
of that?  To fill the world and the street with lamentation,
objurgation?  Not so at all;  the reverse of so.  All moralists
advise him not to complain of any person or of any thing, but of
himself only.  He is to know of a truth that being miserable he
has been unwise, he.  Had he faithfully followed Nature and her
Laws, Nature, ever true to her Laws, would have yielded fruit and
increase and felicity to him:  but he has followed other than
Nature's Laws;  and now Nature, her patience with him being
ended, leaves him desolate;  answers with very emphatic
significance to him:  No.  Not by this road, my son;  by another
road shalt thou attain well-being:  this, thou perceivest is the
road to ill-being;  quit this!--So do all moralists advise:  that
the man penitently say to himself first of all, Behold I was not
wise enough;  I quitted the laws of Fact, which are also called
the Laws of God, and mistook for them the laws of Sham and
Semblance, which are called the Devil's Laws;  therefore
am I here!

Neither with Nations that become miserable is it fundamentally
otherwise.  The ancient guides of Nations, Prophets, Priests, or
whatever their name, were well aware of this;  and, down to a
late epoch, impressively taught and inculcated it.  The modern
guides of Nations, who also go under a great variety of names,
journalists, Political Economists, Politicians, Pamphleteers,
have entirely forgotten this, and are ready to deny this.  But it
nevertheless remains eternally undeniable:  nor is there any
doubt but we shall all be taught it yet, and made again to
confess it:  we shall all be striped and scourged till we do
learn it;  and shall at last either get to know it, or be striped
to death in the process.  For it is undeniable!  When a Nation is
unhappy, the old Prophet was right and not wrong in saying to it:
Ye have forgotten God, ye have quitted the ways of God, or ye
would not have been unhappy.  It is not according to the laws of
Fact that ye have lived and guided yourselves, but according to
the laws of Delusion, Imposture, and wilful and unwilful
_Mistake_ of Fact;  behold therefore the Unveracity is worn out;
Nature's long-suffering with you is exhausted;  and ye are here!

Surely there is nothing very inconceivable in this, even to the
Journalist, to the Political Economist, Modern Pamphleteer, or
any two-legged animal without feathers!  If a country finds
itself wretched, sure enough that country has been _mis_guided:
it is with the wretched Twenty-seven Millions, fallen wretched,
as with the Unit fallen wretched:  they as he have quitted the
course prescribed by Nature and the Supreme Powers, and so are
fallen into scarcity, disaster, infelicity;  and pausing to
consider themselves, have to lament and say, Alas, we were not
wise enough.  We took transient superficial Semblance for
everlasting central Substance;  we have departed far away from
the _Laws_ of this Universe, and behold now lawless Chaos and
inane Chimera is ready to devour us!--'Nature in late centuries,'
says Sauerteig, 'was universally supposed to be dead;  an old
eight-day clock, made many thousand years ago, and still ticking,
but dead as brass,--which the Maker, at most, sat looking at, in
a distant, singular, and indeed incredible manner:  but now I am
happy to observe, she is everywhere asserting herself to be not
dead and brass at all, but alive and miraculous, celestial-
infernal, with an emphasis that will again penetrate the thickest
head of this Planet by and by!--

Indisputable enough to all mortals now, the guidance of this
country has not been sufficiently wise:  men too foolish have
been set to the guiding and governing of it, and have guided it
hither;  we must find wiser,--_wiser,_ or else we perish!  To
this length of insight all England has now advanced;  but as yet
no farther.  All England stands wringing its hands, asking
itself, nigh desperate, What farther?  Reform Bill proves to be a
failure;  Benthamee Radicalism, the gospel of 'Enlightened
Selfishness,' dies out, or dwindles into Five-point Chartism,
amid the tears and hootings of men:  what next are we to hope or
try?  Five-point Charter, Freetrade;  Church-extension, Sliding-
scale;  what, in Heaven's name, are we next to attempt, that we
sink not in inane Chimera, and be devoured of Chaos?--The case is
pressing, and one of the most complicated in the world.  A God's-
message never came to thicker-skinned people;  never had a God's-
message to pierce through thicker integuments, into heavier ears.
It is Fact, speaking once more, in miraculous thunder-voice, from
out of the centre of the world;--how unknown its language to the
deaf and foolish many;  how distinct, undeniable, terrible and
yet beneficent, to the hearing few:  Behold, ye shall grow wiser,
or ye shall die!  Truer to Nature's Fact, or inane Chimera will
swallow you;  in whirlwinds of fire, you and your Mammonisms,
Dilettantisms, your Midas-eared philosophies, double-barreled
Aristocracies, shall disappear!--Such is the God's-message to
_us,_ once more; in these modern days.

We must have more Wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the
Wisest, we must have an Aristocracy of Talent! cry many.  True,
most true;  but how to get it?  The following extract from our
young friend of the _Houndsditch Indicator_ is worth perusing:
'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry everywhere,
articulate or inarticulate, for an "Aristocracy of Talent," a
Governing Class namely which did govern, not merely which took
the wages of governing, and could not with all our industry be
kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and playing the very deuce
with us,--it may not be altogether useless to remind some of the
greener-headed sort what a dreadfully difficult affair the
getting of such an Aristocracy is!  Do you expect, my friends,
that your indispensable Aristocracy of Talent is to be enlisted
straightway, by some sort of recruitment aforethought, out of the
general population;  arranged in supreme regimental order;  and
set to rule over us?  That it will be got sifted, like wheat out
of chaff, from the Twenty-seven Million British subjects;  that
any Ballot-box, Reform Bill, or other Political Machine, with
Force of Public Opinion never so active on it, is likely to
perform said process of sifting?  Would to Heaven that we had a
sieve;  that we could so much as fancy any kind of sieve, wind-
fanners, or ne-plus-ultra of machinery, devisable by man, that
would do it!

'Done nevertheless, sure enough, it must be;  it shall and will
be.  We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction;  every
hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure, done.  The
doing of it is not doubtful;  only the method and the costs!  Nay
I will even mention to you an infallible sifting-process whereby
he that has ability will be sifted out to rule among us, and that
same blessed Aristocracy of Talent be verily, in an approximate
degree, vouchsafed us by and by:  an infallible sifting-process;
to which, however, no soul can help his neighbour, but each must,
with devout prayer to Heaven, endeavour to help himself.  It is,
O friends, that all of us, that many of us, should acquire the
true eye for talent, which is dreadfully wanting at present!  The
true _eye_ for talent presupposes the true reverence for it,--O
Heavens, presupposes so many things!

'For example, you Bobus Higgins, Sausage-maker on the great
scale, who are raising such a clamour for this Aristocracy of
Talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours,
chiefly in very fact pay reverence to?  Is it to talent,
intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus?  The
manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever
reverence him;  did you so much as know that he was a manly man
at all, till his coat grew better?  Talent!  I understand you to
be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity
or other success of talent;  but the talent itself is a thing you
never saw with eyes.  Nay what is it in yourself that you
are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in surveying
meditatively in thoughtful moments?  Speak now, is it the bare
Bobus stript of his very name and shirt, and turned loose upon
society, that you admire and thank Heaven for;  or Bobus with
his cash-accounts and larders dropping fatness, with his
respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony-chaise, admirable in
some measure to certain of the flunkey species?  Your own degree
of worth and talent, is it of _infinite_ value to you;  or only
of finite,--measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of
praise or pudding, it has brought you to?  Bobus, you are in a
vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages;  and will
never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-
talent has already _got_ itself voted for!'--We here cut short
the _Indicator;_ all readers perceiving whither he now tends.


'More Wisdom' indeed:  but where to find more Wisdom?  We have
already a Collective Wisdom, after its kind,--though 'class-
legislation,' and another thing or two, affect it somewhat!  On
the whole, as they say, Like people like priest;  so we may say,
Like people like king.  The man gets himself appointed and
elected who is ablest--to be appointed and elected.  What can the
incorruptiblest _Bobuses_ elect, if it be not some _Bobissimus,_
should they find such?

Or, again, perhaps there is not, in the whole Nation, Wisdom
enough, 'collect' it as we may, to make an adequate Collective!
That too is a case which may befall:  a ruined man staggers down
to ruin because there was not wisdom enough in him;  so, clearly
also, may Twenty-seven Million collective men!--But indeed one of
the infalliblest fruits of Unwisdom in a Nation is that it cannot
get the use of what Wisdom is actually in it:  that it is not
governed by the wisest it has, who alone have a divine right to
govern in all Nations;  but by the sham-wisest, or even by the
openly not-so-wise if they are handiest otherwise!  This is the
infalliblest result of Unwisdom;  and also the balefullest,
immeasurablest,--not so much what we can call a poison-_fruit,_
as a universal death-disease, and poisoning of the whole tree.
For hereby are fostered, fed into gigantic bulk, all manner of
Unwisdoms, poison-fruits;  till, as we say, the life-tree
everywhere is made a upas-tree, deadly Unwisdom overshadowing all
things;  and there is done what lies in human skill to stifle all
Wisdom everywhere in the birth, to smite our poor world barren of
Wisdom,--and make your utmost Collective Wisdom, were it
collected and elected by Rhadamanthus, AEacus and Minos, not to
speak of drunken Tenpound Franchisers with their ballot-boxes, an
inadequate Collective!  The Wisdom is not now there:  how will
you 'collect' it?  As well wash Thames mud, by improved methods,
to find more gold in it.

Truly, the first condition is indispensable, That Wisdom be
there:  but the second is like unto it, is properly one with it:
these two conditions act and react through every fibre of them,
and go inseparably together.  If you have much Wisdom in your
Nation, you will get it faithfully collected;  for the wise love
Wisdom, and will search for it as for life and salvation.  If you
have little Wisdom, you will get even that little ill-collected,
trampled under foot, reduced as near as possible to annihilation;
for fools do not love Wisdom;  they are foolish, first of all,
because they have never loved Wisdom,--but have loved their own
appetites, ambitions, their coroneted coaches, tankards of heavy-
wet.  Thus is your candle lighted at both ends, and the progress
towards consummation is swift.  Thus is fulfilled that saying in
the Gospel:  To him that hath shall be given;  and from him that
hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.  Very
literally, in a very fatal manner, that saying is here fulfilled.

Our 'Aristocracy of Talent' seems at a considerable distance yet;
does it not, O Bobus?




Chapter VI

Hero-Worship


To the present Editor, not less than to Bobus, a Government of
the Wisest, what Bobus calls an Aristocracy of Talent, seems the
one healing remedy:  but he is not so sanguine as Bobus with
respect to the means of realizing it.  He thinks that we have at
once missed realising it, and come to need it so pressingly,
by departing far from the inner eternal Laws and taking up
with the temporary outer semblances of Laws.  He thinks that
'enlightened Egoism,' never so luminous, is not the rule by
which man's life can be led.  That 'Laissez-faire,' 'Supply-and-
demand,' 'Cash-payment for the sole nexus,' and so forth, were
not, are not, and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a
Society of Men.  That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing,
cannot long live together on any such Law of Union.  Alas, he
thinks that man has a soul in him, _different_ from the stomach
in any sense of this word;  that if said soul be asphyxied, and
lie quietly forgotten, the man and his affairs are in a bad way.
He thinks that said soul will have to be resuscitated from its
asphyxia;  that if it prove irresuscitable, the man is not long
for this world.  In brief, that Midas-eared Mammonism, double-
barreled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries,
are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this his
Universe to go.  That, once for all, these are not the Law:
and then farther that we shall have to return to what is
the Law,--not by smooth flowery paths, it is like, and with
'tremendous cheers' in our throat;  but over steep untrodden
places, through stormclad chasms, waste oceans, and the bosom of
tornadoes;  thank Heaven, if not through very Chaos and the
Abyss!  The resuscitating of a soul that has gone to asphyxia is
no momentary or pleasant process, but a long and terrible one.


To the present Editor 'Hero-worship,' as he has elsewhere named
it, means much more than an elected Parliament, or stated
Aristocracy, of the Wisest;  for, in his dialect, it is the
summary, ultimate essence, and supreme practical perfection of
all manner of 'worship,' and true worships and noblenesses
whatsoever.  Such  blessed  Parliament and, were it once in
perfection, blessed Aristocracy of the Wisest, god-honoured and
man-honoured, he does look for, more and more perfected,--as the
topmost blessed practical apex of a whole world reformed from
sham-worship, informed anew with worship, with truth and
blessedness!  He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in
every different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social
business among men;  that the doing of it well, or the doing of
it ill, measures accurately what degree of well-being or of ill-
being there is in the world's affairs.  He thinks that we, on the
whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any Nation in this world
ever did it before:  that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a
Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser
and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the Mahomet a Prophet
of God.  It is this Editor's clear opinion, accordingly, that we
must learn to do our Hero-worship better;  that to do it better
and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its
asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,--Heaven's blessed
life, not Mammon's galvanic accursed one.  To resuscitate the
Asphyxied, apparently now moribund, and in the last agony if not
resuscitated:  such and no other seems the consummation.

'Hero-worship,' if you will,--yes, friends;  but, first of all,
by being ourselves of heroic mind.  A whole world of Heroes;  a
world not of Flunkeys, where no Hero-King _can_ reign:  that is
what we aim at!  We, for our share, will put away all Flunkeyism,
Baseness, Unveracity from us;  we shall then hope to have
Noblenesses and Veracities set over us;  never till then.  Let
Bobus and Company sneer, "That is your Reform!"  Yes, Bobus, that
is our Reform;  and except in that, and what will follow out of
that, we have no hope at all.  Reform, like Charity, O Bobus,
must begin at home.  Once well at home, how will it radiate
outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak
and work;  kindling ever new light, by incalculable contagion,
spreading in geometric ratio, far and wide,--doing good only,
wheresoever it spreads, and not evil.

By Reform Bills, Anti-Corn-Law Bills, and thousand other bills
and methods, we will demand of our Governors, with emphasis, and
for the first time not without effect, that they cease to be
quacks, or else depart;  that they set no quackeries and
blockheadisms anywhere to rule over us, that they utter or act no
cant to us,--that it will be better if they do not.  For we shall
now know quacks when we see them;  cant, when we hear it, shall
be horrible to us!  We will say, with the poor Frenchman at the
Bar of the Convention, though in wiser style than he, and 'for
the space' not 'of an hour' but of a lifetime:  _"Je demande
l'arrestation des coquins et des laches."_  'Arrestment of the
knaves and dastards:'  ah, we know what a work that is;  how long
it will be before _they_ are all or mostly got 'arrested:'--but
here is one;  arrest him, in God's name;  it is one fewer!  We
will, in all practicable ways, by word and silence, by act
and refusal to act, energetically demand arrestment,--_"le
demande cette arrestation-la!"_--and by degrees infallibly
attain it.  Infallibly:  for light spreads;  all human
souls, never so bedarkened, love light;  light once kindled
spreads, till all is luminous;--till the cry, "_Arrest_ your
knaves and dastards rises imperative from millions of hearts, and
rings and reigns from sea to sea.  Nay, how many of them may we
not 'arrest' with our own hands, even now;  we!  Do not
countenance them, thou there:  turn away from their lackered
sumptuosities, their belauded sophistries, their serpent
graciosities, their spoken and acted cant, with a sacred horror,
with an _Apage Satanas._--Bobus and Company, and all men will
gradually join us.  We demand arrestment of the knaves and
dastards, and begin by arresting our own poor selves out of that
fraternity.  There is no other reform conceivable.  Thou and I,
my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us,
_one_ non-flunkey, one hero, if we like:  that will be two heroes
to begin with:--Courage! even that is a whole world of heroes to
end with, or what we poor Two can do in furtherance thereof!

Yes, friends:  Hero-kings and a whole world not unheroic, there
lies the port and happy haven, towards which, through all these
stormtost seas, French Revolutions, Chartisms, Manchester
Insurrections, that make the heart sick in these bad days, the
Supreme Powers are driving us.  On the whole, blessed be the
Supreme Powers, stern as they are!  Towards that haven will we, O
friends;  let all true men, with what of faculty is in them, bend
valiantly, incessantly, with thousandfold endeavour, thither,
thither!  There, or else in the Ocean-abysses, it is very clear
to me, we shall arrive.


Well;  here truly is no answer to the Sphinx-question;  not the
answer a disconsolate Public, inquiring at the College of Health,
was in hopes of!  A total change of regimen, change of constitution
and existence from the very centre of it;  a new body to be got,
with resuscitated soul,--not without convulsive travail-throes;
as all birth and new-birth presupposes travail!  This is sad news
to a disconsolate discerning Public, hoping to have got off by
some Morrison's Pill, some Saint-John's corrosive mixtures and
perhaps a little blistery friction on the back!--We were prepared
to part with our Corn-Law, with various Laws and Unlaws:  but
this, what is this?

Nor has the Editor forgotten how it fares with your ill-boding
Cassandras in Sieges of Troy.  Imminent perdition is not usually
driven away by words of warning.  Didactic Destiny has other
methods in store;  or these would fail always.  Such words
should, nevertheless, be uttered, when they dwell truly in the
soul of any man.  Words are hard, are importunate;  but how much
harder the importunate events they foreshadow!  Here and there a
human soul may listen to the words,--who knows how many human
souls? whereby the importunate events, if not diverted and
prevented, will be rendered _less_ hard.  The present Editor's
purpose is to himself full of hope.

For though fierce travails, though wide seas and roaring gulfs
lie before us, is it not something if a Loadstar, in the eternal
sky, do once more disclose itself;  an everlasting light, shining
through all cloud-tempests and roaring billows, ever as we emerge
from the trough of the sea:  the blessed beacon, far off on the
edge of far horizons, towards which we are to steer incessantly
for life?  Is it not something;  O Heavens, is it not all?  There
lies the Heroic Promised Land;  under that Heaven's-light, my
brethren, bloom the Happy Isles,--there, O there!  Thither
will we;

     There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew.*

-------------
* Tennyson's _Poems_ (Ulysses)
-----------

There dwell all Heroes, and will dwell:  thither, all ye heroic-
minded!--The Heaven's Loadstar once clearly in our eye, how will
each true man stand truly to _his_ work in the ship;  how, with
undying hope, will all things be fronted, all be conquered.  Nay,
with the ship's prow once turned in that direction, is not all,
as it were, already well?  Sick wasting misery has become noble
manful effort with a goal in our eye.  'The choking Nightmare
chokes us no longer;  for we _stir_ under it;  the Nightmare has
already fled.'--

Certainly, could the present Editor instruct men how to know
Wisdom, Heroism, when they see it, that they might do reverence
to it only, and loyally make it ruler over them,--yes, he were
the living epitome of all Editors, Teachers, Prophets, that
now teach and prophesy;  he were an _Apollo_-Morrison, a
Trismegistus! and _effective_ Cassandra!  Let no Able Editor hope
such things.  It is to be expected the present laws of copyright,
rate of reward per sheet, and other considerations, will save him
from that peril.  Let no Editor hope such things:  no;--and yet
let all Editors aim towards such things, and even towards such
alone!  One knows not what the meaning of editing and writing is,
if even this be not it.

Enough, to the present Editor it has seemed possible some
glimmering of light, for here and there a human soul, might lie
in these confused Paper-Masses now intrusted to him;  wherefore
he determines to edit the same.  Out of old Books, new Writings,
and much Meditation not of yesterday, he will endeavour to select
a thing or two;  and from the Past, in a circuitous way,
illustrate the Present and the Future.  The Past is a dim
indubitable fact:  the Future too is one, only dimmer;  nay
properly it is the same fact in new dress and development.  For
the Present holds in it both the whole Past and the whole
Future;--as the LIFE-TREE IGDRASIL, wide-waving, many-toned, has
its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead
dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars;
and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree!




Book II--The Ancient Monk



Chapter I

Jocelin of Brakelond


We will, in this Second Portion of our Work, strive to penetrate
a little, by means of certain confused Papers, printed and other,
into a somewhat remote Century; and to look face to face on it,
in hope of perhaps illustrating our own poor Century thereby.  It
seems a circuitous way;  but it may prove a way nevertheless.
For man has ever been a striving, struggling, and, in spite of
wide-spread calumnies to the contrary, a veracious creature:  the
Centuries too are all lineal children of one another;  and often,
in the portrait of early grandfathers, this and the other
enigmatic feature of the newest grandson shall disclose itself,
to mutual elucidation.  This Editor will venture on such a thing.

Besides, in Editors' Books, and indeed everywhere else in the
world of Today, a certain latitude of movement grows more and
more becoming for the practical man.  Salvation lies not in tight
lacing, in these times;--how far from that, in any province
whatsoever!  Readers and men generally are getting into strange
habits of asking all persons and things, from poor Editors' Books
up to Church Bishops and State Potentates, not, By what
designation are thou called;  in what wig and black triangle dost
thou walk abroad?  Heavens, I know thy designation and black
triangle well enough!  But, in God's name, what _art_ thou?  Not
Nothing, sayest thou!  Then if not, How much and what?  This is
the thing I would know;  and even _must_ soon know, such a pass
am I come to!--What weather-symptoms,--not for the poor Editor of
Books alone!  The Editor of Books may understand withal that if,
as is said, 'many kinds are permissible,' there is one kind not
permissible, 'the kind that has nothing in it, _le genre
ennuyeux;'_  and go on his way accordingly.

A certain Jocelinus de Brakelonda, a natural-born Englishman, has
left us an extremely foreign Book,* which the labours of the
Camden Society have brought to light in these days.  Jocelin's
Book, the 'Chronicle,' or private Boswellean Notebook, of
Jocelin, a certain old St. Edmundsbury Monk and Boswell, now
seven centuries old, how remote is it from us;  exotic,
extraneous;  in all ways, coming from far abroad!  The language
of it is not foreign only but dead:  Monk-Latin lies across not
the British Channel, but the ninefold Stygian Marshes, Stream of
Lethe, and one knows not where!  Roman Latin itself, still
alive for us in the Elysian Fields of Memory, is domestic
in comparison.  And then the ideas, life-furniture, whole
workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin;  covered deeper than
Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven
hundred years!

----------
* _Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, de rebus gestis Samsonis
Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi: nunc primum typis mandata,
curante Johanne Gage Rokewood._  (Camden Society, London, 1840)
----------

Jocelin of Brakelond cannot be called a conspicuous literary
character;  indeed few mortals that have left so visible a work,
or footmark, behind them can be more obscure.  One other of those
vanished Existences, whose work has not yet vanished;--almost a
pathetic phenomenon, were not the whole world full of such!  The
builders of Stonehenge, for example:--or alas, what say we,
Stonehenge and builders?  The writers of the _Universal Review_
and _Homer's Iliad;_  the paviers of London streets;--sooner
or later, the entire Posterity of Adam!  It is a pathetic
phenomenon;  but an irremediable, nay, if well meditated, a
consoling one.

By his dialect of Monk-Latin, and indeed by his name, this
Jocelin seems to have been a Norman Englishman;  the surname de
Brakelonda indicates a native of St. Edmundsbury itself,
_Brakelond_ being the known old name of a street or quarter in
that venerable Town.  Then farther, sure enough, our Jocelin was
a Monk of St. Edmundsbury Convent;  held some _'obedientia,'_
subaltern officiality there, or rather, in succession several;
was, for one thing, 'chaplain to my Lord Abbot, living beside him
night and day for the space of six years;'--which last, indeed,
is the grand fact of Jocelin's existence, and properly the origin
of this present Book, and of the chief meaning it has for us now.
He was, as we have hinted, a kind of born _Boswell,_ though an
infinitesimally small one;  neither did he altogether want his
_Johnson_ even there and then.  Johnsons are rare;  yet, as has
been asserted, Boswels perhaps still rarer,--the more is the pity
on both sides!  This Jocelin, as we can discern well, was an
ingenious and ingenuous, a cheery-hearted, innocent, yet withal
shrewd, noticing, quick-wilted man;  and from under his monk's
cowl has looked out on that narrow section of the world in a
really _human_ manner;  not in any _simial,_ canine, ovine, or
otherwise inhuman manner,--afflictive to all that have humanity!
The man is of patient, peaceable, loving, clear-smiling nature;
open for this and that.  A wise simplicity is in him;  much
natural sense;  a _veracity_ that goes deeper than words.
Veracity:  it is the basis of all;  and, some say, means genius
itself;  the prime essence of all genius whatsoever.  Our
Jocelin, for the rest, has read his classical manuscripts, his
Virgilius, his Flaccus, Ovidius Naso;  of course still more, his
Homilies and Breviaries, and if not the Bible, considerable
extracts of the Bible.  Then also he has a pleasant wit;  and
loves a timely joke, though in mild subdued manner:  very amiable
to see.  A learned grown man, yet with the heart of a good
child;  whose whole life indeed has been that of a child,--St.
Edmundsbury Monastery a larger kind of cradle for him, in which
his whole prescribed duty was to _sleep_ kindly, and love his
mother well!  This is the Biography of Jocelin;  'a man of
excellent religion,' says one of his contemporary Brother Monks,
_'eximiae religionis, potens sermone et opere.'_

For one thing, he had learned to write a kind of Monk or Dog-
Latin, still readable to mankind;  and, by good luck for us, had
bethought him of noting down thereby what things seemed notablest
to him.  Hence gradually resulted a _Chronica Jocelini;_  new
Manuscript in the _Liber Albus_ of St. Edmundsbury.  Which
Chronicle, once written in its childlike transparency, in its
innocent good-humour, not without touches of ready pleasant wit
and many kinds of worth, other men liked naturally to read:
whereby it failed not to be copied, to be multiplied, to be
inserted in the _Liber Albus;_  and so surviving Henry the
Eighth, Putney Cromwell, the Dissolution of Monasteries, and all
accidents of malice and neglect for six centuries or so, it got
into the _Harleian Collection,_--and has now therefrom, by Mr.
Rokewood of the Camden Society, been deciphered into clear print;
and lies before us, a dainty thin quarto, to interest for a few
minutes whomsoever it can.

Here too it will behove a just Historian gratefully to say that
Mr. Rokewood, Jocelin's Editor, has done his editorial function
well.  Not only has he deciphered his crabbed Manuscript into
clear print;  but he has attended, what his fellow editors are
not always in the habit of doing, to the important truth that the
Manuscript so deciphered ought to have a meaning for the reader.
Standing faithfully by his text, and printing its very errors in
spelling, in grammar or otherwise, he has taken care by some note
to indicate that they are errors, and what the correction of them
ought to be.  Jocelin's Monk-Latin is generally transparent, as
shallow limpid water.  But at any stop that may occur, of which
there are a few, and only a very few, we have the comfortable
assurance that a meaning does lie in the passage, and may by
industry be got at;  that a faithful editor's industry had
already got at it before passing on.  A compendious useful
Glossary is given;  nearly adequate to help the uninitiated
through:  sometimes one wishes it had been a trifle larger;
but, with a Spelman and Ducange at your elbow, how easy to have
made it far too large!  Notes are added, generally brief;
sufficiently explanatory of most points.  Lastly, a copious
correct Index;  which no such Book should want, and which
unluckily very few possess.  And so, in a word, the _Chronicle of
Jocelin_ is, as it professes to be, unwrapped from its thick
cerements, and fairly brought forth into the common daylight, so
that he who runs, and has a smattering of grammar, may read.

We have heard so much of Monks;  everywhere, in real and
fictitious History, from Muratori Annals to Radcliffe Romances,
these singular two-legged animals, with their rosaries and
breviaries, with their shaven crowns, hair-cilices, and vows of
poverty, masquerade so strangely through our fancy;  and they are
in fact so very strange an extinct species of the human family,--
a veritable Monk of Bury St. Edmunds is worth attending to, if by
chance made visible and audible.  Here he is;  and in his hand a
magical speculum, much gone to rust indeed, yet in fragments
still clear;  wherein the marvelous image of his existence does
still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an intermittent
light!  Will not the reader peep with us into this singular
_camera lucida,_ where an extinct species, though fitfully, can
still be seen alive?  Extinct species, we say;  for the live
specimens which still go about under that character are too
evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History:  the
Gospel of Richard Arkwright once promulgated, no Monk of the old
sort is any longer possible in this world.  But fancy a deep-
buried Mastodon, some fossil Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were
to begin to speak from amid its rock-swathings, never so
indistinctly!  The most extinct fossil species of Men or Monks
can do, and does, this miracle,--thanks to the Letters of the
Alphabet, good for so many things.

Jocelin, we said, was somewhat of a Boswell;  but unfortunately,
by Nature, he is none of the largest, and distance has now
dwarfed him to an extreme degree.  His light is most feeble,
intermittent, and requires the intensest kindest inspection;
otherwise it will disclose mere vacant haze.  It must be owned,
the good Jocelin, spite of his beautiful childlike character, is
but an altogether imperfect 'mirror' of these old-world things!
The good man, he looks on us so clear and cheery, and in his
neighbourly soft-smiling eyes we see so well our _own_ shadow,--
we have a longing always to cross-question him, to force from him
an explanation of much.  But no;  Jocelin, though he talks with
such clear familiarity, like a next-door neighbour, will not
answer any question:  that is the peculiarity of him, dead these
six hundred and fifty years, and quite deaf to us, though still
so audible!  The good man, he cannot help it, nor can we.

But truly it is a strange consideration this simple one, as we go
on with him, or indeed with any lucid simple-hearted soul like
him:  Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no
chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous
Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but
a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things.
The Sun shone on it;  the vicissitude of seasons and human
fortunes.  Cloth was woven and worn;  ditches were dug,
furrowfields ploughed, and houses built.  Day by day all men and
cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to
their several lairs.  In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived
nations of breathing men;  alternating, in all ways, between
Light and Dark;  between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil,
between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very
Hell.  Not vapour Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all!  Coeur-de-
Lion was not a theatrical popinjay with greaves and steelcap on
it, but a man living upon victuals,--_not_ imported by Peel's
Tariff.  Coeur-de-Lion came palpably athwart this Jocelin at St.
Edmundsbury;  and had almost peeled the sacred gold _'Feretrum,'_
or St. Edmund Shrine itself, to ransom him out of the Danube Jail.

These clear eyes of neighbour Jocelin looked on the bodily
presence of King John;  the very John _Sansterre,_ or Lackland,
who signed _Magna Charta_ afterwards in Runnymead.  Lackland,
with a great retinue, boarded once, for the matter of a
fortnight, in St. Edmundsbury Convent;  daily in the very
eyesight, palpable to the very fingers of our Jocelin:  O
Jocelin, what did he say, what did he do;  how looked he, lived
he;--at the very lowest, what coat or breeches had he on?
Jocelin is obstinately silent.  Jocelin marks down what interests
_him;_  entirely deaf to _us._  With Jocelin's eyes we discern
almost nothing of John Lackland.  As through a glass darkly, we
with our own eyes and appliances, intensely looking, discern at
most:  A blustering, dissipated, human figure, with a kind of
blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain
texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing;  amid
numerous other human figures of the like;  riding abroad with
hawks;  talking noisy nonsense;--tearing out the bowels of St.
Edmundsbury Convent (its larders namely and cellars) in the most
ruinous way, by living at rack and manger there.  Jocelin notes
only, with a slight subacidity of manner, that the King's
Majesty, _Dominus Rex,_ did leave, as gift for our St. Edmund
Shrine, a handsome enough silk cloak,--or rather pretended to
leave, for one of his retinue borrowed it of us, and we never got
sight of it again;  and, on the whole, that the _Dominus Rex,_ at
departing, gave us 'thirteen _sterlingii,'_ one shilling and one
penny, to say a mass for him;  and so departed,--like a shabby
Lackland as he was!  'Thirteen pence sterling,' this was what the
Convent got from Lackland, for all the victuals he and his had
made away with.  We of course said our mass for him, having
covenanted to do it,--but let impartial posterity judge with what
degree of fervour!

And in this manner vanishes King Lackland;  traverses swiftly our
strange intermittent magic-mirror, jingling the shabby thirteen
pence merely;  and rides with his hawks into Egyptian night
again.  It is Jocelin's manner with all things;  and it is men's
manner and men's necessity.  How intermittent is our good
Jocelin;  marking down, without eye to _us,_ what _he_ finds
interesting!  How much in Jocelin, as in all History, and indeed
in all Nature, is at once inscrutable and certain;  so dim, yet
so indubitable;  exciting us to endless considerations.  For King
Lackland was there, verily he;  and did leave these _tredecim
sterlingii_ if nothing more, and did live and look in one way
or the other, and a whole world was living and looking along
with him!  There, we say, is the grand peculiarity;  the
immeasurable one;  distinguishing, to a really infinite degree,
the poorest historical Fact from all Fiction whatsoever.  Fiction,
'Imagination,' 'Imaginative Poetry,' &c. &c., except as the
vehicle for truth, or _fact_ of some sort,--which surely a man
should first try various other ways of vehiculating, and
conveying safe,--what is it?  Let the Minerva and other Presses
respond!--But it is time we were in St. Edmundsbury Monastery,
and Seven good Centuries off.  If indeed it be possible, by any
aid of Jocelin, by any human art, to get thither, with a reader
or two still following us?




Chapter II

St. Edmundsbury


The _Burg,_ Bury, or 'Berry' as they call it, of St. Edmund is
still a prosperous brisk Town;  beautifully diversifying, with
its clear brick houses, ancient clean streets, and twenty or
fifteen thousand busy souls, the general grassy face of Suffolk;
looking out right pleasantly, from its hill-slope, towards the
rising Sun:  and on the eastern edge of it, still runs, long,
black and massive, a range of monastic ruins;  into the wide
internal spaces of which the stranger is admitted on payment of
one shilling.  Internal spaces laid out, at present, as a botanic
garden.  Here stranger or townsman, sauntering at his leisure
amid these vast grim venerable ruins, may persuade himself that
an Abbey of St. Edmundsbury did once exist;  nay there is
no doubt of it:  see here the ancient massive Gateway, of
architecture interesting to the eye of Dilettantism;  and farther
on, that other ancient Gateway, now about to tumble, unless
Dilettantism, in these very months, can subscribe money to cramp
it and prop it!

Here, sure enough, is an Abbey;  beautiful in the eye of
Dilettantism.  Giant Pedantry also will step in, with its huge
_Dugdale_ and other enormous _Monasticons_ under its arm, and
cheerfully apprise you.  That this was a very great Abbey, owner
and indeed creator of St. Edmund's Town itself, owner of wide
lands and revenues;  nay that its lands were once a county of
themselves;  that indeed King Canute or Knut was very kind to it;
and gave St. Edmund his own gold crown off his head, on one
occasion:  for the rest, that the Monks were of such and such a
genus, such and such a number;  that they had so many Carucates
of land in this hundred, and so many in that;  and then farther
that the large Tower or Belfry was built by such a one, and the
smaller Belfry was built by &c. &c.--Till human nature can stand
no more of it;  till human nature desperately take refuge in
forgetfulness, almost in flat disbelief of the whole business,
Monks, Monastery, Belfries, Carucates and all!  Alas, what
mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous
Pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History, and
Philosophy of History;  till, as we say, the human soul sinks
wearied and bewildered;  till the Past Time seems all one
infinite incredible grey void, without sun, stars, hearth-fires,
or candle-light;  dim offensive dust-whirlwinds filling universal
Nature;  and over your Historical Library, it is as if all the
Titans had written for themselves:  DRY RUBBISH SHOT HERE!


And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety;
they are an earnest fact.  It was a most real and serious purpose
they were built for!  Yes, another world it was, when these black
ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiseling, first saw
the sun as walls, long ago.  Gauge not, with thy dilettante
compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's-
Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha
of true Souls departed!

Their architecture, belfries, land-carucates?  Yes,--and that is
but a small item of the matter.  Does it never give thee pause,
this other strange item of it, that men then had a _soul,_--not
by hearsay alone, and as a figure of speech;  but as a truth that
they knew, and practically went upon!  Verily it was another
world then.  Their Missals have become incredible, a sheer
platitude, sayest thou?  Yes, a most poor platitude;  and even,
if thou wilt, an idolatry and blasphemy, should any one persuade
_thee_ to believe them, to pretend praying by them.  But yet it
is pity we had lost tidings of our souls:--actually we shall
have to go in quest of them again, or worse in all ways will
befall!  A certain degree of soul, as Ben Jonson reminds us, is
indispensable to keep the very body from destruction of the
frightfullest sort;  to 'save us,' says he, 'the expense of
_salt.'_  Ben has known men who had soul enough to keep their
body and five senses from becoming carrion, and save salt:--men,
and also Nations.  You may look in Manchester Hunger-mobs and
Corn-law Commons Houses, and various other quarters, and
say whether either soul or else salt is not somewhat wanted
at present!--

Another world, truly:  and this present poor distressed world
might get some profit by looking wisely into it, instead of
foolishly.  But at lowest, O dilettante friend, let us know
always that it was a world, and not a void infinite of grey haze
with fantasms swimming in it.  These old St. Edmundsbury walls, I
say, were not peopled with fantasms;  but with men of flesh and
blood, made altogether as we are.  Had thou and I then been, who
knows but we ourselves had taken refuge from an evil Time, and
fled to dwell here, and meditate on an Eternity, in such fashion
as we could?  Alas, how like an old osseous fragment, a broken
blackened shin-bone of the old dead Ages, this black ruin looks
out, not yet covered by the soil;  still indicating what a once
gigantic Life lies buried there!  It is dead now, and dumb;  but
was alive once, and spake.  For twenty generations, here was the
earthly arena where painful living men worked out their life-
wrestle,--looked at by Earth, by Heaven and Hell.  Bells tolled
to prayers;  and men, of many humours, various thoughts, chanted
vespers, matins;--and round the little islet of their life rolled
forever (as round ours still rolls, though we are blind and deaf)
the illimitable Ocean, tinting all things with _its_ eternal hues
and reflexes;  making strange prophetic music!  How silent now;
all departed, clean gone.  The World-Dramaturgist has written:
_Exeunt._  The devouring Time-Demons have made away with it all:
and in its stead, there is either nothing;  or what is worse,
offensive universal dustclouds, and grey eclipse of Earth and
Heaven, from 'dry rubbish shot here!'--


Truly, it is no easy matter to get across the chasm of Seven
Centuries, filled with such material.  But here, of all helps, is
not a Boswell the welcomest;  even a small Boswell?  Veracity,
true simplicity of heart, how valuable are these always!  He that
speaks what _is_ really in him, will find men to listen, though
under never such impediments.  Even gossip, springing free and
cheery from a human heart, this too is a kind of veracity and
_speech;_--much preferable to pedantry and inane grey haze!
Jocelin is weak and garrulous, but he is human.  Through the thin
watery gossip of our Jocelin, we do get some glimpses of that
deep-buried Time;  discern veritably, though in a fitful
intermittent manner, these antique figures and their life-method,
face to face!  Beautifully, in our earnest loving glance, the old
centuries melt from opaque to partially translucent, transparent
here and there;  and the void black Night, one finds, is but the
summing up of innumerable peopled luminous _Days._  Not parchment
Chartularies, Doctrines of the Constitution, O Dryasdust;  not
altogether, my erudite friend!--

Readers who please to go along with us into this poor _Jocelini
Chronica_ shall wander inconveniently enough, as in wintry
twilight, through some poor stript hazel-grove, rustling with
foolish noises, and perpetually hindering the eyesight;  but
across which, here and there, some real human figure is seen
moving:  very strange;  whom we could hail if he would answer;--
and we look into a pair of eyes deep as our own, _imaging_ our
own, but all unconscious of us;  to whom we for the time are
become as spirits and invisible!




Chapter III

Landlord Edmund


Some three centuries or so had elapsed since _Beodric's-worth_*
became St. Edmund's _Stow,_ St. Edmund's _Town_ and Monastery,
before Jocelin entered himself a Novice there.  'It was,' says
he, 'the year after the Flemings were defeated at Fornham St.
Genevieve.'

-------------
* Dryasdust puzzles and pokes for some biography of this Beodric;
and repugns to consider him a mere East-Anglian Person of
Condition, not in need of a biography,--whose [script] _weorth_
or _worth,_ that is to say, _Growth,_ Increase, or as we should
now name it, _Estate,_ that same Hamlet and wood Mansion, now St.
Edmund's Bury, originally was.  For, adds our erudite Friend, the
Saxon [script], equivalent to the German _werden,_ means to
_grow,_ to _become;_  traces of which old vocable are still found
in the North-country dialects, as, 'What is _word_ of him?
meaning 'What is become of him?' and the like.  Nay we in modern
English still say, 'Woe _worth_ the hour' (Woe _befall_ the
hour), and speak of the _'Weird_ Sisters;'  not to mention the
innumerable other names of places still ending in _weorth_ or
_worth._  And indeed, our common noun _worth,_ in the sense of
_value,_ does not this mean simply, What a thing has _grown_ to,
What a man has _grown_ to, How much he amounts to,--by the
Threadneedle-street standard or another!
--------------

Much passes away into oblivion:  this glorious victory over
the Flemings at Fornham has, at the present date, greatly
dimmed itself out of the minds of men.  A victory and battle
nevertheless it was, in its time:  some thrice-renowned Earl of
Leicester, not of the De Montfort breed, (as may be read in
Philosophical and other Histories, could any human memory retain
such things,) had quarreled with his sovereign, Henry Second of
the name;  had been worsted, it is like, and maltreated, and
obliged to fly to foreign parts;  but had rallied there into new
vigour;  and so, in the year 1173, returns across the German Sea
with a vengeful army of Flemings.  Returns, to the coast of
Suffolk;  to Framlingham Castle, where he is welcomed;  westward
towards St. Edmundsbury and Fornham Church, where he is met by
the constituted authorities with _posse comitatus;_  and swiftly
cut in pieces, he and his, or laid by the heels;  on the right
bank of the obscure river Lark,--as traces still existing
will verify.

For the river Lark, though not very discoverably, still runs or
stagnates in that country;  and the battle-ground is there;
serving at present as a pleasure-ground to his Grace of
Newcastle.  Copper pennies of Henry II are still found there;--
rotted out from the pouches of poor slain soldiers, who had not
had _time_ to buy liquor with them.  In the river Lark itself was
fished up, within man's memory, an antique gold ring;  which fond
Dilettantism can almost believe may have been the very ring
Countess Leicester threw away, in her flight, into that same Lark
river or ditch.*  Nay, few years ago, in tearing out an enormous
superannuated ash-tree, now grown quite corpulent, bursten,
superfluous, but long a fixture in the soil, and not to be
dislodged without revolution,--there was laid bare, under its
roots, 'a circular mound of skeletons wonderfully complete,' all
radiating from a centre, faces upwards, feet inwards;  a
'radiation' not of Light, but of the Nether Darkness rather;  and
evidently the fruit of battle;  for 'many of the heads were
cleft, or had arrow-holes in them.  The Battle of Fornham,
therefore, is a fact, though a forgotten one;  no less obscure
than undeniable,--like so many other facts.

----------
*Lyttelton's _History of Henry II._ (2nd Edition), v. 169, &c.
----------

Like the St. Edmund's Monastery itself!  Who can doubt, after
what we have said, that there was a Monastery here at one time?
No doubt at all there was a Monastery here;  no doubt, some three
centuries prior to this Fornham Battle, there dwelt a man in
these parts, of the name of Edmund, King, Landlord, Duke or
whatever his title was, of the Eastern Counties;--and a very
singular man and landlord he must have been.

For his tenants, it would appear, did not complain of him in the
least;  his labourers did not think of burning his wheatstacks,
breaking into his game-preserves;  very far the reverse of all
that.  Clear evidence, satisfactory even to my friend Dryasdust,
exists that, on the contrary, they honoured, loved, admired this
ancient Landlord to a quite astonishing degree,--and indeed at
last to an immeasurable and inexpressible degree;  for, finding
no limits or utterable words for their sense of his worth, they
took to beatifying and adoring him!  'Infinite admiration,' we
are taught, 'means worship.'

Very singular,--could we discover it!  What Edmund's specific
duties were;  above all, what his method of discharging them with
such results was, would surely be interesting to know;  but are
_not_ very discoverable now.  His Life has become a poetic, nay a
religious _Mythus;_  though, undeniably enough, it was once a
prose Fact, as our poor lives are;  and even a very rugged
unmanageable one.  This landlord Edmund did go about in leather
shoes, with _femoralia_  and bodycoat of some sort on him;  and
daily had his breakfast to procure;  and daily had contradictory
speeches, and most contradictory facts not a few, to reconcile
with himself.  No man becomes a Saint in his sleep.  Edmund, for
instance, instead of _reconciling_ those same contradictory facts
and speeches to himself;  which means _subduing,_ and, in a
manlike and godlike manner, conquering them to himself,--might
have merely thrown new contention into them, new unwisdom into
them, and so been conquered _by_ them;  much the commoner case!
In that way he had proved no 'Saint,' or Divine-looking Man, but
a mere Sinner, and unfortunate, blameable, more or less Diabolic-
looking man!  No landlord Edmund becomes infinitely admirable in
his sleep.

With what degree of wholesome rigour his rents were collected we
hear not.  Still less by what methods he preserved his game,
whether by 'bushing' or how,--and if the partridge-seasons were
'excellent,' or were indifferent.  Neither do we ascertain what
kind of Corn-bill he passed, or wisely-adjusted Sliding-scale:--
but indeed there were few spinners in those days;  and the
nuisance of spinning, and other dusty labour, was not yet so
glaring a one.

How then, it may be asked, did this Edmund rise into favour;
become to such astonishing extent a recognised Farmer's Friend?
Really, except it were by doing justly and loving mercy, to an
unprecedented extent, one does not know.  The man, it would seem,
'had walked,' as they say, 'humbly with God;'  humbly and
valiantly with God;  struggling to make the Earth heavenly, as he
could:  instead of walking sumptuously and pridefully with
Mammon, leaving the Earth to grow hellish as it liked.  Not
sumptuously with Mammon?  How then could he 'encourage trade,'--
cause Howel and James, and many wine-merchants to bless him, and
the tailor's heart (though in a very short-sighted manner) to
sing for joy?  Much in this Edmund's Life is mysterious.

That he could, on occasion, do what he liked with his own is,
meanwhile, evident enough.  Certain Heathen Physical-Force Ultra-
Chartists, 'Danes' as they were then called, coming into his
territory with their 'five points,' or rather with their five-
and-twenty thousand _points_ and edges too, of pikes namely and
battleaxes;  and proposing mere Heathenism, confiscation,
spoliation, and fire and sword,--Edmund answered that he would
oppose to the utmost such savagery.  They took him